Below are the suggestions I received for the next gathering, plus a description about each book. I put up a poll for us to vote on the ones we like, so please vote over here.
I'm thinking we'd be getting together towards the end of May or beginning of June, I'll send out another email (I know, I know) in a couple weeks so we can nail down a date. If you could please send in your choices by the end of the weekend, that would be fantastic.
*The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.
Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.
Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.
* Defending Jacob by William Landay
Andy Barber has been an assistant district attorney in his suburban Massachusetts county for more than twenty years. He is respected in his community, tenacious in the courtroom, and happy at home with his wife, Laurie, and son, Jacob. But when a shocking crime shatters their New England town, Andy is blindsided by what happens next: His fourteen-year-old son is charged with the murder of a fellow student.
Every parental instinct Andy has rallies to protect his boy. Jacob insists that he is innocent, and Andy believes him. Andy must. He's his father. But as damning facts and shocking revelations surface, as a marriage threatens to crumble and the trial intensifies, as the crisis reveals how little a father knows about his son, Andy will face a trial of his own?between loyalty and justice, between truth and allegation, between a past he's tried to bury and a future he cannot conceive.
Award-winning author William Landay has written the consummate novel of an embattled family in crisis?a suspenseful, character-driven mystery that is also a spellbinding tale of guilt, betrayal, and the terrifying speed at which our lives can spin out of control.
* The Paris wife by Paula McLain
A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley.
Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she meets Ernest Hemingway and her life changes forever. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group—the fabled “Lost Generation”—that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris, which hardly values traditional notions of family and monogamy. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises. Hadley, meanwhile, strives to hold on to her sense of self as the demands of life with Ernest grow costly and her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. Despite their extraordinary bond, they eventually find themselves facing the ultimate crisis of their marriage—a deception that will lead to the unraveling of everything they’ve fought so hard for.
A heartbreaking portrayal of love and torn loyalty, The Paris Wife is all the more poignant because we know that, in the end, Hemingway wrote that he would rather have died than fallen in love with anyone but Hadley.
* The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier
There is a city where those who have died live on for as long as someone still alive on earth can remember them. This is the conceit behind Kevin Brockmeier's new novel The Brief History of the Dead. The novel is set in a not-too-distant-future where terrorist warnings are a daily, glossed over event and Coca Cola ad-campaigns inexplicably parody anthrax mailings and a plague is quickly wiping out mankind. This 'City' where the dead exist is rapidly emptying as the plague wipes out more and more of the world's population, as fewer people are left to remember them.
Laura Byrd, who is in Antarctica on a research mission and cut-off from the rest of the world (and the plague), is at the center of the story. She's only beginning to wonder why she hasn't had contact from headquarters in some time and being alone in her station is making her a little stir-crazy. Her research partners ventured out for another station nearby and haven't returned and now she's faced with the decision to leave her camp in search of them or remain where she is until the food runs out. Luckily for the sake of the narrative, she decides to go forth in search of her partners, setting in motion a series of adventures that cause her to recall so many of the memories that begin to connect her to all the people left in the City.
The Brief History of the Dead is a fantastic statement on the mercurial nature of memory. As the dead in the City begin to realize they all have one person connecting them Laura Byrd turns over in her mind all the people she's known in her life and the seemingly inconsequential encounters she's had with such a large number of people. The memories pile up as her attempt to brave the tundra reaches its inevitable conclusion. Who and what she remembers and why define Laura Byrd and because the inhabitants of the City are depending upon her memory to keep their world intact, her memories start to define their existence as well.
Brockmeier creates very believable pictures of both the City and Laura Byrd's trek through the arctic. He stumbles a bit here and there with digressions and side stories that are ultimately unnecessary. But what doesn't work isn't uninteresting- just extra padding and what works really works. The details and rules of the City are related and revealed with perfect timing. The gravity between Laura Byrd and the City's inhabitants, while always apparent, becomes heavier with an emotional resonance that works surprisingly well through to the end, as their separate orbits begin to collide.
