The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

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.

Next meeting date: February 11 @ 6:00 pm
Location: Jessie's House

Sarah's Key

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.

Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life. 

Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode.

Next meeting date: December 3 @ 6:30 pm
Location: Michelle's House

Cleopatra: A life

Her palace shimmered with onyx and gold but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first and poisoned the second; incest and assassination were family specialties. She had children by Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, two of the most prominent Romans of the day. With Antony she would attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled both their ends. Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Her supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order.


Next meeting date: October 30 @ 6:00pm

Location: Chelsea's House

The Help

The Help is a 2009 novel by American author Kathryn Stockett. The story is about African American maids working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi during the early 1960s.

The novel is told from the point of view of three narrators: Aibileen Clark, a middle-aged African-American maid who has spent her life raising white children, and who has recently lost her only son; Minny Jackson, an African-American maid whose back-talk towards her employers results in her having to frequently change jobs, exacerbating her desperate need for work as well as her family's struggle with money; and Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, a young white woman and recent college graduate who, after moving back home, discovers that a maid that helped raise her since childhood has abruptly disappeared and her attempts to find her have been unsuccessful. The stories of the three women intertwine to explain how life in Jackson, Mississippi revolves around "the help", with complex relations of power, money, emotion, and intimacy tying together the white & black families of Jackson.

Next meeting date: September 18 @6:00 pm
Location: Sarah's House

Catching Fire...

Since I have already read our current book, I'm venturing on to Book 2 in the Hunger Games series. Thanks to Mr. Sweeney for my current obsession.

(Note: Real books are better than iPads)

The Dante Club

The pick this month is The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. Provided by the author's web page, found here, below is a summary of our next book:

1865 Boston, a small group of literary geniuses puts the finishing touches on America’s first translation of The Divine Comedy and prepares to unveil the remarkable visions of Dante to the New World. The powerful old guard of Harvard College wants to keep Dante out—believing that the infiltration of such foreign superstitions onto our bookshelves would prove as corrupting as the foreign immigrants invading Boston harbor. The members of the Dante Club—poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell and publisher J. T. Fields —endure the intimidation of their fellow Boston Brahmins for a sacred literary cause, an endeavor that has sustained Longfellow in the hellish aftermath of his wife’s tragic death by fire.
But the plans of the Dante Club come to a screeching halt when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only the members of the Dante Club realize that the style and form of the killings are stolen directly from Dante’s Inferno and its singular account of Hell’s punishments. With the police baffled, lives endangered and Dante’s literary future at stake, the Dante Club must shed its sheltered literary existence and find a way to stop the killer.
The brunt of the burden falls to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose unique literacy in both poetry and medicine continues to pull him into the center of the struggle. An outcast policeman, Nicholas Rey, the first and only black member of the Boston police department, places his future on the line after discovering the secrets of the Dante Club. Together, they find the key to the murders where they least expect it: closer than they could have imagined.

Next meeting date: August 21 @6:30 pm
Location: Jessica's House

The Hunger Games

Our next book is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Here's a preview:

Twenty-four are forced to enter. Only the winner survives.

In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. Each year, the districts are forced by the Capitol to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the Hunger Games, a brutal and terrifying fight to the death – televised for all of Panem to see.

Survival is second nature for sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who struggles to feed her mother and younger sister by secretly hunting and gathering beyond the fences of District 12. When Katniss steps in to take the place of her sister in the Hunger Games, she knows it may be her death sentence. If she is to survive, she must weigh survival against humanity and life against love.

Next meeting: Sunday, June 12 @ 6:00 P.M.
Location: Jessie's Apartment

Room by Emma Donoghue

The next book on the agenda is "Room" by Emma Donoghue. Here is a preview:

In many ways, Jack is a typical 5-year-old. He likes to read books, watch TV, and play games with his Ma. But Jack is different in a big way--he has lived his entire life in a single room, sharing the tiny space with only his mother and an unnerving nighttime visitor known as Old Nick. For Jack, Room is the only world he knows, but for Ma, it is a prison in which she has tried to craft a normal life for her son. When their insular world suddenly expands beyond the confines of their four walls, the consequences are piercing and extraordinary. Despite its profoundly disturbing premise, Emma Donoghue's Room is rife with moments of hope and beauty, and the dogged determination to live, even in the most desolate circumstances. A stunning and original novel of survival in captivity, readers who enter Room will leave staggered, as though, like Jack, they are seeing the world for the very first time. --Lynette Mong

Next Meeting Date: Sunday, May 15th @ 5:00 P.M.
Location: Michelle's House

The Glass Castle

Author: Jeanette Walls

Dinner Prepared by: Chelsea

Great book club meeting this past Sunday. Jessie, you were missed! Jeanette Walls is an amazing woman. She's an inspiration for the way she recalls her ridiculous childhood in an upbeat way. How frustrating it is to the reader to see her continue to forgive her parents when it feels like they are unworthy of forgiveness. While her relationship with her father was somewhat endearing, he soon lost my respect with his booze-getting tactics and the way he used his daughter as a pawn in a pool game. There are no words to describe my feelings toward her mother. Selfish doesn't cut it.

My reasons for making chili for last night's book club are three-fold:

It's sort of the poor man's stew- which is appropriate for the way Jeanette grew up (not to mention how they ate beans and tomatos out of the can on occassion.

I found myself feeling cold while reading that book numerous times

I had a crap-load of stew meat to use up.

Emeril's Chili
Recipe from FootNetwork.com, compliments of Mr. Lagasse himself (P.S. I like his knives.)


