Author Chip Jones to join The Friends of VCU Libraries Book Club to discuss “The Organ Thieves”
The next Friends of VCU Libraries Book Club is set for Sunday, February 21st at 2pm via Zoom. We will discuss “The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South” by Chip Jones. The author will join us for this event. To get the Zoom link to attend, please send an email to kjgotschalk@vcu.edu.
About the book:
In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a black man, went into Virginia’s top research hospital with a head injury, only to have his heart taken out of his body and put into the chest of a white businessman. Now, in The Organ Thieves, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Chip Jones exposes the horrifying inequality surrounding Tucker’s death and how he was used as a human guinea pig without his family’s permission or knowledge. The circumstances surrounding his death reflect the long legacy of mistreating African Americans that began more than a century before with cadaver harvesting and worse. It culminated in efforts to win the heart transplant race in the late 1960s.
The book is available for purchase online and in local bookstores.