Shenk does have a lot of evidence for this assertion, most of it coming from geneticists and other biological researchers who are perplexed at the way their disciplines get depicted in the media. "Today's popular understanding of genes, heredity and evolution is not just crude, it's profoundly misleading," Shenk writes. While most scientists long ago rejected the idea that nature and nurture are two separate factors competing in a zero-sum game to dominate human behavior, laypeople still cling to the idea that whatever aspect of ourselves isn't caused by our environment must be caused by our genes, and vice versa. In recent decades, heredity has gotten most of the credit; the host of the brainiest NPR talk show in my area inevitably prompts every expert to confirm that whatever they're discussing -- mathematical ability, wanderlust, ambition, mental illness -- is genetically determined.

According to Shenk, and he is persuasive, none of this stuff is genetically determined, if by "determined" you mean exclusively or largely dictated by genes. Instead, "one large group of scientists," a "vanguard" that Shenk has labeled "the interactionists," insists that the old genes-plus-environment model (G+E) must be jettisoned and replaced by a model they call GxE, emphasizing "the dynamic interaction between genes and the environment." They don't discount heredity, as the old blank-slate hypothesis of human nature once did. Instead, they assert that "genes powerfully influence the formation of all traits, from eye color to intelligence, but rarely dictate precisely what those traits will be."

Shenk's particular interest is talent, genius and other instances of extraordinary ability, whether the skills be athletic, artistic or scientific. Musicians and athletes most often get held up as examples of the triumph of innate gifts. According to Shenk, we are erroneously led to believe that stars like Tiger Woods and cellist Yo-yo Ma were born to climb to the top of their fields, when in fact the environments they grew up in are just as responsible (if not more so) for their spectacular feats. To prove this point, he methodically debunks several widely cited examples that supposedly prove the reality of inherited gifts: child prodigies, twin studies and geographical pockets of excellence at particular sports. In all of these cases, he demonstrates, observers have ignored and downplayed the enormous role of environment (especially in early childhood) in favor of touting the preeminence of genetics.

"The Genius in All of Us" strives for clarity -- a difficult standard when you're trying to describe such things as the role of environmental factors in controlling the expression of genes that are in turn susceptible to far more influence from environment than most of us realize in the first place. Or when you're explaining that "heritability" -- a "dreadfully irresponsible" word coined by researchers studying identical twins raised apart from each other -- refers to statistical probabilities in large populations, not to the qualities of particular individuals. A lot of the misunderstandings that Shenk laments seem to arise from the fact that genetics often involves statistical reasoning, while most nonspecialists have a pretty weak grasp of how probability, averages and means work.

With this in mind, Shenk states his assertions as plainly as he can in the main text of "The Genius in All of Us," then expands on the topic in his notes for those readers who want more information. It's an inspired method, a lot like the print manifestation of a digital article with hyperlinks to other documents illustrating the key points. For the majority of readers who are really only interested in the book's core argument, it's easy enough to extract the gist in a mere three or four hours of reading, but skeptics and advocates are free to lift the hood and see how it all works. While "The Genius in All of Us" isn't an inventive, sensitive piece of writing like Shenk's celebrated book on Alzheimer's disease, "The Forgetting," it isn't meant to be; he has deliberately stripped it down to communicate a handful of insurrectionary ideas as simply and unequivocally as possible.

To boil these ideas down even further, Shenk asserts that intelligence is not fixed but rather highly malleable depending on the demands placed upon it and the resources made available. Much of our capacity to think, perform and create is primed in early childhood, so the importance of creating a stimulating, challenging and supportive (but not coddling) context for young children can't be overstated. And while some of us are born with a slight edge when it comes to aptitude, most people can come pretty close to the highest levels of achievement in our chosen field if we pursue it in the right way. Of course, the intensity of drive and commitment exhibited by top athletes like Ted Williams or scientists like Einstein (who said "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer") is, in itself, extraordinary. But Shenk believes that this, too, can be inculcated, if we so desire.

