1 1

The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South - Hardcover

The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South - Hardcover

$28.00 USD
$28.00 USD
Sale Sold out
Shipping calculated at checkout.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks meets Get Out in this landmark 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, The Organ Thieves is a story that resonates now more than ever, when issues of race and healthcare are the stuff of headlines and horror stories.

Review Quotes:

"When a great reporter meets the story he was born to tell, Chip Jones's The Organ Thieves is the result. What happened to Bruce Tucker on an operating table in Richmond, Virginia in 1968 can't be dismissed simply as the misdeeds of certain doctors in a certain city in a bygone era. Jones offers something richer and more complex. This extraordinary book raises fundamental questions about racial injustice and inequality that haunt us to this day." --Charles Slack, author of Liberty's First Crisis and Hetty



View full details