The protagonists may have stayed calm, but these stories of cheating the reaper are crazy wild.
Sherwood (The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, 2004, etc.) investigates why some live, others don’t.
His subjects are the people who closely encountered the proverbial cement truck when they stepped out the door one sunny morning, yet lived to tell about it: the woman who dropped six miles through the sky without a parachute; the man who ejected from his fighter plane at sea level doing Mach 1; the woman who fell on her knitting needle, which proceeded through her sternum directly into her heart. Their stories are gripping, to put it mildly, and Sherwood is enough of a storyteller to maintain the narrative pace throughout. He's also enough of a sideshow barker to write that this book “unlocks the secrets of who lives and who dies,” though not with so straight a face as to sound like he’s peddling snake oil. He probes each fantastic story for that mysterious something that pulled the person through. What role did nature play, and what role nurture? Luck is good, Sherwood discovers—luck being a product of openness to random opportunities around you—but keeping your head is critical. The composed often live, the stunned less so, the hysterical rarely. Being relaxed is also a plus, and religious belief, or surrendering to a higher power, has worked its charms. Statistical oddities are curious but unilluminating: Are lefties doomed to shorter lives? Do your initials condemn you? Sometimes the material beggars belief. Can someone who has sunk 20 feet into the ocean and “let seawater fill his lungs” really make it back? Still, Sherwood gains our trust with his Boy Scout common sense: Be prepared, play to your strengths, stay unruffled, keep the faith.
The protagonists may have stayed calm, but these stories of cheating the reaper are crazy wild.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-58024-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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