Title: People Who Eat Darkness
Author: Richard Lloyd Parry
Pub Date: 2011
Genre: Nonfiction; True Crime
Nutshell: The mystery of an English woman who suddenly went missing in Japan
The story of Lucie Blackman, who disappeared in Tokyo while working as a club hostess in 2000, is a sad an incomplete one. Her disappearance ripped her family apart, and became a minor cause celebre for a time within Britain and other countries. The European stereotype of Japanese "strangeness" increased because of it.
Richard Lloyd Parry tells a riveting story with access to all sides--Lucie's father and mother, who split in an acrimonious divorce years before her disappearance and whose mutual hatred of each other caused a great deal of pain and complication for their children; Lucie's siblings, a brother and sister who loved but at times barely knew their older sister; Lucie's friends, some of whom knew her better than others and watched her become someone difference the closer she got to leaving for a foreign country and the deeper she fell into debt; and the man accused of causing her disappearance in Tokyo. Stories sometimes mesh and sometimes are hopelessly far apart, and Lloyd Parry does a good job of keeping all the balls in the air and keeping the reader interested.
This is essentially a true crime story with a lot of history and sociology thrown in as necessary, due to most Western readers' general unfamiliarity with Japanese life and customs. Many Americans and Europeans may not have any idea about the sort of hostess bar where Lucie Blackman worked, or the feelings the Japanese have about Westerners in general and Western women in particular. The section about Lucie's accused kidnapper also deals with the plight of the ethnic Koreans of Japan and the racism they still face even in the modern era. It is much to take in, but Lloyd Parry weaves everything in without making anything boring or too much like a lecture. Lucie is at the center of everything and we are never too far away from her and the search for where she has gone.
I'd recommend this book for any fans of true crime or Japanese culture. The Japanese police don't get a shining grade in this story, but one could easily argue they probably shouldn't. Lloyd Parry is English and may not have all the cultural facts or understanding as an outsider, but I think he did a pretty good job reporting overall and I don't believe he set out to insult anyone.
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
Methland
Title: Methland
Author: Nick Reding
Pub Date: 2009
Genre: Nonfiction
Nutshell: The effects of crystal meth on one small town in Iowa and on the US as a whole.
This is the rare piece of factual reporting that is so easy and quick to read that it doesn't feel like it's factual or reporting. For the subject, it isn't dry or particularly tragic or preachy. Reding manages not to demonize anyone or make anyone into a helpless victim or a villain. Meth changes people, and he just eloquently charts those changes.
Most of the stories take place in tiny Oelwein, Iowa, a place few of us could find on a map but which serves as an excellent microcosm for middle America as a whole. Once a prosperous farm and railroad town, the local meat packing plant eventually got taken over and started offering substandard wages before finally shutting down entirely, putting the majority of the town out of work and into meth. Meth is, as Reding puts it, a quintessentially American drug. It helps you work harder for longer. It's seen as a route to success. And with our Puritan work ethics and appetites for having the finer things, we are easy pickings for addiction.
Reding charts the move from homegrown "batchers" who make their own product in their kitchens, often blowing up their own houses in the process, to the more sinister encroachment of the Mexican cartels, who have no real organizational structure and are much more dangerous than the more familiar specters of the South American drug smugglers from several decades ago. We are left with the very real threat of the Mexican VTOs teaming up with terrorist organizations, each getting funding from the highly lucrative meth trade. It's a sobering thought.
Overall, this was a fascinating read. It covers so many topics, from the drug trade to the changes of small town life to the problems of policing in the 21st century. And Reding does it all with a light hand, never getting bogged down. He obviously comes to care about all his subjects, meth user or law officer or doctor or whoever. Everyone is a human and deserving of their own story. It's a remarkable book.
Author: Nick Reding
Pub Date: 2009
Genre: Nonfiction
Nutshell: The effects of crystal meth on one small town in Iowa and on the US as a whole.
This is the rare piece of factual reporting that is so easy and quick to read that it doesn't feel like it's factual or reporting. For the subject, it isn't dry or particularly tragic or preachy. Reding manages not to demonize anyone or make anyone into a helpless victim or a villain. Meth changes people, and he just eloquently charts those changes.
