Wednesday, April 20, 2011

SHARTARAM by Gregory David Roberts

This was truly a terrible book!  OK, so why did I follow it through 40 hours of recordings?  The book did hold my interest, it portrayed some interesting places in the world (assuming the portrayals were accurate), and it was sometimes funny.  If considered as camp, the entire book could be considered funny – though I’m not sure that was how this was intended.

I picked out this book at random from the Audible website.  There were some warning reviews that this wasn’t “worth the money”.   But it had a few redeeming qualities.

Our hero – Shantaram, but called “Lin”, is an escaped convict from Australia.  He has traveled to India on a forged New Zealand passport.  The explanation for this criminal life is only barely sketched in, and is slightly less than convincing.  He has lost his family somehow (I think perhaps his wife left him), and he turns to heroin as an escape.  In order to support his heroin habit, he turns to armed robbery.  He is caught and sent to an Australian prison, where he is beaten unmercifully.  He accomplishes a spectacular escape from this maximum security prison, and then becomes one of the most wanted men in Australia!

In Bombay, India, he falls in with a group of expatriates and with a jolly Indian tour guide. When he is evicted from his apartment, the tour guide arranges for him to live in a hut in the slum. 

Lin is a man that apparently can do almost anything.  He spends six months with the family of his Indian friend, where he learns the native languages.  He falls in love with a mysterious Swiss woman who grew up in the United States, Carla.  Their ridiculous romance is one of the underlying themes of the book.  He does NOT get the girl – but of course, we knew that when he made all kinds of dumb mistakes in the relationship.

When Lin returns to the slum, he becomes the slum’s doctor!  But then he runs afoul of Madame Chou, who runs an exotic whorehouse.  She arranges for him to be arrested and thrown into a terrible Indian prison, where he endures frightful beatings and privation.  He doesn’t learn until much later in the book who had had this done to him – only a “foreign woman”.  Never mind that it was perfectly obvious to anyone reading the book.

After getting out of prison, he becomes involved with the “Indian mafia”, learning money-laundering, gold smuggling, etc.  But these are good crooks, of course, as they don’t engage in drug trade or prostitution. 
It becomes obvious, however, that the leader of the mafia has other plans for Lin.  He recruits him to accompany a group to Afghanistan, where they will deliver supplies to the fighters against the occupying Russians.  Lin barely escapes falling off his horse off a cliff.  His group is almost wiped out by attacks from Russians, unfriendly Afghans, frigid weather, and, finally, near starvation.

The book is told in the first person, read by someone with a great Aussie accent. 

THE KICKER:  I try not to read reviews of the book until I have written up my own impressions.  Now I find that the author based most of this on his own experiences.  He was in fact a heroin addict and bank robber after his wife left him, did escape from an Australian prison, and was “most wanted”!  He also apparently did all the other things I’ve listed above, and more! 

But my feelings about his presentation of all this remain the same – no one is that good!

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA SACKS by Rebecca Skloot

I keep wanting to call this book “The immortal cells of Henrietta Sacks, because it is her cells that are in fact immortal. 

The basic story (except this is nonfiction) is fairly well known:  Henrietta Sacks was a black working-class woman from the South who moved to Baltimore with her husband.  He worked (I think) in the steelyards there, and they got by.  They had four children.  But Henrietta, while still young, contracted a very nasty cervical cancer.  She was treated in the charity wards of John Hopkins hospital.  In the course of her treatment, some of her cancer cells were removed and given to researchers – without her knowledge.   This was in the early 1950’s.

At that time, researchers had been unsuccessful in growing cells in laboratory settings, hindering their research.  Henrietta’s cells proved to be the answer to their problem – they were strong, aggressive, and grew like crazy.  Fast forward to today, and Henrietta’s cells have been used in hundreds of thousands of commercial and research applications around the world. 

This book is absorbing, and has several facets:
--How the book came to be, and how it was written form the backbone of the narrative.  This is even more significant because the book becomes to a large degree the story of Henrietta’s children – their mother’s famous cells have a large impact on their lives, particularly the youngest daughter, Deborah.
--The author tells Henrietta’s life story.  This gives a perspective on the great black migration from the South in those days, life in the South versus life in the North.
--The central issue is whether researchers had a right to take the cells without Henrietta’s knowledge or consent.  This becomes more relevant when we are told that commercial labs took over much of the production and sale of these cells, for profit (none of which went to either the original researchers or to the family).  In fact, most medical institutions today will ask patients to sign a release that they understand that any products removed from their bodies may be disposed of as the institution sees fit.

