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Reading Diversions Book Club
NOTE:The Reading Diversions Book Club's last meeting was on May 31, 2012. Attendance at our meetings decreased over the previous 12 months to the point that we could not justify the Book Club's continuation, considering the time required to run this program. The Scientific Library staff members involved really enjoyed operating the Book Club since its beginning in 2008. We have gained a great deal of knowledge by reading the many books used in Book Club, books that we probably would not have read otherwise. We hope our members feel similarly. The Reading Diversions collection will remain a part of the Scientific Library's circulating books, so you will continue to be able to borrow these books and read them on your own.
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 was coordinated by Scientific Library staff and offered an opportunity to read and discuss books on fascinating scientific topics, generally from the Library's Reading Diversions collection. We also offered fiction companions to some titles. Members could choose to read the fiction or non-fiction choice, or both. It was not required that they read both books to attend the discussions.
Please contact either Robin Meckley (x5840) or Tracie Frederick (x1094), if you have questions.
2012 Book Club Topics
- Thursday, January 12, 2012, Conference Room A, Building
549
Topic: Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010
- Thursday, February 16, 2012, Conference Room A, Building
549
Topic: Locked-in Syndrome
- Thursday, March 22, 2012, Conference Room A, Building
549
Topic: The Plague
- Thursday, April 26, 2012, Conference Room A, Building
549
Topic: Science in the Movies
- Thursday, May 31, 2012, Conference Room A, Building
549
Topic: National Cancer Research Month
Topic: Best American
Science and Nature Writing 2010
Meeting Date and Location:
Thursday, January 12, 2012, 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Conference Room A,
Building 549
Non-fiction Option:
The Best American Science and Nature Writing
2010
Editor:
Freeman Dyson
Description: The editor of this volume
showcases 28 essays covering astronomy and cosmology, neurology, nature
writing, and three sections loosely organized on the environment. Some are more
optimistic than others that environmental disaster might be averted. Many
standout pieces describe the cutting edges of science, such as a strong piece
by Kathleen McGowan in the neurology section on reprogramming memory and
efforts to reduce the ruinous impact of PTSD. The nature section includes an
essay by Don Stap on the kuaka, an astonishing bird that travels 7,000 miles
over the Pacific Ocean in eight days without stopping or eating, and there is
an arresting essay by Brian Boyd that ponders the evolutionary value of art and
science, concluding that natural selection is evolution toward a purpose-driven
life. (Source: Amazon.com)
Availability of Library
Copy
Discussion
Questions
Fiction Option: No fiction option selected for this topic
Topic: Locked-in Syndrome
Meeting Date and Location: Thursday, February
16, 2012, 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Conference Room A, Building 549
Non-fiction Option:
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of
Life in Death 
Author: Jean Dominique Bauby
Description:
Two days after this remarkable book was published in France to great acclaim,
its author died of heart failure. What caused such a stir was the method Bauby
used to write it. For in December 1995, the 44-year-old former editor-in-chief
of the French Elle magazine had suffered a severe stroke that left his body
paralyzed but his mind intact, a condition known as "locked-in syndrome." Able
to communicate only by blinking his left eyelid, he dictated this book letter
by letter to an assistant who recited to him a special alphabet. The result is
a marvelous, compelling account of Bauby's life as a "vegetable," full of humor
and devoid of self-pity. (Source: Amazon.com)
Availability of Library
Copy
Discussion Questions
Fiction Option: Locked
in 
Author:Marcia Muller
Description:
Returning to her office late one night, San Francisco PI Sharon McCone is shot
while interrupting a burglary. When she wakes up in the hospital, McCone is
fully conscious but locked in. Paralyzed, she can communicate only by blinking
her eyes. Muller articulates this chilling conceit with painful realism, even
citingThe Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Narrative duty falls on McCone's
motley crew of co-workers and her husband, Hy Ripinsky. Each chapter, told from
a different perspective, provides another clue in a convoluted case that
includes multiple murders, a sex scandal in city government and the inevitable
cover-up. (Source: Amazon.com)
Discussion
Questions
Topic: The Plague
Meeting Date and Location: Thursday, March 22, 2012,
12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Conference Room A, Building 549
Non-fiction Option:
Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying
Future of the World's Most Dangerous
Disease 
Author: Wendy Orent
Description: As
journalist Orent shows, what is called the plague-a killer of millions
throughout the centuries-is several different diseases, some spread by animals,
others by humans. Luckily, the Black Death, as the plague was called in the
late 14th and early 15th centuries, "never became a permanent human specialist,
like smallpox," in part, she surmises, because it was too virulent to survive
for long. But when Orent moves on to the present and future of the plague,
she's treading on uncertain ground. With the help of a former Soviet bioweapons
scientist, Igor Domaradskij, whose memoirs she's edited, she throws the
spotlight on the Soviet development of strains of the plague. She contends that
while not as deadly as anthrax, the strains of the plague created in the former
Soviet Union-or other strains of the disease that might be antibiotic
resistant-are indeed something to worry about. (Source:
Amazon.com)
Availability of Library
Copy
Discussion Questions
Fiction Option: Year of
Wonders
Author:Geraldine Brooks
Description: This
book describes the 17th-century plague that is carried from London to a small
Derbyshire village by an itinerant tailor. As villagers begin, one by one, to
die, the rest face a choice: do they flee their village in hope of outrunning
the plague or do they stay? The lord of the manor and his family pack up and
leave. The rector, Michael Mompellion, argues forcefully that the villagers
should stay put, isolate themselves from neighboring towns and villages, and
prevent the contagion from spreading. His oratory wins the day and the village
turns in on itself. Cocooned from the outside world and ravaged by the disease,
its inhabitants struggle to retain their humanity in the face of the disaster.
