I wanted to love or even like this book, but I found that I had to force myself to read it. That is never a good sign.
The subject matter was interesting, but I had trouble with the delivery. The book had entirely too much filler and not enough substance.

The average adult human has 9 pints of blood, and in this book Rose George has 9 different chapters exploring the history, science, and industry of blood. She looks at bleeding and leeches (historical and modern leech raising and use), the development of England's blood bank system during WWII, blood borne diseases (especially HIV/AIDS and Hep C), menstruation practices around the world, the Indian man who who invented a cheap pad-making machine to make women's lives easier and more pleasant, trauma practices, and the potential and possibility of artificial blood.

This book is interesting and well-written, it is also dense. At least it was dense for me, with no medical or scientific background. Most of this was new--though this book is not written for doctors or scientists, who may feel they know a lot of it already. Basically, it is FULL of information, most of which was new to me.
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Thank you to NetGalley and Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt for providing me with an uncorrected proof in exchange for an honest review.

NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH! Nine Pints, written for the layman, is a fascinating history of blood harvesting and handling. Bloid is the thirteenth most highly traded commodity in the world, as a safe and accessible blood supply is necessary for the continued existence of humankind.

Nine Pints covers the ancient practice of leeching, and the continued use of leeches in midern medicine. Who knew that medicinal leeches are now endangered in Great Britain and most of Europe? Modern medical leeches are farmed. A supply of leeches is sometimes kept in hospital pharmacies, but that practice is dwindling as modern surgical techniques advance.

Researchers are continuing to study blood as they attempt to find cures or, at least treatments, for diseases carried by bloid borne pathogens. Protein prions, which cross the blood, brain barrier, are being studied with an eye toward developing vaccines, as these diseases are always fatal.

I would recommend this title to anyone interested in medical science, particularly those interested in maintaining a safe blood supply, as well as those interested in genetic blood disorders or illnesses caused by blood borne pathogens.

In the interest of full disclosure, I received a free digital copy of this title to review from Net Galley .

#NinePints#NetGalley

For fans of Mary Roach and Sam Kean. Nine Pints opens our eyes to the many wonders of blood. While interesting, I struggled with this one a bit. While the subject matter was clearly extensively researched, I found myself bored at times.

In Nine Pints Rose George does for blood what she did for human waste in The Big Necessity. Nine Pints covers issues ranging from the birth of the British blood donor service to the history and current state of medicinal leech usage to the politics of menstruation.

She weaves a story around each topic, offering a very readable combination of fact, anecdote, and analysis.

Despite that, I must admit my interest did flag in one or two places. I think when I read The Big Necessity it introduced me to a number of topics which I had never considered before, and which I think weren’t widely discussed. With Nine Pints, much of the material was familiar to me and has featured in mainstream media.

Indian social entrepreneur Arunachalam Muruganantham, aka Pad Man, has received extensive publicity for his efforts to make good sanitary protection available to women (there has even been a movie made about him) and the terrible treatment of haemophiliacs given contaminated blood has been covered in the light of the public inquiry in the UK.

Other things were new though, such as the role of scientist Janet Vaughan, whose work helped make blood transfusion standard practice and was instrumental in the organisation of blood banks during World War 2, and the long and complex life cycle of the leech! More literal chapter headings might have been useful, so that readers could focus on the topics that interest them.

Overall, it’s an interesting read and offers a fresh perspective on something that is so familiar we often don’t give it much thought.

Fascinating, occasionally infuriating, and deeply compelling. George's history of blood is well worth a deep dive, and her own first-person presence in the text does not detract from the overall writing.

had very high hopes for this book, but it turned out to be a great disappointment. The author's writing style and droll comments make for an extremely difficult read. The book itself is disjointed with some chapters appearing to be in the book to simply take up space and make it longer. I sincerely hope that someone with more focus attempts the subject at another time.

If you are interested in the subject of blood, as am I, this is not a book to waste your time on.