My observations:
--First, this is history, which I enjoy reading.  Families in the South tended to intermarry, which I found interesting (but unappealing!).   Although the black families in the North were poor, they seemed more casual about life.  Henrietta didn’t seem to brood about her cancer.   Her main concern was an inability to have more children.
--These cancer cells probably could have come from a person of any race.  But because Henrietta was black, it added another dimension to the moral problem.  The blacks of Baltimore at that time were somewhat paranoid about the “free” treatment at John Hopkins.  They suspected the hospital of using their poor black patients for medical experiments.   In fact, the author uncovers that one of Henrietta’s daughters, who was epileptic and slow and had to be committed to a mental institution, was subject to medical experimentation there – some of which was probably painful.
--Henrietta’s children, particularly Deborah, were to my view a little obsessed with the “theft” of their mother‘s cells.  Part of this was due to the fact that some people tried to exploit the family.  One charlatan pretended to represent them against John Hopkins.    It took this book’s author over a year to gain Deborah’s trust, but they subsequently became close.  Deborah was a baby when her mother died, but let the stolen cells destroy her equilibrium over and over.

If my cells were taken for medical research and sold, with or without my knowledge, I wouldn’t care.  Nor would I expect recognition for this.  Henrietta’s family kept talking about her cells, when in fact these were cancer cells. 

But this story looms large in Black History for some of the reasons discussed above.  And this book does a great job of telling it.

COLUMBINE by Dave Cullen

Many people would not read a book on this subject.  I, unfortunately, have to admit to being like the majority, ghoulish population of this country who take a perhaps unhealthy interest.  How else to explain the popularity of crime shows such as CRIMINAL MINDS?

In any case, I did not know a lot about this notorious school shooting.   This author takes the story from the planning and perpetration by the two boys, to the aftermath on the families and community.  The book advertises itself as a unique look at the different characters of the two shooters.

Therein lies the interesting part of this book.  The media reported / invented all kinds of motivation /  reasons, but the author challenges most of them.  In a nutshell:
He says that Eric Harris was a classic psychopath /sociopath.  Cullen talks a bit about psychopaths, explaining that PET scans show a decided difference in the brains of such individuals.  So they appear to be freaks of nature, born but not created.   Unlike the Klebold family, the Harris family declined most communication with the public, so it’s difficult to know how they felt about this (other than the obvious). 
Cullen cites certain characteristics of psychopaths such as self-centered behavior, limited attention span, etc.   It sounds like a psychopath would be capable of murder for his own ends.  This doesn’t quite explain for me why Eric Harris would want to murder if he knew his own life would end, but no situations are totally straightforward.  This explanation works as well as any.

The author also portrays Harris as the instigator, and cites instances where he tried to lure others into his plot – testing them with hypothetical questions (“Wouldn’t you want to shoot everyone?”)  Harris is the manipulator of Dylan Klebold. 

Cullen talks a lot about Klebold.  Dylan’s heartbroken parents were more forthcoming in discussing what happened than the Harris’, for one thing.  It seems as though Klebold could almost have been talked out of this up until the last minute, except that Harris’ influence was strong.  Klebold lost interest in shooting very soon after the incident began.

Klebold is likened to the depressive murder/suicide perpetrator, who usually kills himself and a loved one.  Klebold is shown to have been depressed, and, in his depression, said that there was now nothing left to do with his life except “NBK”. “NBK” stands for “Natural Born Killers”, from the movie of that name.  So the press is correct, popular culture did have some impact!  This seems to be the “romantic” image painted for Dylan Klebold by Eric Harris. The book inspires a certain sympathy for Klebold, until you remind yourself what he did to other, innocent students.

The other most interesting “story” to me was that of Patrick Ireland, the boy in the window.  He became famous during the incident by being filmed injured and climbing out of a window in the high school library.  He was in fact seriously injured, destroying his career plans to be an architect (he had brain damage, and the curriculum was too difficult for him).  He instead became a highly successful and happy businessman – though he walked with a limp the rest of his life.   His story was an incredible inspiration.