Most of the stories take place in tiny Oelwein, Iowa, a place few of us could find on a map but which serves as an excellent microcosm for middle America as a whole. Once a prosperous farm and railroad town, the local meat packing plant eventually got taken over and started offering substandard wages before finally shutting down entirely, putting the majority of the town out of work and into meth. Meth is, as Reding puts it, a quintessentially American drug. It helps you work harder for longer. It's seen as a route to success. And with our Puritan work ethics and appetites for having the finer things, we are easy pickings for addiction.
Reding charts the move from homegrown "batchers" who make their own product in their kitchens, often blowing up their own houses in the process, to the more sinister encroachment of the Mexican cartels, who have no real organizational structure and are much more dangerous than the more familiar specters of the South American drug smugglers from several decades ago. We are left with the very real threat of the Mexican VTOs teaming up with terrorist organizations, each getting funding from the highly lucrative meth trade. It's a sobering thought.
Overall, this was a fascinating read. It covers so many topics, from the drug trade to the changes of small town life to the problems of policing in the 21st century. And Reding does it all with a light hand, never getting bogged down. He obviously comes to care about all his subjects, meth user or law officer or doctor or whoever. Everyone is a human and deserving of their own story. It's a remarkable book.
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
The Astronaut Wives Club
Title: The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story
Author: Lily Koppel
Pub Date: 2013
Genre: History, Biography
Nutshell: The stories of the women whose husbands went into space.
So, you probably don't know this about me, but I'm a big space dork. I know way more than the average person my age about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. I wrote papers about the Saturn V rocket in school. So this book was more or less in my area of interest.
This is a pretty easy book. You don't have to know much about the early space program to understand the book, which is mainly about the wives of the astronauts and what they had to deal with. These were mostly all military wives, and the wives of test pilots to boot, so they were already used to quite a bit of pressure before their husbands were ever chosen to go into space. But once the men became astronauts, they also became famous, and women started coming out of the woodwork, adding a whole new stress to their lives and marriages. NASA was also a difficult organization to work for in the 60s, for both the astronauts and the "astrowives." This is basically a story of those issues and problems, and how the women handled them.
Some wives are better profiled than others. Obviously, the Mercury wives get the longest stories, since they were around first. Women like Annie Glenn, Betty Grissom, Marge Slayton and Rene Carpenter are characters in their own right and are duly focused on. Some of the later wives get much shorter shrift. Names become hard to remember, although there are plenty of photos of the astronauts and their wives and families for reference, which help.
I suppose I wanted this book to be a bit more interesting, but I'm not sure what I was expecting. The life of an astronaut's wife wasn't all that exciting. It was a life of waiting and consistently being left behind. And occasional press crawling through the windows. I can't imagine what it must have been like, but this book does give a fair idea. But it did take me a while to read because it wasn't really gripping, but you can't expect that from this kind of history. If you have some spare time and are interested in women's history or the little-known history of the early space program, this is an interesting read.
Author: Lily Koppel
Pub Date: 2013
Genre: History, Biography
Nutshell: The stories of the women whose husbands went into space.
So, you probably don't know this about me, but I'm a big space dork. I know way more than the average person my age about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. I wrote papers about the Saturn V rocket in school. So this book was more or less in my area of interest.
This is a pretty easy book. You don't have to know much about the early space program to understand the book, which is mainly about the wives of the astronauts and what they had to deal with. These were mostly all military wives, and the wives of test pilots to boot, so they were already used to quite a bit of pressure before their husbands were ever chosen to go into space. But once the men became astronauts, they also became famous, and women started coming out of the woodwork, adding a whole new stress to their lives and marriages. NASA was also a difficult organization to work for in the 60s, for both the astronauts and the "astrowives." This is basically a story of those issues and problems, and how the women handled them.
Some wives are better profiled than others. Obviously, the Mercury wives get the longest stories, since they were around first. Women like Annie Glenn, Betty Grissom, Marge Slayton and Rene Carpenter are characters in their own right and are duly focused on. Some of the later wives get much shorter shrift. Names become hard to remember, although there are plenty of photos of the astronauts and their wives and families for reference, which help.
