by Lindsey VanDyke ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 2010
Intelligent, unvarnished and ultimately hopeful; essential reading for anyone touched by childhood cancer.
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VanDyke’s memoir of an idyllic childhood changed irrevocably by cancer.
VanDyke wasn’t quite an average 11-year-old, but she was a happy and healthy one, living with her parents, brother and extended family on a sprawling farm in Oregon, going to school and church, riding horses, celebrating birthdays and so on. But when one of those birthday parties ended with a mystifying emergency that evolved into her diagnosis of kidney cancer, the pace and pattern of life changed forever for both VanDyke and her family. She tells the story in her own voice as an adolescent, showing a remarkable capacity to inhabit the psyche of her former self: Her memories, emotions and language all ring with authenticity. The narrative unfolds in a way that echoes the author’s own gathering awareness of her condition; for the most part, readers learn about diagnoses, medications and treatments right alongside the young VanDyke. The exceptions are brief passages in the voices of her mother, father, nurse and friends, which precede each chapter and read like oral histories that cumulatively provide a broad sense of how cancer affects a tightknit community. This book, VanDyke’s first, is remarkable in its ability to read simultaneously as a compelling YA novel and a serious medical memoir. The scientific names for the diseases, drugs and procedures are given—VanDyke doesn’t miss a detail—yet she also makes clear that this is all knowledge in which a teenage cancer patient learns to become conversant. As Lindsey enters adulthood and receives a new diagnosis of thyroid cancer, the tone of the book changes a bit and may become somewhat less engaging for younger readers, who will identify less with issues of fertility, marriage and career. But embedded within this new journey are poignant observations about PTSD related to her treatment and the lasting psychological scars of childhood cancer—observations that will resonate deeply with both survivors and parents of current patients.
Intelligent, unvarnished and ultimately hopeful; essential reading for anyone touched by childhood cancer.Pub Date: June 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450535649
Page Count: 320
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Rebecca Skloot ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2010
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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edited by Rebecca Skloot and Floyd Skloot
by Bonnie Tsui ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2020
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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by Bonnie Tsui ; illustrated by Sophie Diao
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by Bonnie Tsui
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