A husband’s unsentimental but deeply loving memoir of caring for his wife, who is stricken with Alzheimer’s. Alterra (a pseudonym adopted by the author, a novelist and short-story writer) didn—t take his wife’s forgetfulness seriously when he first began to notice it in 1994. Stella, a talented concert cellist, was, after all, 80. It was when he understood that what she was losing was not simply vocabulary but a sense of the connectedness of things that he became concerned enough to take his wife to their family doctor. Subsequent consultation with a psychiatrist led him to understand that Alzheimer’s is managed less by physicians than by caregivers, and from this point on, Alterra took control. Through the Alzheimer’s Association, he learned about clinical trials of new drugs, and he put Stella into one when she was unable to tolerate the standard drug for slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s. An unusually resourceful man, he persuaded the local police lab to test the medication Stella was given, and on learning it was a placebo, he got her into a program where she was given Sandoz ENA 713. It’s this drug that he credits with slowing her subsequent decline. Nothing, however could halt it, and Alterra unflinchingly describes the inexorable deterioration of Stella’s mind and body. When she could no longer unclench her teeth to eat, he found an infant feeding siphon that worked; when she lost the ability to walk, he figured out that, for a while, marching and dancing could still propel her from place to place. Day care for her and support groups for him helped, but surprisingly, Medicare did not. Alterra’s tale of his bureaucratic encounters is a story in itself, and one he relates with more amusement than bitterness. Today, Stella is wheelchair bound and barely able to speak, but with Alterra still her devoted caregiver. A beautiful, tough-minded love story for all, regardless of age or state of health.
Pub Date: Oct. 22, 1999
ISBN: 1-883642-62-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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
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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