I've joined a book club! Last month we read, A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert. “A Short History of Women” consists of linked stories: in this case, 15 lean, concentrated chapters that hopscotch through time and alternate among the lives of Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a British suffragist, and a handful of her descendants. Several of the stories have been previously published; most could stand alone. Yet together they coalesce into more than the sum of their parts. It is Walbert’s conceit that while the oldest and youngest generations never meet, they share a legacy of echoes: objects and phrases that repeat mysteriously, and with increasing significance, across the decades. This spare novel manages, improbably, to live up to its title: it delivers what feels like a reasonably representative history of women — at least of white, Anglo-Saxon women, over the past hundred-odd years. -NYTimes
I hosted our March gathering and chose, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." From the very beginning there was something uncanny about the cancer cells on Henrietta Lacks’s cervix. Even before killing Lacks herself in 1951, they took on a life of their own. Removed during a biopsy and cultured without her permission, the HeLa cells (named from the first two letters of her first and last names) reproduced boisterously in a lab at Johns Hopkins — the first human cells ever to do so. HeLa became an instant biological celebrity, traveling to research labs all over the world. Meanwhile Lacks, a vivacious 31-year-old African-American who had once been a tobacco farmer, tended her five children and endured scarring radiation treatments in the hospital’s “colored” ward. -NYTimes
I hosted our March gathering and chose, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." From the very beginning there was something uncanny about the cancer cells on Henrietta Lacks’s cervix. Even before killing Lacks herself in 1951, they took on a life of their own. Removed during a biopsy and cultured without her permission, the HeLa cells (named from the first two letters of her first and last names) reproduced boisterously in a lab at Johns Hopkins — the first human cells ever to do so. HeLa became an instant biological celebrity, traveling to research labs all over the world. Meanwhile Lacks, a vivacious 31-year-old African-American who had once been a tobacco farmer, tended her five children and endured scarring radiation treatments in the hospital’s “colored” ward. -NYTimes
I strongly recommend this book. It's a page turner. I didn't know much about the history of bioethics and medicine in general but, I walked away stunned at how these actual events played out in our not-so-distant past. For those of you who work with the very prolific HeLa cells, they came from a human being--Henrietta Lacks and her story is amazing.
The author, Rebecca Skloot, did an incredible job sharing this family's story as well as her own research/writing process. It was her first book and you can be sure I'll be looking for her second!
I tried to come up with some easy menu ideas for this book before I started to read. Tacos? Lasagna? After the first 100 pages it hit me. Southern Comfort food is the only way to go. So, we all coordinated - pot luck style-and came up with this spread:
Sweet potatos w/ coconut milk, collard greens, spicy rice, bbq pulled pork w/ herb biscuits, polenta-with or without shrimp marinated in garlic and diced tomatoes, homemade vanilla bean ice cream with the most amazing banana topping drizzled on top (secret ingredient? splash of rum) and for the first time for most of us--mint juleps!
A group of 9 ladies squeezed around my dining room table for dinner. There were lots of laughs and eventually (after we enjoyed our first bites from our full plates) a great discussion about this book!
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