I catch up on three recently read books

Maus I and II *****
by Art Spiegelman

"Maus" is a classic now; I see students carrying it around for various history and lit classes on campus, that's how I know. Anyhow, I'm sure scholars have written reams of explorations of "Maus" and its connection with counter-culture underground comix in the vein of R. Crumb and its parallels with "Animal Farm" as it retells the story of the Holocaust with the mice as Jews, the Nazis as cats, the Americans as dogs, and the Poles as pigs. What I like best about "Maus" is the way Spiegelman tells the story of the Holocaust as told to him by his father, a concentration camp survivor, and not always an admirable one, but one who is always recognizeably human despite his mouse ears.

The Cookbook Collector ***
by Allegra Goodman

Engaging, nicely written, but curiously forgettable tale of two sisters, one a fussy controlfreak and the other a messy dilettante. The 9/11 disaster is the fulcrum for the story, shifting the path of the story in the same way an earthquake might shift the course of a stream. Parallels have been drawn with Austen's "Sense and Sensibility," but, except for the fact that there are two sisters who are opposites, that's where the similarity ends.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks ****1/2
by Rebecca Skloot

I don't read a lot of nonfiction, but, as a former reporter, I found a good deal to admire about Skloot's search for Henrietta Lacks, whose HeLa cells became a mainstay in scientific research. Skloot encounters doctors, researchers, scientists, lab technicians, and, eventually, Lacks' mistrustful family who feel ambivalent at best about their mother's fame and scientific contributions made largely without her knowledge.

Briefly, Henrietta Lacks was a Baltimore woman who died in her 30s of a virulent strain of ovarian cancer. She received treatment at Johns Hopkins, where doctors cultured her cancer cells and created an "immortal" line of cells, which were important in the development of the polio vaccines and treatments for cancer. Along the way, laboratories that developed the cells for researchers made big bucks from HeLa. Lacks' family felt their mother's body had been violated to make a lot of white people rich while most of them remained so poor they were unable to afford health care insurance. 

Skloot could easily have made this a black-and-white story in many ways, demonizing or canonizing various players. What emerges from her careful research and willingness to be open to all the stories she collects for the book is a celebration of human imagination--the imagination of the researchers who had to invent many of their own lab equipment to culture cells, and the imagination of her family who came to see their mother's cells, as a nephew put it, her "spiritual body" that passed on to help others.

What pops out of this reportage in high relief is a life-affirming story that raises myriad ethical questions about the nature of scientific research that concern us all.