I received a free Kindle copy of Nine Pints: A Journey through the Money, Medicene and Mysteries of Blood by Rose George courtesy of Net Galley  and Henry Holt, the publisher. It was with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazonand my fiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus pages.

This is the first book (and last) I have read by the author.

Readers may sometimes find themselves a bit lost in the thicket of detail in Rose George’s in-depth look at human blood: Nine Pints: A Journey through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of blood, but that’s a small price to pay for such an informative and often fascinating examination of something so essential.

In one section George tours Filton, one of the biggest blood donation sites in Europe, which sets the stage for a trip through blood collection services throughout the world, as well as a history of how they formed, the challenges they face and how they try to overcome the many obstacles to a reliable, safe supply of blood. We learn for instance of England’s “male donor preference” due to all the hormones so many women take, how Filton sets up regular deliveries but at times has to rely on taxis or “a fleet of volunteer bikers,” and that the best method so far to ensure repeat donors is to text donors when their blood had been used, telling them for whom.

Another section, one of the most fascinating ones, entails another trip, this one to a leech farm, which acts as yet another springboard into history as we take a tour of the medicinal use of leeches from the Greeks onward. Who knew leeches were so intriguing? Or, it turns out, so beautiful? There’s a poignant move into blood-borne diseases such as HIV and Zika, and an infuriating, absolutely infuriating, discussion of how companies sold blood knowing it had a good chance of being contaminated. A section that appropriately made my own blood boil. From there we shift into how different societies view menstruation and the constraints they place upon women, such as in Nepal where girls and women are forced to sleep in unheated sheds while they menstruate (this is also the section where we meet the Menstrual Man—an Indian who spent years bringing modern sanitary pads to his country). Other bits of captivating history are the women who drove blood vans during the war (Lady Dunstan “must have been at least 80 [and] always wore a string of pearls . . . “], the horrific history of blood transfusions which began with live vivisections, and the consumption of blood down through the ages. Bringing us up to today and looking ahead to the future, George explores modern studies looking at the impact of infusing “fresh” blood into aged creatures and the attempts to create a synthetic blood.

As noted in my intro, sometimes the details can be a bit slow going, but those moments are quite rare in a book that is filled with stimulating information presented in sprightly fashion. Recommended.

Q. Explain why you believe that reading this book makes you a fine of example of enlightened modern manhood.
A. It has two longish chapters about largely about menstruation, a topic which is not, as the cool kids say nowadays, in my wheelhouse.

Q. What do you want, some kind of medal?
A. Yes, please, and a certificate with a red ribbon, attached with a grommet. And an ice-cream sundae, too, because there was also a chapter on leeches.

I enjoyed this book but believe that people without sufficient knowledge of British culture might find the barrage of UK-specific information a little difficult to comprehend. While hardly an expert myself, I had the good fortune to live in England a long while ago, and, despite the intervening years, acquired enough knowledge to avoid frequent trips to the Google while reading.

Among my fellow colonials, the amount of knowledge of British culture varies wildly, especially as people who have never set foot in the Scepter'd Isle have sometimes consumed an impressive amount of Downton Abbey and Call the Midwife. I propose the following one-question test to determine if you, a non-British person, have sufficient cultural knowledge to enjoy this book. (It represents only one of the many potentially baffling culture references in the book, but I feel that this particular bit of information can stand in for the whole.)

Question: What qualities are often associated with the stereotypical Yorkshire-person?

In case you want to know the answer, a search by keywords “stereotypical Yorkshireman” (sorry ladies) will get you many opinions. The best single short answer, I thought, was here.

If you can answer this question correctly, then you, a non-British person, can enjoy this book. Otherwise, the experience might be a little like listening to people gossip about someone you don't know.

