Reading Diversions Book Club

Reading Diversions is a special Scientific Library collection of books written in an informative and entertaining way. People read these books for scientific INTEREST rather than for scientific RESEARCH.

The Reading Diversions Book Club is coordinated by Scientific Library staff and offers you an opportunity to read and discuss books on fascinating scientific topics, generally from the Library's Reading Diversions collection.  We are also offering fiction compainions to some titles. You may choose to read the fiction or non-fiction choice, or both. It is NOT required that you read both books to attend the discussions.

All are welcome to participate, and we meet approximately every five weeks at lunch time in the Conference Center in Building 549.  Feel free to bring your lunch along to the discussion. See a list of our discussions below for dates and locations.  If you prefer not to buy a copy of the books, the Library may be able to borrow a copy for you. Please contact either Robin Meckley (x5840) or Tracie Frederick (x1094), if you would like to join the group or if you have questions.

• Thursday, January 8, 2009, Conference Room A, Building 549
  Non-fiction: Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud
  Fiction: Intuition
  

• Thursday, February 12, 2009, Conference Room A, Building 549
  Non-fiction: The Reluctant Mr. Darwin
  Fiction: The Darwin Conspiracy
  

• Thursday, March 19, 2009, Conference Room A, Building 549
  Non-fiction: The Dance of Molecules
  Fiction #1: The Diamond Age
  Fiction #2: Prey
  

• Thursday, April 23, 2009, Conference Room A, Building 549
  Non-fiction: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
  Fiction: The Bone Garden
  

• Thursday, May 28, 2009, Conference Room A, Building 549
  Non-fiction: The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa
  Fiction: Kennedy's Brain
  

• Thursday, July 2, 2009, Conference Room A, Building 549
  Non-fiction: The Proteus Effect: Stem Cells and Their Promise for Medicine
  Fiction: My Sister's Keeper: A Novel
  

• Thursday, August 6, 2009, Conference Room A, Building 549
  Non-fiction: The Emperor of Scent: a Story Of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses
  Fiction: Perfume: the Story of a Murderer
  

• Thursday, September 10, 2009, Conference Room A, Building 549
  Non-fiction: Madame Curie: a Biography
  Fiction: The Book About Blanche and Marie
  

• Thursday, October 15, 2009, Conference Room A, Building 549
  Non-fiction: Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health
  Fiction: The Last Adam
  

• 2008 Discussions

Topic: Fraudulent Science
Meeting Date and Location: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Conference Room A, Building 549

Non-fiction Option: Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud    
Author: Robert L. Park
Description: As the author points out, the line between foolishness and fraud is thin. Because it is not always easy to tell when that line is crossed, he uses the term voodoo science to cover several types of science: pathological science, junk science, pseudo-science, and fraudulent science. His book is intended to help the reader recognize voodoo science and to understand the forces that conspire to keep it alive. Scientists, Park observes, insist that the cure for voodoo science is to raise the level of scientific literacy. But what is it that a scientifically literate society should know? It is not specific knowledge of science that the public needs, Park argues, so much as a scientific world view - an understanding that we live in an orderly universe governed by natural laws that cannot be circumvented by magic or miracles. (Source: Books in Print)
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Discussion Questions

Fiction Option: Intuition    
Author:Allegra Goodman
Description: This novel is an intricate mystery and a rich human drama set in the high-stakes atmosphere of a prestigious research institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sandy Glass, a charismatic publicity-seeking oncologist, and Marion Mendelssohn, a pure, exacting scientist, are codirectors of a lab at the Philpott Institute dedicated to cancer research and desperately in need of a grant. Both mentors and supervisors of their young postdoctoral proteges, Glass and Mendelssohn demand dedication and obedience in a competitive environment where funding is scarce and results elusive. So when the experiments of Cliff Bannaker, a young postdoc in a rut, begin to work, the entire lab becomes giddy with newfound expectations. But Cliff's rigorous colleague-and girlfriend-Robin Decker suspects the unthinkable: that his findings are fraudulent. As Robin makes her private doubts public and Cliff maintains his innocence, a life-changing controversy engulfs the lab and everyone in it. (Source: Books in Print)
Discussion Questions

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Topic: Charles Darwin
Meeting Date and Location: Thursday, February 12, 2009, 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Conference Room A, Building 549

