Though certainly not the last word, this is an engaging “investigative journey into the phenomenon of spontaneous remission.”
Fascinating bioscience on the phenomenon of spontaneous healing.
Board-certified psychiatrist Rediger, who is on the faculty at Harvard Medical School, first began exploring the mystery of patients with incurable illnesses and their miraculous regenerations early in his medical career. Raised with traditional Amish principles, the author was astonished by what he learned and now shares in this book, which also doubles as a pragmatic guide to improving general health. Rediger spent nearly two decades interviewing and studying survivors of irremediable diseases and conditions, and his expert analysis drives much of this intriguing volume. He first examines immune system “prodding” and hyperactivation and how factors like diet, stress, and emotion directly affect it—though, as the author notes, these factors are “often passed over in routine medical care.” He chronicles his visit to spiritual healing centers in Brazil, where the ill astonishingly recovered from dire diagnoses. He probes the complex and hotly debated mind-body connection and how one’s sense of identity and healing capacity are interconnected. Rediger, who also has a seminarian background, acknowledges that these episodes are exceptional, and while his research suggests that their instances have “slowly increased in both number and frequency,” they are relatively unexplainable by medical science. He stresses that since there are no clinical trials or double-blind studies to substantiate these incidences or ways of replicating their results, physicians “have to be anthropologists, detectives, and medical investigators.” Science aside, ultimately, it’s the dramatic survivors’ profiles and their moving stories of miraculous second chances that have the most profound impact. These patients illuminate how medicine, identity, diet, the mind, and human biology intersect to possibly trigger curative spontaneous remission. Arrestingly written and chockablock with practical, empowering medical information, this thought-provoking and convincing chronicle of disease avoidance and “remarkable recovery” will give even skeptics something to ponder. Though the text offers no ready answers or explanations, Rediger instills a glimmer of hope and possibility for those who may believe they have none.
Though certainly not the last word, this is an engaging “investigative journey into the phenomenon of spontaneous remission.”Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-19319-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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
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
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