I suppose I wanted this book to be a bit more interesting, but I'm not sure what I was expecting. The life of an astronaut's wife wasn't all that exciting. It was a life of waiting and consistently being left behind. And occasional press crawling through the windows. I can't imagine what it must have been like, but this book does give a fair idea. But it did take me a while to read because it wasn't really gripping, but you can't expect that from this kind of history. If you have some spare time and are interested in women's history or the little-known history of the early space program, this is an interesting read.
Friday, June 13, 2014
The City & The City
Title: The City & The City
Author: China Mieville
Pub Date: 2009
Genre: Crime, Science Fiction
Nutshell: A murder occurs in a fractured town, resulting in more questions than answers.
This was a recommendation from someone I met at a Netrunner tournament, so definitely not the kind of book I probably would have found normally. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, of course.
This book is, at its heart, a pretty standard procedural. It's the story of a cop trying to solve a murder. The twist comes with the city where he lives.
[Here be sort of spoilers, though nothing that will ruin the plot.]
See, Beszel and Ul Qoma, they're different, but they're the same. The city is shared and divided, and residents live in one place or the other, refusing to see the inhabitants of their sister place. It is definitely a novel concept, and while I sincerely doubt it would work in actual life, it might be a darn sight better than some of the ways divided areas operate now.
So a young woman is murdered in Beszel, and Inspector Tyador Borlu is tasked with finding out what's happened to her, and whether or not Ul Qoma has anything to do with it. His investigation becomes weirder and more complex with each new lead, and the story's end reveals as much about the rest of the world as it does the dealings between the two main entities.
This is a weird book, and it started off a bit slow, for all it began with a murder. You're probably going to need to like procedurals to really like this. The stuff about the cities is strange, but it's not that hard to get around if you just maintain a willing suspension of disbelief. But if you don't care about police stories, you're going to be struggling. Overall, this was definitely well-written, but a bit slow at times. Probably because police fiction isn't really my thing. But it held me to the end, and not every book can do that, so it's worth checking out if you think you're curious. I'm going to try some more of Mieville's work (Perdido Street Station was on my radar before) and see what else he does.
Author: China Mieville
Pub Date: 2009
Genre: Crime, Science Fiction
Nutshell: A murder occurs in a fractured town, resulting in more questions than answers.
This was a recommendation from someone I met at a Netrunner tournament, so definitely not the kind of book I probably would have found normally. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, of course.
This book is, at its heart, a pretty standard procedural. It's the story of a cop trying to solve a murder. The twist comes with the city where he lives.
[Here be sort of spoilers, though nothing that will ruin the plot.]
See, Beszel and Ul Qoma, they're different, but they're the same. The city is shared and divided, and residents live in one place or the other, refusing to see the inhabitants of their sister place. It is definitely a novel concept, and while I sincerely doubt it would work in actual life, it might be a darn sight better than some of the ways divided areas operate now.
So a young woman is murdered in Beszel, and Inspector Tyador Borlu is tasked with finding out what's happened to her, and whether or not Ul Qoma has anything to do with it. His investigation becomes weirder and more complex with each new lead, and the story's end reveals as much about the rest of the world as it does the dealings between the two main entities.
This is a weird book, and it started off a bit slow, for all it began with a murder. You're probably going to need to like procedurals to really like this. The stuff about the cities is strange, but it's not that hard to get around if you just maintain a willing suspension of disbelief. But if you don't care about police stories, you're going to be struggling. Overall, this was definitely well-written, but a bit slow at times. Probably because police fiction isn't really my thing. But it held me to the end, and not every book can do that, so it's worth checking out if you think you're curious. I'm going to try some more of Mieville's work (Perdido Street Station was on my radar before) and see what else he does.
