Book Reviews

“Fascinating Journey…”

THE MAN WHO TOUCHED HIS OWN HEART
By Rob Dunn
(Little, Brown and Company – February 3, 2015)

[Kindle & Hardcover, 384 pages, $27.00 U.S. – buy for less on Amazon.com]

Did you know you’ve got about 2.5 billion heartbeats in a lifetime, barring any accidents or unusual events? That’s actually 1.5 billion heartbeats MORE than people could expect in the 1940s and before; bonus beats thanks to the success of modern public health and medicine.

The 2.5 billion beats is just one of the fascinating ideas and take-aways from The Man Who Touched His Own Heart by Rob Dunn, a professor and evolutionary biologist at North Carolina State University.

Disclosure: Midtown (Atlanta) Book Group at Barnes & Noble/Georgia Tech was fortunate to preview The Man Who Touched His Own Heart for February 2015 (Theme: Valentine’s/Hearts – of course!) and participate in the February launch of the book, with the author joining our group discussion via Skype. This review is based on the Advanced Reading Copy provided by the publisher, Little, Brown and Company.

The Man Who Touched His Own Heart is a fascinating non-fiction narrative journey through the history of the human heart and medicine. Author Rob Dunn has done a masterful job of balancing science & health issues with history & biography to offer a compelling read for a general audience, with something for everyone, both science-types and more literary-types (like myself). It is an ideal book group selection, as the subject matter and writing style will contribute to lively discussion.

The science-y, educational stuff (which, being honest, I normally tend to glaze over) is wrapped in interesting stories, colorful characters, surprising facts and sometimes-shocking information, thoroughly researched and footnoted, presented with an underlying sense of humor and, in places, irony:

“Not everything that seems like progress is progress. Not everything that can be done should be done.” – Rob Dunn, Chapter 13: The Beetle and the Cigarette

The Man Who Touched His Own Heart presents a broad spectrum of issues for consideration, including: medical motivation and ethics; the business of medicine; questionable marketing messages and “best practices”; to sticky issues of racism, sexism, discrimination and morality in the long, sometimes-sordid history of medical research.

From Galen (AD 129, patched up Gladiators, wrote a book!) to Da Vinci’s detailed studies of the heart and anatomy in the 1500s; from autopsies of the mummies of ancient Egyptians (with clear evidence of heart disease dating back thousands of years) to a German Nazi who won a Nobel Prize in 1956 for a daring experiment (on himself, before the war) and his contribution to the early development of the heart catheter; from “Heroes” like the rock star surgeons of the 1960s who were able to transplant human hearts (and before that, animal hearts, although sometimes in really horrible ways) to the “Zeroes” who spent decades researching less-sexy areas (i.e. fungi and development of statins – “industrial microbiology”) and never received the recognition they deserved (stolen by Big Pharma)…

The Man Who Touched His Own Heart is a rocket ship journey through the rapid development of science and cardiology since WWII, including pacemakers, bypass procedures, transplants and artificial hearts. It is an amazing history, one well-suited to anyone paying attention to those 2.5 billion beats in his/her own chest.

Happy Valentine’s Day 2015!
While we are talking about hearts in February, please check out my new ebook on Kindle — FREE thru February 14, 2015 —
101 Sexy & Fun Love Notes: Romantic Tips & Tricks to FIRE UP the Passion & Romance in Your Relationship! (Amazon Kindle – February 7, 2015). Download, Read, Enjoy & Review the first ebook in the new series: Rebel Housewife: Survival Guides (Surviving Happily After!).
More info on The Rebel Blog: 101 Sexy & Fun Love Notes.

[Further Disclosure: I have coordinated the Midtown Book Group at Barnes & Noble/Georgia Tech for eight years, and I am a professional book reviewer on www.RebelHousewife.com, for Amazon.com and other sources, for which I do not receive payment or compensation, other than a free book, on occasion, and affiliate links on www.RebelHousewife.com. Having disclosed the obvious perks & benefits of this situation (light sarcasm intended), I offer unbiased review, positives and negatives, although I do not typically review books I don’t enjoy or would be unable to recommend to my readers. Thank you for reading and supporting The Rebel Housewife!]

“Fascinating Science – Tragic Biography”

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS
by Rebecca Skloot
(Broadway Paperbacks/Random House, 2010)

[Trade Paperback, 381 pages, $16.00 U.S. – buy for less on Amazon.com]

Midtown Atlanta Book Group Rating: ★★★★☆
Non-Fiction: Science/Biography
August 2012 Selection

“Doctors took her cells without asking. Those cells never died. They launched a medical revolution and a multimillion-dollar industry. More than twenty years later, her children found out. Their lives would never be the same.”

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was one of our book group’s best books and discussions in six years of reading together, which says a lot, because we’ve read 72 really great books! [Take a look: Books We Have Read. See?!]

Although some readers are hesitant to jump in because of the science — HeLa cells, really?! — scientists and non-scientists alike enjoyed The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The success of the book (and the forthcoming movie from Oprah Winfrey) is due in large part to the author’s deftly balanced approach to a remarkable story, offering a unique and fascinating blend of technical writing in layman’s terms and tragic human interest with the family history. Rebecca Skloot manages to fulfill the expectations of both groups, leading to great discussion and debate about informed consent and the evolution of ethics and procedure in medical science and research; scientific advances v. privacy and rights of the individual, family and heirs; and contribution v. compensation.

Henrietta Lacks was a poor, black woman with five children, living in Baltimore in the 1940s. In 1951, doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital removed cancer cells from Henrietta’s cervix, without her knowledge or consent, which was not at all unusual at the time. Henrietta died from the cancer several months later, but those cancer cells didn’t die. Henrietta’s unwitting contribution to science was to provide the first successful surviving human cell line that, when divided and multiplied, billions of times over, became the basis for many advances in medical science, based on research, study, trials and use of the so-designated HeLa cells.

The tragedy at the heart of this story is that for twenty years, Henrietta’s husband and children did not know about her surviving cells, or the multibillion-dollar they facilitated. The family mourned the loss of wife and mother. One of the daughters had been institutionalized in a mental hospital, where she died at age 15. The other children were farmed out to relatives, abused and neglected. They grew to adulthood in abject poverty. Even after they learned about their mother’s contribution to science, the family never had access to basic care, education or health insurance, much less the medical advances or medications their mother’s cells helped create.

Interest in HeLa, and the tragic story behind the cells, led young writer Rebecca Skloot to begin researching Henrietta’s biography. Although the family was initially resistant and suspicious of her interest, Skloot connected with Henrietta’s only surviving daughter, Deborah, in 2000. Together, they went through the history, interviewed doctors, researchers and family members, and traveled into the past to piece together the science of HeLa and the biography of Henrietta Lacks. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was published, to instant critical acclaim, in 2010.

The Midtown Atlanta Book Group at Barnes & Noble/Georgia Tech LOVED The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks with a group rating of 4 out of 5 Stars.

Next Month:
ATLANTA’S PONCE DE LEON AVENUE: A HISTORY
by Sharon Foster Jones
[Our Local Author Event at Barnes & Noble/Georgia Tech in September!]