Bøker av Barry Werth

"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 Korean War. In a violation of protocol, he took part in an air drop that failed and was captured over China. His sources on the ground had been compromised, and his identity was known. Although he first tried to deny who he was, he eventually admitted the truth. But government policy forbade ever acknowledging the identity of spies, no matter the consequences. Washington invented a fictitious cover story and stood by it for four administrations. As a result, Downey was imprisoned during the decades that Red China, as it was called, was considered by the US to be a hostile nation, until 1972, when the US finally recognized the mainland Chinese government. He had spent twenty-one years in captivity. Downey would go on to become a lawyer and an esteemed judge in Connecticut, his home state. Prisoner of Lies is based in part on a prison memoir that Downey wrote several years after his release. Barry Werth fluently weaves excerpts from the memoir with the Cold War events that determined Downey's fate. Like a le Carrâe novel, this is a 'thrilling, richly informative' (Stephen Kinzer, author of The Brothers) story of one man whose life is at the mercy of larger forces outside of his control; in Downey's case as a pawn of the Cold War, and more specifically the Oval Office and the State Department. His freedom came only when US foreign policy dramatically changed. Above all, Prisoner of Lies is an inspiring story of remarkable fortitude and resilience.""--

"This is the Moneyball of the pharma world, the story of one drug company's quest to transform the pharmaceutical industry and a deeply revealing look into a world where breakneck capitalism meets life-saving medicine.The $325 billion-a-year pharmaceutical business is America's most challenging and one of its most profitable. It is tougher in just about every way than any other enterprise: from the towering biological risks inherent in its mission to treat disease; to the thirty-to-one failure rate in bringing out a successful medicine after a candidate clears all the hurdles to get to human testing; to the billion-dollar-plus cost of ramping up a successful product; to operating in the worlds most highly regulated industry with the possible exception of nuclear power. The Antidote tells the story of Vertex, a maverick drug company led by the charismatic Joshua Boger and a small group of entrepreneurial young scientists who broke off from Merck when it was the world's best drug maker, indeed the most admired business in America because they thought they could make drugs better. Building upon his widely praised The Billion-Dollar Molecule, Barry Werth captures the full scope of Vertex's twenty-five-year drive to liver breakthrough medicines and transform the drug industry. The Antidote draws upon unprecedented inside reporting spanning more than two decades to provide a groundbreaking close-up of Vertex's inner workings and the ferocious but indispensable world it inhabits"--Provided by publisher.