I am not very comfortable with stories about mothers dying of cancer. It hits way too close to home, and it's something I'd prefer not to think about at all. Ever. However, since I know that approach is not only unrealistic, but unhealthy for me as well, once in a while I challenge myself with something that I know will probably be painful. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, met that criterion, as well as being well reviewed and available on CD: Win-win-win! I have also been trying to read a bit more nonfiction lately, especially since I enjoyed The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher so thoroughly.
Immortal Life is the kind of "relaxed" nonfiction in which the author-narrator takes us on a voyage of discovery that infuses dry, scientific facts with the flavor of human interest. Journalist Skloot had been fascinated as a student by the mystery of the woman behind the HeLa cell line, which has been used to develop the polio vaccine and test cancer therapies, and for a host of other biomedical advances over the last sixty years. Scientists have spent entire careers working with HeLa, but virtually none of them (not to mention the general public) were aware that the relentlessly growing cells originated from an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks.
In 1951, Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and a doctor at the Johns Hopkins clinic removed part of the tumor (without her knowledge or consent) before she was treated with radiation therapy. The sample of her cancerous cells grew "like nothing anyone had seen, doubling their numbers every twenty-four hours, stacking hundreds on top of hundreds, accumulating by the millions." Scientists had been struggling to develop self-perpetuating cell lines for years, and Henrietta's cells provided them with an endlessly growing crop on which to perform experiments (some of them vicious and illegal, such as when Henrietta's cancerous cells were injected into healthy patients without their consent). HeLa, as the cells became known, soon spread to laboratories around the world.
In the meantime, the Lacks family had lost Henrietta to a brutally painful death from uremia soon after radiation treatments failed to cure her cancer. Her autopsy revealed that tumors "the size of baseballs had nearly replaced her kidneys, bladder, ovaries, and uterus. And her other organs were so covered in small white tumors it looked as if someone had filled her with pearls." Her children, most notably Deborah Lacks, around whom Skloot frames her story, grew up knowing almost nothing about their mother. It was decades before the Lacks family (struggling to survive in Baltimore) was made aware of the existence of HeLa, which by that point had become a profit-making enterprise and scientific standard. Deborah's brothers reacted with anger, but Deborah was fueled by a desire to discover everything she possibly could about her mother and her dead sister, Elsie, who had been institutionalized and died in the 1950s.
As Skloot comes to a careful truce with the Lacks family and helps Deborah on the slow and painful road to knowing her mother, she intersperses chapters on the scientific developments of cell culture and the discoveries it facilitated. Skloot strikes a careful balance between ethics and the importance of scientific research as she investigates the history of informed consent and presents the "science" part of the story in approachable prose. The combination of these informational chapters with the narrative of Henrietta and Deborah is amazingly effective. I would definitely recommend The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks to anyone interested in accessible nonfiction, the history of medicine, African-American history, or just someone looking for a good, moving story. I admit, I cried more than once while listening in the car.
Grade: A
Random Thoughts:
One of the most amazing things about this story is the fact that so many of the principals were still alive, despite the fact that Lacks died in 1951. For example, Skloot was able to interview the doctor who examined Henrietta and removed her cells. Lab assistants, researchers, family members, and others who were touched by Lacks (or HeLa) were still available for Skloot's research. The book was at least ten years in the making, and at times yielded some amazing and improbable discoveries, especially where Deborah's sister Elsie was concerned. It makes me wonder what on earth Skloot will write about next, since she became a primary character in Immortal Life.
Skloot is donating proceeds from the sale of the book to the Henrietta Lacks Foundation, which has just given out its first grants to some of Henrietta's descendants.
I listened to the book on audio CD, and the narrator was certainly able, but I would also recommend picking up the book to see the eight pages of color photographs, which do a great deal to bring life to the people that Skloot describes.
I may be the only one who thought this, but if there had been another season of The Wire, they could have centered it around the interaction between Johns Hopkins and the citizens of Baltimore.
Book Review Index
Dead Mother: Yes
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Monday, November 22, 2010
Book Review: Fierce Overture [2010]
I first became familiar with Gun Brooke many years ago through her online J/7 fanfiction, and her career as a novelist has since taken off. She now has five novels published, all set in the same world and featuring some of the same characters. In addition, Brooke creates the art for her own book covers, which I think is an intriguing way to see what the author feels is important about the narrative (in this case: very little clothing! Performing!).
