Publishers Weekly
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In this incendiary account, debut author Baker details how a tip he received as a freshman student journalist at Stanford University led to the resignation of university president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Baker, the son of political reporters Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, enrolled at Stanford in 2022 planning to study computer science. He joined the student newspaper as a hobby, but it became something more when a friend alerted Baker to a years-old blog post suggesting that one of Tessier-Lavigne’s published neurobiology papers included a falsified image. Pulling on that thread, Baker reported a series of stories alleging that Tessier-Lavigne was complicit in publishing deceptive and misleading scientific research on multiple occasions. The university assembled a committee to investigate Baker’s claims, and in 2023, Tessier-Lavigne resigned from his post—shortly after Baker became the youngest recipient of a Polk Award. Far from braggadocious, Baker is frank about the toll his reporting took on his social life and his faith in higher education; the book is at its most fascinating when detailing his disillusionment with the “rot” at the heart of academia that prizes the appearance of success over the truth. It’s a confident testament to the power of independent journalism from an author with a bright future. Agent: Raphael Sagalyn, CAA. (May)

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A cub reporter’s big exposé. Baker was 17, a newcomer to Stanford’s student newspaper, when he got a tip about the university’s top boss. In this well-documented book, he describes the “full-time digging” that ensued, yielding a run of consequential articles. His reporting found “falsified” data in neuroscience studies authored by Marc Tessier-Lavigne before he became Stanford’s president. Tessier-Lavigne retracted several studies and was forced to resign. Baker’s step-by-step narrative is brisk and punctuated with well-explained details about sourcing, the particulars of data manipulation, and a scientific-publishing industry in which questionable findings often go uncorrected. His investigation dovetails with his broader look at “Stanford inside Stanford.” In this “exclusive world of excess and access,” tech companies and venture capitalists organize “highly exclusive” get-togethers and establish slush funds for “high-agency” students who learn, per one instructor, that “a great amount of value can be extracted from the people around you.” In such a milieu, some believe innovators can “supersede pesky, traditional rules.” Citing instances of corner-cutting and lawbreaking by university-affiliated power-players, he contends that Stanford “has made a Faustian bargain with Silicon Valley,” one that has enriched the school and faculty members but enabled “corruption.” Baker’s reporting earned him a Polk Award, the first time the prestigious journalism prize went to a college newspaper. As the son of prominent journalists, he encountered people who “assumed nepotism” helped him while reporting. “The reality was so much more mundane. I’d just worked, constantly.” Baker isn’t always discerning about the anecdotes he shares; some, foregrounding his moral compass, read like self-flattery. His pedestrian account of trying to preserve a long-distance relationship with his high-school girlfriend doesn’t add much either. In this absorbing memoir, a college journalist reveals how his scoops brought down his august school’s leader. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.