A beautifully written but painful series of meditations.
A kaleidoscopic vision of what it means to care for an ailing relative.
As Casey (editor, Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, 2001) tells it in the introduction to this collection of essays, she got off easy. Though she saw her sister, Maude, through hospitalization for a manic episode and then a five-month long bout of depression, she points out that the family did eventually see her through: “Once Maud got back on her feet, she returned to her life with tenacity and success,” writes Casey. “My family, meanwhile, was given the pleasure and satisfaction of believing that our hard work had paid off, that we had helped Maud.” But for many of the writers of these almost-uniformly devastating accounts, the only end in sight is death, and the drama lies in learning how to deal with it. Helen Schulman writes about watching her father’s slow decline from his position as chief resident at Mt. Sinai to a bedridden mess with so many problems they didn’t know what killed him until the autopsy. Sam Lipsyte tells of moving back in with his mother to recover from drug addiction only to become her caretaker when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Ann Hood writes of the sudden death of her five-year-old daughter, ravaged by the common strep virus, while Julia Glass writes from the other side of the hospital bed about her experience being cared for as a breast-cancer patient. Stories of Alzheimer’s, M.S. and cancer abound, as well as tales of coping with a child’s autism or a husband’s sudden catastrophic head injury. Thankfully, there are stories of recovery, but they challenge the wishful idea that recovery means a return to life as it had been. Each essay—other contributors include Julia Alvarez, Jerome Groopman and Anne Landsman—explores the burdens, terrors, sorrows and, occasionally, joy involved in undergoing a terrible ordeal with someone you love.
A beautifully written but painful series of meditations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-087530-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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