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A review by jessica_flower
Concussion by Jeanne Marie Laskas
1.0
This is the story of Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian-American immigrant doctor who discovered that the debilitating behaviour a lot of retired football players had developed was caused by a degenerative brain disease. This disease, which he named Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) was caused by sustained head trauma and multiple concussions that occurred when these players played football. This is also the story of the backlash that came from the National Football League (NFL) when he published his research for the world to see, and the multiple times that the NFL silenced and excluded Dr. Omalu as the discussion and research around concussions became too big to be silenced and the public began to be aware of exactly how much damage was being done to these men they were cheering on at every game.
See, that’s a nicely written synopsis, isn’t it? Much better than the actual writing in this book. For a book about one of the most important neuroscientific discoveries of the 21st century, there was truly little neuroscientific writing. I wanted more brains in this book than we got, and we got them much later than expected. What was there was written so poorly I had to reread passages because my god, this author does not know how to make science both factual and interesting.
Some (actually a lot) of the author’s choices on what to focus on and how she describes things rubbed me the wrong way. You’ll see in a moment. For now, just know that this book has good premise, but delivers very poorly on execution. I did some Googling and found out the author is a white successful journalist, born and raised American. Though she has won awards in the journalism industry for her articles, it is without a doubt clear that writing a book is not the same thing as writing a journal article. Not even close. The fictionalized way that the author describes interactions between people was so stiff. I think she could’ve done better by not trying to make this entire book read like a fiction novel.
The writing style could be described as follows:
In other words, there were different story lines that, while interesting enough, kept on colliding in awkward ways. To begin with, the book starts with Dr. Omalu testifying against his mentor Dr. Wecht in a court case, who, as we find out, exploited his labour by underpaying him and giving him autopsy work that Wecht would later take credit for. (Despite this, the book says repeatedly that Omalu saw Wecht as a father figure, a bold man who taught him how to be “like an American”, which makes me really uncomfortable to read about.) This court case doesn’t get mentioned again until three-quarters of the book later.
Then we go way back in time to get Omalu’s background; we learn about his childhood growing up in Nigeria, some family history, and a description of the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s. We learn that Omalu suffers from depression, and how that affected his self-esteem and self-image growing up. Then, we build up to Dr. Omalu traveling to America for med school, becoming a forensic pathologist, getting access to former football star Mike Webster’s brain, discovering and naming CTE, discovering the connection between CTE, chronic long-term brain damage and debilitating behaviour in (former and current) football players and how it all comes from getting hit in the head playing football. You see him gathering his research, writing his papers and sending them to academic journals. All this builds up and you get so excited to see how the NFL and larger scientific community reacted to his paper, and then – the narrative cuts off to tell you all about how he and his fiancée got married in his hometown in Nigeria.
Listen, I’m all for people finding love and getting married to the person they want to spend the rest of their life with, but what was the point? Why put this at this point in the story? Make people interested in finding out the repercussions of Omalu publishing cutting-edge research on brain trauma and then you put us through pages of badly described wedding events? Also, the American priest that Omalu brought to Nigeria for the marriage ceremony was so cringey to read about – he went on about “I am going to Africa!” ever since Omalu and his fiancée asked him to come along. He seemed like that naïve white tourist guy who romanticizes the idea of “Africa” and I wanted to shout at him, “You’re going to Nigeria, southern Nigeria to be specific; you’re going to one country in the continent of Africa, stop making it seem like Africa is this one place with all the same people.”
While we see Omalu adjusting to living in America, we also see him adjusting to being racialized as a black man for the first time. There are italicized passages in Omalu’s own words that the author included in the story, telling us how if he’d known exactly how racism operated in America, he wouldn’t have come. How disappointed and angry he was at being perceived as less than, less intelligent, less creative, less driven. “And every time I smelled racism, I even became angrier and more determined to be myself and stand up for what I believed in, which in my mind was the truth” (p. 246). Those passages are heartfelt and moving, more so than anything else regarding race in this book. I feel that this subject deserved more nuanced attention as it connects to the story overall, of a black immigrant doctor who made a big scientific discovery and led to the reveal of massive corruption and cover-ups in the NFL about brain damage in football. His status as a black immigrant is a big part of why his work and medical research, his ethics, etc. was questioned and why he was consistently, systematically ignored by the NFL, the scientific community, and later by the general public in favor of whiter faces. Even when the U.S. Congress invited medical professionals to testify on the harmful effects of concussions, Dr. Omalu wasn’t invited.
