I have read two remarkable nonfiction books lately and, perhaps, someone might be interested.
The first is THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS by Rebecca Skloot. It's a fascinating journey through the "colored" ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950's to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HELA cells, immortal cells that Henrietta provided for research into vaccines and other research. Her cells are still being used internationally today. One paragraph"
""You better take me to the doctor. I'm bleedin and it ain't my time" Henrietta told her husband. Hopkins was one of the top hospitals for the sick and the poor and it covered more than a dozen acres where a cemetery and insane asylum once sat in East Baltimore. The public wards at Hopkins were filled with patients, most of them black and unable to pay their medical bills. David drove Henrietta nearly twenty miles to get there, not because they preferred it, but because it was the only major hospital for miles that treated black patients This was the era of Jim Crow-when black people showed up at white-only hospitals the staff was likely to send them away, even if it meant they might die in the parking lot."
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THE OTHER WES MOORE by Wes Moore: Great book.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* In 2000, Wes Moore had recently been named a Rhodes Scholar in his final year of college at Johns Hopkins University when he read a newspaper article about another Wes Moore who was on his way to prison. It turned out that the two of them had much in common, both young black men raised in inner-city neighborhoods by single mothers. Stunned by the similarities in their names and backgrounds and the differences in their ultimate fates, the author eventually contacted the other Wes Moore and began a long relationship. Moore visited his namesake in prison; he was serving a life sentence, convicted for his role in an armed robbery that resulted in the killing of an off-duty policeman. Growing up, both men were subject to the pitfalls of urban youth: racism, rebellion, violence, drug use, and dealing. The author examines eight years in the lives of both Wes Moores to explore the factors and choices that led one to a Rhodes scholarship, military service, and a White House fellowship, and the other to drug dealing, prison, and eventual conversion to the Muslim faith, with both sharing a gritty sense of realism about their pasts. Moore ends this haunting look at two lives with a call to action and a detailed resource guide. --Vanessa Bush