Monday, June 9, 2014
Hild
Title: Hild
Author: Nicola Griffith
Pub Date: 2013
Genre: Historical Fiction
Nutshell: The speculative childhood of St. Hilda of Whitby, an English woman living in the 7th century
So, one thing about me is my weird love of the so-called "Dark Ages" and early medieval times, especially in and around what is now Great Britain. So this book, purporting to be about St. Hilda, a woman who really lived in the 600s in England, was definitely interesting to me. England at the time was a weird amalgamation of two types of Christianity (Irish and Roman), along with the native Romanized British religion and the imported Anglo-Saxon faith. It was a time when it was perfectly reasonable to have two or three altars to two or three different gods, because you never knew. The Christ seems to forgive fairly easily--Woden is a bit more of a grudge bearer. Best to be safe and appease both. The monastery at Whitby was crucial in the decision of whether England would declare itself a Celtic or a Roman Catholic country. It may seem like a little thing now, but this was a huge deal back then. The fact that it was settled more or less without bloodshed is a testament to the skill with which people like Hilda were able to negotiate.
Not a lot is known about Hilda's early life. She was a woman after all, so there's only so much written down. She was the daughter of a minor Angle king in the northern part of England. These Germanic kingdoms were constantly fighting with each other, and her father was killed by another minor king (her uncle) who eventually became a sort of overking of the Angles in the area. In addition to the fighting between the Angles, there was also fighting between the other two Germanic kingdoms (Saxons in the south, Jutes in the east) and a couple groups of native kingdoms, which can loosely be broken down along lines of the Irish, the Picts (native Scots), and what we would think of as the Welsh. And then you had the Frankish kingdom in France, which in the next century would gain ultimate ascendancy under Charlemagne. It was a complicated historical moment, and one in which anyone with royal blood wasn't particularly safe, depending on who was in power at the time.
As far as the historical research goes, Griffith definitely did her work. This is a dense book full of information about the time period, what Hild saw, what she smelled, what she knew, what she felt. There is a glossary in the back for the period vocabulary, and a pronunciation guide for the names. There were as many languages as religions, so it can be a struggle, but there's no quiz afterward and you don't have to have them exact. If you're interested in an overview of this complex period in English history, you could certainly do worse than this book. I think she does her best to divorce modern thought from how people's minds worked back then, but that's probably the most difficult task for any historical author. The medieval mind, while of course human and much the same as our own, also traveled along very different paths to what we're used to. At times that can be jarring, and our normal reaction is to clean it up and make it palatable for a more modern eye.
I would say the first two-thirds of the book were more or less what I was expecting, if it was much slower than anticipated. This is strictly Hilda's early life--nothing about her more documented adulthood within the church is touched on. I was thinking it was going to be an entire history, but this is Hilda as child and teenager. About which period there is no information at all. Griffith does well with the more usual tasks that would have been appointed to a young woman of royal blood, but once Hilda starts growing up, things start taking a turn. Sure, there's no proof that Hilda wasn't a natural warrior who fought as well as a man might, just not with a sword. Warrior women were not unheard of in Hilda's time and before. But it seems rather a stretch, and something perhaps more in line with the story Griffith would like to tell, whether in Hilda's guise or someone else's. The nature of Hilda's romantic relationships are also a bit, well, speculative. Again, certainly not anything that is counter-historical, but not what I would call the easiest assumptions either. Of course, this is historical fiction, and nobody, including Griffith, claims that these are the actual events that took place in Hilda's early life. But if you have a historical grounding in the time frame, it may seem a bit reachy, let's say.
Overall, I enjoyed the book. It is LONG--530 pages or so. And dense. There are times when the story seems to stall, and there's a lot of politics, as is fair for a book about this time period. The fighting is well-described and she pulls no punches about what the wounds caused by the weapons of the time would have looked like. It was not an easy era to be a warrior. If you're interested in the history, you could do worse. But there are also shorter books that may not be as full of ancillary facts that are a quicker read.
