Marti's February Pick

The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier 

This is a wonderful story of hope and determination! The setting is Ohio before the Civil War. The country is decisively divided by pro-slavery and anti-slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act has just been enacted.

Honor Bright has been jilted and feels that her life is unmoored. As a Quaker, she has always found comfort in her home, her quilting and her faith. She actually takes a chance and leaves England for a new home in America with her sister, who is moving to Ohio to marry Adam, a man from their village who left for new opportunities. Honor feels she is not a brave or outgoing person, but rather one who allows her sister and others to lead. Honor survives the voyage, but knows going back to England is not possible. Honor and her sister are on their journey to Ohio when tragedy strikes and Honor's sister dies. Now she is left alone to find a new life. 

Honor finds safety with a milliner, Belle, for a short time and ends up marrying Jack Haymaker, another Quaker. They live on his family's farm with his sister and mother. This is such a different world for Honor. She has always lived among people in a town with stores and friends nearby. Now she lives in a vast wilderness, on a farm, near a very small community, where life is totally new. Honor learns to care for the animals and her husband. However, she is upset when she starts to find run-away slaves hiding in the woods near the farm. She begins to leave out food and then slowly begins to help by hiding them or sending them on to the next station. Her new family finds this unacceptable. Honor, with her quiet determination, finds the stricture unacceptable.
     
I found Tracy Chevalier's book to be a slow journey of self-discovery and self worth. Her characters are well drawn and multidimensional. Honor is a person of integrity and is well named. You feel drawn to wanting to help the Underground Railroad and Honor. You can see the quilts Honor creates as surely as you can see the farm with its crops, animals and barn. This is a story that unfolds to its own rhythm and you are brought on its journey. This book is a keeper, one that leaves you sad the book has ended. This is a book I will highly recommend!!!

    ---- Marti

Morgan's February Pick

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

      Sometimes you want to read great literature but then sometimes you don’t. I know as well as anyone that sometimes you just want to read a great story. You want to pick up a book and disappear entirely into another world. That is what happened for me with Erin Morgensterns’s The Night Circus. This story, which follows a mysterious group of individuals (some of whom are magicians) and a bizarre event called Le Cirque des Rêves, is a long and complicated one full of beautiful imagery and fantastical events. What I was most impressed with in this book is the amount of imagination it must have taken to think up the circus itself. The details of every part of the circus, each of its inhabitants and all of their costumes are incredible. Reading this book requires a love of fantasy and a certain level of suspended belief but its story is definitely one worth disappearing into for an evening.
    ---- Morgan

Ben's February Pick

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

    February is Black History Month and there is no shortage of applicable books to read for the occasion. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, To Kill a Mockingbird, Invisible Man, and The Help are but a few examples. Nor is there a dearth of extraordinary individuals to read about; Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, The Freedom Riders, and the Tuskegee Airmen are examples. However, there is one especially phenomenal book to read on a particular African- American woman that has had perhaps the biggest direct impact on all of us individually, on society as a whole, and on posterity. Despite her significance there is only one surviving photograph of her and her grave is an unknown location without a tombstone.
     The woman is Henrietta Lacks and the book is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. The cultures from the cervical cancer that cost Henrietta her life at the age of 31 in 1951 gave rise to the famous, and vastly important, immortal cell line known to scientist as HeLa. The importance of these cells on research is impossible to quantify. Jonas Salk used HeLa cells in creating the first polio vaccine in 1954, and HeLa cells have since been used for research into cancer, AIDS, gene mapping, the effects of radiation, medicinal chemistry, and countless other pursuits. Additionally, HeLa cells were present on the first space missions to test the effect of zero gravity on human cells. By 2009, according to Skloot, “More than 60,000 scientific articles had been published about research done on HeLa, and that number was increasing steadily at a rate of more than 300 papers each month.”
     HeLa cells are so-called “immortal” because they can divide an infinite number of times in standard living conditions. Where most cells are limited by the number of times they can divide by the degradation of the protective caps at the ends of their chromosomes, called telomeres, during chromosomal replication for cell division. This is the process implicated in aging. HeLa cells however, contain an active enzyme, telomerase, that prevents this degradation of telomeres making the cells a fountain of youth. This fact coupled with the cells intrinsic high rate of proliferation makes them ideal for scientific research and the development of new medicines and therapies.
      It is hard to imagine how Henrietta herself remains so obscure when her cells are so prolific in the scientific community and so instrumental in research and discovery. The simple reason is that legally the cells do not belong to her. Henrietta grew up in rural Virginia in abject poverty farming the same tobacco fields her slave predecessors did. Moreover, she lived in a rundown barely habitable log cabin that was once used as slave quarters. When she got sick her access to health care was limited and she had to be treated at Johns Hopkins as it was the only hospital available to her that treated black patients. During her treatment for the cancer she would soon succumb to, a culture of her cells were taken without her consent or even her knowledge. Although her cells have been sold by the billions around the world and fostered countless revenues in medicinal industry her descendants still can not afford health insurance. This elegantly written book and powerful work of non-fiction will enlighten and challenge your understanding of medical ethics, social justice, racial inequalities, gene patenting, patient rights and privacy, the plight of poverty, and health care in this country. All issues with striking importance and parallels to today.
    --- Ben