Book reviews: 'Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land' and 'No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson'

'Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land' by Rachel Cockerell

Melting Point is "a book unlike anything I've ever read," said Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker. It tells the story of a little-known attempt to build an American homeland for European Jews by encouraging thousands to sail to Galveston, Texas, and it places that endeavor in the context of the broader early-20th-century effort to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine or elsewhere. Because author Rachel Cockerell tells the tale entirely through snippets from primary sources, such as diary entries, newspaper reports, and interview transcripts, the characters and events "feel startlingly present." Besides, "only so vast a chorus of voices could do justice to the larger story: the history of an imperiled people and their courageous, blinkered, desperate effort to find a place to call home."

Cockerell's great-grandfather was a pivotal figure in launching the Galveston plan, and she relies on him to make her story cohere, said Lucy Hughes-Hallett in The Guardian. That "doesn't quite work," because David Jochelman, her forebear, is a less striking figure than his main allies, Theodor Herzl and Israel Zangwill. Herzl was the dashing Hungarian Jewish journalist who predicted the devastation of European Jewry and died at 44, just eight years after fathering the movement to create a Jewish state. Zangwill, a playwright, was the most popular Jewish writer working in English, and he and Jochelman split from mainline Zionism to advocate for alternatives to Palestine. East Africa, Western Australia, Mexico, and Libya were all explored as possibilities before Galveston emerged as their faction's favored option. By 1914, 10,000 European Jews had arrived at the Texas port, and the "most compelling" section of Cockerell's "formally ingenious" book is over.

But the family story continues, and in a book "with many distinct voices," it's Cockerell's half-aunt Jo who proves most engaging, said Alice Kaplan in The New York Review of Books. Jo helps tie eras together, enabling Cockerell to create a personal connection, through a relative who moved to Palestine, to the clashes of the late 1940s that displaced some 800,000 Palestinian Arabs and established the nation of Israel. Because Cockerell never voices an opinion, she "avoids the question that will occur to most of her readers today: What if Zion had been established somewhere else?" But the reports she provides of the Palestinian Arabs' displacement are "every bit as horrendous" as the accounts of a 1903 anti-Jewish pogrom she cites earlier. In the end, her "deeply satisfying" book "makes us hear how the yearning for a homeland, an essential part of Jewish history, is mirrored in Palestinian suffering. 'Where can we go? What can we do?' Even the words are the same."

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'No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson' by Gardiner Harris

In the health-care business, "even those companies with warm public reputations may not be worthy of our esteem," said Luke Messac in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Former New York Times investigative reporter Gardiner Harris has dug into Johnson & Johnson's history of exploiting the public's trust, and his findings are "staggering." Since 1894, when it began hawking a baby powder that fueled profits and was revealed only many decades later to contain cancer-causing asbestos, the company has sold dangerous products to consumers, often knowingly, while presenting itself as a paragon of corporate ethics. The author "doesn't spare others from scrutiny or criticism," said Andrew DeMillo in the Associated Press. He also slams the FDA for failing consumers and the media for unjustly flattering the FDA and J&J.

Harris' account of the baby powder scandal alone would make for a great feat of useful muckraking, said Alexander Zaitchik in The New Republic. "Alas, Johnson & Johnson's original sin was nowhere near its last." For decades, it hid Tylenol's toxic effects on the liver. In the 1980s, it began selling Procrit, a bone marrow aid that accelerated the growth of tumors in cancer patients. Then came the antipsychotic Risperdal, marketed to children and the elderly yet damaging to both. Even the company's Covid vaccine was rightfully controversial. For some reason, Harris ends his "investigative demolition job" with "a bizarre attempt at evenhandedness," naming among the indisputable successes of the company the wealth it has generated for shareholders. The rest of his book "illustrates why these profits do not belong in a win column. Indeed, they are the very root of the problem."

Though No More Tears is a takedown of a single company, it indicts the entire system that produces our pharmaceutical and medical products, said Perri Klass in The Washington Post. Harris knows every level of the field, and he's "particularly good at showing how corporate money can support but also corrupt science, and how corporate alliances with government can mean progress but also collusion." Arriving at "an especially salient" moment, when food and drug regulations are being dismantled, No More Tears "contains the outline of a longer—maybe multivolume—treatise."