Books

My most recent book, Are Your Prescriptions Killing You? How to Prevent Dangerous Interactions, Avoid Deadly Side Effects, and Be Healthier with Fewer Drugs (Atria Books/Simon & Schuster, 2012), written with Dr. Armon B. Neel, Jr., grew out of a profile of Neel that I wrote in 2004 for the AARP Bulletin. It has been an Amazon best-seller and earned a laudatory write-up in The New York Times from Abigail Zuger, M.D., an infectious-disease physician in Manhattan who reviews health books for the newspaper’s “Science Times” section. “If anything can make you hoist yourself out of that beach chair and go find a pen [to complete a medication-risk worksheet],” she wrote, “this is the book that will do it.”

Here are a handful of excerpts from the customer reviews — many of them gratifying — posted on Amazon.com:

“An amazing (and scary) book that will make you think twice about the pharmaceutical industry — especially if you have elderly parents or grandparents who have pills thrown at them for every ailment.”

“Armon Neel and Bill Hogan have presented the most important book that caregivers can read. It is an easy read, but it is compelling. It presents vital information that could save your loved one from deadly drug interactions or drug side effects that could and should have been avoided.”

“I think this book may have saved my father-in-law’s life. . . . After his [recent] surgery he continued to be dizzy, exhausted, and just overall really feeling crummy. We visited two weeks ago when I noticed all the pills he was taking — 15 in all. That seemed to be a lot to me. I had just read a book review in The New York Times of Are Your Prescriptions Killing You? I immediately ordered it for him, and when he started to read it he immediately said, ‘They could be writing about me!’ He took the book to his primary doctor, who ordered some testing done. After my father-in-law had his results, the doctor took him OFF OF 11 DIFFERENT PILLS. Needless to say, his heath has improved tremendously and he feels great.”

“Thank you, Dr. Neel and Mr. Hogan, for this easy-to-read and informative book. It’s like having a doctor in the house.”

“I read about this book in The New York Times and was concerned about my mother, who had been taking several medications that, over time, had turned her into a person I did not recognize. The main culprit was amiodorone, a drug that was No. 1 on Armon Neel’s list of dangerous drugs for seniors. . . . Not only was it making her COPD worse, as Dr. Neel states so emphatically, it was also making her dizzy, unsure of herself, depressed, and in a type of a daze. This book gave her the confidence to stop taking it and seek a new doctor. Just three months after discontinuing its use (along with stopping a few other drugs she apparently did not need), she is really on the road back to being herself and so much better, it’s amazing. . . . [T]his is a life-saving and enlightening book.”

My second book, Golf Gadgets — The Ultimate Catalog of Golf Equipment and Accessories (Macmillan/Collier, 1989), sold nearly 25,000 copies during its first two months on the market and, thanks to a wonderful write-up in the April 1990 issue of Golf Digest, kept me in Titleists for some time afterward. Bryant Gumbel even interviewed me about the book on NBC’s “The Today Show.”

My first book, Will the Gentleman Yield? — The Congressional Record Humor Book (Ten Speed Press, 1987), was anything but a runaway best-seller, but it played to reasonably rave reviews and landed me and my co-author, Mike Hill, appearances on “The Today Show,” “The Larry King Show,” and dozens of radio talk shows.

Here’s what Publisher’s Weekly had to say about the book: “Avid readers of the Congressional Record, Hogan and Hill offer a compilation of intentional and unintentional humor uttered on Capitol Hill, mostly in the past 20 years. Some are brief quips, such as Sen. Jesse Helms’s 1982 remark about Tip O’Neill: ‘We sent that bill over to the House and Mr. O’Neill sat on it. And when Mr. O’Neill sits on a bill that is a lot of coverage.’ Others are funny methods of filibustering, such as Sen. Huey P. Long’s lengthy recipes for preparing ‘pot likker’ and frying oysters given during a 1935 session. Sen. Howard H. Baker, Jr., proves to be a standout among congressional comics, as when he states: ‘I propose we do away with middle initials. I have not calculated the potential savings, but it could be significant. After all, who ever heard of Ronald W. Reagan, Bing L. Crosby, and Luke J. Skywalker?’ In addition, there are songs and stories, April Fool’s jokes, poems, and puns. The gentlemen have the floor, and the reader is rolling on it.”

Mike and I also had quite a bit of fun talking about Will the Gentleman Yield? on C-SPAN soon after the book was published. I couldn’t figure out how to embed the video of the interview here, but you can see it on this page of C-SPAN’s website.

Over the years I’ve also edited a lot of books and book-length reports. Here are a few of the ones I’m proudest of:

Alan Green and I started The City Desk, a Washington bureau for city and regional magazines, a couple of years out of graduate journalism school, and in the mid-1990s we found ourselves working together again at The Center for Public Integrity, which was one of the nation’s first nonprofit laboratories for investigative journalism. Alan’s book, Animal Underworld: Inside America’s Black Market for Rare and Exotic Species (Public Affairs, 1999), was the Center’s first commercially published title — and a remarkable investigative-reporting effort in every respect.

