Bookloft Staff Picks

It’s really wonderful when the Enthusiast can share his excitement & admiration for a book or a subject with a colleague.  It’s especially nice when, in my role as senior bookbuyer, my intuition that a forthcoming book would meet up with an enthusiastic reader on staff prompts me to get an advance copy for that coworker, who really loves the book & tells me excitedly about it, to the point that I have to read it too & end up really liking it as well.  That’s a big payoff & it really happened big-time with Linda, our science & biography reader (& so much else) at The Bookloft & The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. (Read Linda’s Staff Picks at  Linda’s Picks.)

Rebecca Skloot’s remarkable real-life story, published last month by Crown after her decade-plus spent researching & writing the book, is an amazing, emotional & eye-opening tale of the life (& immortality) of an African-American woman whose cells were taken during her cancer treatment in the early 1950′s.  What was done with her cells & how they attained immortality (& notoriety) & what was not done for her family makes for an extraordinary reading experience.  Skloot’s close involvement with the Lacks family to tell Henrietta’s & their stories has resulted in a sensitive drama told with novelistic sweep.  At the heart of the book is Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, whose turmoil & passionate curiosity about the mother she lost as an infant makes the story so poignant & drives it suspensefully forward, inspiring ‘her reporter’ Rebecca to craft this fascinating narrative.

As Linda says in her Staff Pick card, this book is written “with compassion & a thorough sense of the scientific implications” of the experimentation done in the past on patients without their informed consent, & Skloot “has brought justice to this issue” by telling the Lacks family story with such clarity & emotional sympathy.  When I read of Henrietta’s treatment & death in the ‘colored’ ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital & her family’s subsequent bereft & drifting decades, I couldn’t help thinking that her unwitting sacrifice & the development of her cells into the predominant disease research medium & a very big business, compared with her family’s poor health care & near destitution, starkly dramatized the inequalities of race & our country’s troubled health care system.  Not that her family ever had any legal claim to benefits from the HeLa cells business, but I couldn’t help thinking of moral & social-justice implications of the family situation.  Skloot fills in the backgrounds of the controversy & the (mostly lacking) legal protections of individuals in the realms of disease treatments & research; she shows that there are no easy answers.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the standout nonfiction title of the new year.  (Buy It Now at #mce_temp_url#.)  It’s compelling reading beyond any entertainment-expectation & it’s a book with a lot of heart that makes you think seriously of the wider world.  Also, considering the realm of books & my recent novel-reading experiences (not good), it has made me weigh the relative merits of reading fiction versus nonfiction.  As I ponder this, while reading David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto & talking with folks at the store about what their most satisfying reading experiences have been (& what the most frustrating), I’ve set myself up for a next-blog discussion of today’s fiction vs. nonfiction books: what they promise & what they deliver, authenticity & contrivance, truth & claptrap, & the entertainment value in each.

In the meantime, you may contribute your thoughts on The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks & the fiction/nonfiction divide, perhaps about a fine novel you’ve recently read; the Enthusiast @ the Bookloft is always interested to hear your responses, come what may.

Tags: Henrietta Lacks, medical research, Rebecca Skloot