From Heronswood nursery, a heuchera, Midnight Rose.
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« April 2011 | Main | June 2011 »
The Damascened Blade
The Damascened Blade by Barbara Cleverly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Great Game, the Khyber Pass, Pathan tribes, hot sun, dust, sudden death – the romance of the Northwest Frontier of India in the ‘20s – we must be reading another Barbara Cleverly Joe Sandilands mystery. We are, and this one is a humdinger.
Once again Joe, vacationing with an old friend who is commander of a fort near the Afghan border, finds himself with a young woman on his hands, this time an American heiress who wants to see the “real” India. She gets her wish when she is kidnapped by a Pathan tribesman. How to get her back without setting off another border war?
There is a murder, of course, but in this book it’s the adventure that matters. And the characters: the son of a Pashtun tribal leader, a WW I British aviator looking for something to do with his planes, a bean counter who wants to close the frontier forts, the beautiful and very pregnant wife of a powerful man who will not be pleased if she dies in childbirth, a crusty old (female) doctor who is trusted by both sides.
One of the gimmicks I like in a mystery is a prologue with some adventure that happened 20 years or so before the action of the main story. This novel has a scene in which a very young British soldier heads out alone to rescue a comrade and in the process acquires the titular damascened blade.
Damascening, by the way, is the inlay of one metal into another, so named because it was thought to look like damask fabric, so named because it was thought to have originated in Damascus. A damascened blade is particularly beautiful. Click on the photo to the right to see the detail.
2011 No 75 Coming soon: Revolt! by Dick Morris
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Cancer cells, called HeLa, have been cultured in labs and shipped all over the world. These cells have been used in research that has led to medical breakthroughs from development of a polio vaccine to effective cancer therapies. Henrietta Lacks was the woman from whom those cancerous cells were taken at Johns Hopkins hospital in 1951.
The story of the struggle to culture human tissue in a lab and the breakthrough that Henrietta’s cancer cells provided is a fascinating one. For many years no one but her doctor and the lab director who first grew the cells knew who she was. Occasionally a name was mentioned in a scientific paper, but it was not her real name. Eventually her real name and a photo of her were published and Henrietta’s poor, uneducated, and deeply dysfunctional family were frightened and disoriented by the news.
Rebecca Skloot became interested in the story of Henrietta Lacks and spent a good deal of time with the family, especially Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, trying to learn as much as she could about the woman who unknowingly benefited modern medicine, and trying to explain to the family how part of their mother could still be alive, that she had not been cloned, that although her cells were alive she was not feeling pain from the experiments done on them, and that no one was going to try to kidnap any of the family to experiment on.
At the time that a biopsy from Henrietta Lacks’ cervical cancer was replicated and distributed around the world patients were not asked for permission to use their tissue in this manner. And often permission is not asked today. Because such tissue contains a patient’s DNA and because some people are disturbed at the invasion of privacy that release of DNA information might entail, “tissue rights” activists are lobbying for laws that would forbid any use of a person’s cells for any purpose without express written permission, a situation that would create administrative nightmares and put roadblocks in the way of medical research. But none of us wants our DNA, with our name attached, released to the world.
Skloot discusses all of this in an entirely unbiased manner giving their due to the different sides of these situations. She shows immense patience with the Lacks family and carefully describs the position of medical researchers who need cellular material for their work. Without cervical cells from many thousands of unknowing women it would not have been discovered that cells change slowly, becoming pre-cancerous long before actual cancer develops. PAP smears and colon biopsies and tests on skin lesions that now give early warning while treatment is still easy and effective would not have been developed. But many companies over the years have made a lot of money from culturing and selling Henrietta Lacks’ cancer cells and her family did not benefit in any way and some of them are angry.
This is an important story. Unfortunately for this book I read it while reading Siddhartha Mukherjee’s history of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, and Skloot’s book suffers badly in comparison to that extraordinarily well-written and researched book. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is loosely organized and repetitious, and the prose shows none of the robustness of Mukherjee’s.
2011 No 74 Coming soon: The Damascened Blade by Barbara Cleverly
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Rachel Ray
Rachel Ray by Anthony Trollope
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This modest, medium-length novel is one of Trollope’s best, and it has an interesting backstory.
