Before you start reading, a warning: this blog post contains spoilers for “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot.
In our last Humanities unit, we learned about literary non-fiction by reading various books of the genre. I chose to read “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot. This book details the life and legacy of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman who had a sample of her cervical cancer cells taken without her knowledge. Doctors then discovered that her malignant cells were able to infinitely reproduce, which made them millions since her cells could be used as a reliable source of testing material for drugs, vaccines, and cures for cancer. All of this happened as her family suffered from poverty, not getting a single penny from the doctors’ profits. This book is a poioumenon – it describes Skloot’s journey to Clover and her experience recording all this information about who Henrietta really is. Some themes and central ideas present in this book are the concept of family, medical consent, the development of the sciences, and discrimination. In this blog post, I will be sharing some pages from my notebook to share my experience reading this book in a book club.
Multiple Ideas
This page was made very early and was one of the first I wrote while reading this book. During our lesson, we read a bit of a short story called “Hidden Figures,” which was about a black woman, Dorothy Vaughan, who worked as a computer in World War 2. We discussed what central ideas were present in the text and did the same for the book we were reading. I wrote about my central idea and also wrote about some recurring ideas and motivations that I thought would be useful for future notes.
Tracking Complexity
Not long after writing about central ideas, I put my analysis to good use when we needed to create a map of motivations, conflicts, and interactions. We were also tasked with identifying some character traits. On this page, I wrote about our most prominent characters so far: Rebecca (narrator), Deborah (Henrietta’s daughter), Courtney Speed (owner of a grocery store in Clover), and Henrietta (Deborah’s deceased mother, whose cells were one of the first immortal cell chains discovered). It wasn’t hard to get three traits for all of them since the book contains lots of breaks from Rebecca’s journey to talk about Henrietta’s childhood and explore her family’s backstory. These passages tend to stray away from the clinical operating rooms and omnipresent unjustness of Deborah’s present life and meander into the past, vividly describing Henrietta’s childhood and life.
Back in the present, Rebecca goes on a winding journey to find out the truth about Henrietta. Her determination gets her on the phone with various members of the Lacks family. As seen in the map I made, the family is exclusive since they regard Henrietta’s cells as a sensitive topic. Most family members don’t pick up her calls or deny her the information. This part was also not h
ard to make since the book is so explicit about Rebecca’s journey (being a poioumenon).
Perspectives and Argument
This page contains our script for the town hall debate. This activity was where we used a central idea as a claim and made a speech supporting it with evidence from the book we read, and the audience could pose questions after our speech. To prepare, we each came up with a point to support our central idea. Niuniu introduced the first piece of evidence, and I provided the rebuttal. By having a strong rebuttal, we were able to thwart many possible denouncements of our argument, so the risk of us failing was much lower. To write this script, we each made a CER and implemented it into the script (like we did for the boxer essay).
Central Idea 1 & Central Idea 2
The last two pages I will be sharing on this blog post are part of the Central Idea summative. In this task, we wrote down a central idea present in our book and constructed an argument to support it, CER style. For this task, we worked individually and not in groups. The central idea I wrote was “Henrietta’s cells helped to further medical knowledge and establish laws and regulations about informed consent.”. I chose to write this since it was prevalent in the book (it was one of the most prominent and important ideas Rebecca wrote about) and it was easy to provide strong evidence for it.
Overall, I found this to be a very fruitful unit and I took a lot away from it. I got to read a fantastic book about something I’ve never even heard of before, and I got to practice and improve my writing and speaking skills.
Recent Comments