Non-fiction Option: The Reluctant Mr. Darwin    
Author: David Quammen
Description: A fresh look at Darwin's most radical idea, and the mysteriously slow process by which he revealed it. Evolution, during the early nineteenth century, was an idea in the air. Other thinkers had suggested it, but no one had proposed a cogent explanation for how evolution occurs. Then, in September 1838, a young Englishman named Charles Darwin hit upon the idea that "natural selection" among competing individuals would lead to wondrous adaptations and species diversity. Twenty-one years passed between that epiphany and publication of On the Origin of Species, the human drama and scientific basis of Darwin's twenty-one-year delay constitute a fascinating, tangled tale that elucidates the character of a cautious naturalist who initiated an intellectual revolution. The Reluctant Mr. Darwin is a book for everyone who has ever wondered about who this man was and what he said. Drawing from Darwin's secret "transmutation" notebooks and his personal letters, David Quammen has sketched a vivid life portrait of the man whose work never ceases to be controversial. (Source: Books in Print)
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Discussion Questions

Fiction Option: The Darwin Conspiracy    
Author:John Darnton
Description: What led Darwin to the theory of evolution? Why did he wait twenty-two years to write On the Origin of Species? Why was he incapacitated by mysterious illnesses and frightened of travel? Who was his secret rival? These are some of the questions driving Darnton's richly dramatic narrative, which unfolds through three vivid points of view: Darwin's own as he sails around the world aboard the Beagle; his daughter Lizzie's as she strives to understand the guilt and fear that struck her father at the height of his fame; and that of present-day anthropologist Hugh Kellem and Darwin scholar Beth Dulicmer, whose obsession with Darwin (and with each other) drives them beyond the accepted boundaries of scholarly research. Hugh and Beth's discovery of Lizzie's diaries and letters lead them to a hidden chapter of Darwin's autobiography. It is a maze of bitter rivalries, petty deceptions, and jealously guarded secrets, at the heart of which lies the birth of the theory of evolution. (Source: Books in Print)
Discussion Questions

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Topic: Nanotechnology
Meeting Date and Location: Thursday, March 19, 2009, 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Conference Room A, Building 549

Non-fiction Option: The Dance of Molecules: How Nanotechnology Is Changing Our Lives     
Author: Ted Sargent
Description: What if a doctor could stop cancer by targeting a single malignant cell before it multiplied? Imagine a paper-thin "power suit" that could keep you warm on a winter day. What about a computer that connects directly with a person's thoughts? In this groundbreaking exploration of the future of nanotechnology, Ted Sargent reveals how all disciplines of science, from medicine to microchips, are converging to create materials using the tiniest scale possible -- molecule by molecule. And instead of trying to overcome the natural world, nanotech takes its every move from the perfect, elegant structure of nature itself. Its potential is seemingly endless, with practical implications that will revolutionize the way we live, work, and play. In an age when science often evokes more fear than faith, when the potential for super viruses and diabolical cloning looms in our consciousness, Sargent enthusiastically illuminates nanotech's positive possibilities. By working with the tiniest building blocks in nature, pioneering scientists will drastically improve the quality of life for all of us. (Source: Books in Print)
Availability of Library Copy  
Discussion Questions

Fiction Option #1: The Diamond Age: or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer    
Author:Neal Stephenson
Description: Decades into our future, a stone's throw from the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has just broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful neoVictorians. He's made an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer Commissioned by an eccentric duke for his grandchild, stolen for Hackworth's own daughter, the Primer's purpose is to educate and raise a girl capable of thinking for herself. It performs its function superbly. Unfortunately for Hackworth, his smuggled copy has fallen into the wrong hands. (Source: Random House)
Discussion Questions

Fiction Option #2: Prey    
Author:Michael Crichton
Description: In the Nevada desert, an experiment has gone horribly wrong. A cloud of nanoparticles-micro-robots-has escaped from the laboratory. This cloud is self-sustaining and self-reproducing. It is intelligent and learns from experience. For all practical purposes, it is alive. It has been programmed as a predator. It is evolving swiftly, becoming more deadly with each passing hour. Every attempt to destroy it has failed. And we are the prey. As fresh as today's headlines, Michael Crichton's most compelling novel yet tells the story of a mechanical plague and the desperate efforts of a handful of scientists to stop it. Drawing on up-to-the-minute scientific fact, Prey takes us into the emerging realms of nanotechnology and artificial distributed intelligence-in a story of breathtaking suspense. Prey is a novel you can't put down because time is running out. (Source: Books in Print)
Discussion Questions

