Independent Journalist Sonia Shah Launches New Website on Science and Politics

Boston, MA: March 2, 2006: Today, independent investigative journalist Sonia Shah, the author of The BodyHunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients and Crude: The Storyof Oil, launched www.soniashah.com, featuring weekly commentary, as well as awealth of exclusive extracts, articles, book reviews, and event information onthe intersections between science and politics.

“Challenges that we face today, from peak oil to pandemic flu and climate change demand popular attention toscience as never before,” explains Sonia Shah. “But while politics and policydepend on science,” she says, “science is political, too.”

The new website,www.soniashah.com, will help unravel the connections, with news, commentary, and exclusive extracts from Shah’s forthcoming books on science and politics, including the fully updated and revised paperback edition of her critically acclaimed 2004 book, Crude: The Story of Oil scheduled for publication in May 2006.

Crude tracks how the West developed its addiction to oil. “Shah has written a brilliant book,” wrote one reviewer in The Guardian newspaper. “This is not a Michael Moore-styleanti-corporate rant—Shah writes beautifully, with dispassionate, elegantclarity—and it is all the more powerful for it.”

Also on tap is provocative material from The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's PoorestPatients, forthcoming from The New Press in July 2006. Based on several years of original reportage from South Africa and India, The Body Hunters powerfully exposes the exploitation of developing countries by the multinational pharmaceutical industry. A 2005-2006 writing fellow of The Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation, Shah’s articles have appeared in The Nation, The Ecologist, Orion, Salon, Playboy and elsewhere, and have been widely anthologized. She is currently at work on a book about the politics of malaria, an ancient scourge that is expected to be the world’s deadliest contagion by the end of this century. She lives in Boston with her family.

• Look for The Body Hunters, paperback edition, as a selection of the Quality Paperback Book Club sometime around December 2006! Hardcover edition will be available in July 2006.
  

• Acclaimed novelist and author of The Constant Gardener, John Le Carré, has written a preface to The Body Hunters.

• Fully updated and revised paperback edition of Crude will be available in April 2006