New topic: there is some disagreement on the Internet about how much blood a person actually has, but I am going with the many websites that say between 8 and 12 pints. I will assume that the population is distributed along a so-called “normal curve”, with the average at 10 pints, and perhaps 2/3rds of the population between 9 and 11 pints. Photos of the author show a somewhat diminutive British lady, so when she decided to use nine pints as the amount of blood she was lugging around, I think she came by this number honestly. On the other hand, if I had written this book, I probably would have had to think of two more blood-related topics to write chapter-length essay/investigations about. This is only another example of how short people, in spite of the impressive amount of complaining that often can be heard in the proximity of their tiny little bodies, get off easy.

Another new topic: I am always search for a book that hits the sweet spot where intellectually stimulating overlaps with serenity. At first, I thought this was a book that was going to firmly occupy that spot in the Venn diagram, as there is a nice calming chapter about how, generally speaking, a fairly well-organized program of volunteer blood donation became the norm in most developed countries and beyond. It seems that some people with the right idea at the right time were able to advance what, in retrospect, seems a completely reasonable and obvious system. They overcame institutional conservatism and apathy to make the right thing happen. Isn't that nice? Calming, right? Evidence that, occasionally, the whole world doesn't completely suck, right? I love books like that.

Well, it turns out we are just being set up for a sucker punch to the gut. And I mean that as a compliment. The blood business is apparently awash (best not to think about that image too much) with dirty dealing, bureaucratic oafishness, and people's lives being ruined so that somebody far away can make a dirty buck. As is often the case in situations like this, my fellow Americans are in the vanguard. As usual, I wondered how people like this can sleep at night, but then again the groaning non-prescription sleep-aid shelf at my local pharmacy probably supplies an adequate answer.

Later, the heat comes off the excesses of wretched capitalism for a while as a chapter explores the lunatic oppression that women on the Indian subcontinent are subjected to because they have the bad judgment to menstruate. In case you, O Westerner, were planning to feel smug and self-satisfied about our superior treatment of the menstruating, hard of the heels of this chapter is another long one (see Q and A above) largely about tampons, in which our own talent for unreasonable behavior comes in for a thorough examination.

The book sometimes reads like a series of long-form journalism articles, connected to each other only that they all have some connection to blood and blood products. I enjoy long-form journalism, so that's OK with me, but your mileage may vary.

I received a free electronic advance review copy of this book via Netgalley and Metropolitan Books, distributed in the USA by Macmillan.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book in return for an honest review. I'd give 3-1/2 stars.

Fascinating story of the 9 pints that we all carry around with us and don’t think about much until it is critical. The book is billed as “an eye-opening exploration of blood, the lifegiving substance with the power of taboo, the value of diamonds, and the promise of breakthrough science.” The journey Rose George takes you on is scientific, political, historical, cultural and educational.

So, let’s start with the pro’s of the book. I learned quite a few interesting things, such as different blood types types have different resistance to disease and how our blood supply and transfusions have involved. There were also some very disconcerting things that I learned, such as some countries where young men are enslaved and bled repeatedly, to the brink of death, and their blood is sold.

This starting me thinking about donating blood, and I checked to see what prescriptions would prevent me from doing so. I learned that most prescriptions don’t matter, but if you are taking thalidomide, you are excluded. What?? I had no idea thalidomide was still in use. It was used in the 1950’s to prevent nausea in pregnant women, and caused horrible birth defects. My assumption was that it was never used again, but it is used to treat multiple myeloma brain cancer, kidney cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma and leprosy.

As for the con’s of the book, there were a few chapters that just didn’t seem to fit with the story:

The chapter on leeches, I could have done without! Blood doesn’t make me squeamish, but leeches do. The history and use of leeches was interesting, but a lot of time spent on this aspect.
The chapter on HIV in South Africa also just didn’t seem to fit into the narrative. It is a blood-borne disease, but George focused more on treatment of HIV.
The chapter of the creation of sanitary pads for women went way off track.
I would have liked to learn more about the moral oppositions to transfusions as well as today’s fad of using transfusions as a fountain of youth.