As someone who has always resisted genetic determinism while still subscribing to the secular mystery religion of talent, I confess that "The Genius in All of Us" has quietly blown my mind. But the book's premise has far more profound implications for social policy. What would education, the workplace and government look like if we behaved as if we truly believed that nobody is born to mediocrity? "Human talent and intelligence are not permanently in short supply like fossil fuel," Shenk writes, "but potentially plentiful like wind power." It's an apt comparison in more ways than one; there are huge vested interests relying on the old attitudes. The determination to turn that around will need to be mighty enough to put even the great Ted Williams to shame.

A lot of the advice focuses on practice (work every day, keep a diary, stop while you're still interested, etc.), and almost as much strives -- gently or not -- to inform aspirants that they shouldn't expect much (or, really, any) money or fame from a literary career. It soon struck me, though, that the perspectives offered are limited. What makes Leonard's advice so refreshing, after all, is that none of it fusses over the writer's own process and delicate ego. His tips ruthlessly focus on the creation of better fiction.

Readers are what every novelist really wants, so isn't it about time that a reader offered them some advice? I've never written a novel, and don't expect to ever do so, but I've read thousands. More to the point, I've started 10 times the number of books that I've finished. Much of the time, I'm sampling brand-new novels that aren't great -- that frequently aren't even very good -- each one written by someone sincerely hoping to make his or her mark. I can tell you why I keep reading, and why I don't, why I recommend one book to my fellow readers, but not another. I've also listened to a lot of other readers explain why they gave up on a book, as well as why they liked it. Here are my five recommendations for the flailing novice:

1. Make your main character want something. Writers tend to be introverted observers who equate reflection with insight and depth, yet a fictional character who does nothing but witness and contemplate is at best annoying and at worst, dull. There's a reason why Nick Carraway is the narrator of "The Great Gatsby" while Gatsby himself is the protagonist. Desire is the engine that drives both life and narrative.

2. Make your main character do something. For the reasons stated above, many writers gravitate toward characters to whom things happen, as opposed to characters who cause things to happen. It's not impossible to write a compelling novel or story in which the main character is entirely the victim of circumstances and events, but it's really, really hard, and chances are that readers will still find the character irritatingly passive. When you hear someone complain that "nothing happens" in a work of fiction, it's often because the central character doesn't drive the action.

3. The components of a novel that readers care about most are, in order: story, characters, theme, atmosphere/setting. Of course all these elements are interlinked, and in the best fiction they all contribute to and enhance each other. But if you were to eliminate these elements, starting at the end of the list and moving toward the beginning, you could still end up with a novel that lots of people wanted to read; the average mass-market thriller is nothing but story. If you sacrifice these elements starting from the beginning of the list, you will instead wind up with a sliver of arty experimentation that, if you're very, very good, a handful of other people might someday read and admire. There's honor in that, but it's daft to write something with the deliberate intention of denying readers what they love and want and then to be heartbroken when they aren't interested. If you want to engage with more than a tiny coterie, take storytelling seriously; if you think that's incompatible with art, you are in the wrong line of work.

4. Remember that nobody agrees on what a beautiful prose style is and most readers either can't recognize "good writing" or don't value it that much. Believe me, I wish this were otherwise, and I do urge all readers to polish their prose and avoid clichés. However, I've seen as many books ruined by too much emphasis on style as by too little. As Leonard himself notes at the end of his list, most of his advice can be summed up as, "if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." Or, as playwright David Hare put it in his list, "Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it." But whether you write lush or (please!) transparent prose, keep in mind that in most cases, style is largely a technical matter appreciated by specialists. You probably don't go to movies to see the lighting and photography, and most readers don't come to books in search of breathtaking sentences.

5. A sense of humor couldn't hurt. American writers in particular are often anxious to be perceived as "serious," which they tend to equate with a mournful solemnity. Like most attempts to appear grown-up, it just makes you look childish. Comedy is as essential a lens on the human experience as tragedy, and furthermore it is an excellent ward against pretension. While readers may respect you for breaking our hearts, we will love you for making us laugh.

