The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
Where to buy The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon books online?
- ISBN13: 9780739328347
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve “the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century”: What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z? In 1925, Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an very ancient civilization, vowing to make one of the most vital archaeological discoveries in history. For centuries Europeans believed the world’s largest jungle concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Captivating the imagination of millions around the globe, Fawcett embarked with his twenty-one-year-ancient son to prove that this very ancient civilization–which he dubbed “Z”–existed. Then he and his expedition vanished.
For decades scientists and adventurers have searched for evidence of Fawcett’s party and the Lost City of Z. Countless have corroded, been captured by tribes, or gone mad. As David Grann delved ever deeper into the mystery surrounding Fawcett’s quest and the greater mystery of what lies within the Amazon, he establish himself, like the generations who preceded him, drawn into the jungle’s “green hell.” His quest for the truth, and his stunning discoveries about Fawcett’s fate and “Z,” form the heart of this enchanting narrative.
From the Compact Disc edition.Amazon.com Review
Amazon Exclusive: John Grisham Reviews The Lost City of Z
Since first publishing A Time to Kill in 1988, John Grisham has written twenty novels and one work of nonfiction, The Innocent Man. His second novel, The Firm, spent 47 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, apt the bestselling novel of 1991. The success of The Pelican Brief, which hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and The Client, which debuted at number one, confirmed Grisham’s reputation as the master of the officially authorized thriller. His most recent novel, The Associate, was published in January 2009. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of The Lost City of Z:
In April of 1925, a legendary British explorer named Percy Fawcett launched his final expedition into the depths of the Amazon in Brazil. His destination was the lost city of El Dorado, the “City of Gold,” an very ancient kingdom of fantastic sophistication, architecture, and culture that, for some reason, had vanished. The thought of El Dorado had captivated anthropologists, adventurers, and scientists for 400 years, though there was no evidence it ever existed. Hundreds of expeditions had gone looking for it. Thousands of men had corroded in the jungles searching for it. Fawcett himself had barely survived several previous expeditions and was more determined than ever to find the lost city with its streets and temples of gold.
The world was watching. Fawcett, the last of the fantastic Victorian adventurers, was financed by the Royal Geographical Society in London, the world’s foremost repository of research gathered by explorers. Fawcett, then age 57, had proclaimed for decades his belief in the City of Z, as he had nicknamed it. His writings, speeches, and exploits had captured the imagination of millions, and reports of his last expedition were front page news.
His expeditionary force consisted of three men–himself, his 21-year-ancient son Jack, and one of Jack’s friends. Fawcett believed that only a tiny group had any chance of extant the horrors of the Amazon. He had seen large forces decimated by malaria, insects, snakes, poison darts, starvation, and insanity. He knew better. He and his two companions would travel light, carry their own supplies, eat off the land, pose no threat to the natives, and suffer months of hardship in their search for the Lost City of Z.
They were never seen again. Fawcett’s daily dispatches trickled to a stop. Months passed with no word. Because he had survived several similar forays into the Amazon, his family tree and friends considered him to be near super-human. As before, they expected Fawcett to stumble out of the jungle, bearded and emaciated and announcing some fantastic discovery. It did not take place.
Over the years, the search for Fawcett became more alluring than the search for El Dorado itself. Rescue efforts, from the serious to the farcical, materialized in the years that followed, and hundreds of others lost their lives in the search. Rewards were posted. Psychics were brought in by the family tree. Articles and books were written. For decades the legend of Percy Fawcett refused to die.
The fantastic mystery of what happened to Fawcett has never been solved, perhaps until now. In 2004, leader David Grann learned the tale while researching another one. Soon, like hundreds before him, he became obsessed with the legend of the colorful adventurer and his baffling disappearance. Grann, a lifelong New Yorker with an admitted aversion to camping and mountain climbing, a lousy sense of direction, and an affinity for take-out food and air conditioning, soon establish himself in the jungles of the Amazon. What he establish there, some 80 years after Fawcett’s disappearance, is a startling conclusion to this absorbing narrative.
The Lost City of Z is a riveting, exciting and painstakingly compelling tale of adventure.
(Photo © Maki Galimberti)
A Q&A with Leader David Grann
Question: When did you first stumble upon the tale of Percy Fawcett and his search for an very ancient civilization in the Amazon—and when did you realize this particular tale had you in “the grip”?
