very simple

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

I had a few fits and starts since finishing my last book, attempting to read Griftopia by Matt Taibbi which I just could not get through (I don’t think it’s anything to do with the book so much as the fact that I think I’m burned out on the subject matter for the moment).

But I finally got a copy of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks from the library, and, while it took me a few days to get into, I could not put it down. I mark my progress on goodreads, and when I opened the book this morning, I was on page 148. And then I spent the rest of the afternoon reading, ultimately finishing the 376-page book in one sitting (broken up only once by the fact that I had to change locations).

I’m still processing, but this book, despite a significant amount of scientific material and background, is incredibly gripping – Skloot interweaves the story of Henrietta’s “immortal cells” with the everyday plight of Henrietta and her family, as well as Skloot’s own, painstaking, years-long challenge in getting the Lacks family to trust her enough to let her write the book. As usual, I’m not going to go into too much detail on the actual details of the book (you can click the book title above to get a plethora of that type of information), but I will say that I was moved to tears at points in the story when I wouldn’t have expected to be. The combination of the Lacks’ family’s own dire circumstances and their (rightful) sense of an injustice having been done to their family, combined with their utter generosity at the end of the day is just something to behold. I highly recommend this.

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

Another novel that is essentially a series of short-story-esque vignettes about people who are connected to one another (like a visit from the goon squad), this time the employees and other assorted folks associated with a failing international newspaper based in Rome. The author worked for the International Herald Tribune before it died, so it’s obviously a subject close to his heart.

It took me a little while to get into the story, but once it got going (and I figured out how the timeline worked), I really enjoyed it. Each “modern day” story of an individual character is followed by a brief vignette from the history of the paper, from it’s founding, through it’s heyday, up until it’s decline and eventual shuttering. Very nicely woven together, with parts that made me incredibly sad and at least one part that had me laugh out loud in public when I was reading it. Definitely recommend.

Port Mortuary by Patricia Cornwell

Book 18 in Cornwell’s continuing saga of Kay Scarpetta. I’ve mentioned this before, but I started reading this series when it was one of the few available in the english-language section of the nearby bookstore while I was living in Milan. Since then, I’ve felt compelled to continue, even though, in literary terms, these are the written equivalent of CSI. I’m not sure what to make of this one. First, Cornwell goes back to the narrative first person, where the entire story is told in Scarpetta’s voice. She had moved away from this device in recent books, giving more of an omniscient reader perspective. Going back to knowing only what Scarpetta knows certainly helped hold the suspense longer. Unfortunately, this was because Scarpetta herself was largely outside of the loop for much of the book. Most of the “suspense” was dependent on Scarpetta’s friends and associates deliberately keeping information from her until the last minute (sure, they all had seemingly legitimate reasons, but those reasons disappeared as soon as it was convenient for Scarpetta to actually find something out). In any event, Scarpetta is basically dropped into the situation after everything has happened, becomes an incredibly unpleasant person for a few hours due to the fact that she hasn’t slept, becomes unreasonably suspicious of everyone, including her husband, and then solves the crime after pretty much everyone else has gotten there as well.

Not loving this one.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

I gave this four out of five stars over at goodreads, but largely because I think the overhype of this book on a whole bunch of end-of-year-best-of lists increased my expectations to a (perhaps unrealistically) very high degree. But it was still a great read. A meditation on time, aging, the follies of both our youth and old age, on our ability to reinvent ourselves, sometimes over and over again. Told through a series of short stories, each in a different voice (including one powerpoint presentation), each focused on a different character, jumping as far back as the 1970s and as far forward as 2020-something, but all inextricably linked and culminating in a complete circle of interconnected lives. Really quite beautifully woven together.

All the Devils Are Here by Bethany McLean

A really in-depth look at all of the decisions and events that led to the 2008 financial crisis/collapse, from the internal workings at all of the major investment banks, the sub-prime lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the ratings agencies and AIG. No one (or very few people) actually committed “crimes”, but everyone kept pushing the envelope of what was appropriate within their given sphere, and each bad decision was compounded by the bad decisions of 100 other players. Each of these financial products (from the mortgages themselves to the securitization vehicles to the collateralized debt obligations to the credit-default-swaps to the synthetic CDOs), when first created, made perfect sense. But not necessarily when all thrown into the mix at the same time, each one feeding off of the other in a vicious cycle of lower and lower standards and more and more debt.

It’s hard to say who was the worst player in the bunch. Was it AIG, which essentially allowed the entire risk-management function to exist inside Hank Greenberg’s septuagenarian head? Or the ratings agencies, who kept giving all of these things triple-A ratings, which were supposed to mean that the investments were as “safe as treasury bonds”, even after they were well aware of the underlying problems? Or the investment banks who sidelined their own risk-managers because they didn’t turn a profit? Or the subprime lenders, who were handing out reams of money to people that they knew could never pay it back, even in a best-case scenario?

And of course, popular notions of “who’s to blame” are often not anywhere near the truth. Fannie and Freddie got a large share of the blame for causing the problem, but in actuality, they were very late to the party, and only ended up in the subprime market in the first place because they were required, by law, to guarantee a certain percentage of low-income housing. Because the subprime lenders were undercutting the more traditional “hard money” lenders that had previously serviced this market, Fannie and Freddie almost had no choice but to start buying up subprime loans. Of course, they didn’t take a step back and try to use their mighty lobbying power to get out of this obligation, or to highlight the problem, but it’s a very different scenario than the idea that they “caused” the entire mess.

Just amazing.

Not quite as “entertaining” as McLean’s prior book, “The Smartest Guys in the Room”, but then again, the collapse of our entire financial system was bound to be less entertaining than a bunch of guys in Houston who were just giant fraudsters, spending tens of thousands of dollars on everything from race cars to strippers.