Henrietta Lacks

Another very interesting read, this story of Henrietta Lacks is fascinating, well told, but a bit all over the place.   Henrietta Lacks is best known today as HeLa, a cell culture that has been grown in labs for over 50 years and has been used throughout biology and medicine to help us learn about cells, growth, cancer, and other diseases.  The book is less the story of Henrietta, as very little is known about her, as the story of what happened to her cells and her family after her death.  In my opinion, there is too much on her family and not enough on her cells in the story.  We hear all about how her family fell apart after her death, her children were abused by another member of the family, there were drugs and crime, and a lot of anger both about her death and about the doctors taking her cells without her permission, not unknown then or even today.  But we don't really hear a lot of what happened with the cells, except that they are at the center of everything we know today about cell growth.  I would have loved some examples, some followup on any single study that used them rather than just asserting repeatedly how important they have been to science.

Still very much an interesting read.

A Discovery of Witches

I loved this book.  Yes, I am probably sappy.  Yes, the middle of the book is a supernatural romance.  Yes, a lot of people have called it the adult twilight, and I have refused to read twilight.   I don't read books about vampires, although I do read books about witches (see also, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane).  But I couldn't put this book down.  Today as I finished it I read it in line at Starbucks, I read it walking to my office from my car and in the ten minutes between classes.  It has been a long time since a book has grabbed my like this.  Typically I am reading more than one at a time, but for the last three days, this was the only thing I was interested in.  No TV, no video games, just what was happening with my witch and my vampire.  And now I have to wait a year for the sequel!  (Although my guess is that that the sequel, the second in the trilogy, will probably be the weakest of the series.)  If you like witches, or vampires, or urban fantasy, take a look at this.  I thought it was a delight.