New York Times Review by Maria Russo

Born with several genetic abnormalities, 10-year-old August Pullman, called Auggie, dreams of being “ordinary.” Inside, he knows he’s like every other kid, but even after 27 surgeries, the central character of “Wonder” bears facial disfigurations so pronounced that people who see him for the first time do “that look-away thing” — if they manage to hide their shock and horror.

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Here’s a review by Nik Dirga:

Now, in The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, author Candice Millard examines just one fascinating year in Roosevelt’s life. After a painful loss running as an independent for a third presidential term in 1912, TR needed something dynamic to keep his mind occupied. Instead of leaning back and relaxing, he decided to take on an ambitious South American tour, and throw some pioneering exploration in along the way. The destination? “The River of Doubt,” a 600-mile long waterway in the heart of the Amazon only recently discovered, completely uncharted.

At this time — 1913 — much of the Amazon was utterly mysterious, with only a few outposts. Entire tribes of Indians remained to be discovered. The river turned out to be full of rapids, waterfalls and obstacles for the small party of Roosevelt, his son Kermit, a few helpers and a crew of camaradas, Brazilian laborers.

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This is an amazing, eye-opening book.  Having studied the German language and after living in Germany for a short time as an exchange student, I was very curious about what that took place during World War II.  This is one of those stories that I had never heard of.  Clearly, Hitler was so incredibly evil and he found other villans to carry out his insidious operations.  It leaves one reeling and wondering “How did the world let this happen?”

Following is an on-line review:

As Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seduced a nation, bullied a continent, and attempted to exterminate the Jews of Europe, a small number of dissidents and saboteurs worked to dismantle the Third Reich from the inside. One of these was Dietrich Bonhoeffer—a pastor and author, known as much for such spiritual classics as The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together, as for his 1945 execution in a concentration camp for his part in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

In the first major biography of Bonhoeffer in forty years, New York Times best-selling author Eric Metaxas takes both strands of Bonhoeffer’s life—the theologian and the spy—and draws them together to tell a searing story of incredible moral courage in the face of monstrous evil. In a deeply moving narrative, Metaxas uses previously unavailable documents—including personal letters, detailed journal entries, and firsthand personal accounts—to reveal dimensions of Bonhoeffer’s life and theology never before seen.

In Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy—A Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich, Metaxas presents the fullest accounting of Bonhoeffer’s heart-wrenching 1939 decision to leave the safe haven of America for Hitler’s Germany, and using extended excerpts from love letters and coded messages written to and from Bonhoeffer’s Cell 92, Metaxas tells for the first time the full story of Bonhoeffer’s passionate and tragic romance.

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From the New York Times, Review by Kevin Baker

“Yet it is one of the many pleasures of Candice Millard’s new book, “Destiny of the Republic,” that she brings poor Garfield to life — and a remarkable life it was. He was the last president to be born in a log cabin. His father died when James was just 1, succumbing to “exhaustion and fever” after fighting a wildfire that had threatened his home. The boy’s mother struggled desperately to make a living for James and his three siblings but donated some of her farmland so their community would have a schoolhouse. James was taught to consider himself the equal of any man — to walk “with his shoulders squared and his head thrown back,” a trait he would always possess.

A near drowning while he labored on the Erie and Ohio Canal convinced him that God “had saved me for my mother and for something greater and better than canalling,” he wrote. For the next few years, he worked his way up through local schools and Williams College; at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (now Hiram College), a preparatory school, he mastered his studies so thoroughly that he was promoted from janitor to assistant professor. Returning there to teach, he became the school’s president at 26. In his spare time, he passed the Ohio bar.

Excelling both in combat and as a top staff officer, he rose to the rank of major general during the Civil War but was sickened by the carnage of battle. “Garfield would later tell a friend,” Millard writes, “that ‘something went out of him . . . that never came back; the sense of the sacredness of life and the impossibility of destroying it.’ ”

Elected to Congress in 1862, Garfield fought for black rights and liberty, writing in his pocket diary, “Servitium esto damnatum”— “slavery be damned.” Modest to a fault, he toiled diligently in the legislative vineyards for 17 years. Even his foibles were endearing: he loved to hear himself talk (speaking “on the floor of Congress more than 40 times in a single day”), something he admitted was a “fatal facility.”

To everyone’s amazement, he won the Republican nomination in 1880, in a deadlocked convention. With a plurality of just 10,000 votes, he became the last member of the House to go directly to the White House.”

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My friend, Linda Dunn, told me about this book with a bit of trepidation just as you would suggest a book about the very disease that almost took that person’s life.  I found the information about this horrible, daunting disease incredible and it gave me such an appreciation for all the scientists and doctors who do research and develop drugs to bring about a cure or at least to find a way to give a patient more time before cancer takes them.  I’m eternally grateful for the hours and hours people have spent doing research that might lead to a breakthrough, or might lead to a dead end.  I can’t even wrap my mind around the suffering that cancer victims- little children and adult had to endure as they experimented with surgeries, drugs and therapies in an effort to eradicate this disease.  I love that Mukjerjee writes about the successes because they are incredible and so touching.  As difficult as it was to think of these cells that invade our bodies from the inside, I feel like I learned so very much.  I actually am proud of myself for daring to read about this disease that also so confounds doctors and has the fear of humankind in its grip.