The editor of an evangelical magazine asked Trollope to write a novel for them to serialize and he went to work on Rachel Ray, which criticizes, satirizes, and triumphs over its pinched, power-hungry evangelical characters. The magazine refused it and it was published elsewhere.
The story is simple and there are no sub-plots. Rachel Ray is a modest girl who leads a retiring life with her widowed mother and her widowed sister. The latter, Mrs Prime, controls Mrs Ray and tries to make Rachel conform to her narrow religious beliefs. When Rachel falls in love with and becomes engaged to Luke Rowan, a would-be gentleman-brewer, Mrs Prime moves out of the house and Rachel is instructed to write to Luke and say the engagement is off. Rachel pines and grows pale.
Can Mrs Ray be counted on to develop a backbone? Will Luke return to marry Rachel? Will Rachel be allowed to marry her beau or will Mrs Prime prevail with her religion-based abuse of power?
2011 No 73 Coming soon: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
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Espresso Tales
Espresso Tales by Alexander McCall Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
By now everyone in the English-speaking world and beyond recognizes the magical pen of Alexander McCall Smith and his various series' of books about Scotland and Botswana. When I first discovered The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and tried to tell my friends they HAD to read this book I got puzzled looks. Now McCall Smith’s stories are recognized everywhere for their warmth and loving charm.
Publisher’s Weekly describes Espresso Tales better than I could:
Once again McCall Smith fixes his telescope on the windows of 44 Scotland Street, the converted Georgian townhouse in Edinburgh that provided the title for his previous novel and initiated this latest series. This time out, perhaps Bertie, the gifted five-and-three-quarter-year-old, will be allowed to have the normal boyhood envisioned by his father, Stuart, and go trout fishing instead of taking yoga and Italian lessons in the "ungendered" life designed by his mother, Irene. But maybe trout fishing will turn out to be less than idyllic. McCall Smith delivers plenty of twists and turns as he skewers the puffery, the pretense, the tedium and self-defeating moves in his characters' daily lives. He also forgives them their weaknesses and bathes them in love. Take Ramsey Dubarton, who puts his wife, Betty, to sleep by reading her installments of his memoirs: Betty dozes and the reader laughs with real admiration for his opacity. As ever, McCall Smith's pacing is impeccable: moving his focus from one character to another seamlessly, dropping in just the right amount of description, keeping the talk light and sharp. Fans of this new series, here served with plenty of java, will be buzzed to know that a third volume is in the making.
2011 No 72 Coming soon: Rachel Ray
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Murder on the Links
Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Golf must have been really big in 1923 when this book was published. There’s no other explanation for the title because the book has almost no connection with golf. Sure, the body is found in an open grave on land where a golf course was being built (in France no less) – and that is one of the important clues to the mystery – but it might as well have been any construction site.
We who love her books forgive Agatha Christie her whim and in this complicated story with new revelations every few pages we are much more interested in which of the many and varied characters could have done the murder than the mystery of the inappropriate title.
The wealthy Mr Renauld’s body is found in a shallow open grave clad only in his underwear and a too-long overcoat. His wife is in their bedroom tied securely and gagged. The front door is open and no one heard anything in the night, which, considering the housekeeper is a light sleeper and the stairs creak loudly, is a mystery in itself.
The suspects include two South American desperadoes who, Mrs Renauld says, tied her up and kidnapped her husband; the Renaulds’ son who was thought to be on a steamer bound for Buenos Aeries at the time (but was he?); the mysterious Mme Daubreuil, a woman with a past; her beautiful daughter, Marthe; the unidentified Bella Duveen; and possibly Mr Renauld’s secretary, Stoner. As is usual in a Christie murder mystery the spotlight shines on each character in turn as Poirot and the reader consider the motive and opportunity of each.
When the murder weapon goes missing and a remarkably well-dressed tramp is found dead with it in his chest things become even more puzzling. Meanwhile Hastings has (as usual) fallen in love with a young woman he met on a train even though he has no idea who she is or even her name. Could she be in any way involved with this murder? Again the spotlight scans each character and Poirot uses the little grey cells to outwit the arrogant French detective and solve the mystery.
2011 No 71 Coming soon: Espresso Tales