Ingredients

2 Tablespoons vegetable oil
2 cups chopped white onions
Salt
Cayenne Pepper
2 lbs stew meat
1 Tablespoon chili powder
2 Teaspoons ground cumin
Crushed Red Pepper
Teaspoons Dried Oregano
2 Tablespoons chopped garlic
3 Cups Crushed Tomatoes
1/4 Cup Tomate paste
2 Cups Beef Stock
1 Cup Canned Dark Red Kidney Beans
2 Tablespoons masa flour
4 Tablespoons water
Cheddar Cheese
Sour Cream
Jalapenos (optional)


Directions

In large saucepan, heat the vegetable oil. When the oil is hot, add the onions and saute for 3-5 minutes, or until the vegetables start to wilt. Season with salt and cayenne. Stir in the stew meat, chili powder, cumin, crushed red pepper, and oregano. Brown the meat for 5-6 minutes. Stir in the garlic, tomatoes, tomato paste, beef stock and beans. Bring the liquid to a boil and reduce to a simmer. Simmer the liquid, uncovered for 1 hour, stirring occassionally or until the beef is tender. Skim off the fat occassionally. Mix the masa and water together. Slowly stir in the masa slurry and continue to cook for 30 mintues. Reseason with salt and cayenne. (I didn't have a large enough pot to cook this in, so did it in the crockpot and added the beans in later so they didn't get mushy!)


Trader Joe's Cornbread Mix
Yummmm! :)

Gods Behaving Badly

Author: Marie Phillips
Dinner Prepared By: Sarah

Greek Salad
Ingredients:

• 1 lb Tomatoes (Roma and cherry)
• 1 large cucumber
• 8 oz Feta cheese (Sarah used reduced fat)
• 1/2 cup kalamata olives
• 1 red onion (diced)

Salad Dressing:

• 6 Tbsp EVOO
• 3 Tbsp white wine vinegar
• 2 Tbsp fresh squeezed lemon juice
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 bunch cilantro (finely chopped)
• 2 crushed garlic cloves
• salt and pepper

Pesto & Ricotta Stuffed Chicken

Ingredients:

• 2-4 Tbsp pesto sauce
• 1/2 cup ricotta cheese (Sarah used reduced fat)
• capers
• greek olives
• sundried tomatoes
• oregano
• 4 chicken breasts
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• pepper

Directions:

Make deeps slits in the side of each chicken breast. Mix pesto, ricotta, capers, olives and oregano together and stuff into each chicken breast. Re-seal each breast, place on a plate and chill for 30 minutes. (Work on vinegrette while waiting)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees farenheight.

Brush chicken with olive oil and season with pepper. Bake for 25-35 minutes or until chicken is cooked. Spoon vinegrette on top and serve.

Tomato Vinegrette

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 1 bunch fresh chives
• 1 lb roma tomatoes (seeded and cubed)
• 1 lime (squeezed and zested)
• salt & pepper

Directions:

Mix olive oil and chives in a food processor until smooth. Pour into bowl and add tomatoes, lime juice and rind. Season with salt & pepper.

Easy Greek Yogurt

Ingredients:

• Non-fat greek yogurt
• Dried apricots
• Dried figs
• Slivered almonds
• Pistacios
• Honey

Directions:

Broil nuts in oven until toasted (Note: they cook fast so watch them carefully!)

Top yogurt with dried figs and nuts.

Drizzle with honey.

Secret Life of Bees

Author: Sue Monk Kidd
Dinner Prepared By: Jessie

Crockpot Herb Pork Roast
Serves 8

Ingredients:

• 4 large garlic cloves, quartered
• 1 pork loin roast, boneless, about 4-5 lbs
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. ground thyme
• 1/2 tsp. dried leaf sage, crumbled
• 1/4 tsp. rosemary, chopped
• 1/4 tsp. dried tarragon, crumbled (optional)
• Dash ground cloves or allspice
• 1 tsp. grated lemon peel
• 1/3 cup water
• 3 tsp. cornstarch (optional)
• 1 tsp. water (optional)

Directions:

Cut 16 small pockets into roast and insert garlic slices. In a small bowl, combine salt, herbs and lemon peel. Rub seasoning mixture into the roast. Pour 1/2 cup water into the slow cooker; add the roast. Cover and cook on LOW for 8-10 hours. Pork should read at least 160 degrees on an instant read thermometer.

If desired, thicken juices. Remove roast from juices. COmbine cornstarch with 3 teaspoons water; sitr until smooth, then stir into crockpot juices. Cook on HIGH until thickened. Serve with the pork roast.

Individual Toffee, Pecan and Peach Crisps

Ingredients:

Filling

• 6 cups frozen sliced peaches (about 2.5 lbs), thawed
• 3 Tbsp. sugar
• 1 Tbsp. fresh lime juice

Topping

• 3/4 cup all purpose flour
• 1/3 cup (packed) golden brown sugar
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 6 tsp. (3/4 stick) chilled unsalted butter, cut into pieces
• 3/4 cup English Toffee bits
• 1/2 cup pecans, coarsely chopped
• Ice Cream (optional)
  

Directions:

Filling - Preheat oven to 350 degrees farenheight. Place six 1 1/4 cup ramekins or custard cups on large baking sheet. Mix peaches, sugar and lime juice in a large bowl to blend. Divide filling among ramekins.

Topping - Whisk flour, brown sugar and salt into a large bowl. Using fingertips, rub in butter until mixture holds together in clumps. Stir in toffee and pecans; sprinkle over filling.

Bake crisps until filling bubbles and topping is golden brown, about 40 minutes. Cool 10 minutes. Serve warm with ice cream, if desired.

*Note* Jessie substituted oats for the pecans in the peach crisps.