Author: Nicola Griffith
Pub Date: 2013
Genre: Historical Fiction
Nutshell: The speculative childhood of St. Hilda of Whitby, an English woman living in the 7th century
So, one thing about me is my weird love of the so-called "Dark Ages" and early medieval times, especially in and around what is now Great Britain. So this book, purporting to be about St. Hilda, a woman who really lived in the 600s in England, was definitely interesting to me. England at the time was a weird amalgamation of two types of Christianity (Irish and Roman), along with the native Romanized British religion and the imported Anglo-Saxon faith. It was a time when it was perfectly reasonable to have two or three altars to two or three different gods, because you never knew. The Christ seems to forgive fairly easily--Woden is a bit more of a grudge bearer. Best to be safe and appease both. The monastery at Whitby was crucial in the decision of whether England would declare itself a Celtic or a Roman Catholic country. It may seem like a little thing now, but this was a huge deal back then. The fact that it was settled more or less without bloodshed is a testament to the skill with which people like Hilda were able to negotiate.
Not a lot is known about Hilda's early life. She was a woman after all, so there's only so much written down. She was the daughter of a minor Angle king in the northern part of England. These Germanic kingdoms were constantly fighting with each other, and her father was killed by another minor king (her uncle) who eventually became a sort of overking of the Angles in the area. In addition to the fighting between the Angles, there was also fighting between the other two Germanic kingdoms (Saxons in the south, Jutes in the east) and a couple groups of native kingdoms, which can loosely be broken down along lines of the Irish, the Picts (native Scots), and what we would think of as the Welsh. And then you had the Frankish kingdom in France, which in the next century would gain ultimate ascendancy under Charlemagne. It was a complicated historical moment, and one in which anyone with royal blood wasn't particularly safe, depending on who was in power at the time.
As far as the historical research goes, Griffith definitely did her work. This is a dense book full of information about the time period, what Hild saw, what she smelled, what she knew, what she felt. There is a glossary in the back for the period vocabulary, and a pronunciation guide for the names. There were as many languages as religions, so it can be a struggle, but there's no quiz afterward and you don't have to have them exact. If you're interested in an overview of this complex period in English history, you could certainly do worse than this book. I think she does her best to divorce modern thought from how people's minds worked back then, but that's probably the most difficult task for any historical author. The medieval mind, while of course human and much the same as our own, also traveled along very different paths to what we're used to. At times that can be jarring, and our normal reaction is to clean it up and make it palatable for a more modern eye.
I would say the first two-thirds of the book were more or less what I was expecting, if it was much slower than anticipated. This is strictly Hilda's early life--nothing about her more documented adulthood within the church is touched on. I was thinking it was going to be an entire history, but this is Hilda as child and teenager. About which period there is no information at all. Griffith does well with the more usual tasks that would have been appointed to a young woman of royal blood, but once Hilda starts growing up, things start taking a turn. Sure, there's no proof that Hilda wasn't a natural warrior who fought as well as a man might, just not with a sword. Warrior women were not unheard of in Hilda's time and before. But it seems rather a stretch, and something perhaps more in line with the story Griffith would like to tell, whether in Hilda's guise or someone else's. The nature of Hilda's romantic relationships are also a bit, well, speculative. Again, certainly not anything that is counter-historical, but not what I would call the easiest assumptions either. Of course, this is historical fiction, and nobody, including Griffith, claims that these are the actual events that took place in Hilda's early life. But if you have a historical grounding in the time frame, it may seem a bit reachy, let's say.
Overall, I enjoyed the book. It is LONG--530 pages or so. And dense. There are times when the story seems to stall, and there's a lot of politics, as is fair for a book about this time period. The fighting is well-described and she pulls no punches about what the wounds caused by the weapons of the time would have looked like. It was not an easy era to be a warrior. If you're interested in the history, you could do worse. But there are also shorter books that may not be as full of ancillary facts that are a quicker read.
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Title: The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Author: Neil Gaiman
Pub Date: 2013
Genre: Fiction, Fantasy
Nutshell: A man remembers his childhood friend and her family, and the unlikely experiences he had with them
So, as a self-respecting geek and lover of books, why is this the first Neil Gaiman book I've ever finished? Not sure. I suppose all the hype was part of it, the enthusiasm, the comic booky sort of aura that surrounded his work. It just kind of turned me off. Plus I tried to read American Gods a while ago and just couldn't quite get into it. If I'm remembering correctly, there was a sort of masculinity to it that I just wasn't able to get hold of for whatever reason. I liked the prose, but the subject matter just didn't entirely work for me.
