Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot chronicles the amazing story of the medical breakthroughs gained from a black woman’s cell line. I heard Skloot last week on NPR’s Fresh Air where she told host Terry Gross that in 1951 Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer. A doctor at Johns Hopkins University treated her disease and snipped cells from her cervix without telling her. Those cells were cultured and used in experiments on everything from polio vaccine to the long-term effects of radiation. Her cells were patented and marketed and earned millions of dollars for the medical researchers — all without the knowledge of her family until some 20 years after her death.

Medical writer Skloot examines the legacy of Lacks’ contribution to science and the effects on  her family, wary of the medical establishment that has a long and troubled history with black folks. The best known case of medical research abuse involving black Americans is, of course, the Tuskegee experiments of the 1930s to study the long-term effects of untreated Syphilis, without knowledge or consent of the patients, imprisoned black men.

After listening to Skloot, I tracked down a book I’d read a few years ago, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present, by Harriet A. Washington.

Medical journalist Washington wrote of the shameful history of the physical and medical misuse of black Americans long before the Tuskegee experiment. She cited medical journals and previously unpublished reports that openly acknowledged racial attitudes and experimentation. She detailed a litany of medical abuses and experimentation aimed at black men in the military and in prison, as well as women and children, all without proper notification or consent.

More recently, I read The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease, by psychiatric professor Jonathan M. Metzl, revealing that in the 1960s schizophrenia was racialized from an illness suffered by sensitive white intellectuals to one of disaffected angry black men who were diagnosed and locked up for their aggressive reactions to racism.

So, I’m not surprised at the revelations of Skloot’s book but what The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks shows is the stunning — and generally unacknowledged — contributions of black Americans to medical research. But it would be so much better if the contributions were made willingly, which raises the concern that too many black Americans shy away from medical research precisely because of the troubled past.

J. D. Salinger has died. The writer who lived so privately has, in death, once again become the subject of the kind of intense public scrutiny that infuriated him. After the reflections of our own Daniel Kraus,  the pieces I enjoyed the most were sort of quirky, personal views: Joanna Smith Rakoff’s memories of working for Salinger’s agent (”Dear Jerry, You Old Bastard,” Slate) and the Valley News piece about “one of the most enjoyable municipal conspiracies ever” — protecting the privacy of Cornish, Vermont’s most famous resident (”J. D. Salinger, Recluse of Cornish, Dies“).

“You very quickly got kind of wrapped up in the joke of it all. They were all so desperate to see if they could talk to the great man,” he said.

In news more of the moment, the release of the unfortunately named iPad (which Ian Chipman is quite excited about) has prompted people to publish articles about e-books almost as fast as it’s possible to read them. The iPad’s effect on the market does seem to provide a welcome check and balance on the seeming dominance of the Kindle, and even emboldened publisher Macmillan to push back with a proposed new pricing model–a move that caused Amazon to remove the “Buy” buttons from Macmillan’s books.

But, amidst all the swirling heat and dust of battle, the most interesting article about the iPad took an entirely different tack. Writing in the New York Observer, Lee Siegel concerned himself not with price points and market share but with the very nature of the beast, explaining “Why the iPad Is Actually a theyPad“:

The keyboard-weak, camera-less iPad simply won’t allow you to easily construct a blog, make a video or comfortably make extensive revisions to your Facebook profile. The new gadget exists solely as an instrument of the new digital hierarchy, which has to create new passive audiences in order to survive, just the way the old hierarchy did.

Siegel is, of course, the guy who pseudonymously defended himself on his own blog, so readers may take his thoughts on Web 2.0 with a large grain of salt. But he provides an important reminder that we need to think big thoughts about the latest, greatest gadgets, even while we’re slavering over their cool new features. Read the rest of this entry �

Casting aside the mantle of starving artist, D.A. Powell joins the ranks of the well-paid. He won the $100,000 award for his collection Chronic. Read more about Powell’s win here.

Have you been looking for an outlet for your Great American Young Adult Novel? For the first time Penguin Group and Amazon are opening the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition to young-adult submissions. Authors Sarah Dessen and Nancy Werlin are two of the judges on the young-adult panel, and entries will be accepted until February 7. Each of the two winners (one for general fiction, one for a young-adult work) will receive a publishing contract with Penguin Group.

On another writing note, last week HarperCollins launched inkpop, an interactive writing platform for teenagers.  What makes this site especially interesting is the fact that HarperCollins editors and authors review the site’s top selections and provide feedback to participating writers whom they think have potential. It’s a win-win for everyone!

Remember, first-time authors, even Madeleine L’Engle had to work herself out of the slush pile to get A Wrinkle in Time published.

