The Help
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
That Went Well
Happiness
Ella Minnow Pea
Henrietta and Isabella
The Help and That Went Well are already posted. Reviews for the others are:
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. This is a multilayered story about faith, science, journalism, and grace. It is also a tale of medical wonders and medical arrogance, racism, and poverty. Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old black mother of five in Baltimore when she died of cervical cancer in 1951. Without her knowledge, doctors treating her at Johns Hopkins took tissue samples from her cervix for research. They spawned the first viable, indeed miraculously productive, cell line—known as HeLa. These cells have aided in medical discoveries from the polio vaccine to AIDS treatments. Skloot tells a rich, resonant tale of modern science, the wonders it can perform and how easily it can exploit society's most vulnerable people.
Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn. Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,(a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the alphabet) “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl’s fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.
Letters to Henrietta by Isabella Bird. Until the middle-aged, unmarried Isabella Bird (1831-1904) left her native Scotland for an independent life of travel, she was debilitated by illness, suffering from "neuralgia, pain in my bones, pricking like pins and needles in my limbs, excruciating nervousness, exhaustion, inflamed eyes, sore throat, swelling of the glands behind each ear, stupidity." Bird was so weak that she required a steel support to hold her head up and spent most of her time confined to bed. Desperate to find a cure, her doctors finally packed her off to the Pacific and Switzerland. Once there, the forty-year-old invalid miraculously recovered, and became determined to seek any adventure that allowed her to see the singular beauty of nature.
In Hawaii, she was the first woman to climb the world's highest volcano; in Perak, she rode elephants through the jungles; in Colorado, she scaled 14,000 foot mountains, spent six months traveling mostly alone on horseback, and fell in love with a one-eyed desperado named Rocky Mountain Jim. But whenever she came home to Scotland, her symptoms returned, making another trip essential. Bird's remarkable journeys took her to the remotest parts of the world and brought her considerable fame. She became the first female Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, advised Prime Minister William Gladstone on the issue of Armenian Christians, and was presented to Queen Victoria in 1893. Her numerous travel writings, including 'The Hawaiian Archipelago,' 'A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains,' 'Unbeaten Tracks in Japan,' and 'The Golden Chersonese,' remain popular today.
In this fascinating collection of Bird's previously unpublished letters to her homebound younger sister Henrietta, one experiences her journeys firsthand and gains insight into the ambiguous private life of a woman who often invented her public face. Containing correspondence from her first two grand tours to Australia, Hawaii, and Colorado in 1872-1873, and to Japan, China, Malaya, and the Holy Land in 1878-1879, 'Letters to Henrietta' provides a fresh view of the legendary Victorian traveler.
I will clarify with Tamra which Happiness book she recommends (there are several!). More later . . .