This, however. This book. I am an American adult woman, and far, faaaaar past the point when the ideas of magic or faeries or any of that should be even remotely credible. And yet, this book tapped into that part of me that still absolutely believes in all of that. I can't entirely explain the feeling I had reading this book, other than to say that it almost felt like I'd read (if not actually experienced) something exactly like it before as a child. It felt familiar in a way that very few other books ever have. I don't know if any book has ever felt so innately perfect to my mind. Obviously, nothing in this book ever happened to me, but it feels almost like it did, because I had such a similar imaginative narrative growing up. It felt as though Gaiman tapped into my kid head and extracted exactly what I always suspected was out there. It was really a remarkable experience, reading this.
I don't want to ruin any plot. Suffice it to say that an unnamed narrator returns to the home of his childhood friend Lettie, who was more than she seemed, and he has a very vivid memory of some events that happened when he was 7 years old that involved this girl and her family and his family and things that lived outside but got in. If children in peril aren't your thing, you might steer clear, but honestly it's all handled so deftly that it's there and gone. And, as the book's opening quote by Maurice Sendak rightly declares, "I remember my own childhood vividly...I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them."
I read this book in a matter of hours. I couldn't stop. It was so gorgeous, so ephemeral, so perfect. It is not snarky at all. I'm currently listening to the Secondary Phase of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show, so I know snarky geek. And I love snarky geek. But this isn't that. It's just beautiful and haunting and just the faintest tinge of disturbing. Like something out of a Celtic myth, which I love precisely because they are so...the world is almost mundane in them until suddenly something is just slightly, but perceptibly, off. Like a dream.
I know I would have loved this book as a child, but I'm glad I read it now as well. It reminded me of what I believed then and what I believe still, somewhere.
Author: Neil Gaiman
Pub Date: 2013
Genre: Fiction, Fantasy
Nutshell: A man remembers his childhood friend and her family, and the unlikely experiences he had with them
So, as a self-respecting geek and lover of books, why is this the first Neil Gaiman book I've ever finished? Not sure. I suppose all the hype was part of it, the enthusiasm, the comic booky sort of aura that surrounded his work. It just kind of turned me off. Plus I tried to read American Gods a while ago and just couldn't quite get into it. If I'm remembering correctly, there was a sort of masculinity to it that I just wasn't able to get hold of for whatever reason. I liked the prose, but the subject matter just didn't entirely work for me.
This, however. This book. I am an American adult woman, and far, faaaaar past the point when the ideas of magic or faeries or any of that should be even remotely credible. And yet, this book tapped into that part of me that still absolutely believes in all of that. I can't entirely explain the feeling I had reading this book, other than to say that it almost felt like I'd read (if not actually experienced) something exactly like it before as a child. It felt familiar in a way that very few other books ever have. I don't know if any book has ever felt so innately perfect to my mind. Obviously, nothing in this book ever happened to me, but it feels almost like it did, because I had such a similar imaginative narrative growing up. It felt as though Gaiman tapped into my kid head and extracted exactly what I always suspected was out there. It was really a remarkable experience, reading this.
I don't want to ruin any plot. Suffice it to say that an unnamed narrator returns to the home of his childhood friend Lettie, who was more than she seemed, and he has a very vivid memory of some events that happened when he was 7 years old that involved this girl and her family and his family and things that lived outside but got in. If children in peril aren't your thing, you might steer clear, but honestly it's all handled so deftly that it's there and gone. And, as the book's opening quote by Maurice Sendak rightly declares, "I remember my own childhood vividly...I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them."
I read this book in a matter of hours. I couldn't stop. It was so gorgeous, so ephemeral, so perfect. It is not snarky at all. I'm currently listening to the Secondary Phase of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show, so I know snarky geek. And I love snarky geek. But this isn't that. It's just beautiful and haunting and just the faintest tinge of disturbing. Like something out of a Celtic myth, which I love precisely because they are so...the world is almost mundane in them until suddenly something is just slightly, but perceptibly, off. Like a dream.
