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megwrites
Title: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Author: Rebecca Skloot
Genre: Non-fiction
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Broadway Paperbacks
Basic
The Positives: The big positive is that this story centers on Henrietta as much as is possible. A lot is done to make her very real and tell about her story apart from the cells. Indeed, there are entire chapters that could well be just a fascinating biography unconnected to any scientific research. This, I feel, is the most important work the book does - bringing Henrietta's humanity and who she was to the center.
The science and the history are well balanced here, and the science itself is fairly understandable to those who have a grasp of some biology concepts. I don't think it would be accessible to people who were at the Lackses level of education, however, and I wish Skloot had gone a little deeper in really making sure that the science of the HeLa cells was accessible to all readers at all levels. The book also does a good job of discussing the scientific history and talking about what doctors knew and believed at the time and how that informed their actions in addition to the social environment. It's quite amusing to see that scientists have believed some rather outlandish things in the absence of evidence. The surprising and interesting part of the book is when Skloot explains that the HeLa cells have been both a blessing and a curse. While they've helped medical science take flying leaps forward, they also have contaminated other cell lines and skewed the results of many, many scientific studies, costing millions in damages.
I also feel she does a good job at talking about the ethics and what kind of legal ground the Lackses and others who have theirs or a loved one's tissues taken stand. Showing the history of case trials up 'til the present day involving what rights people have over their own tissues and cells gives this story a very present day relevance that I think readers might miss out on otherwise.
Overall, it's well written and very sympathetic to the Lackses, as well as being thorough. Not a perfect book, but a fairly good one.
The Negatives: There are times when this book can't help but edge towards The Help territory and I feel Skloot had more work to do in making sure to clarify that racial politics have not improved as much as white people think they have since the 50's and that race is still a defining factor in what is happening to the Lackses. While I'm glad this story is getting out there, the author doesn't really seem to get that there's a reason the Lackses themselves have not been listened to all these years, a reason why nobody bothered to explain anything to them and it wasn't just people being careless. It was a lot more deliberate than that. There are also times when Skloot's portrayal of Deborah makes her come off as irrational and unreasonable, especially when she sometimes draws back from giving Skloot material about Henrietta. As a reader, I could very clearly see that Deborah wasn't being irrational at all! She had every reason to mistrust Skloot, and it seems like Skloot lacked the insight to consider that perhaps Deborah, like all people, had good days and bad days, which meant that there were times when the thought of giving the few pieces of her mother she could keep to a white outsider had to be upsetting and triggering to her and days when she could handle it better.
There are also moments when Skloot is too much in her own POV as a writer and reporter. While I am interested in this story, I'm not all that interested in what she went through to write it aside from her interactions with the Lackses. There are moments when I wanted to say, "Okay, author person, this book ain't about how you wrote a book about this topic. It's about Henrietta Lacks!"
CoC Score: 7/10. I don't give it the full ten because I reserve full 10's for authors of color themselves and because I think that Skloot misses out on the fact that race is still taking a heavy toll on the Lacks family and indeed on many Black families in the U.S. I feel like she could have explored deeper by getting insights from other Black Americans who have been harmed by the racism in the medical system and used that to really hammer home the context in which all of this occurred, and Black experts and historians who have a better grasp on the topic than any white person could, no matter the amount of research they do. There are times when it feels like the moment she changes chapters and shows what went on into the laboratories with mostly white and male scientists, she forgets that they were just as much a part of the system, too. It seems like Skloot wants to overlook at moments that there's a reason that no one listened to or respected the Lackses themselves, but a book written about them by a white person gets a lot of acclaim. I would have liked to have seen that acknowledged more than it was. That said, Skloot is very sympathetic to the Lacks family and to Deborah especially.
Gender Score: 7/10. There's a lot of focus on the women in this story and what they've gone through. Not a perfect score, because anything that ignores where racism and misogyny intersect doesn't get a full 10 from me, and there is a lot of racialized misogyny that underpins and makes what happened to Henrietta Lacks possible in the first place, in a way that it wouldn't have to a white woman.
GLBT Score: 0/10. There's not really any mention of anyone being queer or trans here, but given the subject matter and the fact that I don't think any of the Lackses identifies as queer, trans, non-binary or otherwise not straight and cis, I can give it sort of a good faith pass.
Ablism Score: 6/10. Skloot is fairly sympathetic to the Lackses with regards to the fact that they live with a number of disorders and diseases that are the result of abuse, neglected, and mistreatment by individuals and by a racist health care system that ignores them.