It’s been a long time since I’ve worried what my fellow public transportation riders think of my reading material. There have been too many picture books, middle-grade novels, and tawdry celebrity biographies (Hello, Zsa, Zsa!) for that. But I must admit on recent commutes, I kept my copy The Politician by Andrew Young firmly in my lap. There was something so tawdry about this tell-all that I felt embarrassed reading it. Of course, I’m sure some of my fellow riders had tuned in to watch the Young interview on 20/20 and/or Good Morning America. They got all the salient points and saved themselves the $20-odd bucks.

In order to honor exceptional overlooked books published in 1970, the Man Booker foundation has created the Lost Booker prize. The titles weren’t eligible due a to rule change. To read more about the prize and view the longlist, visit the Guardian’s website.

Literary deaths don’t get any bigger. J.D. Salinger, 91, died at his home on Wednesday, January 27, leaving behind one of the most mysterious and pervasive legacies of any great writer of the twentieth century. When John Updike passed, when David Foster Wallace died, word spread among the hallways pretty quickly at Booklist. But this is something else altogether. People who don’t even read much are writing and calling.

The biggest question for us in the lit world is the one that makes us look the most like vultures: What’s in the vault? Like everyone else, I’m fascinated. Are there a few novels? Seven hundred short stories? Terminator fan fiction?

Over the decades since Salinger stopped publishing, there have been numerous reports of varying degrees of reliability that Salinger did in fact maintain a mythical stash. MSNBC reported today:

“I love to write and I assure you I write regularly,” Salinger said in a brief interview with the Baton Rouge (La.) Advocate in 1980. “But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.”"

The New York Times repeats a claim made by Joyce Maynard, an ex-lover, writing that she knew of at least two novels in a safe, also adding the following:

As for the fictional family the Glasses, Mr. Salinger had apparently been writing about them nonstop. Ms. Maynard said she saw shelves of notebooks devoted to the family.

And this enticing bit of gossip comes from his daughter’s tell-all, in which she explains her father’s organization system for dealing with his output:

A red mark meant, if I die before I finish my work, publish this ‘as is,’ blue meant publish but edit first, and so on.

Read the rest of this entry �

It’s that time again. The behemoth Edgar Nominations list  has been released to the public. Hold on to your hats:

Best Novel

The Missing, by Tim Gautreaux

The Odds, by Kathleen George

The Last Child, by John Hart

Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, by Charlie Huston

Nemesis, by Jo Nesbø, translated, by Don Bartlett

A Beautiful Place to Die, by Malla Nunn

Best First Novel By an American Author

The Girl She Used to Be, by David Cristofano

Starvation Lake, by Bryan Gruley

The Weight of Silence, by Heather Gudenkauf

A Bad Day for Sorry, by Sophie Littlefield

Black Water Rising, by Attica Locke

In the Shadow of Gotham, by Stefanie Pintoff

Read the rest of this entry �

Philip Gross’  The Water Table won the £15,000 TS Eliot prize for poetry, beating out Christopher Reid’s Costa-winning A Scattering. Read more about Gross’ win in the Guardian.

So, the iPad is here (yes yes, total namefail) and all the geeks are mad because it does what everyone’s been conjecturing it’ll do for months if not years, but fails to do anything that no one thought of. Do people think that Apple has people coming up with ideas from different dimensions? Is it supposed to cook for you? Digitally improve all reality within a ten-foot radius of the user? Tell killer stories at cocktail parties?

It is what it is, which, if you work in magazine land or comics world, is pretty exciting. I happen to work in both, so I’m pretty much slavering. No, it probably won’t kill the Kindle as an ebook reader (though that part of it does look waaay nicer), but where it’s light years ahead is in its rich graphical interface. This thing is the perfect comic reader. The model is here already with the iPhone comics readers, where you give ‘em a freebie with issue #1, then charge $.99 or so for the following issues. How easy is it to spend a buck you don’t even have to take out of your pocket to see what happens next to Atomic Robo? (Hint: bad news for Nazis.) But to have it be page-size rather than panel-size is a game-changer.

And how about magazines? How cool would it be to read Booklist on this thing as it appears in print, tap a review, and shoot over to all the neato stuff (find some similar title recommendations, see what else the author has written, immediately add it to a list for Baker & Taylor) we’ve got on Booklist Online, just like that! (/snaps fingers)

Even more, newpapers can chunk in videos right inside of articles–see ya, network newscasts! Chicago weatherman extraordinaire Tom Skilling can give me the forecast, but I’ll be the one in charge of zooming through and around all those high-tech weather models. I want to touch all of my media content on a gloriously glossy screen, and I want it yesterday. Let the saving of the publishing industry commence.

I’m sure there’s all manner of finer points, but that’s for tomorrow (or, you know, many tomorrows’ tomorrows). For today, I’m sold. Anyone got an extra $500 lying around?