David Grann: While I was researching a tale on the mysterious death of the world’s greatest Sherlock Holmes practiced, I came upon a reference to Fawcett’s role in inspiring Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World. Curious, I plugged Fawcett’s name into a newspaper database and was amazed by the headlines that appeared, including “THREE MEN FACE CANNIBALS IN RELIC QUEST” and tribesmen “Seize Movie Actor Seeking to Rescue Fawcett.” As I read each tale, I became more and more curious–about how Fawcett’s quest for a lost city and his disappearance had captivated the world; how for decades hundreds of scientists and explorers had tried to find evidence of Fawcett’s missing party and the City of Z; and how countless seekers had disappeared or died from starvation, diseases, attacks by wild animals, or poisonous arrows. What intrigued me most, though, was the notion of Z. For years most scientists had considered the brutal conditions in the largest jungle in the world unfavorable to humankind, but more recently some archeologists had begun to question this longstanding view and believed that a sophisticated civilization like Z might have existed. Such a discovery would challenge virtually everything that was believed about the scenery of the Amazon and what the Americas looked liked before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Suddenly, the tale had every tantalizing element–mystery, obsession, death, madness–as well as fantastic intellectual stakes. Still, I probably didn’t realize I was fully in the tale’s “grip” until I told my wife that I plotted to take out an extra life insurance policy and follow Fawcett’s trail into the Amazon.
Q: Tell us about the discovery of Fawcett’s previously unpublished diaries and logbooks.
DG: Researching the book regularly felt like a kind of treasure hunt and nothing was more exciting than coming across these materials in an ancient chest in the house of one of Fawcett’s grandchildren. Fawcett, who had been a British spy, was extremely secretive about his search for Z–in part because he didn’t want his rivals to learn the lost city before he did and in part because he feared that too many people would die if they tried to follow in his wake. These ancient, crumbling diaries and logbooks held incredible clues to both Fawcett’s life and death; what’s more, they revealed a key to his clandestine route to the Lost City of Z.
Q: In an attempt to retrace Fawcett’s journey, many scientists and explorers have faced madness, kidnapping, and death. Did you ever hesitate to go to the Amazon?
DG: I probably should have been more hesitant, especially after reading some of the diaries of members of additional parties that had scoured the Amazon for a lost city. One seeker of El Dorado described reaching a state of “privation so fantastic that we were eating nothing but leather, belts and soles of shoes, cooked with certain herbs, with the result that so fantastic was our weakness that we could not remain standing.” In that expedition alone, some four thousand men corroded. Additional explorers resorted to cannibalism. One searcher went so mad he stabbed his own child, whispering, “Commend thyself to God, my daughter, for I am about to kill thee.” But to be honest, even after reading these accounts, I was so consumed by the tale that I did not reflect much about the consequences–and one of the themes I try to explore in the book is the lethal scenery of obsession.
Q: When you were separated from your guide Paolo on the way to the Kuikuro village and seemingly lost and alone in the jungle, what was going through your mind?
DG: Besides dread, I kept wondering what the hell I was doing on such a mad quest.
Q: Paolo and you made a game of imagining what happened to Fawcett in the Amazon. Lacking giving anything away about The Lost City of Z, I was wondering if you came away with any final conclusions?
DG: I don’t want to give too much away; but, after poring over Fawcett’s final letters and dispatches from the expedition and after interviewing many of the tribes that Fawcett himself had encountered, I felt as if I had come as close as possible to knowing why Fawcett and his party vanished.
Q: In his praise for your book, Malcolm Gladwell questions a “central question of our age”: “In the battle between man and a hostile environment, who wins?” Obviously, the jungle has won many times, but it seems man may be gaining. What are your thoughts on the deforestation taking place in the Amazon?
DG: It is a fantastic tragedy. Over the last four decades in Brazil alone, the Amazon has lost some two hundred and seventy thousand square miles of its original forest take in–an area larger than France. Many tribes, including some I visited, are being threatened with extinction. Countless animals and plants, many of them with potential medicinal purposes, are also vanishing. One of the things that the book explores is how early Native American societies were regularly able to overcome their hostile environment lacking destroying it. Sorry to say, that has not been the case with the latest wave of trespassers.
Q: You started this journey as a man who doesn’t like to camp and has “a terrible sense of direction and tend[s] to forget where [you are] on the subway and miss[es] [your] stop in Brooklyn.” Are you now an avid outdoorsman?