Another point on the author bias: her commentary on immigrants at the end of this book is pretty racist. Take this passage from page 250,
Then she proceeds to talk about all the problems Nigeria was having at that time: the Ebola epidemic, terrorist killings, the abduction of schoolgirls by Boko Haram, like this is justification for what she just wrote. As if America doesn’t have its own cesspool of issues, racism and police brutality being just two of them.
I. CAN’T. BELIEVE. THIS. WOMAN’S. AUDACITY.
Writing that it’s normal for immigrants to losing any feeling for the country they come from, is xenophobic, frigid and unnecessarily cruel. Erasing multicultural identity like that is so thoughtless – it makes me mad. Mad enough to want to punch something. I'm a child of immigrants myself. I have extended family who are also immigrants. Living in a new country doesn’t mean that everything that happened from before you moved goes away. Far from it. And it’s a bigger struggle to do so for people of colour. Look at all the stories of immigrants coming to America, children of immigrants feeling isolated from their ethnic backgrounds from trying to assimilate into American culture just to stay afloat. For all that she wrote a book about a black immigrant, this author really doesn’t want to understand what it’s like to be an immigrant.
Oh, wait. There’s more.
Back to the brains for a bit. There are photography pages in the middle of this book, as some biographies and nonfiction books have. There are black-and-white photos of Omalu in the lab, Omalu and his wife and kids, Omalu’s family from Nigeria (his mom, sister, father, and pictures from this father’s funeral). Those were nice and fine to look at.
There are also pictures of brains; a picture of a whole brain with CTE, a cut coronal section of a brain with CTE, and pictures of test tubes with brain tissue in them.
Here’s the issue I have with this. There’s no visible damage seen in these photographs, because CTE is found microscopically. We know this from reading the book, that Dr. Omalu found CTE by putting slices of preserved brain under a microscope.
The author spends long sections of this book talking about Dr. Omalu’s brain slides. She talks about the tau tangles on the brain slides that Dr. Omalu named CTE; these slides that define Dr. Omalu’s research, that define the reason behind the brain trauma of all these football players, that define the disease that is CTE, and THERE IS NOT A SINGLE PICTURE OF THEM!
NOT A SINGLE PICTURE OF VISIBLE MICROSCOPIC CTE ON A BRAIN!
WHY? WHY? THERE SHOULD BE AT LEAST ONE!
At least ONE picture of a brain that actually shows CTE in the brain, and just for comparison, a slide of a normal, healthy brain to show the damned difference!
Isn’t that the whole point of what Dr. Omalu was trying to prove in this research? To show how devastating of an impact concussions can have? And the publisher just chose to leave that out? Give me a fucking break.
This was my biggest reading disappointment of 2020. Which sucks because I’m interested in the intersections between medicine and culture, so I had some expectations for it. Football is still a multi-billion-dollar industry in America, and it’s still popular after this huge scandal about the NFL trying to hide the damaging effects of concussions on players. While there’s been more research in the study of concussions and publicity about how damaging they can be, in some places there’s still not enough care being taken to properly educate young people about concussions and post-concussion syndrome. You can get a concussion from not only collision sports like football, hockey, rugby, soccer and basketball, but also recreational activities like biking or hiking, or accidents like slipping down the stairs or just falling and hitting your head the wrong way. Having taken medical anthropology courses in university (and y’know, living in Canada, right next to America, we get a lot of news from our several-billion-dollar-military-budget neighbours), I’m well aware of how healthcare in Canada and the United States is organized and accessed, and how there’s not a few clinics and hospitals that are overworked, understaffed and underfunded (even outside of a pandemic). Before treating concussions, you gotta diagnose them first, and that doesn’t come easy. Symptoms don’t always come the day of; they can show up days, weeks, even months after the injury, and there are cases of doctors not believing patient’s symptoms. Sometimes it takes a second, third, fourth, etc. medical opinion to get an accurate diagnosis (one of my friends was only diagnosed with a concussion after seeing a 4th doctor). Knowing this makes this book even more frustrating.
I’m rating this 1 star because that is the only way I can show my profound disappointment in this book on this damn website.
