by Dominick Bosco ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1992
Life within a ``hell and heaven, dungeon and sanctuary'' for the mentally ill, here given the fictitious name of Bedloe State Hospital. Bosco (coauthor, Alone with the Devil, 1989) disguises names throughout, not only to protect the privacy of individuals but also to ensure that his story is not seen as simply an exposÇ of a specific institution—for he would have us know that there are a multitude of ``Bedloes'' in the land. A few statistics and trends are cited, but Bosco tells his story largely by getting inside the heads of people. Leading these is Bedloe's medical director, who has recurring dreams of being the first Psychiatrist General of the US with a wonderful program that takes care of everyone—except his own schizophrenic daughter. At work, he struggles with Bedloe's superintendent, a small-minded bureaucrat promoted above his level of competence. The staff includes humane, skilled doctors as well as ones who are a disgrace to their profession, compassionate attendants as well as sadistic ones. At the bottom of the pyramid are the patients themselves, mostly helpless and often hopeless. Neglect and abuse are commonplace, and murder, rape, and suicide are not unusual. Even more shocking—because of its acceptance as policy—is ``treatment by bus ticket,'' i.e., getting rid of patients by declaring them ``stabilized'' and putting them on a bus to another state. Keeping watch on all this horror are only an accreditation committee that permits Bedloe to exist but keeps it on probation, and the patients' families—some of which, driven by the failure of the system, have organized themselves into a force for change. In the ugly world Bosco describes, they are the brightest ray of hope. A grim and gripping report.
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55972-113-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
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by Rebecca Skloot ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2010
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
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edited by Rebecca Skloot and Floyd Skloot
by Bonnie Tsui ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2020
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
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by Bonnie Tsui ; illustrated by Sophie Diao
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by Bonnie Tsui
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