DG: No. Once was enough for me!
Q: Early in the book, you write, “Ever since I was young, I’ve been drawn to mystery and adventure tales.” What have been some of your favorite books–past and present–that fall into this category?
DG: I’m a huge Sherlock Holmes fan, and every few years go back and read the tales again. I do the same with many of Joseph Conrad’s novels, including Lord Jim. I’m permanently amazed at how he produced quest novels that reflected the Victorian era and yet seem to have been written with the wisdom of a historian looking back in time. As for more contemporary authors, I read a lot of crime fiction, especially the works of George Pelecanos and Michael Connelly. I also relish books, such as Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, that cleverly play with this genre. Finally, there are the gripping yarns written by authors like Jon Krakauer and Nathaniel Philbrick-—tales that are all the more spellbinding because they are right.
Q: Brad Pitt and Paramount optioned The Lost City of Z in the spring. Any updates?
DG: They have hired a screenwriter and director and seem to be moving forwards at a excellent clip.
Q: What are you effective on now?
DG: I recently finished a couple of crime tales for The New Yorker, including one about a Polish leader who allegedly committed murder and then left clues about the real crime in his novel. Meanwhile, I’m hoping to find a tantalizing tale, like The Lost City of Z, that will lead to a new book.
Q: Anything else you’d like to add?
DG: Just that I hope that readers will delight in The Lost City of Z and find the tale of Fawcett and his quest as captivating as I did.
(Photo © Matt Richman)
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The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-term Health
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Referred to as the “Grand Prix of epidemiology” by The New York Times, this study examines more than 350 variables of health and nutrition with surveys from 6,500 adults in more than 2,500 counties across China and Taiwan, and conclusively demonstrates the link between nutrition and heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. While revealing that proper nutrition can have a dramatic effect on sinking and reversing these ailments as well as curbing obesity, this text calls into question the practices of many of the current dietary programs, such as the Atkins diet, that are widely well loved in the West. The politics of nutrition and the impact of special interest groups in the creation and dissemination of public information are also discussed.
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The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
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“The best way to know the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any number of the additional mysterious changes that mark everyday life,” writes Malcolm Gladwell, “is to reflect of them as epidemics. Thoughts and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.” Although anyone familiar with the theory of memetics will admit this concept, Gladwell’s The Tipping Point has reasonably a few appealing twists on the theme.For example, Paul Revere was able to stimulate the forces of resistance so effectively in part because he was what Gladwell calls a “Connector”: he knew just about everybody, particularly the revolutionary leaders in each of the towns that he rode through. But Revere “wasn’t just the man with the largest Rolodex in colonial Boston,” he was also a “Maven” who gathered wide information about the British. He knew what was going on and he knew exactly whom to tell. The phenomenon continues to this day–reflect of how regularly you’ve received information in an e-mail message that had been forwarded at least half a dozen times before reaching you.Gladwell develops these and additional concepts (such as the “stickiness” of thoughts or the effect of population size on information dispersal) through simple, clear explanations and entertainingly illustrative anecdotes, such as comparing the pedagogical methods of Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues, or explaining why it would be even simpler to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with the actor Rod Steiger. Although some readers may find the transitional passages between chapters hold their hands a small too tightly, and Gladwell’s closing invocation of the possibilities of social engineering sketchy, even chilling, The Tipping Point is one of the most effective books on science for a all-purpose audience in ages. It seems inevitable that “tipping point,” like “future shock” or “chaos theory,” will soon become one of persons thoughts that everybody knows–or at least knows by name. –Ron HoganAmazon.com Review
“The best way to know the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any number of the additional mysterious changes that mark everyday life,” writes Malcolm Gladwell, “is to reflect of them as epidemics. Thoughts and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.” Although anyone familiar with the theory of memetics will admit this concept, Gladwell’s The Tipping Point has reasonably a few appealing twists on the theme.
For example, Paul Revere was able to stimulate the forces of resistance so effectively in part because he was what Gladwell calls a “Connector”: he knew just about everybody, particularly the revolutionary leaders in each of the towns that he rode through. But Revere “wasn’t just the man with the largest Rolodex in colonial Boston,” he was also a “Maven” who gathered wide information about the British. He knew what was going on and he knew exactly whom to tell. The phenomenon continues to this day–reflect of how regularly you’ve received information in an e-mail message that had been forwarded at least half a dozen times before reaching you.
