MixedThe Chicago TribuneThe alienation of labor no longer shocks the way it did in the nineteenth century—we accept without surprise that our employers generally own the rights to the fruits of our work—but the alienation of our own bodies still does. It is this sense of violation, of theft, that animates Lacks’ sons Lawrence and Sonny in their fruitless quest for compensation from Johns Hopkins, and that accounts for much of the energy in Skloot’s narrative … The race question is the most compelling component of the book, but it is also the most misleading … The story of HeLa and of Henrietta Lacks is not simple, and Skloot struggles in places with order and chronology and plot line, and sometimes confuses irony with argumentation. Where she succeeds magnificently is in her depiction of the Lacks family.
