"Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future" by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber (Tarcher / Putnam, 360 pages, $24.95).
Commercial interest groups and companies, and the public relations people who work for them, have virtually destroyed the ostensible objectivity of non-profits, university authorities, influential charities and much of the news media, according to this angry and often well-documented tract. Drug companies buy approvals from prestigious good-works organizations; physicians writing letters to medical journals have been well paid by tobacco interests. And so on. The authors are zealots, and in the gunsights of their book almost everything decent appears corrupt. This is PR at its darkest, most cynical. Don't read it while armed.
