Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more. Henrietta’s cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can’t afford health insurance.
Soon to be made into an HBO movie by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball, this New York Times bestseller takes readers on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers filled with HeLa cells,
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Bestselling author Bruce Feiler was a young father when he was diagnosed with cancer. He instantly worried what his daughters’ lives would be like without him. “Would they wonder who I was? Would they wonder what I thought? Would they yearn for my approval, my love, my voice?” Three days later he came up with a stirring idea of how he might give them that voice. He would reach out to six men from all the passages in his life, and ask them to be present in the passages in his daughters’ lives. And he would call this group “
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When Liz’ s mother died of AIDS, she decided to take control of her own destiny and go back to high school, often completing her assignments in the hallways and subway stations where she slept. Liz squeezed four years of high school into two, while homeless; won a New York Times scholarship; and made it into the Ivy League. Breaking Night is an unforgettable and beautifully written story of one young woman’s indomitable spirit to survive and prevail, against all odds.
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Merle’s Door meets the Daily Coyote in this extraordinary story of a dog’s journey back to her family. Sophie Tucker, a three-year-old Australian blue heeler, goes overboard into the predator infested waters of the Great Barrier Reef, and Sophie’s heartbroken family has given her up for lost; little do they know that Sophie swam six miles to an isolated nature preserve called St. Bees—where she survived unassisted for five months by living off the land. The story of her survival and rescue is nothing short of miraculous.
Journalist Emma Pearse delves into Sophie’s story and re-creates the accident and Sophie’s improbable journey.
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Thad Roberts, a fellow in a prestigious NASA program had an idea—a romantic, albeit crazy, idea. He wanted to give his girlfriend the moon. Literally.
Thad convinced his girlfriend and another female accomplice, both NASA interns, to break into an impregnable laboratory at NASA—past security checkpoints, an electronically locked door with cipher security codes, and camera-lined hallways—and help him steal the most precious objects in the world: the moon rocks.
But what does one do with an item so valuable that it’s illegal even to own? And was Thad Roberts—undeniably gifted,
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A lovely, warm, and poignant true story that reads like compelling fiction, How to Love an American Man is Kristine Gasbarre’s unforgettable memoir recalling the valuable lessons on love she learned from her newly widowed grandmother—and how Grandma’s advice and memories enabled the author to find and fall for a man with an old-fashioned approach to romance. Fans of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, women readers drawn to tales of powerful female bonding, and anyone looking for a beautiful love story will be moved and, perhaps, profoundly inspired by How to Love an American Man.
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