Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood
This was a bit of a hard read. The subject matter is incredibly interesting, and the authoress is incredibly talented and writes well, but the way she writes is so dense that it can be a challenge to follow. In theory, this type of writing is what really what makes me tick, great premise, segues to interesting stories, definitely human interest of the lowest order (you don’t get lower than blood in all honesty), and superbly well researched, and still having her own voice.
Its not just dry reporting, its witty and well done.
But so dense.
You pretty much drown at the first segue, and each story (there are 9 related blood stories here) just adds on with each additional divergence. At the end, its very much a collection of disparate stories thinly connected by blood. However, there is 0 chance that you come away from this book with less knowledge about blood, in all its different clotting, menstruating, life saving, and spectularly valuable, both monetary and otherwise, ways.
The chapter that hit me the hardest was the chapter about its use in trauma. The story starts off with a cyclist basically getting run over by a truck. She’s alive and talking, but soon goes into shock and then all the crazy life saving techniques that are possible now in the 21st century comes into play. This particular chapter was talking about how EMTs now carry full blood bags and how that means so much more lives are saved becuase full blood has some magical properties that plasma doesn’t.
The cyclist ends up with her entire chest fully wide open as the surgeons have to palpate it into livelniess again and the whole scenario was just that much more poignant to me becuase I was also recently in the trauma center after having had an unfortunate run in with a family of deer. No other vehicle was involved or else I’d probably also be in the same sorry state the lady ended up in, but reading through that ER incident gave me more than a little bit of PTSD.
all in all, i’d say that this is a technically well written book that tends to lose readers becuase of the authoress’s lack of focus. That lack of focus might make it more interesting in some context, but a lot of the jumping around jumping back works better for some chapters than others. In any case, the subject is interestingly enough for me to overcome the difficulty, but others might not find it as interesting.
Its still one of the better books i’ve read this year, hence, 4 stars.