An inspirational story of losing pride, embracing humanity and accepting love.
One woman’s rebellion against powerlessness places her in perhaps the most powerless situation of all—crossing the Atlantic Ocean alone in a 23-foot rowboat.
McClure’s unique debut memoir unravels, true to its setting, in a series of currents and waves. At various speeds and intensities, she reveals her life-or-death battle against the ocean, her inner demons and the motives behind her journey. Growing up a self-proclaimed misfit, she was haunted by guilt over being unable to protect her developmentally handicapped brother from the world’s cruelty. Her attempts to do so produced a strong, solitary, athletic young woman, but her inability to completely shield him solidified her feeling of impotence. That feeling remained with her throughout her life, even as she worked to help the homeless, the disabled and the terminally ill. She cared fiercely about humanity but was emotionally isolated and blamed herself for failing to save the world. Driven to overcome this self-perceived weakness, 35-year-old McClure departed from the coast of North Carolina in 1998, planning to row the 3,600 miles to France. Isolated at sea for 91 days, battling three hurricanes and a loss of all communication while cherishing the beauty and bliss of the sea, she fluctuated between accepting and challenging nature. A stirring metaphor for life’s unpredictable ups and downs, McClure’s real-life journey was both propelled and hindered by the ever-transitory ocean currents. When the North Atlantic’s worst recorded hurricane season forced her to request rescue at sea, she felt like a failure. Returning home depressed and unable to merge her now-divided self, she stumbled for the first time upon love—and a new plan to conquer the sea. On that voyage, yet another hurricane brought her crashing to her knees, but this time she learned to embrace her demons and forgive herself. Nearly ten years after the conclusion of her groundbreaking journey, McClure offers her reflections in contemplative, honest language, revealing her meaningful road to self-discovery.
An inspirational story of losing pride, embracing humanity and accepting love.Pub Date: April 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-171886-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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