See, that’s a nicely written synopsis, isn’t it? Much better than the actual writing in this book. For a book about one of the most important neuroscientific discoveries of the 21st century, there was truly little neuroscientific writing. I wanted more brains in this book than we got, and we got them much later than expected. What was there was written so poorly I had to reread passages because my god, this author does not know how to make science both factual and interesting.
Some (actually a lot) of the author’s choices on what to focus on and how she describes things rubbed me the wrong way. You’ll see in a moment. For now, just know that this book has good premise, but delivers very poorly on execution. I did some Googling and found out the author is a white successful journalist, born and raised American. Though she has won awards in the journalism industry for her articles, it is without a doubt clear that writing a book is not the same thing as writing a journal article. Not even close. The fictionalized way that the author describes interactions between people was so stiff. I think she could’ve done better by not trying to make this entire book read like a fiction novel.
The writing style could be described as follows:
“This happened. Then this happened. And then this happened. Also, this happened as well. And here’s a tangent that sort of correlates to what was just said, but it takes you out of the narrative that you just read and now you’re left with all this information trying to organize it on your own. . . Then this happened.”
In other words, there were different story lines that, while interesting enough, kept on colliding in awkward ways. To begin with, the book starts with Dr. Omalu testifying against his mentor Dr. Wecht in a court case, who, as we find out, exploited his labour by underpaying him and giving him autopsy work that Wecht would later take credit for. (Despite this, the book says repeatedly that Omalu saw Wecht as a father figure, a bold man who taught him how to be “like an American”, which makes me really uncomfortable to read about.) This court case doesn’t get mentioned again until three-quarters of the book later.
Then we go way back in time to get Omalu’s background; we learn about his childhood growing up in Nigeria, some family history, and a description of the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s. We learn that Omalu suffers from depression, and how that affected his self-esteem and self-image growing up. Then, we build up to Dr. Omalu traveling to America for med school, becoming a forensic pathologist, getting access to former football star Mike Webster’s brain, discovering and naming CTE, discovering the connection between CTE, chronic long-term brain damage and debilitating behaviour in (former and current) football players and how it all comes from getting hit in the head playing football. You see him gathering his research, writing his papers and sending them to academic journals. All this builds up and you get so excited to see how the NFL and larger scientific community reacted to his paper, and then – the narrative cuts off to tell you all about how he and his fiancée got married in his hometown in Nigeria.
Listen, I’m all for people finding love and getting married to the person they want to spend the rest of their life with, but what was the point? Why put this at this point in the story? Make people interested in finding out the repercussions of Omalu publishing cutting-edge research on brain trauma and then you put us through pages of badly described wedding events? Also, the American priest that Omalu brought to Nigeria for the marriage ceremony was so cringey to read about – he went on about “I am going to Africa!” ever since Omalu and his fiancée asked him to come along. He seemed like that naïve white tourist guy who romanticizes the idea of “Africa” and I wanted to shout at him, “You’re going to Nigeria, southern Nigeria to be specific; you’re going to one country in the continent of Africa, stop making it seem like Africa is this one place with all the same people.”
While we see Omalu adjusting to living in America, we also see him adjusting to being racialized as a black man for the first time. There are italicized passages in Omalu’s own words that the author included in the story, telling us how if he’d known exactly how racism operated in America, he wouldn’t have come. How disappointed and angry he was at being perceived as less than, less intelligent, less creative, less driven. “And every time I smelled racism, I even became angrier and more determined to be myself and stand up for what I believed in, which in my mind was the truth” (p. 246). Those passages are heartfelt and moving, more so than anything else regarding race in this book. I feel that this subject deserved more nuanced attention as it connects to the story overall, of a black immigrant doctor who made a big scientific discovery and led to the reveal of massive corruption and cover-ups in the NFL about brain damage in football. His status as a black immigrant is a big part of why his work and medical research, his ethics, etc. was questioned and why he was consistently, systematically ignored by the NFL, the scientific community, and later by the general public in favor of whiter faces. Even when the U.S. Congress invited medical professionals to testify on the harmful effects of concussions, Dr. Omalu wasn’t invited.
