May and Pearl, two sisters living in Shanghai in the mid-1930s, are beautiful, sophisticated, and well-educated, but their family is on the verge of bankruptcy. Hoping to improve their social standing, May and Pearl’s parents arrange for their daughters to marry “Gold Mountain men” who have come from Los Angeles to find brides.
But when the sisters leave China and arrive at Angel’s Island (the Ellis Island of the West)--where they are detained, interrogated, and humiliated for months--they feel the harsh reality of leaving home. And when May discovers she’s pregnant the situation becomes even more desperate. The sisters make a pact that no one can ever know.
As President Bush is preparing to invade Iraq, Wall Street Journal correspondent Asra Nomani embarks on a dangerous journey from Middle America to the Middle East to join more than two million fellow Muslims on the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. On a journey perilous enough for any American reporter, Nomani is determined to take along her infant son, Shibli -- living proof that she, an unmarried Muslim woman, is guilty of zina, or "illegal sex." But Nomani discovers she is not alone. She is following in the four-thousand-year-old footsteps of another single mother, Hajar (known in the West as Hagar), the original pilgrim to Mecca and mother of the Islamic nation.
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a mother of five, 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. Doctors took her cells without asking. Those cells never died. They 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. 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. Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death.
Don't ask me why I am reading three books at once (it's a long story) but I am sooo excited about each of them. Nothing beats a great book! What are you all reading these days???
2 comments:
Cute short read was The Penderwicks, and I'm now reading "The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag" or something like that, it's the second installment after "The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie" which was really cute and clever - they are murder mysteries, but seen through the eyes of an enormously clever and quite cynical eleven year old chemist-girl.
Recently read Tree Grows in Brooklyn - loved it. And finished Chronicles of Narnia (again) to my kids... can never read that enough.
Wow I am really impressed! They do sound interesting.... The last one, about HeLa, seems to be what Law & Order based their episode from last night on. Very interesting.
I am currently reading "The Gates of Zion"--fiction about an American journalist in Israel at the time that Israel became a state. It's intriguing, especially since I know nothing about any of it (I'm an ignorant college-grad, what can I say?)
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