O’Sullivan is a skilled storyteller in the same league as Oliver Sacks. Furthermore, she includes asides on the history of...
A collection of probing and empathetic stories of difficult neurological cases.
Epilepsy is one of the oldest of human diseases. Suddenly, the brain’s neurons fire at once, producing the massive electric discharge of a general seizure—or if only a subset of neurons fires, it’s a focal seizure. British epilepsy consultant O’Sullivan (Is It All in Your Head?: True Stories of Imaginary Illness, 2017), a winner of the Wellcome Book Prize, writes compassionately and sensitively about mostly those who suffer from focal seizures. There’s Mike, a high-powered lawyer who developed epilepsy following a presumed mugging that injured his frontal lobes; Eleanor, a young woman whose most basic movements could trigger seizures, causing a complete loss of muscle tone (she grew afraid to leave her bed); and Donal, a school janitor facing job loss who developed seizures in which he saw cartoon figures of the seven dwarfs moving across the room. Most of O’Sullivan’s patients spent days in a telemetry clinic with electrodes attached to their scalps and under surveillance in hopes of capturing when and where a seizure would occur. While these studies have been invaluable in aiding diagnosis, they also reveal how much of the brain and its interconnectedness remains unknown. “There are still gaping holes in our knowledge about the brain,” writes the author. “Even the basic questions remain unanswered.” O’Sullivan also writes about how much she has learned from her patients. Many are not much helped by drugs, and the locations of their seizures are often too risky for surgery. Yet they show resilience and a determination to get on with their lives in spite of epilepsy.
O’Sullivan is a skilled storyteller in the same league as Oliver Sacks. Furthermore, she includes asides on the history of neurology, which, perhaps more than other specialties, owes much to the patients who have endured injury, strokes, degenerative diseases, and epilepsy in order for researchers to better understand how the brain is organized.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59051-866-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
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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