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TO DANCE WITH THE DEVIL

THE NEW WAR ON BREAST CANCER: POLITICS, POWER, AND PEOPLE

A big, sprawling story of the fighters in the war against breast cancer, told by a journalist who seems unable to get a firm grip on her subject. Stabiner (Inventing Desire: Inside Chiat/Day, 1993, etc.), who has written for the New Yorker and other magazines, provides a revealing profile of the unconventional and headstrong breast surgeon Dr. Susan Love, whose UCLA Breast Center she visited daily from January to September 1994. Stabiner also offers compelling glimpses into the lives of seven of Love's patients. The conflicts between Love, a dedicated and outspoken activist, and her bosses at UCLA, who fear she is not dealing with the money-losing center's real problems, are adeptly outlined. If Stabiner had chosen to write a behind-the-scenes account of the Breast Center, she could claim success. Through her account, we learn a great deal about the unpredictable nature of the disease, the terrible decisions women must make, and the woefully imperfect weapons that doctors are equipped with. When it comes to the larger war on cancer, however, Stabiner skimps. Although she interviewed numerous government officials, clinicians, lobbyists, fund-raisers, and medical researchers, their stories seem oddly disjointed and incomplete. The changes in how breast cancer research is being funded, the search for the breast cancer gene and its therapeutic implications, the impact of managed care on breast cancer treatment—these are issues that deserve more thoughtful consideration in a work that purports to be giving the big picture. Unfortunately, Stabiner seems to be more interested in personalities than in the issues at stake here. Delivers less than it promises, but the punch it has is still a strong one.

Pub Date: May 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-385-31284-9

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997

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WHY WE SWIM

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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THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

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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