The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.
Crown Book. 02/02/2010.
369 pages.

Rebecca Skloot, born in 1972, is a journalist and an author focused on science and medicine. She stayed on the New York Time Bestseller list with her book The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks.
Rebecca Skloot wrote this book to uncover the untold story of Henrietta Lacks. She first discovered Henrietta's existence when she was 16 at College and decided to try telling Henrietta's story when she was in graduate school.

In the whole book we can learn about the life of Henrietta Lacks, black woman of the 20th century, with an incurable cancer of the cervix and the story of her entire family during her disease and after her death. We can also see the condition of the black people in the time of the segregation and their relation to medicine. Finally through the real story of the one we used to call HeLa, we follow the torment of the Lacks family dealing with the revelation of the extortion of Henrietta cells.

The work done by Rebecca Skloot is not just a simply book telling a story, it's a real investment and a real job of historical reasearch. It took her less than 10 years ! She based her thesis on people she met and on documentation she had seen in college which were talking about the HeLa cells.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is especially more interesting when we realise that Rebecca is actually a white woman.
Mrs, Skloot also raised the questions of the experimentatin on black persons, in showing us how many experiments had been done on them, and the power of scientists.

In my opinon this masterpiece written by Rebecca Skloot has to be read by everyone. It tells a lot about the history of medicine and after all each person should know about the existence of the HeLa cells.
It's thanks to this moving story between medicine and a tragical family history that Rebecca shows an example of what happened to probably a lot of black people in the 20th century. I have to say that my face has known a lot of expressions while I was reading. The book has plenty of twists which makes you realise the sadness and the tragic situation Henrietta was living.
Henrietta was a wife, a mother, a daughter but she was mostly a woman, a woman to whom (thanks to her cells) we owe now a lot of the cures we have. However she is still an unknown person for a lot of people in the world.
It is a pleasure to read the narrative which is written extremely simply to understand even if we are not very good with English.

To conclude a movie will maybe come out based on Rebecca's book, it will allow more people to know about Henrietta and maybe open the eyes of the whole world on a hidden story.