Generation Rx

From The New York Times:

APOCALYPTIC literature naturally gravitates toward the maudlin, lamenting that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, usually courtesy of someone like Eminem orTom DeLay. This is what makes Greg Critser's "Generation Rx" such an unexpected delight. Although his message is unrelievedly depressing - drug companies, with the nation's physicians and the federal government already on the payroll, have transmogrified a self-reliant nation into a herd of functional drug addicts - there is something so congenial and non-self-righteous about the way he tells his story that few of the scoundrels singled out for public obloquy will take personal offense.

Thus, describing the evolution of Glaxo from a sleeping giant to a juggernaut, Critser says that "in the boggy pharma jungle," the company "swung on the vine of prior greatness while withering on stultifying British business practices." Marveling at the liver, he writes, "It is the only organ that can, with time, regenerate itself, a kind of Donald Trump of the human body." And he identifies Washington as "an unfathomable brothel to all but the Reverends Rove and Cheney."

More here.