An American Hero: The True Story of Charles A. Lindbergh
by Barry Denenberg
August 17th (3rd Thurs) 7:30 pm at Amanda C.'s
Message from Amanda C. I am hosting in August. I'd like to suggest "American Hero: The True Story of Charles A. Lindbergh" However, the library does not have the book anymore. I have one copy to share. I am a slow reader and it took me 4 hours to read the whole book (So, it is possible all who would like to, can read it before August's meeting). I don't know if there are digital copies (I'm not a big digital reader) Is this still a good book to pick? Or should I pick a book more readily available?
Summary from Barnes and Noble: Illustrated with archival photographs, this acclaimed biography presents a full portrait of the handsome and brave aviation pioneer--from his global fame to the kidnapping of his baby son and his shocking politics. 272 pp. Ages 10 and up. Pub: 1/98.
Founding Mothers
By Cokie Roberts April 27th (4th Thurs) 7:30pm at Aimeé's
Summary from LitLovers:
While the "fathers" were off founding the country, what were the women doing? Running their husband’s businesses, raising their children plus providing political information and advice. At least that’s what Abigail Adams did for John, starting when he went off to the Continental Congress, which eventually declared the independence of the American colonies from the British. While the men were writing the rebellious words, the women were living the revolution, with the Redcoats on their doorsteps. John’s advice to Abigail as the soldiers approached Braintree: if necessary "fly to the woods with our children." That was it, she was on her own, as she was for most of the next ten years while Adams represented the newly independent nation abroad.
Abigail Adams is the best known of the women who influenced the founders, but there are many more, starting with Martha Washington, who once referred to herself as a “prisoner of state” for the constraints placed on her as the first First Lady. She was the one charged with balancing the demands of a Republic of the "common man" on the one hand, while insisting on some modicum of courtliness and protocol so that the former colonies would be taken seriously by Europe. She also took political heat in the press from the president’s political opponents when he was too popular to criticize.
And there are women like Esther Reed, married to the president of Pennsylvania, who, with Benjamin Franklin’s daughter Sarah Bache, organized a drive to raise money for Washington’s troops at Valley Forge. In 1780 the women raised more than three hundred thousand dollars. Reed wrote a famous patriotic broadside titled The Sentiments of an American Woman, calling on women to wear simpler clothing and hairstyles in order to save money to contribute to the cause. It worked! The women who ran the boarding houses of Philadelphia where the men stayed while writing the now sacred documents of America had their quite considerable say about the affairs of state as well.
This will be the story of some of those women, as learned through their seldom seen letters and diaries, and the letters from the men to them. It will be a story of the beginnings of the nation as viewed from the distaff side. (From the publisher.)
I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai January 21st (3rd Thurs) 8pm at Amanda C.'s Summary: When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.
On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive.
Instead, Malala's miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she has become a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest nominee ever for the Nobel Peace Prize.
I Am Malala is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls' education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons.
I Am Malala will make you believe in the power of one person's voice to inspire change in the world. (From the publisher.)
Summary: Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, Northup published this exceptionally vivid and detailed account of slave life. It became an immediate bestseller and today is recognized for its unusual insight and eloquence as one of the very few portraits of American slavery produced by someone as educated as Solomon Northup, or by someone with the dual perspective of having been both a free man and a slave. (From the publisher.)
James A. Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked Garfield down and shot him in the back.
But the shot didn’t kill Garfield. The drama of what happened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in turmoil. The unhinged assassin’s half-delivered strike shattered the fragile national mood of a country so recently fractured by civil war, and left the wounded president as the object of a bitter behind-the-scenes struggle for power—over his administration, over the nation’s future, and, hauntingly, over his medical care. A team of physicians administered shockingly archaic treatments, to disastrous effect. As his condition worsened, Garfield received help: Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, worked around the clock to invent a new device capable of finding the bullet.
Meticulously researched, epic in scope, and pulsating with an intimate human focus and high-velocity narrative drive, The Destiny of the Republic will stand alongside The Devil in the White Cityand The Professor and the Madman as a classic of narrative history. (From the publisher.)
We will also be having our annual White Elephant Gift (Book) Exchange this evening. Hope to see you there!
Summary: On a May afternoon in
1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and
disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil,
gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It
was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was
struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of
the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.
The
lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood, he’d been a cunning
and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing
his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he had channeled his
defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried
him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile.
But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a
journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into
the unknown.
Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open
ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy
aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of
endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering
with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. His fate,
whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of
his will.
In her long-awaited new book, Laura Hillenbrand writes with the same rich and vivid narrative voice she displayed in Seabiscuit.
Telling an unforgettable story of a man’s journey into extremity,
Unbroken is a testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and
spirit.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot
Sept 19th (3rd Wed.) 8pm at Judy's home
Summary: Her name was Henrietta
Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco
farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her
cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools
in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they
are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty
years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d
weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State
Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine;
uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects;
helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning,
and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.
Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.
Now
Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored”
ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories
with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying
hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith
healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and
grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.
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.
Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst The Rwandan Holocaust by Immaculée Ilibagiza with Steve Erwin
July 20th (3rd Wed.) 8pm at Aimeè's
Summary: Immaculee Ilibagiza grew up in a country she loved, surrounded by a family she cherished. But in 1994 her idyllic world was ripped apart as Rwanda descended into a bloody genocide. Immaculee’s family was brutally murdered during a killing spree that lasted three months and claimed the lives of nearly a million Rwandans.
Incredibly, Immaculee survived the slaughter. For 91 days, she and seven other women huddled silently together in the cramped bathroom of a local pastor while hundreds of machete-wielding killers hunted for them.
It was during those endless hours of unspeakable terror that Immaculee discovered the power of prayer, eventually shedding her fear of death and forging a profound and lasting relationship with God. She emerged from her bathroom hideout having discovered the meaning of truly unconditional love—a love so strong she was able seek out and forgive her family’s killers. The triumphant story of this remarkable young woman’s journey through the darkness of genocide will inspire anyone whose life has been touched by fear, suffering, and loss.
Summary: In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot who spared nothing in his zeal for the American Revolution; who rose to become the second president of the United States and saved the country from blundering into an unnecessary war; who was learned beyond all but a few and regarded by some as "out of his senses"; and whose marriage to the wise and valiant Abigail Adams is one of the moving love stories in American history.
This is history on a grand scale -- a book about politics and war and social issues, but also about human nature, love, religious faith, virtue, ambition, friendship, and betrayal, and the far-reaching consequences of noble ideas. Above all, John Adams is an enthralling, often surprising story of one of the most important and fascinating Americans who ever lived.
summary from www.librarycatalog.pima.gov
Click on the picture to go to the library web site
Summary: The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.
Click on the picture to go to the library web site
