The Privileges by Jonathan Dee

I picked this randomly off the new book shelf at the library. The cover looked like a Vanity Fair magazine photo and for some reason I thought the story might be like the articles in that magazine: stylish but not shallow. Ah, the effect of a good cover!

The Privileges is about a power couple, Adam and Cynthia, and it follows them from their wedding day through Adam’s rise in the financial world, to their days as New York City philanthropists. The story wasn’t boring and Dee is a good writer. Even though it’s about rich people in New York, it’s not overloaded with superfluous descriptions of shopping and restaurants. There’s also a lot of relationship analysis, which I like.

What I didn’t like was the book’s amorality. Cynthia is cold and harsh, and she treats her family appallingly. Adam justifies his insider trading as some kind of gift from on high, like, because he’s smart enough to figure out a way to do it without being caught, that makes it okay. Dee refuses to judge his characters or provide any kind of divine retribution, and I found that unsatisfying. I really wished the whole thing WAS a Vanity Fair article. It could have used some of that magazine’s “take them down a notch” approach to the rich and famous.

(Book 48, 2010)

Good Things in the Royal Mail

Today I got a treat in the mail...

This is what was inside:

Rosy Thornton's new book, not yet available in the U.S. (but coming in December).

Brave Girl Eating by Harriet Brown

This is a memoir of Brown’s experience helping her daughter Kitty recover from anorexia, using an approach called family-based treatment (FBT). It’s also an indictment of traditional attitudes towards anorexia (blame the victim, blame the family) and a call to action to make FBT more widely available to doctors, therapists, and struggling families. A recent randomized controlled trial of FBT shows that FBT offers a success rate greater than 50%, vs. 23% for traditional treatment methods.

Anorexia is a nightmare for children and their parents. Brown chronicles her family’s dawning horror as they realize how sick Kitty has gotten, and the medical maelstrom they encounter as they try to learn about the disease, find the best treatment, and fight for coverage from their insurer. In family-based treatment, parents take responsibility for their child’s weight restoration; this is a huge difference from traditional approaches that isolate the child from her parents and place the responsibility for weight restoration directly on the patient. But FBT is a hard path to take. Brown and her husband had to sit with Kitty during every meal and every snack for the many months it took her to gain weight. It was an emotional rollercoaster as meals would take hours, and be accompanied by rivers of tears as Kitty fought the demons that were preventing her from eating.

Brown takes deeply entrenched theories (both scientific and popular) about anorexia and turns them on their heads. Here is the fundamental question: Is extreme weight loss caused by deviant thinking, or is the deviant thinking caused by the weight loss? According to Brown, (and FBT advocates) it’s the nutritional deficits that result from too much weight loss that lead to the deviant thinking among anorexics, not the other way around. On this issue Brown has become a crusader, and she backs up her conclusions with results of studies performed on starvation victims. Without exactly saying it, she clearly blames the medical establishment for long-held “blame the victim” attitudes and she seeks to rebut that approach in this book.

Okay, but why did I read this book, you are wondering? It’s not my usual fare. It’s because I know Harriet Brown, and I know Kitty (not her real name). For several years their family lived in our neighborhood, and my oldest son was friends with Kitty in the sibling-ish manner of boys and girls who have gone to school together their whole lives. I saw Harriet fairly frequently at school events and other neighborhood activities. Lots of my friends have been skeptical about Harriet’s decision to write this book: is she taking advantage of Kitty’s illness for her own personal gain as a writer? Let me answer a resounding NO to this question; I think she is doing adolescent girls a huge favor by telling their family’s story and by calling attention to FBT. If you know both of these women (Kitty is 19 now), you know they are no shrinking violets. Kitty was always fearless on the playground, and for as long as I’ve known her, Harriet has been pissed off about something or other. It’s like she’s finally found her cause and she brings to it a wealth of wisdom, the energy of a true zealot, and the communication skills of an experienced journalist; quite a formidable combination.

(Book 47, 2010)

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

I imagine if you are fan of Jasper Fforde, creator of oddball alternate-universe mysteries like the Thursday Next series, you might like this book. Several years ago I tried to read The Eyre Affair and abandoned it in exhaustion. In the intervening years Fforde has cranked out five more Thursday Next books and a couple of Nursery Crime novels, and now he’s begun a third series, the first of which is this one, Shades of Grey.

Shades of Grey is part dystopian tale, part social satire, and total fantasy. The world has undergone some unspecified disaster, destroying civilization as we know it, and damaging people’s ability to perceive color. The society that has evolved organizes people into castes by what colors they can see, and (as you can imagine), some colors confer more status than others. The Purples are at the top of the heap; the Greys are at the bottom. The world is controlled by the Colortocracy, complete with rigid rules and arcane traditions that combine the worst of North Korea with English public schools. (Prefects are in charge, everyone must play a sport, there is much singing in praise of someone called Munsell.)

This book is very funny (a la Douglas Adam), but it’s also very complicated and difficult to follow. Fforde’s world is so enormously complex that huge portions of the book are just explication. The story (about Eddie, a naïve Red, and Jane, a subversive Grey) is constantly interrupted in its forward progress by whimsical asides about the black market value of lingonberry jam and the abuse of the color green, for example. Fforde’s total infatuation with his own cleverness is his undoing. In the end I was overwhelmed by detail and lost track of who was who and why it mattered.

(Book 46, 2010)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

I had planned to read this at some point, but bumped it up in my queue when I heard about Go Big Read, the University of Wisconsin Common Reading Program. I like it when a book gets a lot of attention around here; it makes for a change from all the fuss about the football team. Rebecca Skloot is speaking on campus in late October. For information about that event, and others related to Go Big Read, click on the button on my sidebar.

This book is the true story of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman from Baltimore who had cancerous cells taken from her body without her consent by researchers at Johns Hopkins hospital. Because these cells (codenamed HeLa) were among the first to grew easily in a lab, they became the basis for much of the medical research that goes on today around the world. Biologists work on HeLa cells all the time, for cancer research, but also for research on genetics, organ transplantation, and pharmaceutical development. The book is a fascinating combination of family saga and medical documentary. Skloot explains the science well and doesn’t overdo (or underdo) it. Her portrait of Henrietta and her family is sensitive and honest. Henrietta’s early death from cancer left her young family motherless and adrift. Her cells proliferated while her family barely got by.

I’ve heard criticism that this book portrays the Lacks family unflatteringly. Skloot has transcribed their voices from her recordings of her interviews with them, and she included their regionalisms and reproduced their accents. She also doesn’t omit unpleasant details like Henrietta’s son’s prison record and tendency toward continued violence. The Lacks family suffers from entrenched poverty, poor education, and little access to reliable health care. Their situation is far from unique and Skloot is never judgmental. I thought it was a good look at one family’s situation, and an important part of the narrative.

The book brings up so many issues: Why could the researchers take Henrietta’s cells without her permission? (In many situations it’s still possible for this to happen today.) Why is it okay for someone to profit from the sale of Henrietta’s cells when she and her family received nothing for them? (Tissue culture vendors sell HeLa cells by the test-tube-full.) What part does this story play in the long history of exploitative research on African Americans by white scientists? Why is the health care system in the U.S. so uneven and unfair? Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah Lacks, points out the irony of her family’s situation:

Truth be told, I can’t get mad at science, because it help people live, and I’d be a mess without it. I’m a walking drugstore! I can’t say nuthin bad about science, but I won’t lie, I would like some health insurance so I don’t got to pay all that money every month for drugs my mother cells probably helped make.

(Book 45, 2010)