The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers by Scott CarneyMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
In traditional journalism style, Scott Carney delivers a little about a lot. As the international trade in body parts (and in adoptable children as well) is broad and complex, this could have been a much longer book. Most of the author’s focus is on the supply side of the marketing process, with particular emphasis on his familiar stomping grounds in India. The reporting is good, but here and there it left me wondering about the demand side of things. For example, Carney thoroughly describes a case of a child kidnapped in India and sold to an unwitting couple in the United States. The story left me wondering about why anyone in a country with millions of legitimately-orphaned children would need to resort to kidnapping, and why the notoriously racist US adoption system would create any kind of a black market for non-white children. There are answers to these questions (and many others like them) that I wish had been within Carney’s scope. That aside, the book is well researched and well written.
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