Wonderful Wednesdays (on Thursdays) The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Hello All,

We've had like one zillion (I would never use hyperbole) snow days. These snow days have given me ample time to hang out with my kidlet and my husband, time to trash the house to the brink of absolute destruction, watch old school TV (which I will go into more in-depthly in a later post, maybe Saturday) and blog surf. Blog surfing has become a delightful new past-time and yesterday I found a book blog ning (yes, my friends a whole ning for book bloggers) and within it I have found some deLIGHTful book blogs.

The one I am going on about today is called Tiny Library and she has started a meme on Wednesday that I'm going to do on Thursdays seeing as Wednesdays are taken up with my Music Challenge. I'm so pumped!

From Tiny Library:

Wonderful Wednesdays is a meme about spotlighting and recommending some of our most loved books, even if we haven't read them recently.  Each week will have a different theme or genre of book to focus on.

This week's theme is biographies.

The biography I would like to talk about is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloots.

I first heard of this book on The Colbert Report, now don't laugh I get a lot of my non-fiction books from recommendations from The Colbert Report.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Featured on the Steven Colbert Report

I love that this book is about science and race relations in the early 20th Century and I found it sad that I had no idea that the HeLa cell was from an actual person who, in essence, didn't know that the cell was being used. Actually, I asked around while I was reading this book...no one I knew had any idea about the true story behind the HeLa cell.

I also used this book as my non-fiction focus for my students for their first semester Book Talk and I am proud to say that 3 students picked up and read the book. I love this book, it is at once informational, tragic, breath-taking in its scope and research and life-affirming. It is through Rebecca and Henrietta's youngest daughter, Debra, that we learn about this sensitive, beautiful black woman and how she changed and still changes the way we look at science, although most of her family lived in poverty and haven't received much recognition because of it.