I could go on, but I'll stop there unless the populace clamors for more. Naturally, writers of genius have broken these "rules" as well as every other rule ever conceived. But, let's face it, geniuses don't need lists like this and couldn't follow them even if they tried. Most writers are not geniuses, and most readers would be exhausted by a literary diet that consisted only of the works of geniuses. The novel can be a down-to-earth and companionable thing as well as an exalted one, and while management gurus like to go on about the good being the enemy of the great, they are in fact misquoting Voltaire. He said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good," which means exactly the opposite. And he, as you are no doubt aware, was a bona fide genius.

I won't lie and say that "The Surrendered" doesn't occasionally indulge in either of those two things, but that doesn't wind up mattering, because the narrative sweep of the novel turns out to be irresistible. Characters that shoulder their way into the reader's psyche with an almost alarming vitality and Lee's organically skillful plotting are the powerful engines driving "The Surrendered." It's about survival and its costs, as embodied by two people: June Singer, a well-off Korean-born antiques dealer who is rolling up her Manhattan life in the early chapters of the book, and Hector Brennan, an alcoholic janitor in New Jersey. Hector is, implausibly, the father of June's son, Nicholas, though he doesn't know the young man exists and hasn't seen or heard from June in decades. Nicholas has run off to Europe and disappeared, and June has resolved to barge back into Hector's life, insisting that he join the search.

We learn, from the novel's first chapter, what June endured as an 11-year-old refugee fleeing south from North Korea during the war; she lost her parents, her older brother and sister and finally the younger brother and sister entrusted to her care. All this leaves her boiled down to a flinty core of stubborn will and, Hector thinks, "surely the strongest person he had ever known." Whether June's fearsome will was forged by the war or simply revealed by it is one of the novel's mysteries, but without a doubt it's the reason she made it out of Korea alive, as well as why she prospered afterward.

Hector, on the other hand, is merely lucky, although he doesn't see it that way. He's big and, despite his drinking, still fit, "a shockingly beautiful man," according to June's dispassionate assessment. Hector wins every fight he gets into and his wounds heal with uncanny speed. As a soldier in the Korean War, he stepped away, unharmed, from scenes of carnage. With the name of a classical hero and hailing from the town of Ilion, N.Y. ("Ilium" being another name for Troy), he appears singled out for a glorious destiny, but as Hector sees it, he's cursed to trudge onward even as the people around him are destroyed. As an adolescent, he slipped away for an assignation with a married woman instead of performing his nightly duty of walking his drunken father home from the neighborhood bar; his father fell into a river and drowned. Crippled by guilt, Hector has spent his life believing he was "the cause, and the symptom, and the disease; he was the dooming factor for everyone but himself."

What links this unlikely pair is love, not for each other, but for Sylvie Tanner, the wife of a minister who ran the Seoul orphanage where Hector once worked and June once lived -- even then, at the age of 14, she was a notoriously aggressive loner. Sylvie's story is the third strand of the novel, coming in late and telling of her childhood as the daughter of missionaries so devoted to their cause that she felt "set just outside the centripetal force of their labors, the impassioned orbit of their work." Kind and gentle, she represents, for June and Hector, the possibility of emerging from trauma with one's humanity, and ability to feel for others, intact. How did she end up failing them both?

"The Surrendered" moves backward and forward in time with an impressive smoothness, nosing out the events that led June and Hector to unite, however briefly, and create Nicholas. Just once, Lee stoops to sheer melodrama (there's a car crash in the book's second half that's a bit over the top), but it's an error of daring too much, rather than of settling for too little, and ultimately, it's forgivable. So are the moments, not frequent, when he strains too hard after writerly gorgeousness, clotting up his sentences with an excess of metaphorical flourishes. In a novel so rich in the hearty pleasures of storytelling, these blemishes are almost endearing, the overflow of a welcome enthusiasm. Also, Lee's reaching does sometimes work, as when he describes intimacy's tentative return to the middle-aged Hector's life, thanks to a tender barfly: "With each night she spent, another diaphanous layer of her presence seemed to settle upon him and everything else, the fine dust of her that he could almost taste on a spoon, on the rim of a glass."

