Here is my 8th annual list of books and films, edition 2022.
My book list kicks off with "The Right Price" by Peter Neumann of Tufts, and here is Neumann's book list.
For my 2021 list and backlist to earlier years, here.
The Right Price: A Value-Based Prescription for Drug Costs (2022), is an essential handbook for understanding today's wide-ranging debates about drug valuation and health outcomes research. Find the Tufts health economics center, the CEVR - here.
Through tweets and cross-references, Neumann's also led me to the works of Brian D. Smith, who has written 8 books on life science strategies. Smith's industry view, diagnosis, and prescriptions are found at New Drugs, Fair Prices: Managing the Pharmaceutical Innovation Ecosystem for Sustainable and Affordable New Medicines (2022). I'm also looking forward to Smith's book on analytical and strategic marketing, Brand Therapy: 15 Techniques for Creating Brand Strategy in Pharma and Medtech (2018), because it expands my thinking in directions that are less familiar to me.
From that entry point, we can go either toward healthcare (but not strategy) or strategy (but not healthcare).
The Least of Us is Sam Quinones' new book (2021) on the epidemics of fentanyl and meth which have replaced the "oxycodone epidemic." It follows his widely acclaimed earlier book on the opioid epidemic, Dreamland (2015). "The Least of Us" is a good complement to the excellent dramatic miniseries Dopesick (Hulu, 2022).
History of technology, and sometimes political history, usually give me a few favorites every year. For this theme, The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World (2018) is about the history of engineering precision and I especially enjoyed the first half, learning that the steam engine depended not only on vision and theory, but on simply developing pistons and cylinders precise and tight enough to contain high pressure steam and operate for a long life cycle. I read "The Perfectionists" along with a 2022 book, Slouching towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century [1970-2010].
I really enjoyed (mostly as audiobook) a detailed book on the history of insulin. You may well be thinking, who needs more than the Wikipedia article? But this book tells the full story and what I loved about it, the story is full of crazy. It was one damn thing after another, threats, yelling, lawsuits, and bizarre turns of all kinds. This book is: Insulin: The Crooked Timber, A History from Thick Brown Muck to Wall Street Gold (2022) by Kersten Hall. I also found and read a narrower older book that was quite interesting, Chris Feudtner's book Bittersweet: Diabetes, Insulin, and the Transformation of Illness, based on decades of detailed patient records at the Joslin Clinic for diabetics in Boston, as far back as the 1890s. (2004).
History outside of healthcare and technology, I enjoyed the history, Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties by David De Jong (2022). While his focus is on these billionaire families in modern Germany, 80% of the book starts about 1910 and rolls forward through every decade, so it's really a pretty detailed history of German economics and society from WW I forward.
Light Reading or Honorable Mentions
In this section, a few more titles I enjoyed enough to mention to others. Lucy Worsley is the perpetually lively face of innumerable BBC documentaries about history, and she published "Art of the English Murder," about the changing view of murder in fiction and society over a couple centuries. I enjoyed a history of Hollywood focused on each decade's stars, "Gods Like Us" (2013, Ty Burr). Easy airplane reading included older and newer celebrity biographies by William Daniels (There I Go Again), Julie Andrews (Homework), and Randy Rainbow.
Undercurrents, by Kristy Bell, 2022, in which an English art critic who's emigrated to Berlin reviews 20 years of her life there and a century in the life of the apartment building she lives in.
While reading the new book Saving Freud (2022), about the last couple years of Freud's life and his late emigration from Vienna to die in London, I ran across a 1972 memoir by his personal physician, Max Schur, remembering the 1920s and 1930s when Schur was approaching 80. This is, "Freud: Living and Dying."
Film and Television
Two healthcare related miniseries, DROPOUT (about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos) and DOPESICK (Michael Keaton; about the Oxycontin story) were excellent. Michael Stuhlbarg's portrayal of one the Sacklers was a gem.
I equally enjoyed an HBO documentary, not new, called THE VERTIGO YEARS, a history of 1900-1910 and the rapid cultural changes of the time. (I think I saw it on Amazon Prime, but today seems to be only on "Curiosity Stream," which is a shame). There's also a book.
I was really impressed by the biodrama movie MINIMATA, about photographer Edward Smith, and his courageous photojournalism of a village and mercury poisoning in Japan around 1975. I remember when the work was new (I was around 16 and into photography). The film sadly got almost no press because it starred Johnny Depp, who was in a sex abuse trial at the time. (There's also a conventional documentary about Smith, "Photography Made Difficult.")
On the theme of dark history, the Netflix 4-part documentary about Bernie Madoff (MONSTER OF WALL STREET) was good. Enjoyed a dark little indie fiction movie, THE OUTFIT, set in hardly more than one room and on one night, starring Mark Rylance. It runs like a Swiss watch.
On a lighter noted, we enjoyed Stanley Tucci Searching for Italy, ten or so episodes of touring Italy for its foods and restaurateurs (on CNN).
I thought FREE GUY, a fantasy comedy movie set inside a video game, a Ryan Reynolds vehicle from January 2022, was a riot. This fall we enjoyed the Hulu miniseries REBOOT, a 30-minute situation comedy about an oddball cast and their writing team rebooting a situation comedy.
Podcasts
Besides tracking a few things that are widely known, like NPR Fresh Air, I enjoyed a business podcast series, "Business Wars." (Get a break from genomics and biopharma by hearing about battles between Haagen Dasz vs Ben & Jerry's, or Mars vs. Hershey). Doctor/Senator Bill Frist's podcast "A Second Opinion" is one I always scan every couple months to see who he's interviewing.
My Own Videos
Arising from my adventures with Zoom video technology, I've developed basic skills in video editing. I put work-related videos online on YouTube at my YT channel Bruce Quinn, and comedy or other efforts post (occasionally book or movie reviews) at Bruce Quinn Playground. For example, my two-minute micro review of Barack Obama's 17 favorite 2022 movies, has gotten almost a thousand views this past week. My own video review of Minamata is here. My comedy parody about a society to prevent the extinction of chihuahuas is here.
