105
people found this helpful, as of 2023
ranked #249,106 most helpful
out of 571,544,897 reviews
★★☆☆☆
Way too much from way too little
When she writes about cell biology, science, and the ethics of medical research, RS writes well. When she writes about the woman behind the HeLa cells, she provides little more than a sketch of a life. No surprise. There is very little to document the life of HL, any more than there is to document the lives of the overwhelming majority of people on the planet. Most life stories are just not that interesting in the telling. And so it is with HL. To be sure, the times she lived in, her family's place in the broader social history of the US, including the deplorable existence of race-based medicine and medical-research practices -- all of these are interesting in themselves. But as SL demonstrates in this exhaustingly overlong book, there's simply not much to say about HL herself. I can only assume RS realized this early on in her project, since she spends countless pages spinning out, in chapter after redundant chapter, the story of HL's descendants (her children for the most part). How many times can we be told that the sons want financial compensation (I don't blame them), and that the daughter wants to connect with a mother she lost so young (my heart goes out to her). TILoHL feels, at almost every turn, as though it has been stuffed, stuffed, and stuffed some more: with unnecessary dialogue, with unwelcome editorializing, with irrelevant scene setting. And just when the bloat of this book threatens to burst through its seams, one arrives at one of the longest acknowledgment sections in the history of publishing. For all the legions of people who were evidently involved in reading, researching, fact-checking, and providing feedback on versions of this book, one might suppose it truly were the outstanding piece of popular science reportage that many reviewers claim it to be. I, for one, am at a loss to understand the hype. TILoHL is exceedingly well documented. It is also several hundred pages too long. It would have made a fine New Yorker profile, not a book. At least, not this one.