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Topic: Use of Human Cadavers
Meeting Date and Location: Thursday, April 23, 2009, 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Conference Room A, Building 549

Non-fiction Option: Stiff: The Curious Lives Of Human Cadavers    
Author: Mary Roach
Description: Despite the irreverent, macabre title, this is a respectful and serious examination of what happens to cadavers, past and present. Salon columnist Roach explains how surgeons and doctors use cadavers donated for research purposes to help the living, and also examines potential new variations on how we bury the dead. She explores some interesting historical side avenues as well: the use of corpses to test the guillotine, earlier anatomical beliefs, grave robbers, the elixirs various civilizations concocted out of corpses for medicinal purposes, and, most important, how cadavers provided valuable information to us for understanding such plane crashes as TWA Flight 800. Roach also addresses philosophical issues. (Source: Books in Print)
Availability of Library Copy
Discussion Questions

Fiction Option: The Bone Garden    
Author: Tess Gerritsen
Description: Present day: Julia Hamill has made a horrifying discovery on the grounds of her new home in rural Massachusetts: a skull buried in the rocky soil - human, female, and, according to the trained eye of Boston medical examiner Maura Isles, scarred with the unmistakable marks of murder. But whomever this nameless woman was, and whatever befell her, is knowledge lost to another time. Boston, 1830: In order to pay for his education, Norris Marshall, a talented but penniless student at Boston Medical College, has joined the ranks for local "resurrectionists" - those who plunder graveyards and harvest the dead for sale on the black market. Yet even this ghoulish commerce pales beside the shocking murder of a nurse found mutilated on the university hospital grounds. And when a distinguished doctor meets the same grisly fate, Norris finds that trafficking in the illicit cadaver trade has made him a prime suspect. To prove his innocence, Norris must track down the only witness to have glimpsed the killer: Rose Connolly, a beautiful seamstress from the Boston slums who fears she may be the next victim. Joined by a sardonic, keenly intelligent young man named Oliver Wendell Holmes, Norris and Rose comb the city - from its grim cemeteries and autopsy suites to its glittering mansions and centers of Brahmin power - on the trail of a maniacal fiend who lurks where least expected... and who waits for his next lethal opportunity. With suspense and pitch-perfect period detail, The Bone Garden interweaves the narratives of its nineteenth- and twenty-first-century protagonists, tracing the dark mystery at its heart across time and place to a finale as ingenious as it is shocking. (Source: Books in Print)
Discussion Questions

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Topic: AIDS
Meeting Date and Location: Thursday, May 28, 2009, 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Conference Room A, Building 549

Non-fiction Option: The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa    
Author: Helen Epstein
Description: A New York Times Notable Book of 2007, The Invisible Cure is an account of Africa's AIDS epidemic from the inside--a revelatory dispatch from the intersection of village life, government intervention, and international aid. Helen Epstein left her job in the US in 1993 to move to Uganda, where she began work on a test vaccine for HIV. Once there, she met patients, doctors, politicians, and aid workers, and began exploring the problem of AIDS in Africa through the lenses of medicine, politics, economics, and sociology. Amid the catastrophic failure to reverse the epidemic, she discovered a village-based solution that could prove more effective than any network of government intervention and international aid, an intuitive response that calls into question many of the fundamental assumptions about the AIDS in Africa. Hardcover title is The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS (2007). (Source: Books in Print)
Availability of Library Copy  More copies are available for the discussion.   Contact the Library to borrow one.

Fiction Option: Kennedy's Brain    
Author: Henning Mankell
Description: When Louise Cantor finds her twenty-eight year old son dead in his apartment, everything indicates it was a suicide. Louise, however, refuses to accept this, and with nothing more than few suspicions and a mother's intuition, she and her ex-husband set out to find what happened. What they discover is a dark underworld of people exploiting the victims of the AIDS epidemic: corrupt businessmen dealing infected blood, suspicious researchers carrying out dangerous tests, and lecherous drug dealers peddling black market medicine. Their investigation takes them across three continents, and leads them into some mighty financial institutions and highest corridors of power, where suddenly their own lives are at stake. (Source: Books in Print)
Contact the Library to borrow a copy.

