Reviews

Winner of:

• National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine’s 2011 Communication Award for Best Book
• Chicago Public Library and the Chicago Public Library Foundation 21st Century Award
• Medical Journalists’ Association Open Book Award, General Readership, Non-Fiction
• Ambassador Book Award in American Studies
• 2010 Wellcome Trust Book Prize
• American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Young Adult Science Book Award
• Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction
• 2010 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction
• Amazon Best Book of the Year
• Barnes & Noble Best Books for Adults 2010
• 2010 Indie Lit Award for NonFiction
• Goodreads.com Readers Choice Award for Best Debut Author and Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
• Powells’ 2011 Puddly Award for Nonfiction
• Bookbrowse.com Diamond Award for Best Book
• Audie Award for Best Nonfiction Audiobook

Selected for More than Sixty Best of the Year Lists, Including:

Reviews

Chosen as a Best Book of the Year by more than 60 publications, including New York Times, The New Yorker, People, USA Today, O, The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Boston Globe, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times.

“I could not put the book down . . . The story of modern medicine and bioethics—and, indeed, race relations—is refracted beautifully and movingly.”

—ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY (READ THE FULL REVIEW)

“One of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a very long time . . . The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks . . . floods over you like a narrative dam break, as if someone had managed to distill and purify the more addictive qualities of Erin Brockovich, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and The Andromeda Strain . . . it feels like the book Ms. Skloot was born to write.”

—DWIGHT GARNER, NEW YORK TIMES (READ THE FULL REVIEW)

“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a triumph of science writing . . . one of the best nonfiction books I have ever read.”

—WIRED.COM

“A deftly crafted investigation of a social wrong committed by the medical establishment, as well as the scientific and medical miracles to which it led.”

—ERIC ROSTON, WASHINGTON POST (READ THE FULL REVIEW)

“Beautifully crafted . . . Thanks to the author’s narrative skills, it is a tale that one experiences rather than reads.”

—SCIENCE MAGAZINE (READ THE FULL REVIEW)

“Indelible . . . Much like Ann Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, this is a heroic work of cultural and medical journalism. With it, Skloot reminds doctors, patients, and outside observers that however advanced the technology and esoteric the science, the material they work with is humanity, and every piece of it is precious.”

—LAURA MILLER, SALON (READ THE FULL REVIEW)

“Skloot narrates the science lucidly, tracks the racial politics of medicine thoughtfully, and tells the Lacks family’s often painful history with grace . . . Science writing is often just about ‘the facts.’ Skloot’s book, her first, is far deeper, braver, and more wonderful . . . Made my hair stand on end.”

LISA MARGONELLI, NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW

“Riveting . . . a tour-de-force debut.”

—CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, FAVORITE BOOK OF THE YEAR

“A real-life detective story, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks probes deeply into racial and ethical issues in medicine . . . The emotional impact of Skloot’s tale is intensified by its skillfully orchestrated counterpoint between two worlds.”

—NATURE

“Science journalist Skloot makes a remarkable debut with this multilayered story about faith, science, journalism, and grace . . . Skloot tells a rich, resonant tale of modern science, the wonders it can perform and how easily it can exploit society’s most vulnerable people.”

—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, STARRED REVIEW (READ THE FULL REVIEW)

“A well-paced, vibrant narrative . . . Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot’s graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lacks 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.”

—KIRKUS REVIEWS, STARRED REVIEW (READ THE FULL REVIEW)

“Funny, tender, sometimes violent . . . Folds together a sweeping history of scientific triumph and shame, a dramatic true story of Skloot’s long struggle to win the family’s confidence, and a cast of characters whose anger, generosity, pride, and improbable grace make them impossible to forget.”

—CHRISTINE WICKER, DALLAS MORNING NEWS

“This extraordinary account shows us that miracle workers, believers, and con artists populate hospitals as well as churches, and that even a science writer may find herself playing a central role in someone else’s mythology.”

—THE NEW YORKER (READ THE FULL REVIEW)

“No one can say exactly where Henrietta Lacks is buried: during the many years Rebecca Skloot spent working on this book, even Lacks’s hometown of Clover, Virginia, disappeared. But that did not stop Skloot in her quest to exhume, and resurrect, the story of her heroine and her family. What this important, invigorating book lays bare is how easily science can do wrong, especially to the poor. The issues evoked here are giant: who owns our bodies, the use and misuse of medical authority, the unhealed wounds of slavery . . . and Skloot, with clarity and compassion, helps us take the long view. This is exactly the sort of story that books were made to tell—thorough, detailed, quietly passionate, and full of revelation.”

—TED CONOVER, AUTHOR OF NEWJACK AND THE ROUTES OF MAN

“It’s extremely rare when a reporter’s passion finds its match in a story. Rarer still when the people in that story courageously join that reporter in the search for what we most need to know about ourselves. When this occurs with a moral journalist who is also a true writer, a human being with a heart capable of holding all of life’s damage and joy, the stars have aligned. This is an extraordinary gift of a book, beautiful and devastating—a work of outstanding literary reportage. Read it! It’s the best you will find in many many years.”

—ADRIAN NICOLE LEBLANC, AUTHOR OF RANDOM FAMILY

“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.”

—BOOKLIST, STARRED REVIEW (READ THEFULL REVIEW)

“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a fascinating read and a ringing success. It is a well-written, carefully researched, complex saga of medical research, bioethics, and race in America. Above all it is a human story of redemption for a family torn by loss, and for a writer with a vision that would not let go.”

