The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Hardcover) ….by Rebecca Skloot
It’s the book everyone is talking about and it sounds fascinating :
‘Honestly, I can’t imagine a better tale.
A detective story that’s at once mythically large and painfully intimate.
Just the simple facts are hard to believe: that in 1951, a poor black woman named Henrietta Lacks dies of cervical cancer, but pieces of the tumor that killed her–taken without her knowledge or consent–live on, first in one lab, then in hundreds, then thousands, then in giant factories churning out polio vaccines, then aboard rocket ships launched into space. All of which is to say: the science end of this story is enough to blow one’s mind right out of one’s face.
But what’s truly remarkable about Rebecca Skloot’s book is that we also get the rest of the story, the part that could have easily remained hidden had she not spent ten years unearthing it: Who was Henrietta Lacks? How did she live? How she did die? Did her family know that she’d become, in some sense, immortal, and how did that affect them? These are crucial questions, because science should never forget the people who gave it life. And so, what unfolds is not only a reporting tour de force but also a very entertaining account of Henrietta, her ancestors, her cells and the scientists who grew them.The book ultimately channels its journey of discovery though Henrietta’s youngest daughter, Deborah, who never knew her mother, and who dreamt of one day being a scientist ‘ Jad Abumrad
$15 Publisher: Crown; 1 edition (February 2, 2010) www.amazon.com
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