The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. Crown, 2010. Print length: 368 p. EW's slant: "...quite simply, a tour de force..." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (407 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive - even thrive - in the lab. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs, beginning with the cure for polio. Meanwhile, Henrietta's family continued to live in poverty and frequently poor health, and their discovery decades later of her unknowing contribution - and her cells' strange survival - left them full of pride, anger, and suspicion. For a decade, Skloot doggedly but compassionately gathered the threads of these stories, slowly gaining the trust of the family while helping them learn the truth about Henrietta, and with their aid she tells a rich and haunting story..." - Tom Nissley for Amazon.The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson. Random House, 2010. Print length: 720 p. EW's slant: "...an indelible portrait of race, class, and politics in 20th-century America." Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (100 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career." - Amazon.
The Emperor of All Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Simon and Schuster, 2010. Print length: 592 p. EW's slant: "...brilliant, riveting history..." Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (49 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"...a magnificent, profoundly humane 'biography' of cancer - from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with - and perished from - for more than five thousand years. The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the nineteenth-century recipients of primitive radiation and chemotherapy to Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive. Riveting, urgent, and surprising, [it] provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments..." - Amazon.
Autobiography of Mark Twain, by Mark Twain. Edited by Harriet E. Smith and other editors of The Mark Twain Project. University of California Press, 2010. Print length: 743 p. EW's slant: "...a sprawling wit-packed accumulation of memories and opinions." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (98 reviews). Kindle edition $9.79. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Mark Twain is his own greatest character in this brilliant self-portrait, the first of three volumes collected by the Mark Twain Project on the centenary of the author's death. It is published complete and unexpurgated for the first time. (Twain wanted his more scalding opinions suppressed until long after his death.) Eschewing chronology and organization, Twain simply meanders from observation to anecdote and between past and present. There are gorgeous reminiscences from his youth of landscapes, rural idylls, and Tom Sawyeresque japes; acid-etched profiles of friends and enemies, from his 'fiendish' Florentine landlady to the fatuous and 'grotesque' Rockefellers; a searing polemic on a 1906 American massacre of Filipino insurgents; a hilarious screed against a hapless editor who dared tweak his prose; and countless tales of the author's own bamboozlement, unto bankruptcy, by publishers, business partners, doctors, miscellaneous moochers; he was even outsmarted by a wild turkey. Laced with Twain's unique blend of humor and vitriol, the haphazard narrative is engrossing, hugely funny, and deeply revealing of its author's mind." - Publishers Weekly.
Just Kids, by Patti Smith. HarperCollins, 2010. Print length: 304 p. EW's slant: "...a dazzlingly evocative remembrance of a vanished era that rightfully earned her this year's National Book Award for nonfiction." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (111 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe weren't always famous, but they always thought they would be. They found each other, adrift but determined, on the streets of New York City in the late '60s and made a pact to keep each other afloat until they found their voices - or the world was ready to hear them. Lovers first and then friends as Mapplethorpe discovered he was gay, they divided their dimes between art supplies and Coney Island hot dogs. Mapplethorpe was quicker to find his metier, with a Polaroid and then a Hasselblad, but Smith was the first to fame, transformed, to her friend's delight, from a poet into a rock star. (Mapplethorpe soon became famous too - and notorious - before his death from AIDS in 1989.) Smith's memoir of their friendship, Just Kids, is tender and artful, open-eyed but surprisingly decorous..." - Tom Nissley for Amazon.
Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff. Publisher. Print length: 384 p. EW's slant: "...smart, sweeping prose, restores Cleopatra to her former glory." Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (78 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, among the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a child with Caesar and - after his murder - three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age... Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra's supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order." - Amazon.
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, by Mary Roach. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. Print length: 334 p. EW's slant: "...simultaneously informative and get-strange-looks-on-the-subway hilarious..." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (112 reviews).Kindle edition $9.34. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"With her wry humor and inextinguishable curiosity, Mary Roach has crafted her own quirky niche in the somewhat staid world of science writing, showing no fear (or shame) in the face of cadavers, ectoplasm, or sex. In Packing for Mars, Roach tackles the strange science of space travel, and the psychology, technology, and politics that go into sending a crew into orbit. Roach is unfailingly inquisitive (Why is it impolite for astronauts to float upside down during conversations? Just how smelly does a spacecraft get after a two week mission?), and she eagerly seeks out the stories that don't make it onto NASA's website- - from SPCA-certified space suits for chimps, to the trial-and-error approach to crafting menus during the space program's early years (when the chefs are former livestock veterinarians, taste isn't high on the priority list). Packing for Mars is a book for grownups who still secretly dream of being astronauts..." - Lynette Mong for Amazon.
Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. HarperCollins, 2010. Print length: 464 p. EW's slant: "A must-read for anyone curious about the hows and whys of a cutthroat presidential campaign." Amazon customer rating: 3 12 stars (675 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"In 2008, the presidential election became blockbuster entertainment. Everyone was watching as the race for the White House unfolded like something from the realm of fiction. The meteoric rise and historic triumph of Barack Obama. The shocking fall of the House of Clinton - and the improbable resurrection of Hillary as Obama's partner and America's face to the world. The mercurial performance of John McCain and the mesmerizing emergence of Sarah Palin. But despite the wall-to-wall media coverage of this spellbinding drama, remarkably little of the real story behind the headlines has yet been told... In Game Change, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, two of the country's leading political reporters, use their unrivaled access to pull back the curtain on the Obama, Clinton, McCain, and Palin campaigns... Based on hundreds of interviews with the people who lived the story... a reportorial tour de force that reads like a fast-paced novel. Character driven and dialogue rich, replete with extravagantly detailed scenes, this is the occasionally shocking, often hilarious, ultimately definitive account of the campaign of a lifetime." - Amazon.
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean, by Susan Casey. Doubleday, 2010. Print length: 336 p. EW's slant: "...white-knuckle account...delivers a thrill so intense you may never get in a boat again." Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (105 reviews). Kindle edition $9.78. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Casey, O Magazine editor-in-chief, travels across the world and into the past to confront the largest waves the oceans have to offer. This dangerous water includes rogue waves south of Africa, storm-born giants near Hawaii, and the biggest wave ever recorded, a 1,740 foot-high wall of wave (taller than one and a third Empire State Buildings) that blasted the Alaska coastline in 1958. Casey follows big-wave surfers in their often suicidal attempts to tackle monsters made of H2O, and also interviews scientists exploring the danger that global warning will bring us more and larger waves. Casey writes compellingly of the threat and beauty of the ocean at its most dangerous... [and] ...smoothly translates the science of her subject into engaging prose." - Publishers Weekly.
1 comments:
Looks like a good list of recommendations. I like the dog. :)
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