8 Books For Fans Of Erin Brockovich

Can you believe it’s been twenty-five whole years since Julia Roberts first graced our screens as the inimitable Erin Brockovich? If you haven’t revisited this now-classic film, now is the time: it’s a David and Goliath battle of small and scrappy idealists against greedy corporate overlords. And because I am both a big reader and a person who has seen this movie no fewer than twenty times, I am in a perfect position create a list of reading recommendations for fans of Erin Brockovich. They’re called books, Ed.

Empire Of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe

You might not know the Sacklers (unless you spend a lot of time in the museums they’ve paid a lot of money to adorn with the family name), but you definitely know their product: OxyContin, the opioid that triggered an epidemic of abuse. Opioid overdoses are now the leading cause of accidental death in America (turns out guns aren’t their only problem, not even their biggest!) and in Empire Of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe carefully examines how the actions of the Sackler family were the catalyst for this crisis. Read my full review of Empire Of Pain here.

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

John Carreyrou is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story behind Theranos, the Silicon Valley biotech startup he revealed to be a multi-billion dollar fraud. The story of Theranos, and its charismatic founder Elizabeth Holmes, has reached mythic proportions in popular culture. Bad Blood is the riveting true story told in full, straight from the source, so if you’ve only heard it in snippets and memes, this is the book for you. Read my full review of Bad Blood here.

She Said by Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey

She Said is the untold story of what it takes to bring accusations against powerful men to light, and the revelations that forever changed the way we understand power and harassment in the #MeToo era. Kantor and Twohey don’t simply paint a portrait of Harvey Weinstein as a monster (though they have plenty of evidence to do just that). Instead, they examine the social mechanisms—the company policies and the power-brokers and the “boy’s club”—that enabled a monster to thrive, unrestrained and without consequences, for decades. Read my full review of She Said here.

The Woman They Could Not Silence by Kate Moore

For all it has given us, medicine has an ugly history of stripping the freedom and dignity from some of the most vulnerable members of society. In The Woman They Could Not Silence, Kate Moore offers an account of one such transgression, that of a 19th century woman cast to the side by her husband. It was an era where women could all-too-easily succumb to the label of ‘crazy’, and find themselves institutionalised on the flimsiest of grounds. Of course, women and other marginalised groups still experience this kind of discrimination, but examining our history informs our understanding of how to dismantle these systems of oppression.

The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Henrietta Lacks was a poor, black, Southern tobacco farmer, still working the land upon which her ancestors were enslaved. She sadly developed cervical cancer in the prime of her life. While undergoing treatment at John Hopkins, her cancer cells were taken – without her knowledge – and used to create the first ever “immortal” human tissue grown in culture. The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks is the definitive true story of one of the most important women the world doesn’t know. Read my full review of The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks here.

Character Limit by Kate Conger & Ryan Mac

If there’s a single present-day Goliath in desperate need of a David, it’s Elon Musk: the tragic weirdo with a questionable fortune who seems hell-bent on using it to destroy the world. One of his most visible sieges on the world stage has been his takeover of Twitter, and his violent destruction of a once vibrant and thriving social media platform. In Character Limit, Conger and Mac give us “a revelatory, three-dimensional, and definitive account of what really happened when Musk showed up [at Twitter, spoiling for a brawl and intent on revolution, with his merciless, sycophantic cadre of lawyers, investors, and bankers”. Read my full review of Character Limit here.

Puff Piece by John Safran

Puff Piece is “a probing look into Big Tobacco and the vaping industry”, sparked by Phillip Morris launching the HeatStick (it’s tobacco rolled in paper with a filter at one end, but it’s NOT a cigarette, they’re at pains to tell us) around the same time as the introduction of the Euro ban on menthol cigarettes in 2020. Safran tackles the ethical ramifications, big and small, of multinational companies manipulating language to shimmy through legislative loopholes. It’s funny, insightful, informative, ingenious – everything we’ve come to expect from Safran. Read my full review of Puff Piece here.

Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin

The 2008 global financial crisis was the defining world event for millennials, a disaster that plunged the world’s economy into chaos as we were coming of age and trying to enter the workforce as ‘grown ups’ for the very first time. Too Big To Fail is a blow-by-blow account of the economic cataclysm, describing how the most powerful men and women in finance and politics decided the fate of the world’s economy. Spoiler: it’s a story of unmatched greed, jaw-dropping egotism, and boot-quaking fear.