NINE PINTS

A JOURNEY THROUGH THE MYSTERIOUS, MIRACULOUS WORLD OF BLOOD

ROSE GEORGE

Portobello, 383pp, £14.99

The title refers to the amount of blood each of our bodies contains. George ‘covers many thousands of miles in pursuit of the intricacies of her subject’, wrote Dwight Garner in the New York Times, including visits to the largest blood-processing facility in Europe, a leech farm in Wales, and a South African township where AIDS is rife. ‘She’s a nimble writer, one who walks in fear of euphemism or pretension. There are no peacock displays of pointless erudition in her work; no recondite allusions are dragged in. She rips open her topics as if they were bags of chips.’ Guardian reviewer Sarah Ditum welcomed the fact that ‘George’s journalistic eye is combined with sharp moral judgment,’ citing as an example the chapter on the UK’S infected-blood scandal. ‘It is impossible to read this chapter without becoming furious, too – about the haemophilia patients who were used as “guinea pigs” for a new and unsafe blood product because they were cheaper than animal testing.’

Part of the empathy George displays for victims of blood disorders, wrote Sinead Gleeson in the Irish Times, derives from her own experience as ‘a frequent blood donor, an endometriosis sufferer with difficult periods’, and as someone ‘going through menopause’. Her book is ‘full of striking facts and disturbing stories: leeches need to be exercised twice a day; clinical vampirism; studies into whether animals are attracted to menstrual blood; “blood bikers” who voluntarily deliver blood to UK hospitals; the 2008 case in Gorakhpur in India, where poor migrant men were being bled to death as blood slaves. What’s notable about George’s work – and, in particular, this book – is her approach to the subject and how deftly she communicates vast tracts of information. George has clearly undertaken a huge volume of research and travel, but it’s presented engagingly, often sardonically.’