The protagonists may have stayed calm, but these stories of cheating the reaper are crazy wild.
Sherwood (The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, 2004, etc.) investigates why some live, others don’t.
His subjects are the people who closely encountered the proverbial cement truck when they stepped out the door one sunny morning, yet lived to tell about it: the woman who dropped six miles through the sky without a parachute; the man who ejected from his fighter plane at sea level doing Mach 1; the woman who fell on her knitting needle, which proceeded through her sternum directly into her heart. Their stories are gripping, to put it mildly, and Sherwood is enough of a storyteller to maintain the narrative pace throughout. He's also enough of a sideshow barker to write that this book “unlocks the secrets of who lives and who dies,” though not with so straight a face as to sound like he’s peddling snake oil. He probes each fantastic story for that mysterious something that pulled the person through. What role did nature play, and what role nurture? Luck is good, Sherwood discovers—luck being a product of openness to random opportunities around you—but keeping your head is critical. The composed often live, the stunned less so, the hysterical rarely. Being relaxed is also a plus, and religious belief, or surrendering to a higher power, has worked its charms. Statistical oddities are curious but unilluminating: Are lefties doomed to shorter lives? Do your initials condemn you? Sometimes the material beggars belief. Can someone who has sunk 20 feet into the ocean and “let seawater fill his lungs” really make it back? Still, Sherwood gains our trust with his Boy Scout common sense: Be prepared, play to your strengths, stay unruffled, keep the faith.
The protagonists may have stayed calm, but these stories of cheating the reaper are crazy wild.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-58024-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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