Here’s a partial review from the New York Times:

At the end of every evening he (Mukherjee) found himself stunned and speechless in the neon floodlights of the hospital parking lot, compulsively trying to reconstruct the day’s decisions and prescriptions, almost as consumed as his patients by the dreadful rounds of chemotherapy and the tongue-twisting names of the drugs, “Cyclophosphamide, cytarabine, prednisone, asparaginase. . . .”

Eventually he started this book so as not to drown.

The oldest surviving description of cancer is written on a papyrus from about 1600 B.C. The hieroglyphics record a probable case of breast cancer: “a bulging tumor . . . like touching a ball of wrappings.” Under “treatment,” the scribe concludes: “none.”

For more than 2,000 years afterward, there is virtually nothing about cancer in the medical literature (“or in any other literature,” Mukherjee adds.) The modern understanding of the disease originated with the recognition, in the first half of the 19th century, that all plants and animals are made of cells, and that all cells arise from other cells. The German researcher Rudolph Virchow put that in Latin: omnis cellula e cellula.

Cancer is a disease that begins when a single cell, among all the trillions in a human body, begins to grow out of control. Lymphomas, leukemias, malignant melanomas, sarcomas all begin with that microscopic accident, a mutation in one cell: omnis cellula e cellula e cellula. Cell growth is the secret of living, the source of our ability to build, adapt, repair ourselves; and cancer cells are rebels among our own cells that outrace the rest. “If we seek immortality,” Mukherjee writes, “then so, too, in a rather perverse sense, does the cancer cell.”

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This is the amazing, true story of Henrietta Lacks who when treated for cervical cancer, the doctors take some of those cells and find that they multiply.  These cells are used in research and we are all the recipients of the progress medical research is able to make due to these cells.  This is a story about Henrietta and her family and there struggles with poverty and lack of rights because of their skin color.  I found this book incredibly interesting and rich.

From the website:  rebeccaskloot.com/the-immortal-life/

About The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more. Henrietta’s cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can’t afford health insurance.

Soon to be made into an HBO movie by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball, this New York Times bestseller takes readers on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers filled with HeLa cells, from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia, to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew. It’s a story 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’re made of.

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This is a great book to get on target with some of the things you want to accomplish.  Great for someone who is trying to make new resolutions to de-clutter their closets and life.  Much great information on how to strengthen relationships too. She does a lot of research and includes interesting studies.

Partial review by Cym Lowell:

Gretchen Rubin realized that despite having a seemingly “perfect” life she was not as happy as she should be. Blessed with a kind and loving husband, two beautiful daughters ages 7 and 1, and a law degree, she knew that she appeared to have it all but was discontented. She had left the law for working full time as a writer because she loved to write, but started wondering why she wasn’t happier.

I had everything I could possibly want –yet I was failing to appreciate it. Bogged down in petty complaints and passing crises, weary of struggling with my own nature, I too often failed to comprehend the splendor of what I had.She also realized that “I wasn’t as happy as I could be, and my life wasn’t going to change unless I made it change.”

So Rubin started “The Happiness Project”, because she was trying to find a way to make herself happier and find out what is important to her. She not only wanted to make herself happier, but those around her as well.

She de-cluttered her closets, ate better and exercised more, slept more, tried to stop nagging her husband and children, and decided to not only be a better friend, but to keep making new friends. She drew up charts, and came up with her own solutions to her problems (including The Four Splendid Truths), and shared these solutions on her blog. She sang in the mornings and collected bluebird figurines.

She also tried not to always expect others to appreciate her efforts, because she always expects “gold stars”. This was one of the hardest things for her to do.

Many of her ideas are quite sensible. Having a clean, orderly environment is essential. Helping others and being a good friend are clearly important to true happiness. She realized “one of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy.”

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THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY by Erik Larson

Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

Review by Janet Maslin

“As part of his research for ”The Devil in the White City” Erik Larson visited the part of Graceland cemetery where members of Chicago’s turn-of-the-century elite are enshrined. As he puts it, ”On a crystalline fall day you can almost hear the tinkle of fine crystal, the rustle of silk and wool, almost smell the expensive cigars.”

Mr. Larson likes to embroider the past that way. So he relentlessly fuses history and entertainment to give this nonfiction book the dramatic effect of a novel, complete with abundant cross-cutting and foreshadowing. Ordinarily these might be alarming tactics, but in the case of this material they do the trick. Mr. Larson has written a dynamic, enveloping book filled with haunting, closely annotated information. And it doesn’t hurt that this truth really is stranger than fiction.

”The Devil in the White City,” a book as lively as its title, has the inspiration to combine two distantly related late-19th-century stories into a narrative that is anything but quaint. One describes planning and preparation for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and it holds an unexpected fascination.”

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Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

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