A “riveting” (The Economist), “gripping” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) true story of the longest-held prisoner of war in American history, John Downey, Jr., a CIA officer captured in China during the Korean War and imprisoned for twenty-one years.John (Jack) Downey, Jr., was a new Yale graduate in the post-World War II years who, like other Yale grads, was recruited by the CIA. He joined the Agency and was sent to Japan in 1952, during the Kore...

Join journalist Barry Werth as he pulls back the curtain on Vertex, a start-up pharmaceutical company, and witness firsthand the intense drama being played out in the pioneering and hugely profitable field of drug research.Founded by Joshua Boger, a dynamic Harvard- and Merck-trained scientific whiz kid, Vertex is dedicated to designing—atom by atom—both a new life-saving immunosuppressant drug, and a drug to combat the virus that causes AIDS.You will be ho...

In this timely and much praised book, Barry Werth draws upon inside reporting that spans more than two decades. He provides a groundbreaking close-up of the upstart pharmaceutical company Vertex and the ferocious but indispensable world of Big Pharma that it inhabits.In 1989, the charismatic Joshua Boger left Merck, then America’s most admired business, to found a drug company that would challenge industry giants and transform health care. Werth described the compa...

In 31 Days, acclaimed historian Barry Werth takes readers inside the White House during the tumultuous days of August 1974, following Richard Nixon's resignation and the swearing-in of America's "accidental president," Gerald Ford. The Watergate scandal had torn the country apart. In a dramatic, day-by-day account of the new administration’s inner workings, Werth shows how Ford, caught between political expedience, the country’s demands for justice, and his own moral compass, stru...

From the acclaimed author of Billion Dollar Molecule and The Antidote, a revisionist, passionate history of the pharmaceutical industry, detailing how the nascent industry ushered in an age of cures.For the past thirty-five years, the acclaimed author Barry Werth has been covering one of the most consequential and underappreciated stories of our time—the rise of pharmaceutical companies, along with the science of drug research and the people who m...

In Banquet at Delmonico’s, Barry Werth, the acclaimed author of The Scarlet Professor, draws readers inside the circle of philosophers, scientists, politicians, businessmen, clergymen, and scholars who brought Charles Darwin’s controversial ideas to America in the crucial years after the Civil War.The United States in the 1870s and ’80s was deep in turmoil–a brash young nation torn by a great depression, mired in scandal and corruption, rocked by crises in governm...

Damages is the riveting true story of one family’s legal struggles in the world of medicine. At the urging of a friend, the Sabias filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against Dr. Humes and Norwalk Hospital. Barry Werth takes us through the seven-year lawsuit, allowing us to see the legal strategy plotted by the Sabias’s attorneys, Connecticut’s premier medical malpractice law firm.

During his thirty-seven years at Smith College, Newton Arvin published groundbreaking studies of Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, and Longfellow that stand today as models of scholarship and psychological acuity. He cultivated friendships with the likes of Edmund Wilson and Lillian Hellman and became mentor to Truman Capote. A social radical and closeted homosexual, the circumspect Arvin nevertheless survived McCarthyism. But in September 1960 his apartment was raided, and his cache of beefca...

From the acclaimed author of Billion Dollar Molecule and The Antidote, a revisionist, passionate history of the pharmaceutical industry, detailing how the nascent industry ushered in an age of cures.For the past thirty-five years, the acclaimed author Barry Werth has been covering one of the most consequential and underappreciated stories of our time—the rise of pharmaceutical companies, along with the science of drug research and the people who m...

Join journalist Barry Werth as he pulls back the curtain on Vertex, a start-up pharmaceutical company, and witness firsthand the intense drama being played out in the pioneering and hugely profitable field of drug research.Founded by Joshua Boger, a dynamic Harvard- and Merck-trained scientific whiz kid, Vertex is dedicated to designing—atom by atom—both a new life-saving immunosuppressant drug, and a drug to combat the virus that causes AIDS.You will be ho...

In 31 Days, Barry Werth takes readers inside the White House during the tumultuous days following Nixon’s resignation and the swearing-in of America’s “accidental president,” Gerald Ford. The congressional hearings, Nixon’s increasing paranoia, and, finally, the devastating revelations of the White House tapes had torn the country apart. Within the White House and the Republican Party, Nixon’s resignation produced new fissures and battle lines—and new opportunities for political a...

In 31 Days, Barry Werth takes readers inside the White House during the tumultuous days following Nixon’s resignation and the swearing-in of America’s “accidental president,” Gerald Ford. The congressional hearings, Nixon’s increasing paranoia, and, finally, the devastating revelations of the White House tapes had torn the country apart. Within the White House and the Republican Party, Nixon’s resignation produced new fissures and battle lines—and new opportunities for political a...