Meandering and laden with extraneous details, Steinberg’s narrative nonetheless builds a disturbing picture of a society...
A South African journalist probes into the disconnect between modern medicine and a severely stressed tribal culture in a nation where some six million people, more than one in eight citizens, are HIV-positive.
Steinberg (The Number: One Man’s Search for Identity in the Cape Underworld and Prison Gangs, 2005, etc.) focuses on two men: Sizwe Magadla, a shopkeeper in a small, poor, remote village in the Lusikisiki district of the country’s Eastern Cape Province, and Dr. Hermann Reuter, who runs an antiretroviral treatment program there. In cooperation with the provincial health department, the international organization Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) has set up local healthcare clinics to test and administer antiretroviral medicines. With Sizwe as his interpreter, Steinberg spends time at Lusikisiki’s clinics, observing the treatment program, getting to know nurses and patients and following the workings of a support group for HIV-positive patients. In Reuter’s view, if good AIDS treatment is provided, people will come and get it. However, Sizwe refuses to be tested, and Steinberg wants to understand why. Conversations with the skeptical Sizwe reveal not just a fear of demons and witchcraft and a suspicion that white doctors’ needles impart sickness, but deeper issues. The author eventually realizes that Sizwe will not be tested because to be found HIV-positive would mean he could not marry or have children to carry on his name. His individual story reveals the limitations of treatment programs in a place where medicine has long been seen as an ingredient in white political power.
Meandering and laden with extraneous details, Steinberg’s narrative nonetheless builds a disturbing picture of a society caught in a tragic situation with no clear solutions.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5269-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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