Another point on the author bias: her commentary on immigrants at the end of this book is pretty racist. Take this passage from page 250,
“If Bennet has any emotional ties to Nigeria, to the nation or the culture, he can’t find them. Maybe that’s typical for an immigrant in America. People expect you to have some measure of longing for the land you left, and you don’t want to disappoint anybody, but frankly all that stuff is dead. That’s like weeds you pulled. Nobody misses a dandelion.”
Then she proceeds to talk about all the problems Nigeria was having at that time: the Ebola epidemic, terrorist killings, the abduction of schoolgirls by Boko Haram, like this is justification for what she just wrote. As if America doesn’t have its own cesspool of issues, racism and police brutality being just two of them.
I. CAN’T. BELIEVE. THIS. WOMAN’S. AUDACITY.
Writing that it’s normal for immigrants to losing any feeling for the country they come from, is xenophobic, frigid and unnecessarily cruel. Erasing multicultural identity like that is so thoughtless – it makes me mad. Mad enough to want to punch something. I'm a child of immigrants myself. I have extended family who are also immigrants. Living in a new country doesn’t mean that everything that happened from before you moved goes away. Far from it. And it’s a bigger struggle to do so for people of colour. Look at all the stories of immigrants coming to America, children of immigrants feeling isolated from their ethnic backgrounds from trying to assimilate into American culture just to stay afloat. For all that she wrote a book about a black immigrant, this author really doesn’t want to understand what it’s like to be an immigrant.
Oh, wait. There’s more.
Back to the brains for a bit. There are photography pages in the middle of this book, as some biographies and nonfiction books have. There are black-and-white photos of Omalu in the lab, Omalu and his wife and kids, Omalu’s family from Nigeria (his mom, sister, father, and pictures from this father’s funeral). Those were nice and fine to look at.
There are also pictures of brains; a picture of a whole brain with CTE, a cut coronal section of a brain with CTE, and pictures of test tubes with brain tissue in them.
Here’s the issue I have with this. There’s no visible damage seen in these photographs, because CTE is found microscopically. We know this from reading the book, that Dr. Omalu found CTE by putting slices of preserved brain under a microscope.
The author spends long sections of this book talking about Dr. Omalu’s brain slides. She talks about the tau tangles on the brain slides that Dr. Omalu named CTE; these slides that define Dr. Omalu’s research, that define the reason behind the brain trauma of all these football players, that define the disease that is CTE, and THERE IS NOT A SINGLE PICTURE OF THEM!
NOT A SINGLE PICTURE OF VISIBLE MICROSCOPIC CTE ON A BRAIN!
WHY? WHY? THERE SHOULD BE AT LEAST ONE!
At least ONE picture of a brain that actually shows CTE in the brain, and just for comparison, a slide of a normal, healthy brain to show the damned difference!
Isn’t that the whole point of what Dr. Omalu was trying to prove in this research? To show how devastating of an impact concussions can have? And the publisher just chose to leave that out? Give me a fucking break.
This was my biggest reading disappointment of 2020. Which sucks because I’m interested in the intersections between medicine and culture, so I had some expectations for it. Football is still a multi-billion-dollar industry in America, and it’s still popular after this huge scandal about the NFL trying to hide the damaging effects of concussions on players. While there’s been more research in the study of concussions and publicity about how damaging they can be, in some places there’s still not enough care being taken to properly educate young people about concussions and post-concussion syndrome. You can get a concussion from not only collision sports like football, hockey, rugby, soccer and basketball, but also recreational activities like biking or hiking, or accidents like slipping down the stairs or just falling and hitting your head the wrong way. Having taken medical anthropology courses in university (and y’know, living in Canada, right next to America, we get a lot of news from our several-billion-dollar-military-budget neighbours), I’m well aware of how healthcare in Canada and the United States is organized and accessed, and how there’s not a few clinics and hospitals that are overworked, understaffed and underfunded (even outside of a pandemic). Before treating concussions, you gotta diagnose them first, and that doesn’t come easy. Symptoms don’t always come the day of; they can show up days, weeks, even months after the injury, and there are cases of doctors not believing patient’s symptoms. Sometimes it takes a second, third, fourth, etc. medical opinion to get an accurate diagnosis (one of my friends was only diagnosed with a concussion after seeing a 4th doctor). Knowing this makes this book even more frustrating.
I’m rating this 1 star because that is the only way I can show my profound disappointment in this book on this damn website.