More Baths Less Talking (13 page)

After I had read the first three or four chapters, I was a little worried on Skloot's behalf: I thought she was telling the story too quickly. Henrietta's cells were duplicating, her place in medical history was assured… maybe the last couple of hundred pages would turn out to be the first one hundred rehashed and analyzed, and the book would lose its breathtaking opening momentum. But the author knows what she has, and what she has is a gold mine of material dealing with class, race, family, science, and the law in America. In fact,
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
, like Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's incredible
Random Family
, is about pretty much everything. (
Random Family
and Skloot's book both took a decade to research and write, perhaps not coincidentally. I suspect that in both cases, the subject matter grew richer and richer with each year of contemplation.) Skloot tells brief, vivid, and astonishing stories of medical-ethics cases; she follows the cells as they get blasted into space and help find a vaccine for polio; she weaves in the lives of Henrietta's children as they struggle through the decades following their mother's
death. They had no idea that she had achieved immortality until the 1970s, because nobody had ever taken the trouble to tell them, or to ask their permission—a courtesy denied Henrietta herself, of course. And while you can go online this very second and buy HeLa cells, the Lacks family has struggled, mostly in vain, for employment, access to health care, and recognition for Henrietta's contribution to science. If I come across a book as good, as gripping, as well constructed, and as surprising as this in the rest of 2011, I will be a happy and grateful man.

Contemporary fiction is OK, but you don't really learn anything from it, do you? It's mostly written by a bunch of arty losers who couldn't be bothered to go out and get a proper job, and who don't know anything about the world anyway. Nonfiction, that's the thing. Or historical fiction, because you know when you're reading it that people have done a whole load of research into nineteenth-century brick-making. Or thrillers, because you can learn a lot of things about high-grade weaponry. My New Year's resolution is to get a job as a, you know, a business guy, and join a business-guy book club. Plus, I'm going to befriend an important politician, a minister or a secretary of state. If any of you ministers or secretaries of state out there subscribe to this magazine and read this column, then face-book me, OK? I am literally holding my breath, so hurry.

 

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