Animal Underworld garnered a raft of rave reviews; I particularly liked the one that appeared early on in Publishers Weekly. Here’s an excerpt: “In a shocking and heartbreaking exposé, Green examines the fate of unwanted animals cast off by U.S. zoos and theme parks. Many of the nation’s leading zoos, he reports, sell their unwanted animals — whether surplus, aging and decrepit, or babies bred for sale — to supposedly reputable dealers who, in turn, dump the animals onto roadside attractions, unaccredited petting zoos, private hunting parks and bogus sanctuaries that will hand over endangered species to anyone for a buck. . . . Green crisscrossed the country, combing thousands of health certificates and interviewing hundreds of people. He tracked smugglers and poachers who traffic in rare species disappearing from their native habitats, which are then sold to ‘exotic pet’ owners. He takes aim particularly at the thousands of Americans who keep dangerous pets like tigers or cougars, inviting human tragedies. A major feat of investigative reporting, this book spells out sensible strategies to clean up this unholy mess, including a proposal that zoos should provide cradle-to-grave care to their denizens. Green’s important, eye-opening report could spark a national debate.”

Little wonder that Animal Underworld won the won the first-place award for books in 1999 from Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE), which praised Alan’s “passion for detail” and “even-handed approach.”

There’s never been a book about Congress quite like this one, and its central message — namely, that special interests pretty much own the legislative branch of government — may be even more relevant today. Chuck Lewis, the founder and first executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, pushed to do this book in the wake of the success of the first edition of The Buying of the President, and it fell to me, as the Center’s director of investigative projects, to outline the book and assemble the immensely talented team of researchers and reporters that got it done. The only real model I had was Both Your Houses: The Truth About Congress (Praeger, 1972), an insightful, in-your-face effort by New York Times reporter Warren Weaver, Jr., but our goal was to bring lots more investigative firepower to the project. With The Buying of the Congress: How Special Interests Have Stolen Your Right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (William Morrow, 1998), I think we succeeded.

Molly Ivins, the legendary newspaper columnist and political commentator, had some nice words to say about the book, including these: “Even for those of us who for years have been collecting examples of how legalized bribery works, Lewis & Co. have come up with some fresh and truly outrageous stuff.”

In the acknowledgments for the book, Chuck Lewis had some nice words to say about me, calling me “a nationally respected reporter and editor . . . who brought his amazing blend of innate investigative instincts, Washington wisdom, collegial compassion, and editorial perfectionism to this undertaking.”

Following up on the success of The Buying of the President (Avon Books, 1996), the Center for Public Integrity undertook this new-and-improved effort for the 2000 election. The Buying of the President 2000 (Harper Perennial, 2000) became the standard money-in-politics reference work for that campaign and perhaps even afterward, documenting as it did the “career patrons” of that year’s presidential candidates — including George W. Bush, who shattered all previous fund-raising standards for presidential candidates. (Bush’s top career patron, incidentally, was Enron Corporation, the Houston-based energy, commodities, and services company that collapsed into bankruptcy in December 2001.) “Throughout his long business career and in his six years as governor of Texas, Bush has relied on family connections, sweetheart deals, and the inside track to build a fortune,” we wrote. “And Bush . . . has always been willing to return the favors.”

The next edition of The Buying of the President, in 2004, landed on The New York Times best-seller list, and the subsequent edition, in 2008, was produced in its entirety online. By then I was back at the Center, and it struck me then that presidents were no longer able to turn their backs on big donors, as Teddy Roosevelt had done in 1906, when — in the wake of muckraker Ida Tarbell’s eye-opening exposé of John D. Rockefeller’s oil empire — he mapped out the antitrust suit against Standard Oil that prompted steel baron Henry Clay Frick to go off the deep end. “We bought the son of a bitch,” Frick complained, “and then he didn’t stay bought.”

My initial assignment on joining the Center for Public Integrity in 1996 as its first director of investigative projects (before then I’d been on the Center’s board of directors and had edited many of its investigative reports) was to bring this book to the finish line. Written by two prize-winning environmental reporters, Dan Fagin and Marianne Lavelle, Toxic Deception: How the Chemical Industry Manipulates Science, Bends the Law, and Endangers Your Health (Birch Lane Press, 1997) put a microscope on four hazardous chemicals: alachlor, atrazine, formaldehyde, and perchloroethylene. This eye-opening exposé documented, as never before, how some of the world’s biggest chemical companies could keep dangerous products on the market even when safer, cheaper alternatives were widely available.

The New York Times described Toxic Deception this way: “Toxic Deception shows how the industry uses campaign contributions, junkets, job offers, ‘scorched-earth’ courtroom strategies, misleading advertising and multimillion-dollar public relations campaigns to keep their products on the market no matter how great the potential dangers,” It’s the story of the triumph of a special interest over the public interest.”

“Toxic Deception shows how the industry uses campaign contributions, junkets, job offers, ‘scorched-earth’ courtroom strategies, misleading advertising, and multimillion-dollar public relations campaigns to keep their products on the market no matter how great the potential dangers,” Bob Herbert of The New York Times wrote. “It’s the story of the triumph of a special interest over the public interest.”

It was a privilege to work with Dan and Marianne on this book. (Marianne is now the science writer in residence at Ursinus College’s Center for Science and the Common Good. Dan is the director of the Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program at New York University; his best-selling book, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation (Bantam, 2013), was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer for General Nonfiction.)

Over the years, in addition to these four Center for Public Integrity books, I edited many of the Center’s investigative reports, including the ones listed below. (I’ve included links to PDF versions of the reports, where available).