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"Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup"

People say that evil isn't very interesting; it's the human response to evil that can hold our attention. I think that's true in "Bad Blood." Elizabeth Holmes--the monster at the center of the story--doesn't seem to have much depth. She doesn't really show signs of genuine contrition, and it's never clear in the story that she is wrestling with the scary implications of what she is doing. For that reason, she can be a bit tiresome--as a character. To me, the real stars of "Bad Blood" are the people who struggle against Holmes: a young man whose nonagenarian grandfather tells him to just fall in line with EH, a guy who ends up committing suicide because the pressures of working with EH are too great, and an outspoken lab expert who takes photos of various problems in EH's facilities (among many other characters).

It worries me that Adam McKay is involved with the Holmes story, because McKay tends to have contempt for his characters, and that approach isn't consistently interesting. (I can already picture a smug McKay film in which the director tells us over and over what we already know: Elizabeth Holmes is a bad person. We saw a version of that with "Vice" in the past several months.)

Reading "Bad Blood," I also thought of Janet Malcolm, who has paid a great deal of attention to the ways in which journalists are opportunists. The author of "Bad Blood" positions himself as a kind of hero, but I wonder if, really, he feels a sense of identification with Elizabeth Holmes. Both the author and Holmes will do what it takes to get what they want. For the author, this means pursuing interviews with a whistleblower who is then terrorized by Holmes's lawyers. The author admits to feeling "twinges of guilt" when he learns what his source has gone through, but I'm curious if the author himself (given his experience in journalism) could have anticipated some of this terror, and could have supported his source more actively. Just a thought.

Another fascinating part of "Bad Blood": the romance of biochemistry! Who spends hours and hours sitting around thinking about how bizarre blood is? It seems to me that the idea Holmes had--to revolutionize how we analyze blood samples--was a good and seductive one. She just didn't have any discipline or common sense or training--any ability to realize her own dreams. But if someone really could extract a droplet of blood at home--and know within minutes if any serious diseases were brewing under the skin? That's pretty sexy. It's even inspiring. You can maybe understand why Henry Kissinger and Chelsea Clinton and Joe Biden, among others, found themselves enchanted by Holmes.

Those are my initial thoughts--not really a book review. I loved "Bad Blood" and devoured it in two days. I'm excited to see the HBO film tonight.
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