A review by talonsontypewriters
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

challenging informative medium-paced
Very difficult to rate, so I'll refrain for now -- Henrietta Lacks's story is very important, and one I think everyone working in science, if not everyone full stop, should know, but I think it could have benefited from being told by someone else or in a different way. A story that doesn't need to be a memoir turning into one always annoys me, but the inclusion of many of Skloot's personal experiences is particularly questionable in this case. The level of extraneous detail about the Lacks family and the trauma they went through sometimes bordered on voyeuristic, especially given how Skloot openly expresses that she pursued this information to the point of what I'd call stalking and harassment, and there's some definite hints of a white savior complex. In other words, it reads as the very same kind of exploitation and invasion of privacy that Skloot is trying to criticize in Henrietta Lacks's treatment (probably -- even that gets a bit wishy-washy toward the end).

Strong premise and opening, but begins to fall apart in execution midway through, and by the last few chapters I was wondering what there still even was to say. If you're more interested in Henrietta Lacks's life and the bioethical issues surrounding HeLa cells than the story of how this book came into being and the experiences of the Lacks children and other descendants, I'd probably recommend finding a different source.
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