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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Bahni Turpin
- Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
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Publisher's summary
Number one New York Times best seller.
Now a major motion picture from HBO® starring Oprah Winfrey and Rose Byrne.
One of the “most influential” (CNN), “defining” (Lit Hub), and “best” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) books of the decade.
One of essence’s 50 most impactful Black books of the past 50 years.
Named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Financial Times, New York, Independent (UK), Times (UK), Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Globe, and Mail.
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 without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than 60 years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important 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.
Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than 20 years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family - past and present - is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.
Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family - especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance? Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.
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Editorial reviews
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is both a story of scientific progress and a biography of the poor Southern family whose matriarch, Henrietta Lacks, made that progress possible. It is also a critical exploration of the interplay between science, race, class, and ethics in the United States. Finally, it is, at times, the personal narrative of Rebecca Skloot, a reporter who worked for 10 years to learn these stories and to tell them. Cassandra Campbell’s performance captures the full range of tone in these elegantly woven narratives. She delivers what the story demands of her, uniting several storytelling styles into one single, dynamic voice.
In her narration, Campbell makes particularly masterful use of distance and proximity. At some points in the story, she has the cool tone of an investigative reporter, duly noting the gruesome evidence of patient mistreatment at the Hospital for the Negro Insane in the 1950s or the horrors of medical malpractice in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. When she tells the stories of the members of the Lacks family, her voice is warm and compassionate, but still carries the distinct distance of a biographer/observer. And, at a few rare but poignant moments in the story, Campbell’s voice sounds exposed and intimately close to the listener’s ear, as the narrative brings us inside Skloot’s own struggle to understand and cope with the uncomfortable truths and thorny issues Henrietta’s story raises.
Bahni Turpin, who performs the dialogue for all the members of the Lacks family, supplies those voices with more than the appropriate dialect. Though she speaks for several different characters some of them appear only briefly or infrequently in the story Turpin manages to give unique weight and depth to each. Her portrayal of Zacharia Lacks, Henrietta’s youngest son, is perhaps most exceptional in its taciturn conveyance of anger, love, and pain. Emily Elert
Critic reviews
Winner of The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for nonfiction
"The story of modern medicine and bioethics - and, indeed, race relations - is refracted beautifully, and movingly.” (Entertainment Weekly)
"Writing with a novelist's artistry, a biologist's expertise, and the zeal of an investigative reporter, Skloot tells a truly astonishing story of racism and poverty, science and conscience, spirituality and family driven by a galvanizing inquiry into the sanctity of the body and the very nature of the life force." (
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Here, Michael Palmer has created a cat-and-mouse game where one woman must confront a conspiracy of doctors to uncover an evil practice that touches every single person who ever has a medical test. With unforgettable characters and twists and betrayals that come from the most unlikely places, The Second Opinion will keep you guessing...and looking over your shoulder.
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The Postmortal
- A Novel
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- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
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Overall
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In a world where an anti-aging cure is available worldwide, immortality comes with its own unique problems. John Farrell is about to get "The Cure". Old age can never kill him now. The only problem is, everything else still can.
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By: Drew Magary
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The Hour I First Believed
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- Length: 25 hrs and 9 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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When high-school teacher Caelum Quirk and his wife, Maureen, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, while Caelum is away, Maureen finds herself in the library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed. Miraculously, she survives. But when Caelum and Maureen flee to an illusion of safety on the Quirk family's Connecticut farm, they discover that the effects of chaos are not easily put right.
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excellent all around yarn
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Donald Thornton was a ditchdigger who wanted more for his six daughters. "I love you better than I love life," he assured his children. "But I'm not always gonna be around to look after you, and no man's gonna come along and offer to take care of you, because you ain't light-skinned. That's why you gotta be able to look after yourselves. And for that you gotta be smart."
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- Narrated by: Katy Butler
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- Unabridged
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Like so many of us, award-winning writer Katy Butler always assumed her aging parents would experience healthy, active retirements before dying peacefully at home. Then her father suffered a stroke that left him incapable of easily finishing a sentence or showering without assistance. Her mother was thrust into full-time caregiving, and Katy became one of the 24 million Americans who help care for aging parents. In an effort to correct a minor and non - life threatening heart arrhythmia, doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker.
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A better way to narrate a book about death?
