An intimately incisive life story.
A Cameroonian-born lawyer and essayist explores layers of a multiracial upbringing across cultures, continents, and economic classes.
By age 14, Bee had lived in four different countries: Cameroon, which she left in infancy with her aunt and her aunt’s White husband; France, where she spent most of her childhood; England, where she lived as a preteen; and the U.S., which became her adopted home. All of her moves brought connections to cultures far different from the traditional, clan-centered traditions in Cameroon. They also gave her an early awareness that she was a Black girl moving in a White-dominated world. “My blackness was a marker that assigned me in and out of teams,” she writes. “The stark contrast against my dad’s white skin and differing last name reminded me of having been imported. An outsider in my body and in my own home.” After her aunt divorced and left for London with no job, Bee also came to know housing insecurity and that the concept of home was as impermanent and as “cumulative as a nesting doll.” The Christian faith she shared with her aunt became the impetus to join an evangelical church in Nevada, where Bee and her aunt eventually moved. Academic success led to Harvard Law School, a radical restructuring of her worldview, and the painful end of an early marriage to a fellow evangelical. Answering a calling to seek economic justice for others who faced housing insecurity, Bee took a job with the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, D.C. Her life stabilized, and she bought a house of her own. Still, the meaning of home, including the Black female body that faced so much danger in the world, continued to haunt her, as did the distance between her birthplace and her present-day circumstances. Interwoven throughout with Bee’s personal and multifaceted definitions of home, this richly tapestried memoir offers a unique perspective on identity as it restlessly probes the nature of belonging.
An intimately incisive life story.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-66260-133-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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