It’s no surprise that Patrick Radden Keefe endorsed this book. Stop me if you’ve heard this: Dangerous medicine promoted dishonestly by a greedy pharmaceutical company, leading to deaths and heartbreak. Government fails at every step of the way, despite efforts to raise alarm from regulators and members of the public. The people responsible largely get away with it.

That’s thalidomide in a nutshell, in more than a dozen countries around the world.

The big difference here is that thalidomide was never for sale in the United States, so the damage was done by over 1000 doctors who were enlisted to perform unlicensed ‘clinical trials’ on patients, while the pharmaceutical company collected only the data that supported their case. And it actually made it harder for the people affected to find justice.

It’s a heck of a story, and Vanderbes tells it well. It has a bit of a detective-story quality to it, and characters whose stories would make compelling biographies on their own – like Helen Taussig who went deaf, but refined her sense of touch to the point where she could feel arrhythmias through someone’s chest. There are others.

The chapters are short which makes the book difficult to put down, but several sparse or blank pages separating them makes the book feel needlessly padded. While Vanderbes is a seasoned writer, this is her first nonfiction book. It felt like it could have been bulked up in a few sections to add colour or depth. Perhaps even some first-person perspective on how the author realized that the American side of this story wasn’t the success that’s generally believed to be the case.

Regardless it’s a good read, and if you’re at all curious about how the thalidomide disaster happened, or jonesing for another dose of Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, it’s worth picking up.