An angry book delivering well-deserved hard knocks to male members of the biomedical, government, and corporate...
This critical analysis of how breast cancer is perceived, researched, and treated calls urgently for fundamental changes.
Kasper, a senior research scientist at the University of Illinois Center for Research on Women and Gender, and Ferguson (Sociology/Grinnell Coll.) contend that the best interests of women with breast cancer have frequently been overlooked or undermined. Their collection of essays supporting this thesis begins with a history of breast cancer that uses the debate over radical mastectomy to demonstrate how social forces, such as feminism and patients’-rights movements, affect diagnosis and treatment. Next, an essay by Ferguson charges that plastic and reconstructive surgeons, the FDA, the AMA, and implant manufacturers have medicalized breasts by defining women with small breasts as deformed and diseased. Part two looks at the economics and politics of breast cancer. Individual contributors claim that the financing and fragmented organization of the health-care system obstruct women’s access to high-quality care, that social inequality shapes that access, and that corporate interests have much to gain from the detection, diagnosis, and treatment of breast cancer, little to gain from its prevention, and much to lose from the regulation of toxic products. The editors also look at the roles and motives of various government agencies, cancer societies, industry, and women’s-health advocates in breast cancer policymaking and at controversies in breast cancer research. In Part Three, the focus shifts to social change, with an examination of how breast cancer has been presented in popular women’s magazines since 1913 and of how the breast cancer movement, with its diverse components, has evolved. In a concluding essay, Kasper and Ferguson present their own recommendations, calling for research and clinical practices concentrating on prevention, for the elimination of corporate profit-making interests, for reformation of the health-care industry, and for attention to the needs of underserved women.
An angry book delivering well-deserved hard knocks to male members of the biomedical, government, and corporate establishments.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-21710-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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