This was one of the books to read last year, and received what appears to be universal acclaim from both critics and fans. The back cover describes it as a “story of the collision between ethics, race and medicine” which is why I finally gave in and read it. It was, briefly, but was more than anything filled with repetitive, minute-to-minute details of the process of her creating this book and her dealings with the family, who seemed awful to me. It couldn’t have possibly been her goal to shine this family in a positive light, which is fine and desirable in a work of non-fiction, but these people were so unlikeable, I’m not sure why more than half the book was about their lives. Also, some of the details were completely unnecessary and irritating.
Did I need to know every time one Henrietta’s relatives got arrested? Did I need to know the brand of liquor was stolen? Did I need complete details of every time Deborah and Rebecca had a conversation about absolutely nothing? Did I need to know that Gladys wasn’t wearing any underwear when they approached her at her house? Why on Earth would that be included? Did we need the complete transcript of each and every one of their religious ramblings? We get it: these people love Jebus but don’t know a whole lot about science. If you want to paint a picture of what these people are like because, for whatever reason, you want a great chunk of your book to focus on her family’s lives, we got the picture with the first ten examples. It got so repetitive that after repeated tellings of some horrible or stupid thing they said or did, I had so thoroughly disliked the family that I had no empathy anymore and was tired of reading about them.
Did this narrative make the book more readable for some people? Did all this human interest crap make the story more interesting?
It could have been a great story, but instead turned into a lengthy play-by-play of this family’s lives, with some sprinklings of the history of HeLa and a chapter or two on the ethics of medical research.
I have avoided the book because it made too many reading group lists too quickly; many reading-group books are excellent, but not all; not sure how to explain it.
I was also worried about how Big Medicine would be portrayed. I fight against that type of behavior in my job during the day, I don’t have a lot of room for it in my leisure reading.
I know someone involved in the publishing of the book - it has been their longshot horse they have been riding for all it is worth. More power to them - it seems to really have caught on…
I was so ready to be on their side, too. Poor black woman in the 1950s has her cells taken without permission or notice, when then become the basis for endless scientific research, meanwhile her family, completely ignorant of this fact for many years, can’t even afford health insurance. How distasteful. But goddamn, at about 2/3 through I was like, “I can’t take anymore of this hostile, ignorant family. And stop telling me about every time one of them takes a piss. I don’t care.”
I need to know I’m not alone, so I came here, where people hate everything.
Thank you, MeanOldLady. I’ve been tempted to buy this book on multiple occasions due to the near-universal praise it’s gotten. However, something always stopped me. I had a vibe that the book was very much a “light” pop-sci book with very little sci. So, thank you for taking one for the team and saving me some money by confirming my suspicions.
I didn’t like it either. The science was interesting but it was almost too basic. I expected to be confused and I wasn’t, which made me think the author dumbed it down, or didn’t understand it very well herself.
Also, I get that the HeLa cells have made millions for pharmas, but I just couldn’t sympathize with the family. Sure, the pharmas could have shared the wealth, but Henrietta was dead, and she’s the only one who deserved anything.
Next up is the book about the radio station employees who were starving and getting arrested while the book was a bestseller.
I started but didn’t finish this book. I did skim through most of it. I just couldn’t really feel the outrage: HeLa made a fortune for the companies but it’s not like they stole her invention or killed her or injected her with cancer to do it, and it’s a lot better than if the cells had just been buried with her. And if her family had money they’d probably have squandered it all and been broke the next year because now in addition to being belligerant they’d be pissed off at not having money any more.
Yeah, see, I would have sympathized with the poor, black, exploited family, if they’d responded to that situation by growing up confident, educated, well-adjusted, successful and literate. Why if they’d been witty, urbane, capable of sparkling cocktail conversation about French literature or snarky internet memes, and dressed in nice clothes in a pleasant apartment, I might even have sympathized enough to want to help them, perhaps.
[I don’t think the book is really about the science. I think it’s about the family, and how the author came to realize that’s what the story is really about. ]
They took her cancer cells. There’s no street value. To this day people who sell their bodies for cadavers are paid a few hundred dollars- they don’t get rich off of it, in fact it’s less than a cheap funeral would cost. Were it not for these cells Henrietta Lacks would be completely totally forgotten; the family should be glad that at least something came from their mother’s suffering that could benefit others- most painful deaths are just painful deaths. I’m an organ donor- I truly hope that when I die something in my body is of use to somebody and I want no compensation for my heirs if it is.
