A keen, close study of the neuroses attached to everyday living.
A set of personal essays on the author’s struggle to apply order to her hard-to-quantify self, from sleep to fitness to romance.
Arndt’s first book is largely a memoir of her body, focused on the ways she measures it to better comprehend herself, an effort that inevitably falls short. She undertakes a sleep study to determine (inconclusively) if she’s narcoleptic or has “idiopathic hypersomnia.” She takes Adderall to buy time that’s forever slipping through her grasp. She obsessively minds the time, which typically prompts her to arrive frustratingly early for appointments; at a judo tournament, waiting for her bout, she contemplates the sweet spot of having enough time to relax but not so much that she’s anxious. (“All I could think about was not thinking too much about the wait.”) Online dating, with its match percentages and other algorithms, almost seems designed to kill romance before it can bloom, to generate “a compulsive worry that there might be someone even better out there if only we’d swipe enough to find them.” Most memoirists address dating with humor and medical issues with pathos, but Arndt cultivates a stoic middle ground, an approach that at its best reflects rigorous observation but sometimes is so distant the writing feels flat. Throughout, though, she’s engaging about the ways that “normal” arrangements alienate us, from kitchens’ sexist design for “a person with a specific body shape” to our social norms about weight and sweat. The author occasionally writes in a more lyrical mode, as in a diary of small incidents experienced during her work commute. But her strongest pieces place her at the center of larger forces that make her (and us) feel abnormal. “If what ailed me was uncertain and unverifiable,” she writes, “then I was uncertain and unverifiable too.”
A keen, close study of the neuroses attached to everyday living.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946448-13-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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