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By: Katy Butler
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Ask Me Why I Hurt
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The unforgettable inspiring memoir of one extraordinary doctor who is saving lives in a most unconventional way, Ask Me Why I Hurt is the touching and revealing first-person account of the remarkable work of Dr. Randy Christensen. Trained as a pediatrician, he works not in a typical hospital setting but, rather, in a 38-foot Winnebago that has been refitted as a doctor's office on wheels. His patients are the city's homeless adolescents and children.
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The reality of our streets
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God's Hotel
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San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God's hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves - "anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care - ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for 20 years. Laguna Honda, lower-tech but human-paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished.
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Great read
- By kayla solomon on 04-08-17
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Fatal
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The master of medical suspense brings us another novel of controversy, biology, and human greed. Internist Matt Rutledge has spent the last five years trying to find links between the deaths of his wife and his father. He suspects the Belinda Coke and Coal Company has released toxic chemicals into the environment that have caused the "Belinda Syndrome," a miasma of symptoms that include violent and deadly paranoia in some, Ebola-like hemorrhaging in others. But he lacks proof.
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A great audiobook by my favortie medical author!
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The Blue Cotton Gown
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Heather is pale and thin, seventeen and pregnant with twins when Patricia Harman begins to care for her. Over the course of the next five seasons Patsy will see Heather through the loss of both babies and their father. She will also care for her longtime patient Nila, pregnant for the eighth time and trying to make a new life without her abusive husband. And Patsy will try to find some comfort to offer Holly, whose teenage daughter struggles with bulimia. She will help Rebba learn to find pleasure in her body and help Kaz transition into a new body.
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Hope, Heartbreak, Compassion
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Code Orange
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Overall
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Story
Walking around New York City was what Mitty Blake did best. He loved the city, and even after 9/11, he always felt safe. Mitty was a carefree guyhe didnt worry about terrorists or blackouts or grades or anything, which is why he was late getting started on his Advanced Bio report.Mitty does feel a little pressure to hand something inif he doesnt, hell be switched out of Advanced Bio, which would be unfortunate since Olivias in Advanced Bio.
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Code Orange
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Truth Doesn't Have a Side
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Overall
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One day in 2002 the 50-year old body of former Pittsburgh Steeler and hall of famer Mike Webster was laid on a cold table in front of pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu. Webster's body looked to Omalu like the body of a much older man, and the circumstances of his behavior prior to his death were clouded in mystery. But when Omalu cut into Webster's brain, it appeared to be normal. Something didn't add up.
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Truly Enlightening
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Near Death
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Milan, Italy, today. It is the most serious crisis that the world has ever faced. Bewildered, young and old, believers and atheists are asking all the same distressing questions: What will they do now that the greatest dream of humanity has turned into a nightmare? What will happen when the countdown clock winds to zero?
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Not quite dead...yet
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Full Body Burden
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Kristen Iversen grew up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated "the most contaminated site in America." Full Body Burden is the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and--unknown to those who lived there--tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium.
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A story that no one else wanted to tell.
- By Carol on 01-28-13
By: Kristen Iversen
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What listeners say about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
- Stephen
- 03-25-10
Interesting Story
Henrietta Lacks was a poor black woman in Baltimore who had cancer in the early 1950's. Her cancerous cells had the ability to be cultured and grown - an ability that is not present in most cells. The rare ability for these cells to be grown in culture provided a cell line that was used in the creation of the polio vaccine and numerous other cures. The cells themselves did not provide the cure, the cells provided a means in which researchers could study a disease and develope a cure. The book was written because for years, the identity of the donor of these cells was only known as Hela. Neither Henrietta or anyone in her family received and compensation or, until relatively recently, any notoriety for these cells. The author fairly protrays that, for the era in which these cells were obtained, there was nothing wrong, illegal or underhanded going on. Procedures such as informed consent were non existent in the 1950's. I was left with the feeling that the Lack's family should receive some compensation for Henrietta's cells. Not because they have a legal right to compensation (which is questionable) but because it is the right thing to do.
Although the book is supposed to be about Henrietta, almost half (sometimes seemed like more) of the book is about one of Henrietta's daughters. This may interest those who develop a personal interest in the Lacks clan, but has little to do with the cells and was distracting.
