This is a list of the suggested possibilities for the next few months. Take a look at them and then send me and email or a FB message by September 2 or so with your picks, in order.
In no particular order:
Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck: In September 1960,
John Steinbeck and his poodle, Charley,
embarked on a journey across America. A picaresque tale, this chronicle
of their trip meanders through scenic backroads and speeds along
anonymous superhighways, moving from small towns to growing cities to
glorious wilderness oases.
Travels with Charley in Search of America
is animated by Steinbeck’s attention to the specific details of the
natural world and his sense of how the lives of people are intimately
connected to the rhythms of nature—to weather, geography, the cycle of
the seasons. His keen ear for the transactions among people is evident,
too, as he records the interests and obsessions that preoccupy the
Americans he encounters along the way.
Travels with Charley in Search of America,
originally published in 1962, provides an intimate and personal look at
one of America’s most beloved writers in the later years of his life—a
self-portrait of a man who never wrote an explicit autobiography. It was
written during a time of upheaval and racial tension in the South—which
Steinbeck witnessed firsthand—and is a stunning evocation of America on
the eve of a tumultuous decade.
Midwives by Chris Bohjalian: With a suspense, lyricism, and moral complexity that recall
To Kill a Mockingbird and
Presumed Innocent,
this compulsively readable novel explores what happens when a woman who
has devoted herself to ushering life into the world finds herself
charged with responsibility in a patient's tragic death.
The time
is 1981, and Sibyl Danforth has been a dedicated midwife in the rural
community of Reddington, Vermont, for fifteen years. But one treacherous
winter night, in a house isolated by icy roads and failed telephone
lines, Sibyl takes desperate measures to save a baby's life. She
performs an emergency Caesarean section on its mother, who appears to
have died in labor. But what if--as Sibyl's assistant later charges--the
patient wasn't already dead, and it was Sibyl who inadvertently killed
her?
As recounted by Sibyl's precocious fourteen-year-old
daughter, Connie, the ensuing trial bears the earmarks of a witch hunt
except for the fact that all its participants are acting from the
highest motives--and the defendant increasingly appears to be guilty. As
Sibyl Danforth faces the antagonism of the law, the hostility of
traditional doctors, and the accusations of her own conscience,
Midwives engages, moves, and transfixes us as only the very best novels ever do.
A Prison Diary by Jeffrey Archer: On July 19, 2001, following a conviction for perjury, international
bestselling author Jeffrey Archer was sentenced to four years in prison.
Prisoner FF8282, as Archer is now known, spent the first three weeks in
the notorious HMP Belmarsh, a high-security prison in South London,
home to murderers, terrorists and some of Britain's most violent
criminals.
On the last day of the trial, his mother dies, and the
world's press accompany him to the funeral. On returning to prison,
he's placed on the lifer's wing, where a cellmate sells his story to the
tabloids. Prisoners and guards routinely line up outside his cell to
ask for his autograph, to write letters, and to seek advice on their
appeals.
For twenty-two days, Archer was locked in a cell with a
murderer and a drug baron. He decided to use that time to write an
hour-by-hour diary, detailing the worst three weeks of his life.
When
A Prison Diary was published in England, it was condemned by the prison authorities, and praised by the critics.
Middlemarch by George Eliot: One of the most ambitious narratives of nineteenth-century realism,
Middlemarch
tells the story of an entire town in the years leading up to the Reform
Bill of 1832, a time when modern methods were starting to challenge old
orthodoxies. Eliot's sophisticated and acute characterization gives
rich expression to every nuance of feeling, and vividly brings to life
the town's inhabitants—including the young idealist Dorothea Brooke, the
dry scholar Casaubon, the young, passionate reformist doctor Lydgate,
the flighty young beauty Rosamond, and the old, secretive banker
Bulstrode—as they move in counterpoint to each other. Art, religion,
politics, society, science, human relationships in all their
complexity—nothing is left unexamined under the narrator's
microscope. Also included in this edition are pictures and an extensive
section on George Eliot's life and works.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Henrietta’s
family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years
after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her
husband and children in research without informed consent. And though
the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human
biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As
Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past
and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of
experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the
legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.
Over
the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in
the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah,
who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed
with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when
researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space?
What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at
the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why
couldn’t her children afford health insurance?
Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down,
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.