I know I would have loved this book as a child, but I'm glad I read it now as well. It reminded me of what I believed then and what I believe still, somewhere.
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Title: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Author: Rebecca Skloot
Pub Date: 2010
Genre: Biography, Medical
Nutshell: The story of the nearly forgotten woman behind some of the most famous cells in science
This book has been on my radar more or less since it was published. I'm a sucker for approachable medical matter, and I like a good biography. My family has also been--well, "touched" wouldn't quite cover it...smacked?--by cervical cancer. I lost a grandparent to it and nearly lost a parent. So I have kind of a weird relationship to the subject matter that sort of made me interested but weirdly repelled. But it was available as an ebook from my library, so I thought I would finally give it a shot.
And I'm pretty glad I did, actually. This is, as the praise will tell you, a well-written history of a lot of things. Cancer research, medical ethics, one woman's unwitting contribution, and the resulting fallout for her family. Obviously, the "human elements" are most compelling. Henrietta's life was short, but she left a legacy behind with her cells but also with her children.
There are a couple disturbing things that the book reveals. One is the overwhelming amount of fear and paranoia that the Lacks family and other older black residents feel about the white medical community. But if you look into the history, as Skloot does, you definitely see some of the reasoning behind it. While this is ostensibly a medical story, it really brings an era of terribly destructive racism into sharp focus. I was born well after the peak of the civil rights struggle, but I do understand a fair bit about it. I knew about the Tuskegee experiments, for example. But the overwhelming fear that Baltimore residents had of Johns Hopkins was new to me. Most of their fears were unfounded, but the paternalistic view that so many doctors had of their black patients went a fair way into creating some horror stories all the same.
The other troubling thing is how cavalier many researchers are toward the concept of who owns a person's tissues and blood. Members of the Lacks family donated blood without ever being clearly told what it was for, and their genetic information and names were subsequently made public without their permission. Doctors and researchers either assumed that the family knew what they were involved with or directly tried to keep them in the dark as much as possible. One researcher hands Henreitta's daughter a dense medical textbook and tells her that all her questions are answered there. These are very poorly educated people, and the way many medical professionals handled them was certainly enlightening.
Now, HIPAA and other laws have made some decent strides toward preventing some of what happened to the Lacks family. You can't just publish names and information now, you can't have access to medical records without direct permission. But doctors can still use or sell your tissues and blood for medical testing, and while it would be nice if they informed you what it might be used for and whether money might be generated from it, they certainly don't have to, and many don't. Your tissues aren't really you anymore. Which might not seem like a big deal, until you look at a family like the Lackses, who could not afford medical care while their mother's cells were selling for $100 a vial. They certainly felt it was unfair that they were in poverty while research companies had made billions selling what they viewed as parts of their mother. And while eventually most of them came to terms with the knowledge that there was really nothing that could be done, and that at least their mother was still helping people, there's still a stark and pretty inequitable contrast between a donor or a donor's family and the medical establishment.
There is also the matter of Henrietta's oldest daughter Elsie, who was committed to an asylum at a young age for what was probably epilepsy and mental impairment. Skloot uncovers details of her time at the Crownsville Hospital, and it is truly disturbing. It is a fairly small piece of the story overall, but what occurred there should not be forgotten.
Overall, this was not a hard book to read. Medical terms are explained, history is recounted, and stories are told fairly. There are no real bad guys in the story of Henrietta Lacks. There are certainly misguided people--products of their time who failed to uphold the standards of care we recognize today. There are careless people--professionals who did not do due diligence in obtaining even the slightest amount of informed consent, people whose zeal for discovery overwhelmed their better judgement. But there are no real villains, and that's probably a fair assessment. Henrietta was treated the same as any woman with cervical cancer would have been then. Her case was already far advanced and horribly complicated. My grandmother died over 20 years after Henrietta of the same disease. Doctors did their best for her person while she was alive (their best being rather primitive in today's terms, but still). It was after she died that they got a bit out of hand, but I don't believe there was evil intent behind their actions. It was standard practice for the time, and luckily for all of us, standard practice has improved quite a bit since then.
I'd recommend this book if you're interested in medical history, or just fascinated with the life of one woman who changed the world and never even knew.