But who really reads a novel in search of lovely sentences? What most of us hope to meet on the page are characters who bloom into a persuasive illusion of life, and in June and Hector -- one strong of will, the other strong in body -- Lee has most definitely succeeded. It's impossible not to want to know how they came to be the way they are or how they will end up. They may struggle to go on caring, but we don't have to.

Hegemann lifted as much as a full page of text from an obscure, independently published novel, "Strobo," by a blogger known as Airen. Another German blogger, Deef Pirmasens, was the first to point out the passages from "Axolotl Roadkill" that are said to be largely duplicated from "Strobo," with small changes. Despite the uproar caused by this revelation, "Axolotl Roadkill" has been selling better than ever and has been nominated for the $20,000 fiction prize at the Leipzig Book Fair. "Obviously, it isn't completely clean but, for me, it doesn't change my appraisal of the text," a jury member and newspaper book critic told the New York Times, explaining that the jury knew about the plagiarism accusations when it selected the novel for its short list. "I believe it's part of the concept of the book."

Plagiarizing journalists like the recently fired Gerald Posner (currently providing the occasion for ecstasies of self-righteousness over at Slate) could never pull off such a justification. Novelists and other artists, however, are always boasting about how much they "steal," as Robert McCrum pointed out in the Guardian a few weeks ago. How, then, can they wax indignant when other writers lift their work? "There's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity," Hegemann pronounced in a statement to the press. (Jim Jarmusch, incidentally, said virtually the same thing, and he probably got it from somebody else.) When the admirably game McCrum posted a quick follow-up take on the Hegemann affair, he prompted a heated conversation about copyright and its validity in the Information Age.

To this conundrum, Hegemann has added a heaping dollop of generational special pleading, and the story has prompted teachers to offer multiple examples of students who don't seem to understand what plagiarism is or that it's wrong. Kids these days, this Cassandra-ish line of reasoning goes, have unfathomably different values, and their elders had better come to terms with this because children are, after all, the future. You can't tell them anything! It's as if people under 25 have become the equivalent of an isolated Amazonian tribe who can't justly be expected to grasp our first-world prohibitions against polygamy or cannibalism -- despite the fact that they've grown up in our very midst.

Count me among those who think that most plagiarism scandals are overblown -- a classic example being the novelist Ian McEwan, who replicated in "Atonement" a few phrases from a memoir he used as historical research for that novel. What smells off in this instance is precisely Hegemann's claim to be using her borrowings to advance a cutting-edge concept of artistry. The daughter of an avant-garde dramatist, she says she practices "intertextuality" and explains, "Very many artists use this technique ... by organically including parts in my text, I am entering into a dialogue with the author."

This would be more plausible if Hegemann had acknowledged from the beginning that she'd included work from other writers in "Axolotl Roadkill," but by all indications, she did not. (Granted, it's hard for me to substantiate this for myself since I don't read German and can't compare Hegemann's novel to Airen's.) Some copyright critics have pointed out that, thanks to "Axolotl Roadkill," "Strobo" is now enjoying a sales boost, proving that "remixes" can be a rising tide that lifts all boats. However, it took Pirmasens' plagiarism accusation to bring Airen's involuntary "contribution" to "Axolotl Roadkill" to the public's attention. If Hegemann intended to enter into a dialogue with Airen, she took pains to make it look like a monologue. If she viewed the writing itself as collaborative, she suppressed any urge to share those handsome royalty checks.