—BOSTON GLOBE (READ THE FULL REVIEW)

“A work of both heart and mind, driven by the author’s passion for the story, which is as endlessly renewable as HeLa cells.”

—LOS ANGELES TIMES FACES TO WATCH IN 2010 FEATURE

“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks brings to mind the work of Philip K. Dick and Edgar Allan Poe. But this tale is true. Rebecca Skloot explores the racism and greed, the idealism and faith in science that helped to save thousands of lives but nearly destroyed a family. This is an extraordinary book, haunting and beautifully told.”

—ERIC SCHLOSSER, AUTHOR OF FAST FOOD NATION

“Skloot’s book is wonderful—deeply felt, gracefully written, sharply reported.”

—SUSAN ORLEAN, AUTHOR OF THE ORCHID THIEF

“Rebecca Skloot has written a marvelous book so original that it defies easy description. She traces the surreal journey that a tiny patch of cells belonging to Henrietta Lacks’s body took to the forefront of science. At the same time, she tells the story of Lacks and her family—wrestling the storms of the late twentieth century in America—with rich detail, wit, and humanity. The more we read, the more we realize that these are not two separate stories, but one tapestry. It’s part The Wire, part The Lives of the Cell, and all fascinating.”

—CARL ZIMMER, AUTHOR OF MICROCOSM

“This is a science biography like the world has never seen. What if one of the great American women of modern science and medicine—whose contribution underlay historic discoveries in genetics, the treatment and prevention of disease, reproduction, and the unraveling of the human genome—was a self-effacing African-American tobacco farmer from the Deep South? A devoted mother of five who was escorted briskly to the Jim Crow section of Johns Hopkins for her cancer treatments? What if the untold millions of scientists, doctors, and patients enriched and healed by her gift never, to this day, knew her name? What if her contribution was made without her knowledge or permission? Ladies and gentlemen, meet Henrietta Lacks. Chances are, at the level of your DNA, your inoculations, your physical health and microscopic well-being, you’ve already been introduced.”

—MELISSA FAY GREENE, AUTHOR OF PRAYING FOR SHEETROCK AND THERE IS NO ME WITHOUT YOU

“A jaw-dropping true story . . . raises urgent questions about race and research for ‘progress’ . . . an inspiring tale for all ages.”

—ESSENCE

“Has the epic scope of Greek drama, and a corresponding inability to be easily explained away.”

—SF WEEKLY

“There are a handful of journalists who have such a deep capacity for empathy that they can become fully absorbed into their subjects’ lives, gaining their confidence and crossing huge divides of race, culture, class, and geography to tell a story of transcendent humanity. This is what Rebecca Skloot . . . has done in her first book, a nonfiction masterpiece.”

—THE PROGRESSIVE

“One of the great medical biographies of our time.”

—FINANCIAL TIMES

“No dead woman has done more for the living . . . a fascinating, harrowing, necessary book.”

—HILARY MANTEL, THE GUARDIAN (UK)

“Skloot’s engaging, suspenseful book is an incredibly welcome addition for non-science wonks.”

—NEWSWEEK

“Extraordinary . . . If science has exploited Henrietta Lacks, [Skloot] is determined not to. This biography ensures that she will never again be reduced to cells in a petri dish: she will always be Henrietta as well as HeLa.”

—THE TELEGRAPH (UK), BEST READ OF THE YEAR

“Brings the Lacks family alive . . . gives Henrietta Lacks another kind of immortality—this one through the discipline of good writing.”

—BALTIMORE SUN

“In this gripping, vibrant book, Rebecca Skloot looks beyond the scientific marvels to explore the ethical issues behind a discovery that may have saved your life.”

—MOTHER JONES

“More than ten years in the making, it feels like the book Ms. Skloot was born to write . . . Skloot, a young science journalist and an indefatigable researcher, writes about Henrietta Lacks and her impact on modern medicine from almost every conceivable angle and manages to make all of them fascinating . . . a searching moral inquiry into greed and blinkered lives . . . packed with memorable characters.”

—DWIGHT GARNER, NEW YORK TIMES, TOP TEN BOOK OF 2010

“Astonishing . . . No matter how much you may know about basic biology, you will be amazed by this book.”

—JOURNAL OF CLINICAL INVESTIGATION

“Rebecca Skloot did her job, and she did it expertly . . . A riveting narrative that is wholly original.”

—THEROOT.COM

“Journalist Rebecca Skloot’s history of the miraculous cells reveals deep injustices in U.S. medical research.”

—TIME

“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a fascinating look at the woman whose cultured cells—the first to grow and survive indefinitely, harvested without compensation or consent—have become essential to modern medicine.”

—VOGUE

“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a remarkable feat of investigative journalism and a moving work of narrative nonfiction that reads with the vividness and urgency of fiction. It also raises sometimes uncomfortable questions with no clear-cut answers about whether people should be remunerated for their physical, genetic contributions to research and about the role of profit in science.”

—NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO

“An indelible, marvelous story as powerful as those cells.”

—PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“As much an act of justice as one of journalism.”

—SEATTLE TIMES, BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“A stunning book . . . surely the definitive work on the subject.”

—THE INDEPENDENT (UK), BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“Graceful . . . I can’t think of a better way to capture the corrosive effects of ethical transgressions in medical research. It’s a heartbreaking story, beautifully rendered.”

—THE LANCET