The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A friend of mine in Chicago is starting a book club, and this is going to be their first book. So I thought I’d take a look. I’m not much one for non-fiction, or this kind of subject, but Rebecca Skloot is a fine writer, and I found the book to be very readable. A fine, good read. Engaging, compelling, interesting, and probably most importantly, eye-opening. There’s the praise.
Ostensibly an attempt to tell Henrietta’s story, this book ends up being more about the story of trying to tell Henrietta’s story. Maybe that’s the author’s intent. Maybe there’s some deep symbolism there. In as much as the cancer cells taken from Henrietta Lacks continued to live and multiply, so too does the ongoing effect of those cells on her family. Maybe. That’s seems a bit easy. I think what we really have here is just too little information available about Henrietta herself, and so she gets covered in a few short chapters.
There, of course descriptions of how her cells have set a course for cancer research, and genetic research in general. But the vast majority of the book seems to be around how Skloot has to deal with one of Henrietta’s daughters, Deborah, in order to get as much information as she can to write the book at all. Which is not a bad thing, per se, and it is a good story. But the book ends up being about itself, a book about what it took to write the book.
That’s what I got out of it, anyway. And just like you always suspect, in the back of your mind, that good guys are going to win, to survive, when you’re watching them put in danger in a movie, so too did I have that sense as I was reading this. “I’m holding the book, so Skloot must have succeeded in getting it written.”
Skloot manages to tell the story without making it just about racism and sexism and class. Those elements are present in the story, but Skloot doesn’t let them take over, doesn’t make this book just a screed. And she does give a good introduction, as much as needed, to the science of cell division, cancer, the commercial side of things, patients’ rights, rights to privacy, again without lecturing too much, to provide context for what Deborah is dealing with as she fights to understand and honor her mother’s legacy.
If, in the end, Skloot’s goal was to elevate Henrietta Lacks to the stature of important historical figure, and to make her a real person and not just a footnote through an examination of her families survival after her passing, then I’d say she succeeded, and the book is worth reading.