McEwan, who did credit the out-of-print nurse's memoir he used as a source for "Atonement," could at least argue that what he incorporated from that source was only a tiny portion of a very different and substantively original work. Hegemann has already, and rather stupidly, cut herself off from that option by declaring that she intended to write a collaboration from the very beginning, only she just forgot to mention it before this. How innovative is "Axolotl Roadkill"? Again, it's difficult for the Anglophone observer to say for sure, but since both "Axolotl Roadkill" and "Strobo" recount life among the youngest participants in Berlin's wild club scene, Hegemann's claim to be presenting the material in a "completely different and unique context" seems a stretch.

And -- please! -- how much longer can very young writers publish novels depicting anomie, drug use and casual sex among their peers and still provoke wonder among their elders? It happens every few years, from the apotheosis of "Less Than Zero" to the sensation of Nick McDonell's "Twelve," yet every new iteration is treated like some shocking, never-before-imagined exposé, when, really, only the playlist changes. With suspicious frequency, the enthusiasm for "Axolotl Roadkill" seems to boil down to just this strain of titillated astonishment. You can't blame other 17-year-olds for finding it incredibly daring and fresh, but as for us adults -- shouldn't we know better?

Which is not to say that "The Possessed" failed to enlighten me about both Russian books and the people who adore them. For a while now, my beef with Russian literature has been that it is too confusing, not because of the names (the usual reason people give), but because of the manners. One character will do or say something seemingly innocuous -- offer another character a cup of tea or compliment him on his hat -- and the other character will react in some extravagant yet utterly unpredictable way, with fury, say, or abject gratitude. Why? I know of only one example in which this sort of thing has been explained: the famous case of Irena, in Chekhov's "Three Sisters," who is distraught to receive an expensive samovar as a gift because (experts will tell you) the urns were traditionally given to older women.

The fact that I could never quite understand what was going on put me off of Russian novels; for Batuman, it's a prime attraction. Her "fascination with Russianness" dates back to her early youth when, as a first-generation Turkish-American from New Jersey, she took violin lessons from a Russian named Maxim. His behavior baffled her, particularly the period during which he exhaustively coached her for a juried examination, repeatedly insisting, "We have to be very well prepared because we do not know who is on this jury." When she turned up for the exam, she found the panel headed up by "not some unknown judge, but Maxim himself."

Captivated, Batuman developed an appetite for what she calls "mystifications." "What I used to enjoy in poetry," she writes, "was precisely the feeling of only half understanding." Most essayists would probably approach the cognitive netherland of semi-communication as a sad and serious dilemma, but for Batuman it's a kind of heaven, lush with comic possibility. Russians, with their unfathomable and melodramatic behavior, strike her as both awe-inspiring and amusing. "The Possessed" describes Batuman's experiences at scholarly conferences where, in the middle of dinner, elderly ladies suddenly say things like "I would like to know if it is TRUE THAT YOU DESPISE ME," and on assignment meeting people who "told me about their dream to reestablish Petersburg as 'the birthplace of ice sculpture.'"

Quite a few of the adventures Batuman recounts, however, took place not in Russia but in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. In her early 20s, as a result of a series of misunderstandings and inexplicable actions, she wound up spending a summer there, studying "Old Uzbek," a language and culture that was half invented, half stolen by the Soviets; it is at once tragic, bizarre and ridiculous. Batuman got interested in the Uzbek language because she'd hoped it would bridge Turkish and Russian, the languages of her heritage and her literary passion, respectively. In Samarkand, a ramshackle town with a glorious, if very distant, past, she trudged along unpaved streets ("a few times I saw a chicken walking around importantly, like some kind of a regional manager") to a landmark known only as "the nine-story building," where an instructor informed her of the indignities suffered by the Uzbeks at the hands of assorted barbaric conquerors. "Shaking her head sorrowfully, she told me that Genghis Khan not only rode a bull, but he didn't wear any pants. She said that God should forgive her for mentioning such things to me, 'but he didn't wear any pants.'"

