"Chip Jones's The Organ Thieves is the brilliantly researched and written story of how Jim Crow racism infected the medical profession during the Cold War era. The twists and turns in this Virginia saga are astonishingly sad and at times triumphant. Every page is a revelation. A must read!" —Douglas Brinkley, Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University and author of American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race.
Description
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks meets Get Out in this “startling…powerful” (Kirkus Reviews) investigation of racial inequality at the core of the heart transplant race.
In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a black man, went into Virginia’s top research hospital with a head injury, only to have his heart taken out of his body and put into the chest of a white businessman. Now, in The Organ Thieves, Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist Chip Jones exposes the horrifying inequality surrounding Tucker’s death and how he was used as a human guinea pig without his family’s permission or knowledge.
The circumstances surrounding his death reflect the long legacy of mistreating African Americans that began more than a century before with cadaver harvesting and worse. It culminated in efforts to win the heart transplant race in the late 1960s. Featuring years of research and fresh reporting, along with a foreword from social justice activist Ben Jealous, “this powerful book weaves together a medical mystery, a legal drama, and a sweeping history, its characters confronting unprecedented issues of life and death under the shadows of centuries of racial injustice” (Edward L. Ayers, author of The Promise of the New South).
Reviews
“Journalist Chip Jones tells a gruesome story….The disregard for Black lives The Organ Thieves documents makes it an urgently modern warning.” —The Washington Post
“Startling… A powerful story that examines institutional racism, mortality, medical ethics, and the nature of justice for black men living in the American South… A moving exploration of an unthinkable trespass against an innocent man.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Doggedly reported… A dramatic and fine-grained exposé of the mistreatment of black Americans by the country’s white medical establishment.” —Publishers Weekly