July 14, 2011

Book Review: The Red Market


The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers

By Scott Carney

WILLIAM MORROW

Tragedy struck one evening in 2006, when an American girl, part of a student group the author was mentoring on a trip to India, fell from a rooftop and died. As Carney negotiated with police and insurance companies to get her body home, it struck him that “every corpse has a stakeholder.” In his subsequent multi-year investigation of the international trade in blood and body parts, he talked to an Indian bone trafficker banished from his village for robbing graves, followed the trail of a kidnapping-adoption ring from Chennai to a quaint Midwestern town (a story first published in these pages), and exposed brokers who bought kidneys from desperate refugees in Indonesia. A fascinating read, The Red Market sheds needed light on what Carney calls “the darkest corners of our economic world.”

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