Gladwell develops these and additional concepts (such as the “stickiness” of thoughts or the effect of population size on information dispersal) through simple, clear explanations and entertainingly illustrative anecdotes, such as comparing the pedagogical methods of Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues, or explaining why it would be even simpler to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with the actor Rod Steiger. Although some readers may find the transitional passages between chapters hold their hands a small too tightly, and Gladwell’s closing invocation of the possibilities of social engineering sketchy, even chilling, The Tipping Point is one of the most effective books on science for a all-purpose audience in ages. It seems inevitable that “tipping point,” like “future shock” or “chaos theory,” will soon become one of persons thoughts that everybody knows–or at least knows by name. –Ron Hogan
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Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Sixth Edition
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The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association” is the style manual of choice for writers, editors, students, and educators in the social and behavioral sciences. It provides invaluable guidance on all aspects of the writing process, from the ethics of authorship to the word choice that best reduces bias in language. Well-known for its authoritative and simple-to-use reference and citation system, the Publication Manual also offers guidance on choosing the headings, tables, facts, and tone that will result in strong, simple, and elegant scientific communication. The sixth edition offers new and expanded instruction on publication ethics, statistics, journal article reporting standards, electronic reference formats, and the construction of tables and facts. The sixth edition has been revised and updated to include: new ethics guidance on such topics as determining authorship and terms of collaboration, duplicate publication, plagiarism and self-plagiarism, disguising of participants, validity of instrumentation, and building data available to others for verification; new journal article reporting standards to help readers report empirical research with clarity and precision; simplified APA heading style to make it more conducive to electronic publication; updated guidelines for sinking bias in language to reflect current practices and preferences, including a new section on presenting past language that is inappropriate by present standards; new guidelines for reporting inferential statistics and a significantly revised table of statistical abbreviations; and, new instruction on using supplemental files containing lengthy data sets and additional media. This book includes significantly expanded content on the electronic presentation of data to help readers know the purpose of each kind of spectacle and choose the best match for communicating the results of the investigation, with new examples for a variety of data displays, including electro physiological and biological data. It offers consolidated information on all aspects of reference citations, with an expanded discussion of electronic sources emphasizing the role of the digital object identifier (DOI) as a reliable way to locate information. It features expanded discussion of the publication process, including the function and process of peer review. It contains a discussion of ethical, officially authorized, and policy supplies in publication; and guidelines on effective with the publisher while the article is in press. Key to this edition of the Publication Manual is an updated and expanded Web presence. Look up additional supplemental material keyed to this book. This book lets you test your knowledge of APA Style with a free tutorial on style basics. It lets you learn about the changes in the sixth edition with a free tutorial reviewing key revisions. Sign up for an on-line course to enrich and enhance your understanding of APA Style. Read the APA Style blog and share your comments on writing and referencing. Consult frequently questioned questions to sharpen your understanding of APA Style. This title lets you examine additional resources on such topics as ethics, statistics, and writing. It lets you familiarize yourself with submission standards for APA books and journals.
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Change Your Brain, Change Your Life: The Breakthrough Program for Conquering Anxiety, Depression, Obsessiveness, Anger, and Impulsiveness
Where to buy Change Your Brain, Change Your Life: The Leap forwards Program for Conquering Anxiety, Depression, Obsessiveness, Rage, and Impulsiveness books online?
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BRAIN PRESCRIPTIONS THAT REALLY WORK
In this leap forwards bestseller, you’ll see scientific evidence that your anxiety, depression, rage, obsessiveness, or impulsiveness could be related to how point structures in your brain work. You’re not stuck with the brain you’re born with. Here are just a few of neuropsychiatrist Dr. Daniel Amen’s surprising–and effective–”brain prescriptions” that can help heal your brain and change your life:
To Conquer Anxiety and Panic:
¸ Use simple breathing techniques to immediately cool inner turmoil
To Fight Depression:
¸ Learn how to kill ANTs (automatic negative thoughts)
To Curb Rage:
¸ Follow the Amen anti-rage diet and learn the nutrients that cool rage
To Conquer Impulsiveness and Learn to Focus:
¸ Renovate total focus with the “One-Page Miracle”
To Stop Obsessive Worrying:
¸ Follow the “get unstuck” writing exercise and learn additional problem-solving exercises
From the Trade Paperback edition.Amazon.com Review
In this age of do-it-yourself health care (heck, if the doctor only sees you for 10 minutes each visit, what additional options are there?), Change Your Brain, Change Your Life fits in perfectly. Filled with “brain prescriptions” (among them cognitive exercises and nutritional advice) that are geared toward readers who’ve veteran anxiety, depression, impulsiveness, excessive rage or worry, and obsessive behavior, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life milks the mind-body tie for all it’s worth.