Author: Rebecca Skloot
Pub Date: 2010
Genre: Biography, Medical
Nutshell: The story of the nearly forgotten woman behind some of the most famous cells in science
This book has been on my radar more or less since it was published. I'm a sucker for approachable medical matter, and I like a good biography. My family has also been--well, "touched" wouldn't quite cover it...smacked?--by cervical cancer. I lost a grandparent to it and nearly lost a parent. So I have kind of a weird relationship to the subject matter that sort of made me interested but weirdly repelled. But it was available as an ebook from my library, so I thought I would finally give it a shot.
And I'm pretty glad I did, actually. This is, as the praise will tell you, a well-written history of a lot of things. Cancer research, medical ethics, one woman's unwitting contribution, and the resulting fallout for her family. Obviously, the "human elements" are most compelling. Henrietta's life was short, but she left a legacy behind with her cells but also with her children.
There are a couple disturbing things that the book reveals. One is the overwhelming amount of fear and paranoia that the Lacks family and other older black residents feel about the white medical community. But if you look into the history, as Skloot does, you definitely see some of the reasoning behind it. While this is ostensibly a medical story, it really brings an era of terribly destructive racism into sharp focus. I was born well after the peak of the civil rights struggle, but I do understand a fair bit about it. I knew about the Tuskegee experiments, for example. But the overwhelming fear that Baltimore residents had of Johns Hopkins was new to me. Most of their fears were unfounded, but the paternalistic view that so many doctors had of their black patients went a fair way into creating some horror stories all the same.
The other troubling thing is how cavalier many researchers are toward the concept of who owns a person's tissues and blood. Members of the Lacks family donated blood without ever being clearly told what it was for, and their genetic information and names were subsequently made public without their permission. Doctors and researchers either assumed that the family knew what they were involved with or directly tried to keep them in the dark as much as possible. One researcher hands Henreitta's daughter a dense medical textbook and tells her that all her questions are answered there. These are very poorly educated people, and the way many medical professionals handled them was certainly enlightening.
Now, HIPAA and other laws have made some decent strides toward preventing some of what happened to the Lacks family. You can't just publish names and information now, you can't have access to medical records without direct permission. But doctors can still use or sell your tissues and blood for medical testing, and while it would be nice if they informed you what it might be used for and whether money might be generated from it, they certainly don't have to, and many don't. Your tissues aren't really you anymore. Which might not seem like a big deal, until you look at a family like the Lackses, who could not afford medical care while their mother's cells were selling for $100 a vial. They certainly felt it was unfair that they were in poverty while research companies had made billions selling what they viewed as parts of their mother. And while eventually most of them came to terms with the knowledge that there was really nothing that could be done, and that at least their mother was still helping people, there's still a stark and pretty inequitable contrast between a donor or a donor's family and the medical establishment.
There is also the matter of Henrietta's oldest daughter Elsie, who was committed to an asylum at a young age for what was probably epilepsy and mental impairment. Skloot uncovers details of her time at the Crownsville Hospital, and it is truly disturbing. It is a fairly small piece of the story overall, but what occurred there should not be forgotten.
Overall, this was not a hard book to read. Medical terms are explained, history is recounted, and stories are told fairly. There are no real bad guys in the story of Henrietta Lacks. There are certainly misguided people--products of their time who failed to uphold the standards of care we recognize today. There are careless people--professionals who did not do due diligence in obtaining even the slightest amount of informed consent, people whose zeal for discovery overwhelmed their better judgement. But there are no real villains, and that's probably a fair assessment. Henrietta was treated the same as any woman with cervical cancer would have been then. Her case was already far advanced and horribly complicated. My grandmother died over 20 years after Henrietta of the same disease. Doctors did their best for her person while she was alive (their best being rather primitive in today's terms, but still). It was after she died that they got a bit out of hand, but I don't believe there was evil intent behind their actions. It was standard practice for the time, and luckily for all of us, standard practice has improved quite a bit since then.
I'd recommend this book if you're interested in medical history, or just fascinated with the life of one woman who changed the world and never even knew.
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