The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

Jan 13, 2015 Nadine in NY Jones rated it it was amazing

Shelves: microhistory, narrative-nonfiction, history-of-science, womens-history, lotsa-buzz, biography, non-fiction, history, science, 100-best-of-21st-c

I started reading this early in the morning in the Syracuse airport. I read it on the plane, and those twenty minutes during the descent when they made us turn off all electronic devices, even readers, was awful. I got fifty percent through by then. Happily, I had nothing better to do for the rest of the day, so I kept reading, all afternoon and all evening. I'm not sure how I would have managed if I'd had to set it down! I could hardly stand to go to sleep that night, since I hadn't finished, b ...more

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Dec 29, 2011 ellen rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-2012, reviewed, nonfiction, topic-popular-history

I liked the book, although I think that a deeper exploration of consent and medical research would have been interesting. I would have liked to read more about the history of nonconsensual medical research and experimentation, particularly as it relates to race. Skloot did an effective job of weaving together the narrative about Henrietta, Henrietta's descendants, and her own journey researching and writing this book. She also included a lot of the scientific information necessary to grasp what ...more

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Aug 07, 2011 Heather rated it it was ok

I really enjoyed the personal aspects of the book that discussed Henrietta's life and the lives of her children. However, some of the more technical parts that talked about how the cells were being used by some of the scientists got a little too technical for me. If I wasn't in a quiet room reading those parts, I had to read over certain paragraphs numerous times before I understood what they were talking about. Maybe I didn't pay enough attention when I took biology in high school. ...more

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Aug 10, 2017 Andrea rated it it was amazing

Great story, and intersting to learn about the person about the woman behind the HeLa cells. I couldn't think it was a story about her children as well....and all I could think was so many of her children's health issues was probably taced back to thier childhood truama. Also, the culture diffrence between the medical world and the black community is a mile wide if not more. When the Lacks family would ask question most doctors answered as if they had medical school....but most didn't have more ...more

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Oct 01, 2011 Katy rated it it was ok

So that's what the odor of sleeping gas seeping out of a book smells like.

This book is a missed opportunity. Read and enjoy if you want to learn all about the author and little about Ms. Lacks or the bioethical disaster that made her part of science. ...more

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