The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot | Teen Ink

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

January 28, 2015
By Maxime Bon BRONZE, Clichy, Other
Maxime Bon BRONZE, Clichy, Other
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

A Brilliant book:

Very few people know much about the person of Henrietta Lacks. But all you need to know is in this book.

This book was rewarded as the "book of the year" in 2011 by over 60 medias.

We have here an intelligent book from an intelligent writer: Rebecca Skloot.

Rebecca L. Skloot is an American journalist an writer who focused especially on science and medicine. She has done literarcy studies also when she was younger.

She has already written a lot of articles for the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine.

 

The story of the book is about Henrietta Lacks, better known under the name "HeLa".

She died at age 31 in 1951 of a cancer and she left behind her 5 children. She was living in the midst of racial segregation in the United States.

Just before she died, scientists took her cells to do experients and they discovered that HeLa cells would be beneficial for the progress of medicine.

And it is certainly, nowadays, one the biggest step in the history of medicine.

 

Then from my point of view, what I find striking in this book is the examples of different scenes of segregation. For example the fact that black people did not go to hospitals because they were not accepted because of their skin color ( that is what happened with Herietta Lacks). 

The research of the author is also fantastic, I think that she has spent a lot of time to get all the information she needed to for this book.

The description of black people's situation is extremely precise.

The only thing I dislike in this book is that it is not longer that I wanted to but it is just a detail.

To conclude this book is really amazing, the book is well written, the work is well done,what else could we say about it ?


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