Hello Everyone,
We had a good meeting this week and a fascinating discussion of The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam, by Elizabeth Griswold. If you haven’t read this book yet, it’s one that we would highly recommend.
For May we will be reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. We will meet on Tuesday, May 10, 6:30 PM at the Toadstool Bookshop. Here’s the review from Amazon:
From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. And from that same life, and those cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive–even thrive–in the lab. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs, beginning with the cure for polio. Meanwhile, Henrietta’s family continued to live in poverty and frequently poor health, and their discovery decades later of her unknowing contribution–and her cells’ strange survival–left them full of pride, anger, and suspicion. For a decade, Skloot doggedly but compassionately gathered the threads of these stories, slowly gaining the trust of the family while helping them learn the truth about Henrietta, and with their aid she tells a rich and haunting story that asks the questions, Who owns our bodies? And who carries our memories? –Tom Nissley
Planning ahead, for June we will read The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation’s Call to Greatness, by Harlow Giles Unger. The June meeting will be on Tuesday, June 14th.
And planning even further ahead, for August we are considering Sarah Vowell’s new book, Unfamiliar Fishes, which is about U.S. expansionism in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines.
I hope you can join us on May 10th.
If you have any book recommendations, please let me know.
Linda Cates lindacates@mindspring.com