An absorbing read that probes our foibles and uncertainties with gentleness, wisdom, and humor.
Elliott (Bioethics and Philosophy/Univ. of Minnesota) examines the American fascination with “enhancement technologies,” techniques provided by medical science for transforming, improving, or even discovering one’s true self.
A participant for five years in a Canadian research project examining how new technologies illuminate issues of identity, Elliott looks for answers not only in professional literature but also in conversations with the people involved: psychiatrists and other clinicians, patients, clients, and consumers. And he looks at our culture, the movies, books, television shows, and commercials that shape people’s perceptions of their world and expectations of themselves. His scope is broad, and the result is both entertaining and surprising. Opening with a discussion of Stephen Hawking’s voice synthesizer and an “accent-reduction clinic” in North Carolina, he moves on to consider drugs that reduce social anxieties or calm hyperactivity, cosmetic surgery that alters the size of appendages or changes gender, human growth hormones that increase stature, treatments that change the color of hair or skin, and cochlear implants that ameliorate deafness. He asks what these enhancement technologies mean to the people who choose them and what these choices say about Americans’ ideas of success, self-improvement, and self-esteem. The proper use of enhancement technologies and the way in which public identification and description of a condition contribute to its spread come under scrutiny in a chapter on apotemnophilia, a bizarre psychosexual attraction to the idea of being an amputee. Elliott also explores such lesser body modifications as tattooing and piercing. Shorter versions of “Amputees by Choice” and “Pilgrims and Strangers” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and the Hedgehog Review, respectively, and many other chapters have a similar stand-alone quality.
An absorbing read that probes our foibles and uncertainties with gentleness, wisdom, and humor.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05201-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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