Hear ye! Hear ye!

It was decided today that December’s Non-fiction book for discussion will be Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (click here for Amazon’s description), a work that spent more than a year on the New York Times best sellers list.  If you haven’t read it already, you can easily find it in the WAGGIN system in a variety of formats – regular print, large print, and audiobook – and it’s part of our Overdrive collection, too. The discussion group will meet on December 6th at 3pm, so you’ve got plenty of time to request your copy and prepare for the lively discussion to follow.

Curious about what we’ll talk about? Below are some of the discussion questions found on the author’s website…if you won’t be able to make it to the meeting, please feel free to share your thoughts here!

One of Henrietta’s relatives said to Skloot, “If you pretty up how people spoke and change the things they said, that’s dishonest” (page xiii). Throughout, Skloot is true to the dialect in which people spoke to her: The Lackses speak in a heavy Southern accent, and Lengauer and Hsu speak as nonnative English speakers. What impact did the decision to maintain

speech authenticity have on the story?

As much as this book is about Henrietta Lacks, it is also about Deborah learning of the mother she barely knew, while also finding out the truth about her sister, Elsie. Imagine discovering similar information about one of your family members. How would you react? What questions would you ask?

Deborah shares her mother’s medical records with Skloot but is adamant that she not copy everything. On page 284 Deborah says, “Everybody in the world got her cells, only thing we got of our mother is just them records and her Bible.” Discuss the deeper meaning behind this statement…If you were in Deborah’s situation, how would you react to someone

wanting to look into your mother’s medical records?

As a journalist, Skloot is careful to present the encounter between the Lacks family and the world of medicine without taking sides. Since readers bring their own experiences and opinions to the text, some may feel she took the scientists’ side, while others may feel she took the family’s side.What are your feelings about this? Does your opinion fall on one side or the other, or somewhere in the middle?

Henrietta signed a consent form that said, “I hereby give consent to the staff of The Johns Hopkins Hospital to perform any operative procedures and under any anaesthetic either local or general that they may deem necessary in the proper surgical care and treatment of: ________” (page 31). Based on this statement, do you believe TeLinde and Gey had the

right to obtain a sample from her cervix to use in their research? What information would they have had to give her for Henrietta to have given informed consent? Do you think Henrietta would have given explicit consent to have a tissue sample used in medical research if she had been given all the information? Do you always thoroughly read consent

forms before signing them?

Consider Deborah’s comment on page 276: “Like I’m always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can’t do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different.” Is it possible to approach history from an objective point of view? If so, how and why is this important, especially in the context of Henrietta’s story?

Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover. It’s Title, on the Other Hand…

If you’ve been in the library lately, you might have noticed that we’re in the process of moving things around a bit (okay, a LOT). From this temporary disorder has come an unexpected bright side – finding books that might not have otherwise been stumbled across. Here are just a few with titles that grab the attention and beg to be taken home…

• Knit Your Own Dog – Sally Muir (non-fiction)
• The Psycho Ex Game – Merrill Markoe and Andy Prieboy (novel)
• Is this thing on? : a computer handbook for late bloomers, technophobes, and the kicking & screaming – Abigail Stokes (non-fiction)
• Sand in My Bra and Other Misadventures – Jennifer Leo (memoir)
• Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger – Beth Harbison (novel)
• Am I the Only Sane One Working Here? – Albert J. Bernstein, Ph.D.
• Bitter is the new black : confessions of a condescending, egomaniacal, self-centered, smart-ass or, why you should never carry a Prada bag to the unemployment office – Jen Lancaster (memoir)
• The Demon in the Freezer – Richard Preston (non-fiction)

* The last two mentioned here can not actually be found on the FSPL shelves…Jen Lancaster’s books need to be requested from elsewhere within the system and the Richard Preston book was discovered in the book sale area 😉

We’re in the Midst of the Dog Days of Summer, so…

This seems like the ideal time for a post on the topic! Books with dogs as central characters often make ideal light reading for the summer months while on vacation – fortunately for the voracious readers out there, such books are abundant, too.

The website Stop, You’re Killing Me has a page listing mysteries featuring canines (there’s a separate list for “cat books”, as well), and a quick check of the Polaris system shows that the Sarris library has books by Susan Conant and Laurien Berenson, among others. Keep in mind, though, that you’re not limited to what your local library has…you can search the whole system and have the book(s) delivered to the establishment most convenient to you.

Of course, dogs don’t just solve mysteries – they’re our companions, too. Memoirs about canine companions can be found in our non-fiction section. ..Your library has quite a selection featuring dogs –  some by Jon Katz, another made famous on the silver screen (Marley & Me), and even one written by a dog (Trixie Koontz’s Bliss to You). These books – and more – can be found at your friendly, local library…c’mon in and check them out!