The Hindu On Books newsletter: Gardiner Harris on J&J's dangerous ways, Vajpayee's biography, Delhi in fiction and more

The Hindu

22-07-2025

Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. The literary world has lost two writers, including a celebrated poet. Andrea Gibson, who used the pronoun they, explored gender identity, politics and a four-year battle with terminal ovarian cancer through verse.
In Memoriam
The 49-year-old starred in a documentary, 'Come See Me in the Good Light', with their wife Megan Falley which was shown at the Sundance Film Festival amid cheers and tears.
In a poem Gibson wrote shortly before they died, titled 'Love Letter from the Afterlife,' they wrote: 'Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before.'
Mystery writer Martin Cruz Smith, who wrote thrillers like Gorky Park and Hotel Ukraine, the 11th and latest in the series featuring the Moscow investigator Arkady Renko, has passed away at age 82. In its obituary, AP quoted from an interview Smith gave to 'Strand Magazine' in 2023: 'My longevity is linked to Arkady's. As long as he remains intelligent, humorous, and romantic, so shall I.' The fictional Arkady was given the same condition like the writer's – Parkinson's disease. Publisher Simon&Schuster penned a moving tribute saying, Smith's books are one of the great achievements in modern suspense writing.
In reviews this week, we learn more about Gardiner Harris' takedown of one of America's most loved companies, Johnson&Johnson, and its dark and dangerous secrets, we read an excerpt from the second and last part of Atal Bihari Vajpayee's biography, and several books with Delhi at the centre and more.
Books of the week
The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson (Ebury Press) is a hard hitting expose on what went on at J&J, the pharma major. It uncovers the secrets across the company's drugs and products from baby powder, Tylenol, Risperdal (antipsychotic), EPO (a cancer drug), metal-on-metal hip implants, among others, which adversely impacted the health of users. Chillingly, the company continued to market them, fully cognisant of the harmful effects. In a conversation with Ramya Kannan, Harris, an investigative reporter, describes the Herculean task he took on, and what he was up against.
Asked among all the violations, what he thought was the most egregious, he said: 'J&J, early on, would find out that its product was dangerous, and would hide those dangers not only from the public, but from the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and other regulatory agencies, knowing that it could result in a number of deaths. I estimate that at least 2 million Americans alone died from using J&J products. So it really is hard to rank order. But the worst of the worst, just in terms of sheer numbers, would probably be Risperdal.
Epidemiological analysis shows that it is probably one of the most deadly drugs that has ever been sold in the U.S. It is sold to children, even though it causes boys to grow breasts and young girls to express milk. And again, the company hid those risks, lied about them in publications.'
The second volume of a two-part biography, Believer's Dilemma (Picador India) begins with a watershed moment when India voted in its first non-Congress government at the Centre in 1977. The Sangh Parivar was in the coalition, and Atal Bihari Vajpayee got the post of External Affairs Minister. Two years later, when the coalition collapsed, Vajpayee 'publicly apportioned some of the blame to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh,' whose ideology he believed in. After a stint in government, 'the believer now had dilemmas,' writes Abhishek Chaudhary, and Vajpayee's relationship with the Sangh Parivar would 'remain a convoluted affair till the very end.' Read an excerpt.
Is Delhi the 'Valhalla of hucksters, the nourishing nucleus of the confidence trick that is Indian democracy?' Ranbir Sidhu's new novel Night in Delhi (Context) is set in Delhi where almost everybody is out to scam somebody. The novel's unnamed protagonist is a minor crook and thief. As Aditya Mani Jha writes in his review, all the happenings are a window into the city's invisible gears and mechanisms, the covert economies that keep the whole thing together on a wing and a prayer. 'Sidhu's gaze is unflinching, shorn of sentiment, intent on grabbing the reader by the scruff of the neck, making them look at things they would have otherwise turned their gaze away from,' he points out.
Spotlight
Radhika Oberoi (Stillborn Season, Of Mothers and Other Perishables) writes an essay on Delhi in fiction, foregrounding old and new titles including Arundhati Roy's 2017 novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. She mentions a new anthology, Basti & Durbar: Delhi-New Delhi: A City in Stories (Speaking Tiger), edited by Rakhshanda Jalil, and says it is a soulful exposition of the many Delhis that exist, simultaneously, or piled upon the ruins of erstwhile Delhis. 'In the introduction, Jalil poses a few questions: 'Is the city central, or peripheral, to the writer's concerns? Can the 'spirit' of Delhi, the sum total of its disparate and disarming parts, ever really be captured in words?'' Delhi, says Oberoi, is a sensual city, a resilient city, a city of whores, eunuchs, and coiffed rummy players at the Gymkhana Club. 'And because it is unloved by those who live in its neighbourhoods and study at its universities, it becomes the stuff of literature.'
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The New Geography of Innovation (HarperCollins) by Mehran Gul asks whether the geography of innovation is shifting from the U.S., the source of just about all the technologies that define modern life, from computers to social networks and electric cars. He looks to places like Taiwan (which has the world's most important semiconductor company, TSMC), and other places in Asia, Sweden (Spotify), Nordic countries (known for best-known games like Candy Crush and Angry Birds) and so forth.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Matt Richtel's new book, How We Grow Up: Understanding Adolescence, is based on years of investigative reporting for the New York Times, and offers a look at the modern adolescent experience—from rising anxiety and early puberty to how the digital world collides with a still-developing brain. If you liked the television series 'Adolescence' on Netflix which held a mirror to youth and society, this book is revelatory.
Amrita Mahale's new novel, Real Life (Hamish Hamilton), is a mystery set around the disappearance of wildlife biologist Tara from the Mahamaya Valley in the Himalayas. As Tara's best friend Mansi tries to find out what happened, she is drawn into the mysteries of the Valley, the clash between technology and nature, and where a woman's voice can be silenced in many ways.
Rudraneil Sengupta's The Beast Within (Context) is an effective police procedural, a rare breed in the country's bookscape. The reviewer, Sumana Mukherjee, writes that Sengupta delves into the many layers that comprise policing in India. His weary and damaged Inspector Prashant Kumar is a credible protagonist who works the many planes of the National Capital Region's realities without either diminishing inequities or ignoring power structures.