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Topic: Use of Stem Cells
Meeting Date and Location: Thursday, July 2, 2009, 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Conference Room A, Building 549

Non-fiction Option: The Proteus Effect: Stem Cells And Their Promise For Medicine    
Author: Ann B. Parson
Description: What exactly are these biological wonders-these things called stem cells? They may be tiny, but their impact is earth-shaking, generating excitement among medical researchers-and outright turmoil in political circles. They are reported to be nothing short of miraculous. But they have also incited fear and mistrust in many. The power of stem cells rests in their unspecialized but marvelously flexible nature. They are the clay of life waiting for the cellular signal that will induce them to take on the shape of the beating cells of the heart muscle or the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas. With a wave of our medical magic wand, it's possible that stem cells could be used to effectively treat (even cure) diseases such as Parkinson's disease, diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune disorders, and even baldness. But should scientists be allowed to pick apart 5-day-old embryos in order to retrieve stem cells? And when stem cells whisper to us of immortality-they can divide and perpetuate new cells indefinitely-how do we respond? Stem cells are forcing us to not only reexamine how we define the beginning of life but how we come to terms with the end of life. Meticulously researched, artfully balanced, and engagingly told, Ann Parson chronicles a scientific discovery in progress, exploring the ethical debates, describing the current research, and hinting of a spectacular new era in medicine. (Source: Books in Print)
Availability of Library Copy  More copies are available for the discussion.   Contact the Library to borrow one.

Fiction Option: My Sister's Keeper: a Novel    
Author: Jodi Picoult
Description: Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate -- a life and a role that she has never challenged...until now. Like most teenagers, Anna is beginning to question who she truly is. But unlike most teenagers, she has always been defined in terms of her sister -- and so Anna makes a decision that for most would be unthinkable, a decision that will tear her family apart and have perhaps fatal consequences for the sister she loves. My Sister's Keeper examines what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person. Is it morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child's life, even if that means infringing upon the rights of another? Is it worth trying to discover who you really are, if that quest makes you like yourself less? Should you follow your own heart, or let others lead you? (Source: Books in Print)
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Topic: Science of Scent
Meeting Date and Location: Thursday, August 6, 2009, 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Conference Room A, Building 549

Non-fiction Option: The Emperor of Scent: a Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses    
Author: Chandler Burr
Description: For as long as anyone can remember, a man named Luca Turin has had an uncanny relationship with smells. He can distinguish the components of just about any smell, from the world's most refined perfumes to the air in a subway car on the Paris metro. A distinguished scientist, he once worked in an unrelated field, though he made a hobby of collecting fragrances. But when, as a lark, he published a collection of his reviews of the world's perfumes, the book hit the small, insular business of perfume makers like a thunderclap. Who is this man Luca Turin, they demanded, and how does he know so much? The closed community of scent creation opened up to him, and he discovered a fact that astonished him: no one in this world knew how smell worked. Billions and billions of dollars were spent creating scents in a manner amounting to glorified trial and error. The solution to the mystery of every other human sense has led to the Nobel Prize, if not vast riches. Why, Luca Turin thought, should smell be any different? So he gave his life to this great puzzle. And in the end, incredibly, it would seem that he solved it. But when enormously powerful interests are threatened and great reputations are at stake, Luca Turin learned, nothing is quite what it seems. (Source: Books in Print)
Availability of Library Copy  More copies are available for the discussion.   Contact the Library to borrow one.

Fiction Option: Perfume: the Story of a Murderer    
Author: Patrick Süskind
Description: The year is 1738; the place, Paris. A baby is born under a fish-monger's bloody table in a marketplace, and abandoned. Something is missing: he doesn't "smell" the way a baby should smell; indeed, he has no scent at all. Slowly, as we watch Jean-Baptiste Grenouille cling stubbornly to life, we begin to realize that a monster is growing before our eyes. For this dark and sinister boy who has no smell himself possesses an absolute sense of smell, and with it he can read the world to discover the hidden truths that elude ordinary men. He can smell the very composition of objects, and their history, and where they have been. As he leaves childhood behind and comes to understand his terrible uniqueness, his obsession becomes the quest to identify, and then to isolate, the most perfect scent of all, the scent of life itself. At first, he hones his powers, learning the ancient arts of perfume-making until the exquisite fragrances he creates are the rage of Paris, and indeed Europe. Then, secure in his mastery of these means to an end, he withdraws into a strange and agonized solitude, waiting, dreaming, until the morning when he wakes, ready to embark on his monstrous quest: to find and extract from the most perfect living creatures-- the most beautiful young virgins in the land-- that ultimate perfume which alone can make him, too, fully human. (Source: Books in Print)
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Topic: Marie Curie
Meeting Date and Location: Thursday, September 10, 2009, 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Conference Room A, Building 549

