Toxin | 
| Author: Robin Cook
Publisher: Berkley
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  262 reviews
Sales Rank: 388650
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.6 x 4.1 x 1.3
ISBN: 0425166619
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780425166611
ASIN: 0425166619
Publication Date: February 1, 1999
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Amazon.com Review
Just when you thought it was safe to eat a hamburger again, Robin Cook--master of medical mysteries, deadly epidemics, and creepy comas--returns with an all too likely villain drawn right from current headlines: the American meat industry. If you've ever wondered where the E. coli bacteria comes from, and exactly how it can ravage the human body, destroying everything in its path, this is the book for you. As usual, Cook delivers solid information, well-researched medical arcana, and a scathing indictment of managed health care. His protagonist, Kim Regis, is an all-too-typical ego-driven surgeon, whose arrogance and invulnerability set him up to be brought low by the deadly toxin that takes the life of his young daughter. Sparing no time and barely a paragraph to reflect on his loss, Regis goes right after the culprit, a meat-packing behemoth that brings dead and diseased animals to the slaughterhouse, breaking every health regulation in the book. The scenes set on the killing floor and in the boning rooms will make a vegetarian out of the most confirmed red-meat eater. Toxin is a heart-pounding thriller that hits very close to home. --Jane Adams
Product Description
A gripping tale of bacterial poisoning, product tampering, and corporate malevolence by the dean of medical thrillers. After his daughter, Becky, dies from poisoning caused by "E. coli" bacteria, surgeon Kim Regis investigates and comes up against a code of silence more impenetrable that anything he has ever encountered in the medical world.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 257 more reviews...
 Unrelatable, factually inacurrate, and worst of all-- BORING October 13, 2008
This is the first-- and only-- of Robin Cook's books I read. Perhaps he does better work when the subject is something he's better versed on. However, it looks like he got his information for this book from some unholy combination of PETA and Michael Moore.
Our protagonist is presumably Dr. Regis, who is unfortunately an ill-informed egotistical temperamental idiot. He has to have a random stranger in an elevator tell him how many cases there are hospitalizations resulting from e. coli every year. He seems completely unaware that hundreds of benign strains of e. coli exist. He throws temper tantrums at professionals. He interrupts his own child's surgery, something that would most certainly not be allowed in any hospital I've been to, doctor-to-doctor friendliness or not. We're supposed to be cheering for this guy? Sure, he's got a kid in trouble, but he doesn't have to be a jerk about it.
Next, we have the vegetarian meat inspector. Um....okay. Perhaps in the utopia Mr. Cook grew up in, animals went straight from being alive and animated to meat in a tube, but in reality, they have to be slaughtered. And most of us who have spent any time at all in the country have no compunction about gutting fish or slaughtering a cow. It's morally dichotomous at best to indict a whole industry based on your squeamishness about slaughterhouses and stockyards.
How 'bout the rednecks driving around in a beat-up pickup truck collecting diseased animals to sell to stockyards? Like ANY corporate stockyard would inherit the huge liability risk associated with procuring animals from an unknown source. Sorry, just doesn't happen, but thanks for engaging in the stereotype!
And on and on it goes-- poorly researched, blatantly biased writing that tries to make a human interest story out of corporate evil and ignorance, but unfortunately is an indictment only of the author's willful ignorance.
Don't waste your time. September 24, 2008
Here's the book:
Managed Health Care = evil! Meat industry = evil! The protagonist of the book = out of control nut case with no character development!
There, I saved you a few bucks. There is no story here, just a rant disguised as a novel.
 Fact stranger than Fiction February 28, 2008
Isn't anyone scared that what was on the news last week (i.e. the CA packing plant videos) five years after I read this for an ethics for scientists class at Towson. It's a shame the folks at the FDA didn't read it!
 Irritatingly Cliche-ridden November 13, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I wanted to slap the protagonist, slap his ex-wife, slap his girlfriend and, until she got sick, slap his kid (what 10-year-old do you know who says "fabulous"?). These characters are some of the most unsympathetic and poorly fleshed-out I've seen in Cook's books. In order to make us care about his causes, he needs to make us care about his characters. The egocentric surgeon, the bimbo girlfriend, the resentful ex-wife, the spoiled, manipulative child, the uncaring, evil corporation - we've seen these cliches a million times.
 Captivating, Scary, Sad October 8, 2007
This book was recommended to me by a friend and I couldn't put down because it really drew me in. I was anxious to see if the father ever was able to find out why his girl died. It was about meat contamination and the scary part was that it was so believable that it could really happen.
Karen Arlettaz Zemek, Author of "My Funny Dad, Harry"
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