PS- My problem with the book was that I essentially saw it as two separate and almost completely unrelated stories. Here’s what happened to a woman’s cancer cells. Here’s what happened to her family. I’m not really sure there was supposed to be a point.
In any case, must run. There’s a martini social I’m late for and there’s a Proust pun I have been simply dying to try out on somebody and I think Muffy and C.C. might just be the ones! (They’re really top drawer… r-e-a-l-l-y top drawer.)
I might’ve heard the same “radio story” as the rest of you (npr science friday?) and I was bored to death listening to it. The discussion of medical ethics is alright, but the way they kept talking up this woman as if she were of some great value and it was a huge crime that her family wasn’t rich and famous was just bizarre. Who cares? People have their biological samples used in research all the time.
I normally don’t get human interest stories generally, but I can at least kind of see where other people might care. Here I don’t see it at all. Why are we supposed to care about this woman or her family? What has she done?
Oh, come now. How is this fair? My beef with the family was not that they weren’t better educated or snazzier dressers; they were just obnoxious, unlikeable people.
That’s sort of my problem. If the book described itself as the story behind Henrietta Lacks, donor (/theft victim, or whatever) of HeLa, and her descendants, then I would have never picked up the book in the first place, as I don’t care about what her grandkids are doing right now, and I certainly don’t want to read the jabbering conversations they had. I’ve tried to break myself of criticizing things for not being what I wanted them to be, but this book told me it was about science, ethics, race and medicine when it wasn’t. In addition to how the book sold itself, the reviews seemed to agree with this assessment. One said “Skloot narrates the science lucidly [and] tracks the racial politics of medicine thoughtfully.” Oh, you mean those three paragraphs in the beginning where she discusses the science in a very brief and rudimentary way? And I’m fine with the science being basic. I’m not a biologist, so I don’t need the book to get all Sir Lord Dr. Scientist on me, but there was barely any science in this book at all. Honestly, by the last third, Skloot didn’t discuss anything at all besides her road trips with Deborah, and the hostile encounters she had with her and other family members. Jeez, I don’t care about Henrietta’s daughter’s theories about Jurassic Park, and if I did, the stories were repetitive and could have easily been cut in half without losing anything. Three fourths of the way through, no new information was introduced at all, and I could have easily put the book down right then, and not have missed anything.
Except the part about the elderly aunt on the front porch not wearing any underwear. That detail was important.
Exactly. Any of us who has ever had a test or bloodwork, any woman who has ever had a pap smear, anyone who has ever had anything surgically removed from their bodies might have a part of them preserved somewhere. In Macon, Georgia Mercer University medical college often plastinated peculiar samples (tumors for instance) removed in surgery for use by medical students. These things are of no benefit to the person or their family but might be to somebody down the line.
Something I wished had been addressed more in the book was that Henrietta Lacks was a charity patient and received quality care. Surely the resources expended on her 60 years ago are worth a few cells- cells which, worth noting, nobody had any idea were going to be as important as they are now.
Finally, someone else who did not like this book! I was amazed by how much I disliked it, after all the absolutely glowing reviews.
Sampiro is right – there are two stories, and one has nothing, really, to do with the other. And as others have said, it is so repetitive and way too long; where was the editor? One example: I don’t have my copy of the book to check this, but wasn’t the Acknowledgements section like twenty pages long?
There were just way too many scenes of the author doing really nothing worth writing about, like the time she drove around and around the same few blocks looking for some store. And it’s true – the family, even at its best, was just not likable. Oh, this book was so endless and boring!
Yeah, I kinda hated the family, too. It seemed weird to me that they expected money from their mom’s cells. Like Sampiro said, I think I would have been happy to have something come out of a premature death. I think the comparison is made between this and true cases of violation of medical ethics, like the Tuskeegee syphilis study.
Now, if you want a good book on the clash of culture and medicine, try The Spirit Moves You and You Fall Down. Fabulous book.