The narrator, the young widow Anna Frith, is one of the few who succeeds. With
Mompellion and his wife, Elinor, she tends to the dying and battles to prevent
her fellow villagers from descending into drink, violence, and superstition.
All is complicated by the intense, inexpressible feelings she develops for both
the rector and his wife. (Source: Amazon.com)
Discussion Questions
Topic: Science in the
Movies
Meeting Date and Location: Thursday, April
26, 2012, 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Conference Room A, Building 549
Non-fiction Option #1:
The Real Science Behind the X-Files: Microbes,
Meteorites and Mutants 
Author: Anne Simon
Description:
Virologist Simon doubles as the science adviser for television's The X-Files,
helping agents Scully and Mulder's adventures fit, or at least approach,
plausibility. Her book cuts back and forth between X-Files script excerpts,
behind-the-scenes anecdotes of her work on the series and accounts of the
real-life counterparts and inspirations for the show's many biological plot
devices. Where, for instance, Scully and Mulder find a town whose citizens stay
young through cannibalism, Simon explains the real consequences when people eat
people: a rare brain ailment caused by rogue proteins called prions. Simon (who
teaches at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst) likes to remind readers
that professional scientists watch The X-Files and look for mistakes. (Source:
Amazon.com)
Availability of Library
Copy
Discussion Questions
Non-fiction Option #2:Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and
Cinema 
Author: David A. Kirby
Description:
Scientific expertise, Kirby points out, is most valuable to filmmakers as a
tool to help them utilize their own creative expertise. Drawing on interviews
and archival material, Kirby examines such science consulting tasks as fact
checking, shaping visual iconography, advising actors, enhancing plausibility,
creating dramatic situations, and placing science in its cultural contexts.
Kirby finds that cinema can influence science as well: Depictions of science in
popular films can promote research agendas, stimulate technological
development, contribute to scientific controversies, and even stir citizens
into political action. (Source: Amazon.com)
Discussion Questions
Fiction Option: No fiction option selected for this topic
Topic: National Cancer
Research Month
Meeting Date and Location:
Thursday, May 31, 2012, 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Conference Room A,
Building 549
Non-fiction Option:
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of
Cancer 
Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee
Description:
An exhaustive account of cancer's origins, The Emperor of All Maladies
illustrates how modern treatments--multi-pronged chemotherapy, radiation, and
surgery, as well as preventative care--came into existence thanks to a
century's worth of research, trials, and small, essential breakthroughs around
the globe. While The Emperor of All Maladies is rich with the science and
history behind the fight against cancer, it is also a meditation on illness,
medical ethics, and the complex, intertwining lives of doctors and patients.
Mukherjee's profound compassion--for cancer patients, their families, as well
as the oncologists who, all too often, can offer little hope--makes this book a
very human history of an elusive and complicated disease. (Source:
Amazon.com)
Availability
of Library Copy
Discussion
Questions
Fiction Option: The Honest Look
Author: Jennifer L. Rohn
Description: In
becoming a scientist, Claire Cyrus hopes to escape the fate of her dead father,
a brilliant but critically unsuccessful poet whose poverty and bitterness
derailed her own strong talent for verse. Soon after moving from England to
take up her first job in a start-up biotech company in the Netherlands, she
finds herself an outcast in her strange new environment, shunned by her jealous
colleagues and moving only on the fringes of the expatriate community. But when
she makes an accidental discovery in the lab, her life will never be the same
again. The Honest Look is a tale of passion, betrayal and a devastating secret
that threatens to bring down careers, a company and a widely accepted
scientific theory. Unfolding in the modern corporate laboratory, where the
idealism of advancing knowledge and the uncompromising reality of profit
margins exist in uneasy truce, this is a story of how people with various
stakes in a common endeavor react when its integrity is called into question,
and how these reactions can be shaped and warped by denial, greed, hatred and
love. (Source: Amazon.com)
Discussion
Questions
