House of Broken Angels - Luis Alberto Urrea

 Two years ago in October 2018 I attended my second Nashville, TN Festival of the Book where I heard Luis speak.  He's a wonderful storyteller and I added this book to my TBR list.  I loved this story.  It's about the last birthday party of a family patriarch who is dying of cancer.  His family migrated from Mexico when he was a small boy.  The story of their lives on both sides of the border is a revealing look into first generation experience, the bonds of family and the hope for the future.  A great read.

Published: 2018  Read: September 2020  Genre: Fiction

She Has Her Mother's Smile - Carl Zimmer

Sub-title: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

Zimmer is science writer and journalist. This book is a tome, 574 pages, a little large for late night reading.  The book spans a wide variety of topics related to inheritance and heredity.  A fascinating read with many details of the science of heredity to pursue further.  Reading this book got me to follow the author on Twitter. 

Passages I flagged:

[because the first diagrams of families evolved to be displayed as trees] "the French gave these pictures a name in honor of their forking shape: "pe de grue"  meaning "crane's foot."  In English, the word became pedigree.

"When viruses infect bacteria, they typically land on their victim and inject a string of DNA inside.  Many microbes can chop off the tip of this incoming DNA and insert it into a stretch of its own DNA, called a CRISPR region. (CRISPR is short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.)" 

"If you go back far enough in the history of a human population, you reach a point in time when all the individuals who have any descendants among living people are ancestors of all living people." [Yale mathematician Joseph Chang]

"For some reason, the hard bony case surrounding the inner ear was often rich with DNA, even when none could be found elsewhere in a skeleton".

[microchimerism] ..."most mothers experience [it].  ..research has revealed that all pregnant women have fetal cells in their bloodstream at thirty-six weeks.  After birth, the fraction drops, but up to half of mothers still carry fetal cells in their blood decades after carrying their children."

"..so called cumulative culture is a hallmark of our species.  Humans are constantly adding on to the practices they've learned, creating complex new forms of culture." 

Published: 2018  Read: August/September 2020  Genre: Historical Science 

Before and After - Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate

 This is the book I wanted to be written when I read the fictionalized story of the Tennessee Children's Home Society.  It's the true stories of several of the children who were adopted through the Home run by an unscrupulous woman, Georgia Tann, who for over 30 years trafficked in children with impunity.

The first three-fourths of the book are positive, upbeat stories of how the children's lives turned out well despite always having a feeling of being different.  Most were raised as only children who were adopted into well-to-do homes.  The last few stories were not so positive.  The writing was weak and I was frustrated that the writers didn't seem to attempt to research adoption or unknown parentage. I also felt that their lack of organization in pulling the adoptees together was inexcusable, as if they were just trying to promote themselves and write a book and needed the stories to pull it together.  

Published: 2019  Read: September 2020   Genre: Non-fiction

I Will Be Complete - Glen David Gold

 

Back in 2018 I went to the Southern Festival of the Book in Nashville for the second time with my good friend, Kathryn.  It's a long weekend of many author's speaking about their books in multiple venues.  I'd started reading Glen David Gold's Carter Beats the Devil at one time but didn't finish it.  Listening to him tell the story of writing this memoir had me adding it to my TBR list and I finally got it from the library this month.

He had a tumultuous childhood, growing up in California with a flitty, flawed, bohemian mother and a boom to bust, cold father.  The book focuses on the disastrous relationship with his mother and his finally breaking away from her.

I felt that while their relationship was fraught with dysfunction, he was still a privileged, well-off, only child whose native intelligence did not extend to his emotional smarts.

Quotes:

"Recently a friend asked why it was so hard for me to understand that people are what they do.  It was a concept so slipper I needed to write it down and stare at it like an advanced algebraic equation."

"There isn't much that causes people to recoil more than sensing someone wants to be liked." 

"Regardless of the pride I took in the empty place in my chest, I still had a contrary faith I believed in so deeply that I'd mistaken it for an axiom.  If I love you hard enough I can fix you.  It doesn't work like that.  This is what I want to say so it's as familiar as the stars and sunrise: your love is not enough. 

 

Published: 2018  Read: September 2020  Genre: Memoir