You will be disappointed if you want to learn about the cells themselves, as the author only provides general descriptions and there is little technical information provided...this book is about people. That being said, there are some very good sections where the truly unethical behavior of doctors using these and other cells is described. They are quite disturbing stories.
The last hour of the book is a discussion by the author over the ethics of cells and tissues and who really owns them.
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25 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Jessica
- 05-04-10
Great Listen
I thought the weaving of the different characters was expertly done, loved the audible interview with the author at the end. great read - couldn't stop listening!
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20 people found this helpful
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- teatime
- 12-07-11
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
I was hesitant to listen to this book. I am not really into science and the workings of bodily functions. Cells have personally bored me.
However, I could not help but notice the very positive reviews surrounding this book. The subject matter did not seem so appealing.
I was wrong and am very glad to have listened to this book. Not only did I enjoy it and learn a lot ... my house is very clean. I stayed up late, listening as I cleaned. The book is totally engaging on many levels: culturally (not a pun ), personally, scientifically. It also brings great hope and an insight into how far we have grown as human beings.
I recommend The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, very glad that Rebecca Skloot had the persistence and courage to write it.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Rebecca
- 12-25-11
A Journey to Find The Woman Who Was HeLa
Skloot's fascinating book is somewhere in between a biography (Henrietta Lacks and her family), "Emperor of All Maladies" (cancer and cancer research) and "Warmth of Other Suns" (civil rights and the medical treatment of black patients in the 1950s).
Rebecca Skloot pursues the story of the woman behind the HeLa cells and finds Henrietta Lacks who died of cervical cancer in 1951. Along the way Rebecca meets Henrietta's children and grandchildren - tells us about the woman, and what medical discoveries that have come from her cells (including cures for polio and HPV and helping researchers understand cervical cancer).
The book also explores medical treatment of blacks in the 1950s before civil rights (separate wards in Baltimore's Johns Hopkins) and the ethics of using body parts/organs/biopsies for experiments and how the profit derived from new medical products should be shared with the family.
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3 people found this helpful
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- TheDallesmbt
- 05-27-11
Different Insight into Medical Research
All of us in some way benefit from medical research, but few of us take the time to understand it. This remarkable book set out to discover the woman behind the "HeLa" cells that are used throughout the world. However, it encompasses far more than the story of Henrietta Lacks. It also gives a very clear and thorough explanation of medical research in the 1950's as well giving the reader insight into the impact that the use of these cells had on both Henrietta and her family. Reading this book will provide a great deal of "food for thought" regarding moral and ethical decisions with regard to the research that is so beneficial to so many.
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2 people found this helpful
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- E. Pearson
- 02-21-12
A Straightforward Look at Truth
This is really a fascinating story. The author awakens readers to an awareness of our need to ask questions about how our "everyday" blessings came to be. Scientists, like their test subjects, do not live in a vacuum, and though much good came from the HeLa cells, we are left to consider the implications of the naively predatory practices of the age. Were we to rewrite history, would we choose to leave Henrietta Lacks to herself and her familys' memory, or would we "consume" her again for all the scientific and medical good her sample cells promised? The author tells the HeLa story extremely well--it is both intellectual enough and personable enough to keep the average reader engaged. She explains her motivations and resists the urge to demonize science and medicine. Best of all she tells the Lacks' story with straightforword empathy. I am very glad I read this book.
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- Barbara J. Anderson
- 12-13-17
Excellent Journalistic Story and well narrated
I was so impressed with the research behind this story. I learned a great deal, it had me happy, sad, disappointed, and hopeful. The family deserves this book and more. And I am just an old white woman.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Diane
- 10-25-11
across many genres
What made this book so intriguing was it's combination of family drama, character study, and medical/ science history. It reads like great fiction, but is made even more fascinating by the fact that it is all true.
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- Chalynn
- 10-21-11
Good book.
I really liked the way this book brought the scientific research down from its lofty aims. The book explored the human experience of research, and raised questions about whose rights prevail.
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- ilene
- 11-16-11
This is a must read
The story could never have taken place without the passion and devotion of the author to find out who was Henrietta Lacks. She had gained the trust of the family to discover that through the lack of communication they did not know all that was being done with her cells. The book takes you on a journey of discovery of all that was done and is being done in research and how this has effected the human lives of her ancestors.
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1 person found this helpful