An inspiring love story wrapped in a serious call for new ways to treat disease.
Actress and health and guru enthusiast Henner (Total Memory Makeover, 2012, etc.) teams with her husband, Michael Brown, to recount the odyssey that brought them together—and the horrifying cancer diagnosis that threatened to tear them apart.
In 2003, life for the couple had suddenly turned magical. Friends since college, the middle-age divorcés suddenly found themselves on their first date together, giddy with the unshakable knowledge that no matter how much their lives had diverged since college, they were meant to be together. What Henner—who by that time had built a successful second career as a bestselling author in the self-improvement industry—didn’t know was that Brown had been diagnosed with bladder cancer two years prior. A successful publisher, Brown had spent the earlier part of his life at sea, drinking hard, smoking a lot, eating poorly, and never fretting too much about his health. Remarkably, he even dismissed the cancer diagnosis his nonchalant doctor delivered, even after blood continued to show up in his urine. As author of the Total Health Makeover, Henner was not about to accept defeat, and she immediately set to work getting Brown to doctors specializing in integrative cancer therapies. Faced with the choice of having both his bladder and prostate removed or undergoing a painful and uncertain immunotherapy procedure, Brown chose the latter. He also chose to fully dedicate himself to the diet and nutrition regimen Henner had advocated for years. “The patient that is treated and then sent home to resume their sedentary, toxic lifestyle is being given a death sentence,” Brown writes. Some readers may view the couple’s criticism as a scathing polemic against current medical practices and procedures, but theirs is also a moving memoir about true love and how they managed to stare death in the eye and beat it together.
An inspiring love story wrapped in a serious call for new ways to treat disease.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9394-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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