Next book group is February 28th 2011

We will be reading "Cutting For Stone" by Abraham Verghese!
Available in paperback, hardcover, kindle, the audio book on CD is available at Southwest (right now) and I am 16th on the waiting list to download the book from the library.
Here are some specifics....

Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese, 2009  Knopf Publishing Group  541 pp.

In Brief, from http://www.litlovers.com/:

A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel—an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home.

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics—their passion for the same woman—that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him—nearly destroying him—Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.

An unforgettable journey into one man’s remarkable life, and an epic story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of healing others. (From the publisher.)

M E R R Y C H R I S T M A S !!

My Christmas Gift to "Our Book Group"

It is my hope that this blog will serve as a chronicle of our book groups journeys through great books and snoozers. This is where you can come to find out what book has been chosen (if you happened to have missed a meeting), who will be hosting the next book group and most importantly WHEN is the next book group.

Also, you can post comments or afterthoughts about a particular book or link to something interesting - no expectations though :)

You can look back to books that we have read on the "Books of Reading Past" page and add your ideas to the "Future Reads" page.

January 13th, 2011 - Book The Immortal Life of Henrieta Lacks

By Rebecca Skloot -  Here is an editorial review of the book that we will discuss on January 13th.
From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. And from that same life, and those cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. 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 that asks the questions, Who owns our bodies? And who carries our memories? --Tom Nissley

My Christmas Gift to "Our Book Group"

Merry Christmas!!
This blog will chronicle our reading adventures of the past and collect our future reading suggestions.
Off we go!