Unraveled Wednesday: 7/12/2023

I'm joining Kat and fellow Unravelers with more of the Forget-Me-Not Hitchhiker. It's what I've been working on most of this past week in hopes of finishing it, but the ball of yarn that is left to knit may be imbued with some sort of magic. I keep knitting and knitting, but it never seems to get any smaller. I'm betting it will run out someday but today is not that day.

I've also been working on the Hitch on the Move, but it looks pretty much the same except it now has a few more triangles. 

I read two books last week, one interesting and informative and one that was a disjointed mess. The interesting and informative one is Wonder Drug: The Secret History of Thalidomide in America and Its Hidden Victims. Wonder Drug is a horrifying and tragic tale of greed and negligence. In 1960, a New Drug Application for thalidomide crossed the desk of Dr. Frances Kelsey, an FDA Medical reviewer. The drug was touted as a new miracle drug for a range of ailments, including morning sickness, touting it as “completely atoxic, safe for everyone, children and pregnant women included." Kelsey refused to approve thalidomide, due to the lack of safety data and shoddy research. Except that Cincinnati-based chemical company William S. Merrell was busy distributing thalidomide to an estimated 20,000 women in the US through the free samples given to more than 1,200 doctors. Thalidomide had not been approved by the FDA, so Merrell was asking doctors to perform "clinical trials" on their patients. This is not at all how clinical trials are run, and the whole scam was marketing by Merrell.

The author tells this sad tale of medical scandal through research and interviews with patients and those affected. Merrell escaped without any penalties, but this did force a change to the FDA’s rubber-stamping patent approval process. There are clear villains and heroes in this book, and it makes for an illustrative and chilling read.

The disjointed mess was Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club. If I viewed it as a light bit of entertaining fluff to read in the summer, it might have been okay, but overall there were too many things I disliked to consider the book light and entertaining. I enjoy stories about food and family, but sad, tragic, and appalling things happened too often for this to be a cozy novel. Many of the characters felt flat, especially the selfish and always disagreeable Florence. Another character, Brenda, is described as a "sexually liberated local pariah". That's pretty much what she is, and I couldn't understand what she was adding to the story. The timeline of the novel extends from 1934 to the present time, and each chapter changes time and point of view which made it difficult for me to always understand what was happening when. Due to some of these jumps, the reader does have a good idea that something terrible is going to happen. I could barely pay attention in the intervening pages just waiting for tragedy to strike. I really disliked how the author simply disposed of a primary character just a few pages from the end of the book. I enjoyed Stradal's prior novels, but this one is too disjointed for me to recommend. Two and a half stars rounded down.

What are you making and reading this week?