Fierce Overture, the latest in the series, features a high-powered music executive--Helena Forsythe--who is having difficulties with one of her superstars, the young, beautiful, and extremely successful Noelle Laurent. Helena has spent her life focusing on her career and feels that Noelle's desire to sing her own soulful music, rather than the bubbly pop she is known for, would be a bad business decision both for Noelle and Helena's company. As the CEO, Helena has the last word, but things are quickly complicated by her growing attraction to Noelle, who is nothing at all like the party girl she has been painted in the tabloids. After a passionate night together, each woman finds herself reassessing her career and emotional life. But Helena's inability to commit to supporting Noelle's dream means that their burgeoning relationship could easily turn to heartbreak.
Grade: B+
Random Thoughts:
I like Brooke's series, and it's nice to see the progress that characters like Carolyn Black and Annelie Peterson have made since they got together in the first book. However, I felt that Helena perhaps changed her mind one too many times about Noelle's right to record her own music. Will she approve it? Won't she? The story relied a little too heavily on this question when it could have possibly diversified and thrown a different obstacle in the couple's path. The sex scenes were definitely above average, including one that involved cell phones and bathtubs.
Book Review Index
Dead Mother: I think so, but not 100% sure.
Fierce Overture, the latest in the series, features a high-powered music executive--Helena Forsythe--who is having difficulties with one of her superstars, the young, beautiful, and extremely successful Noelle Laurent. Helena has spent her life focusing on her career and feels that Noelle's desire to sing her own soulful music, rather than the bubbly pop she is known for, would be a bad business decision both for Noelle and Helena's company. As the CEO, Helena has the last word, but things are quickly complicated by her growing attraction to Noelle, who is nothing at all like the party girl she has been painted in the tabloids. After a passionate night together, each woman finds herself reassessing her career and emotional life. But Helena's inability to commit to supporting Noelle's dream means that their burgeoning relationship could easily turn to heartbreak.
Grade: B+
Random Thoughts:
I like Brooke's series, and it's nice to see the progress that characters like Carolyn Black and Annelie Peterson have made since they got together in the first book. However, I felt that Helena perhaps changed her mind one too many times about Noelle's right to record her own music. Will she approve it? Won't she? The story relied a little too heavily on this question when it could have possibly diversified and thrown a different obstacle in the couple's path. The sex scenes were definitely above average, including one that involved cell phones and bathtubs.
Book Review Index
Dead Mother: I think so, but not 100% sure.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Meditation on Writing
In case anyone has noticed my relative silence over here for the past few weeks, it's not because I have become suddenly shy again (as far as I know I am still a newly-minted extrovert). On the contrary, I have been engaged in a not-so-secret project that involves writing at least 50,000 words in the month of November and calling it a novel. At first I thought, "oh, I'll try this and get bored with it like I usually do and that will be that." But just past the halfway point, I've got over 26,000 words written--and not just one word repeated 26,000 times--and I think I might actually make the deadline. It's not something that I ever expected to happen, and I'm still a little cautious about discussing it at all, in case that causes me to self-destruct. I am very good at enthusiastically starting projects and historically pathetic at bringing them to a satisfying close. So: cautious optimism. As I've been forcing myself to write the required 1,667 words a day, I've also been thinking about my history as a writer.
I have consistently been a voracious reader, but writing was something I only did in fits and starts throughout my childhood. I am still quite proud of the short story I wrote some (cough) years back from the point-of-view of a Rain-Blo bubble gum ball, even though the story itself may longer exist.1 As a young adult with no actual ability to make geeky friends who were my age, I spent a great deal of time generating D&D characters . . . but never actually played the game. To this date I still have not played D&D once (much less an entire campaign), but that's OK, I suspect that character generation (and character names) might be the best part. Then I went to college, and all of my writing time was taken up with things called 'papers', some of which didn't actually feel like work.2
After graduate school (Master's #1), I worked two simultaneous jobs as a technical writer, so there still wasn't much space in my life for "fun" writing. However, despite not liking to read short stories all that much, I used to write them, in the form of fan-fiction, for other people to read on the internet. Most of the archive sites for these stories seem to have mercifully disappeared, and I'm not going to say much more about that. However, I do still have a t-shirt that vaguely references that time of my life, so as long as I keep it I will always have a gentle reminder that I used to be passionate about TV. Eventually I developed this blog as an outlet for my desire to write. It allows me to keep up on my more formal prose with book reviews, and once in a while do a little navel gazing.