The language known as "Old Uzbek," despite its dubious history and the fact that no books printed in it could be found in any of the Samarkand bookstores, was portrayed to Batuman as infinitely more illustrious and refined than Persian. "Old Uzbek had special verbs for being unable to sleep, for speaking while feeding animals, for being a hypocrite, for gazing imploringly into a lover's face, for dispersing a crowd. It was all just like a Borges story -- except that Borges stories are always so short, whereas life in Samarkand kept dragging obscurely on and on." One great Old Uzbek poet, blind from birth, evidenced his talent by "molding a cooked bean into the shape of a ram, an animal he had never seen before." A medieval Uzbek poem takes the form of love letters exchanged between the colors red and green.

Batuman's affinity for the intersection of the grandiose and the absurd led her -- unsurprisingly to anyone but herself -- into an academic career. As a graduate student, she attracted the kind of friend who'd call up for advice on how to deal with dirty underwear, or who came over in the pouring rain to expound on "the two simple keys that were necessary for a perfect understanding of the poet Osip Mandelstam" or who, in one memorable example, wound up joining a monastery on an Adriatic island.

Batuman's various scholarly projects have a sprightly aspect one doesn't ordinarily associate with comp lit departments. They include: a dissertation comparing novel-writing to double-entry bookkeeping, a consideration of the "narrating sidekick" as a literary device (I should add that she seems nearly as obsessed with Sherlock Holmes as with any Russian character) and a contemplation of "the hugeness of novels, the way they devour time and material." In hopes of obtaining a field-research grant to get her to a conference at Tolstoy's former estate, she concocted a theory that the novelist might have been murdered. Then she seems to have half-convinced herself that it might be true. Meanwhile, her beloved Russians continued to provide her with fodder. On the flight over, Aeroflot lost her luggage, and when she called to check on it, she was told it would be sent to her eventually, but "in the meantime, are you familiar with our Russian phrase, resignation of the soul?"

The very funny voice Batuman uses to recount her exploits can be drolly formal, as if all the old books she reads have infected her with the antique air of a provincial czarist official. An incident in which she is bored by a fellow traveler on a layover in the Frankfurt airport is characterized as "having extinguished two hours of my youth." And who under the age of 60 uses the word "comportment"? Or perhaps this is just the way you wind up writing when you're the sort of person who gets dragooned into judging a boys' "leg contest" in a Hungarian summer camp.

Possibly there isn't enough direct discussion of Russian literature in Batuman's book to please those who will pick it up with that expectation. Even the chapter devoted to the Dostoevsky novel that gives the book its title (relating "the descent into madness of a circle of intellectuals in a remote Russian village") spends most of its pages detailing how disturbingly her friends in graduate school replicated the same story. (The current, more accurate translation of Dostoevsky's title for that book is "The Demons.") Perhaps it's all just another mystification. Regardless, I'm hooked.

There's a run-of-the-mill "The Cells That Changed the World" book in that premise, and one with a better claim to credibility than most of the "Changed the World" titles that have flooded bookstores since Dava Sobel's "Longitude" became a surprise bestseller 14 years ago. But "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" is far from run-of-the-mill -- it's indelible. Skloot (whom -- full disclosure -- I know slightly) spent a decade tracking down Lacks' surviving family and winning over their much-abused trust, a process that becomes part of the story she tells. Actually, it often takes over the story entirely. Just as the DNA in a cell's nucleus contains the blueprint for an entire organism, so does the story of Henrietta Lacks hold within it the history of medicine and race in America, a history combining equal parts of shame and wonder.

Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman born and raised in rural Virginia, was treated for the cervical cancer that killed her in Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital. A sample of her cancer cells taken during an early examination was handed over to a Hopkins researcher, George Gey, who probably never met Lacks herself. Unlike the vast majority of human cells, which almost always die soon after being removed from the body, Lacks' turned out to be astonishingly robust and easy to culture. They contain an enzyme that prevents them from automatically degenerating like normal cells, rendering them immortal, capable of dividing and multiplying seemingly forever. HeLa has provided countless experimenters with the once-rare raw materials needed to test drugs and procedures that have saved lives and transformed medicine.