Overall, this book was eye-opening and made me think, which is what a good book should do.

www.candysplanet.wordpress.com

The author is British, so the book starts out describing blood banking in Britain, and about Janet Vaughan, the woman who basically started blood banking. There’s a chapter on leeches and bloodletting, both the history, and current uses today. Another chapter discusses HIV in South Africa, which seemed oddly irrelevant. Canadian for-profit blood banks, trauma surgery, vampires, and menstrual blood are all discussed. I found the stereotyping of Americans (“the Canadian border official has been taking demeanor lessons from the Americans. He is icy, underwhelming, as solid as his shape”) annoying. On the whole, I was quite disappointed in this book.

cultural-exploration, historical-figures, historical-places-events, historical-research, medical, war-is-hell

I have been an RN since forever and have worked in an assortment of acute, rehab, and chronic care settings, so my views are not unbiased nor uninformed. Perhaps if I give one example from each chapter it might be useful to those who speak medicalese and those who don't.
1. The changing understanding of blood though millennia including the relatively recent divisions of typing, and the development of blood storage and accessibility.
2. The medical use of leeches from antiquity to the present well past the time of blades or scarification such as brought about the demise of former President Washington.
3. The incredible contributions of Dame Janet Maria Vaughan of the women's college at Oxford in the mid twentieth century.
4. The greatest cause of HIV/AIDS around the world is donating blood in Africa and Southeast Asia.
5. The treatment perils for hemophilia. I value the people mentioned, but am very unhappy that Arthur Ashe went unmentioned even though he came from the country whose pharmaceutical companies denied culpability in the deaths of so many unique people.
6. The practices of derision and blame placed upon women in many countries which also have almost no clean water or sanitary facilities simply because the women are having menstrual bleeding.
7. Beginning with the man who endured verbal abuse from nearly everyone while researching the manufacture and distribution of affordable sanitary napkins and tampons in India and developing nations where women could not afford them and were forced to use some methods from antiquity.
8. Trauma Medicine in civilian hospitals and in war areas and the changes in the use of blood and blood products.
9. The history of vampirism and the search for synthetic products as well as blood as a fountain of youth.
There is an extensive bibliography following these chapters.
I found it to be well written, educational, and enjoyable.
I requested and received a free ebook copy from Metropolitan Books courtesy of NetGalley. Thank you!

This book is interesting right from the very start. We all have blood, but tend not to think how amazing it is. I learned more about blood transfusion, blood-borne diseases, and tampon safety (or lack thereof). It was surprising to read how almost no one knows where in the body blood is manufactured; perhaps it is just that my family is very into science so we knew.

The average adult has nine pints of blood in their body. The value of that blood fluctuates depending on the context, use, and the body it inhabits. It can be life-saving, but also transmit deadly diseases. It can considered taboo in some cultures for women to get her periods, basically exiling them when it occurs, but can be valued at a high price in the terms of plasma transfusions.

Author Rose George explores these topics and more in this extremely informative, engaging read. A book of this subject matter has the possibility of being being too scientific, preachy, or lecturing. George is a gifted storyteller and discusses the past, present, and future about blood and its possibilities in an entertaining way.

Even if the sight of blood makes you lightheaded, this is a great, engrossing read and you'll walk away with a different, more informed perspective on the subject.

I recieved this book from the publisher in exchange for a honest review.

thank you for the opportunity to review Nine Pints
by Rose George! I recommend this read - I learned so much and really enjoyed it.

Thank you Net Galley for the free ARC.

Right from the start this book became fascinating. The first chapter takes you to a blood processing facility, where whole blood is processed and divided into platelets and plasma and more. Then you thank your lucky stars and thank Janet Vaughan who made sure transfusions became possible that you live in a country that has a safe collection system. There are also chapters on bloodborne illnesses, menstruation and leeching. Something for everybody!