Written by a child psychiatrist and neuroscientist who has also authored a book on attention deficit disorder, Change Your Brain contains dozens of brain scans of patients with various neurological problems, from caffeine, nicotine, and heroin addiction to manic-depression to epilepsy. These scans, regularly showing large gaps in neurological activity or areas of extreme overactivity, are downright frightening to look at, and Dr. Amen should know better than to resort to such scare tactics. But he should also be commended for advocating natural remedies, including deep breathing, guided imagery, meditation, self-hypnosis, and biofeedback for treating disorders that are so frequently dealt with by prescription only.
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
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- ISBN13: 9780307712509
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Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken lacking her knowledge—became one of the most vital tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to vital advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.
Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.
Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s tiny, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.
Henrietta’s family tree did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa started using her spouse and children in research lacking informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family tree never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the tale of the Lacks family tree—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the officially authorized battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.
Over the decade it took to uncover this tale, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family tree—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so vital to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance?
Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to place down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.
From the Hardcover edition.Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2010: From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. And from that same life, and persons cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving tale of medicine and family tree, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken lacking her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive–even thrive–in the lab. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs, beginning with the cure for polio. Meanwhile, Henrietta’s family tree nonstop to live in poverty and frequently poor health, and their discovery decades later of her unknowing contribution–and her cells’ weird survival–left them full of pride, rage, and suspicion. For a decade, Skloot doggedly but compassionately gathered the threads of these tales, slowly gaining the trust of the family tree while helping them learn the truth about Henrietta, and with their aid she tells a rich and haunting tale that questions the questions, Who owns our bodies? And who carries our memories? –Tom Nissley
Amazon Exclusive: Jad Abumrad Reviews The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Jad Abumrad is host and creator of the public radio hit Radiolab, now in its seventh season and reaching over a million people monthly. Radiolab combines cutting-edge production with a philosophical approach to huge thoughts in science and beyond, and an inventive method of storytelling. Abumrad has won copious awards, including a National Headliner Award in Radio and an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science Television journalism Award. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks:
Honestly, I can’t imagine a better tale.
A detective tale that’s at once mythically large and painfully intimate.
Just the simple facts are hard to judge: that in 1951, a poor black woman named Henrietta Lacks dies of cervical cancer, but pieces of the tumor that killed her–taken lacking her knowledge or consent–live on, first in one lab, then in hundreds, then thousands, then in giant factories churning out polio vaccines, then aboard rocket ships launched into space. The cells from this one tumor would spawn a multi-billion dollar industry and become a foundation of modern science–leading to breakthroughs in gene mapping, cloning and fertility and helping to learn how viruses work and how cancer develops (among a million additional things). All of which is to say: the science end of this tale is enough to blow one’s mind right out of one’s face.
But what’s truly remarkable about Rebecca Skloot’s book is that we also get the rest of the tale, the part that could have easily remained hidden had she not spent ten years finding it: Who was Henrietta Lacks? How did she live? How she did die? Did her family tree know that she’d become, in some sense, immortal, and how did that affect them? These are crucial questions, because science should never forget the people who gave it life. And so, what unfolds is not only a reporting tour de force but also a very entertaining account of Henrietta, her ancestors, her cells and the scientists who grew them.
The book ultimately channels its journey of discovery though Henrietta’s youngest daughter, Deborah, who never knew her mother, and who dreamt of one day being a scientist.
As Deborah Lacks and Skloot search for answers, we’re bounced effortlessly from the tiny tobacco-farming Virginia hamlet of Henrietta’s childhood to modern-day Baltimore, where Henrietta’s family tree remains. Along the way, a series of unforgettable juxtapositions: cell culturing bumps into faith healings, cutting edge medicine collides with the dark truth that Henrietta’s family tree can’t afford the health insurance to care for diseases their mother’s cells have helped to cure.
Rebecca Skloot tells the tale with fantastic sensitivity, urgency and, in the end, damn fine writing. I highly recommend this book. –Jad Abumrad
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