But Lacks never knew her cells had been taken by Gey or why. Her family, who struggled to survive through a series of hardships that make "The Color Purple" look tame by comparison, occasionally heard from Hopkins or from journalists captivated by the HeLa story, but they had difficulty understanding what little information they were given. Then, in the '60s, a scientist discovered that most of the other cell lines being cultivated throughout the world had been contaminated by HeLa cells, and had probably been taken over by them. Hopkins researchers tracked down the Lackses to get the blood samples they needed to detect that contamination; the family thought they were being tested for the terrifying disease that had killed Henrietta. They believed that "Henrietta" had been shot into space, blown up with nuclear bombs and cloned. They worried that she might somehow be suffering through these experiences. And, eventually, they were enraged to learn that companies were making money selling vials of her cells while her children couldn't even afford medical insurance.

By the time Skloot contacted Henrietta's daughter, Deborah, the Lacks clan had been bewildered by doctors, terrified by rumors and bamboozled by con men. Deborah couldn't remember her mother, and had only the foggiest notion of how she died. Her memories of the abusive cousins who came to "take care" of her and her younger brother after her mother's death were, unfortunately, all too vivid. The loss of Henrietta -- "Sweetest girl you ever wanna meet, and prettier than anything," according to one relative -- haunted Deborah and her siblings. When outsiders unearthed the fact that they'd also had an epileptic and mentally disabled sister who'd died in an institution, Deborah's tormenting, thwarted desire to know what really happened to her mother and sister precipitated a breakdown.

The role Skloot assumed when she stepped into this narrative could serve as a textbook example for the mission of narrative journalists everywhere. "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" is the story of two different worlds coexisting side by side and largely unintelligible to each other; Skloot makes it her job to build a meaningful bridge between them. A white, secular science writer from the Pacific Northwest, she explained the basics of biology to the devout, Southern Lackses and the emotional and social perspective of the Lackses to her educated readers. She drew diagrams of cells for Deborah's angry brother, and witnessed a spiritual healing of a mentally unraveling Deborah at the hands of a man who tells her he suspects Henrietta's illness was caused by voodoo. Above all, she listened to Deborah and her family, and took their anxieties and confusion seriously.

Naturally, Henrietta's story raises all sorts of issues -- of patient consent, medical ethics, the ownership of genetic material and so on. What it most impressively succeeds at, however, is allowing readers to see the world from the Lackses' perspective. Early in the book, Deborah's sister-in-law speaks darkly of how "John Hopkins was known for experimentin on black folks. They'd snatch em off the street." Deborah worries that the hospital infected her mother with cancer and that her sister might have undergone similar ordeals in the institution where she died. Sounds paranoid, but while most of the Lackses' suspicions about Hopkins are unfounded, Skloot demonstrates that such fears were far from unreasonable, given widespread attitudes in the medical profession, sensational newspaper reports and a historical record that included the likes of the Tuskegee experiments.

Most of the doctors and researchers Henrietta and her family interacted with over the years either assumed the Lackses grasped what was going on or concluded that it didn't matter. "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" does not lack for astonishing examples of professional arrogance and insensitivity. The doctor who wanted blood samples from Henrietta's descendants sent a Chinese-born assistant who spoke broken English to request them and responded to Deborah's questions by handing her a textbook he'd edited on medical genetics. As a result, she spent weeks on tenterhooks, waiting for the results of a nonexistent "cancer test." Deborah's valiant attempts to read the textbook and her determination to go back to school in her 50s so that she could understand what was going on with "them cells" are heart-rending. When, via Skloot, she finally connects with a kind, respectful Austrian researcher who gives her a tour of his lab and hands her a vial of her mother's cells, it's as if a sunbeam has finally broken through the cloud cover.

Much like Ann Fadiman's classic investigation of the botched treatment of an epileptic Hmong child in a California hospital, "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down," "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" is a heroic work of cultural and medical journalism. With it, Skloot reminds doctors, patients and outside observers that however advanced the technology and esoteric the science, the material they work with is humanity, and every piece of it is precious.