Generation Rx: Summary and book reviews of Generation Rx by Greg Critser, plus links to an excerpt from Generation Rx and a biography of Greg Critser.
Generation Rx How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies
by Greg Critser
Hardcover: Oct 2005,
288 pages.
Paperback: Jan 2007,
320 pages.
Greg Critser's brilliantly incisive Generation Rx moves the conversation about
prescription drugs to where it hits home: our own bodies. How, he asks, has
big pharma created a nation of pharmaceutical tribes, each with its own unique
beliefs, taboos, and brand loyalties? How have powerful chemical compounds for
chronic diseases, once controlled by physicians, become substances we feel
entitled to, whether we need them or not? How did we come to hate drug
companies but love their pills?
Read on in Generation Rx for: -- exclusive interviews with the strategists,
scientists, and current and former heads of GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, Merck,
Roche, and more -- a first-ever, inside look at the rollicking business story
behind pharma's rise to power -- the dramatic effects our drug culture is
having on our major organs, from the liver to the heart to the brain -- why
old bodies and young bodies are the biggest, and riskiest, arenas for our
great American prescription pill party -- how the largely uncharted terrain of
polypharmacy (various drugs taken together) has unleashed unanticipated, often
deadly, consequences on unwitting patients
Generation Rx will make every American who has ever taken a prescription
drug look anew at what's in our medicine cabinets, and why.
If you're looking for a light, easy to digest read you may find Generation Rx provides more information than you want to know. However, if you really want to understand the American pharmaceutical business and its effects on the American people, stop right here and read the very extensive excerpt at BookBrowse, which is not only interesting in its own right but will give you a good flavor of the book as a whole (Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
What Mr. Critser has done in these pages is synthesize a lot of information and reserve it to the reader in an accessible, easily digested form - much as he did with information about obesity in his 2003 book, Fat Land. While his prose sometimes buckles from his efforts to be chatty and conversational - at one point, he describes the liver, which can regenerate itself, as "a kind of Donald Trump of the human body" - he does a lucid job conveying the dramatic ways in which the development and marketing of pharmaceuticals have changed over the last two decades and the equally dramatic and often disturbing consequences of this phenomenon.
The New York Times - Joe Queenan
Apocalyptic literature naturally gravitates toward the maudlin, lamenting that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, usually courtesy of someone like Eminem or Tom 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.
Library Journal - Kathy Arsenault
In this informed study of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, journalist Critser sounds the impassioned alert that your medicine cabinet may be hazardous to your health....To the reader's great relief, this sorry saga of unprincipled greed is followed by potential practical solutions...For all libraries.
Kirkus Reviews
If a knowledgeable public is the key, this straightforward, highly readable book is a step in the right direction.
Publishers Weekly
According to Critser, almost half of all Americans use a prescription drug daily; one in six take three or more. What are the possible consequences of the staggering recent growth in the use of such drugs? ....Critser's account is solid, thorough and told with vigor.
Booklist - Donna Chavez
Starred Review. Critser has a knack for turning the words of the pharmaceutical industry--he calls it Big Pharma--against it, packing every page with enough "Oh, wow!" information to jade even the most hardened cynic.
A shocking exposé of the $15 billion marketing maelstrom aimed at our children and how we can stop it.
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