Books-N-Wine Book Club

The book for July is a long, non-fiction treatise on how and why different societies developed at different times in history.

Meeting is July 22, 2013

This is a newly published book about the young women who came to Oak Ridge, TN, during World War II for the Manhattan Project.

Article in Oak Ridge Newspaper where Jeff first saw the book:

http://www.oakridger.com/article/20130416/NEWS/130419929/0/features

This link includes pictures of the author.

We're trying something new this time.  There are 400 pages listed.  Because it is longer than we may have time to complete, we are reading the first half of the book.  We'll decide at the May meeting if we want to read the rest.  (Update: Read chapters 1 to 7.)

This is a humorous travel-logue by J. Maarten Troost.  It was published in 2004.  Susan had read it in her Houston book club.

After our marathon meeting last time, the book we chose is a short one.  The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.

Switching to non-fiction, this is the story of one of the most important tools in medicine, the HeLa cell line.

The cells were taken without her knowledge from Henrietta Lacks who died from cervical cancer in 1951.  This book is the story of the cell line and the family of Mrs. Lacks.

The story has been featured on RadioLab (

link

) and Science Friday (

link

,

book review

) among others.

As the story has come out, controversy has arisen over whether: her family should be compensated; is this exploitation of a minority family; and is this a result of holding science too high?

This is a book that Susan read in her Houston book club.  She said it had her by the second page.

The next meeting is scheduled for Tuesday,

February 26th.

A new release, this is a book that a friend showed Susan recently.  I don't know how to describe its genre, but it looks interesting.

Amazon Description

The New York Times bestselling author of The Map of Time returns with a mesmerizing novel casting H.G. Wells in a leading role, as the extraterrestrial invasion featured in The War of the Worlds is turned into a bizarre reality.

A love story serves as backdrop for The Map of the Sky when New York socialite Emma Harlow agrees to marry millionaire Montgomery Gilmore, but only if he accepts her audacious challenge: to reproduce the extraterrestrial invasion featured in Wells’s War of the Worlds. What follows are three brilliantly interconnected plots to create a breathtaking tale of time travel and mystery, replete with cameos by a young Edgar Allan Poe, and Captain Shackleton and Charles Winslow from The Map of Time.

I selected the book for December: I could not stand another angst-ridden introspective, so we are moving to a fast-paced thriller.

Trojan Horse

is the sequel by Mark Russinovitch to

Zero-Day

we read in July 2011.  Zero-Day's plot device was rootkits which describes malware that hides itself inside a computer system by preventing its associated files from discovery.  Russinovitch was the one who discovered the Sony rootkit on music CDs that attempted to enforce DRM on their music.

The term Trojan Horse is a description of

computer malware

that masquerades as something helpful, but opens up remote access.

From the Amazon Description:

Set at a boys’ boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II,

A Separate Peace

is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world.

A bestseller for more than thirty years,

A Separate Peace

is John Knowles’s crowning achievement and an undisputed American classic.

We've been in the apocalyptic genre for several months.  With the

Hunger Games

series it was a combination of youth and apocalypse.  This one is a youth-related, but classic novel.  It seems like it could be a lot like a previous pick called

So Long, See You Tomorrow

.

Susan got bitten by the Hunger Games bug.  We will meet on August 20th to discuss the trilogy.  As

Hunger Games

was our selection in February, there remain

Catching Fire

and

Mockingjay

for our August selections.

World Hunger

by Brian Kenneth Swain. It's an excellent novel about what could happen when a company goes too far with genetically modified organisms. We will be talking with the author that evening (via phone).

At our July 23rd meeting, five of us had the pleasure of talking with Brian via FaceTime as he joined in on our club meeting for an hour and a half.  He continues to be involved and interested in Genetically Modified Organism research and is considering if there is a sequel to World Hunger.  He is invited to be on some upcoming panel discussions on GMO.

Brian noted that using the term "World Hunger" as his title has the benefit on Amazon that his book appears near the top of this common search term.  He said he chooses titles that have multiple meanings.  For World Hunger there are three meanings:

1) WH in the literal sense of hungry people who could be fed with the help of Vanguard's products.

2) WH in the sense of Vanguard's hunger or profits and market domination.

3) WH in the sense of the GM insects eating everything they come into contact with.

This was an especially interesting thing to learn from the author.  Another book of his is "

Alone in the Light

" which also has a title that takes on multiple meanings.

Our shared bottle of wine was from South Eastern Australia called "The Little Penguin."  It was a pleasant wine to share and it has a cute picture.

(I don't know why this is rotated to the left.  The picture is vertical in the original.)