Non-fiction Option: Madame Curie: A Biography    
Author: Eve Curie
Description: Marie Sklodowska Curie (1867-1934) was the first woman scientist to win worldwide fame, and indeed, one of the great scientists of this century. Winner of two Nobel Prizes (for Physics in 1903 and for Chemistry in 1911), she performed pioneering studies with radium and contributed profoundly to the understanding of radioactivity. The history of her story-book marriage to Pierre Curie, of their refusal to patent their processes or otherwise profit from the commercial exploitation of radium, and her tragically ironic death from the very substance that had made her famous is the stuff of legend. But, as this book reveals, it was also true. An astonishing mind and a remarkable life are here portrayed by Marie Curie's daughter in a classic and moving account. (Source: Books in Print)
Availability of Library Copy  More copies are available for the discussion.   Contact the Library to borrow one.

Fiction Option: The Book About Blanche and Marie    
Author: Per Olov Enquist
Description: Swedish novelist Enquist (The Royal Physician's Visit) finds various riveting facets in the working friendship between Marie Curie and her lab assistant, Blanche Wittman. After working with the uranium-rich ore called pitchblende, Blanche got radiation poisoning; she eventually had both legs and one left arm amputated. She moved around on a wagon and lived in Marie's Paris apartment, where she died in 1913. Blanche kept several notebooks, collectively entitled The Book of Questions, in which she revealed her obsession with love, first stoked years before by the doctor who treated her for hysteria at age 18, J.M. Charcot-the renowned head of Salpêtrière Hospital (Paris's asylum for mad women) whose public experiments were duly absorbed by the young Sigmund Freud. As Enquist fancifully, lugubriously and rapturously riffs on, extends, and wonders after the notebooks (which really exist), Blanche, Marie (suffering the scandal of her adulterous relationship with Paul Langevin) and the conflicted Charcot get alternating point of view chapters, and the modern sensibility that sprang from her body-scientifically scrutinized and dissected, but ever resistant to being known or possessed-emerges beautifully. (Source: Publishers Weekly)
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Topic: Typhoid
Meeting Date and Location: Thursday, October 15, 2009, 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Conference Room A, Building 549

Non-fiction Option: Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health    
Author: Judith W. Leavitt
Description: She was an Irish immigrant cook. Between 1900 and 1907, she infected twenty-two New Yorkers with typhoid fever through her puddings and cakes; one of them died. Tracked down through epidemiological detective work, she was finally apprehended as she hid behind a barricade of trashcans. To protect the public's health, authorities isolated her on Manhattan's North Brother Island, where she died some thirty years later. This book tells the remarkable story of Mary Mallon--the real Typhoid Mary. Combining social history with biography, historian Judith Leavitt re-creates early-twentieth-century New York City, a world of strict class divisions and prejudice against immigrants and women. Leavitt engages the reader with the excitement of the early days of microbiology and brings to life the conflicting perspectives of journalists, public health officials, the law, and Mary Mallon herself. Leavitt's readable account illuminates dilemmas that continue to haunt us. To what degree are we willing to sacrifice individual liberty to protect the public's health? How far should we go in the age of AIDS, drug-resistant tuberculosis, and other diseases? For anyone who is concerned about the threats and quandaries posed by new epidemics, Typhoid Mary is a vivid reminder of the human side of disease and disease control. (Source: Books in Print)
Availability of Library Copy  More copies are available for the discussion.   Contact the Library to borrow one.

Fiction Option: The Last Adam
Author: James Gould Cozzens
Description: Dr. George Bull is an old-fashioned country doctor whose affair with Janet Cardmaker is creating waves in the small town where he practices. When there is a mysterious outbreak of typhoid which the doctor is slow in reacting to, it all comes to a head. The townspeople hold an emergency meeting and decide to replace Dr. Bull with a new doctor. Dr. Bull must find a way to save his job, his reputation, and a young man's life, that all other practitioners have written off as a permanent invalid.
Contact the Library to borrow a copy.