I've always had a secret desire to write a romance novel, and have a rough half-dozen started on various forms of media that are now obsolete and therefore inaccessible to me.3 When I started reading my mother's romance novels as a kid, I felt that I was enough of a judge of quality to arrogantly think "hey, I could do this!" I mean, who hasn't picked up a "trashy" romance and thought that they could produce something equally bad, if not slightly better? This month is my opportunity to finally put my money where my mouth is. At some point (in September or October), I volunteered to write a novel that will probably only appeal to a very small subset of people, but which will make me happy to write. And I think that's what actually matters.
1It may actually still exist; there's a lot of stuff in the garage. But that's another post entirely. If I find it someday, I'll be sure to post it here, so STAY TUNED. In the meantime (spoiler alert), if I remember correctly, it doesn't end well for our gumball hero.
2My favorite papers were for Literary Theory. One involved ten pages of deconstruction applied to the message inside a Cadbury chocolate egg wrapper, and the other was a discussion of "Jesse's Girl" as a tale of homosocial desire (we had been reading Sedgwick). For the opportunity to write these, I have to give all the credit to my friend and mentor Dr. Tromp, the same person who facilitated footnote 3.
3The same is true of my 120+ page senior thesis on Emily Brontë, but I like to think that I could recover that with the help of OCR from my hard copy, if ever there was an emergency in which my scholarship--DIGITIZED--was the only hope for humanity. For reference, the title is: 'Through life and death, a chainless soul': Emily Brontë's Poetic Reconfiguration of Romanticism, Female Authorship, and the Critical Paradigm. Available only in one college library in Ohio, my living room, and my father's house. Oh, to be young again.
Meditation Index
I have consistently been a voracious reader, but writing was something I only did in fits and starts throughout my childhood. I am still quite proud of the short story I wrote some (cough) years back from the point-of-view of a Rain-Blo bubble gum ball, even though the story itself may longer exist.1 As a young adult with no actual ability to make geeky friends who were my age, I spent a great deal of time generating D&D characters . . . but never actually played the game. To this date I still have not played D&D once (much less an entire campaign), but that's OK, I suspect that character generation (and character names) might be the best part. Then I went to college, and all of my writing time was taken up with things called 'papers', some of which didn't actually feel like work.2
After graduate school (Master's #1), I worked two simultaneous jobs as a technical writer, so there still wasn't much space in my life for "fun" writing. However, despite not liking to read short stories all that much, I used to write them, in the form of fan-fiction, for other people to read on the internet. Most of the archive sites for these stories seem to have mercifully disappeared, and I'm not going to say much more about that. However, I do still have a t-shirt that vaguely references that time of my life, so as long as I keep it I will always have a gentle reminder that I used to be passionate about TV. Eventually I developed this blog as an outlet for my desire to write. It allows me to keep up on my more formal prose with book reviews, and once in a while do a little navel gazing.
I've always had a secret desire to write a romance novel, and have a rough half-dozen started on various forms of media that are now obsolete and therefore inaccessible to me.3 When I started reading my mother's romance novels as a kid, I felt that I was enough of a judge of quality to arrogantly think "hey, I could do this!" I mean, who hasn't picked up a "trashy" romance and thought that they could produce something equally bad, if not slightly better? This month is my opportunity to finally put my money where my mouth is. At some point (in September or October), I volunteered to write a novel that will probably only appeal to a very small subset of people, but which will make me happy to write. And I think that's what actually matters.
1It may actually still exist; there's a lot of stuff in the garage. But that's another post entirely. If I find it someday, I'll be sure to post it here, so STAY TUNED. In the meantime (spoiler alert), if I remember correctly, it doesn't end well for our gumball hero.
2My favorite papers were for Literary Theory. One involved ten pages of deconstruction applied to the message inside a Cadbury chocolate egg wrapper, and the other was a discussion of "Jesse's Girl" as a tale of homosocial desire (we had been reading Sedgwick). For the opportunity to write these, I have to give all the credit to my friend and mentor Dr. Tromp, the same person who facilitated footnote 3.
3The same is true of my 120+ page senior thesis on Emily Brontë, but I like to think that I could recover that with the help of OCR from my hard copy, if ever there was an emergency in which my scholarship--DIGITIZED--was the only hope for humanity. For reference, the title is: 'Through life and death, a chainless soul': Emily Brontë's Poetic Reconfiguration of Romanticism, Female Authorship, and the Critical Paradigm. Available only in one college library in Ohio, my living room, and my father's house. Oh, to be young again.
Meditation Index
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
