The book club will be reading Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver. Meet with them on Tuesday to discuss the book.

from GoodReads:

Flight Behavior

Flight Behavior transfixes from its opening scene, when a young woman’s narrow experience of life is thrown wide with the force of a raging fire. In the lyrical language of her native Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver bares the rich, tarnished humanity of her novel’s inhabitants and unearths the modern complexities of rural existence. Characters and reader alike are quickly carried beyond familiar territory here, into the unsettled ground of science, faith, and everyday truces between reason and conviction.

Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man. As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a secret tryst, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media. The bewildering emergency draws rural farmers into unexpected acquaintance with urbane journalists, opportunists, sightseers, and a striking biologist with his own stake in the outcome. As the community lines up to judge the woman and her miracle, Dellarobia confronts her family, her church, her town, and a larger world, in a flight toward truth that could undo all she has ever believed.

Flight Behavior takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change. With a deft and versatile empathy Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world.

Call now to register your entry!

Entries will be sold at the end of the evening.

The Pember Book Club will be discussing “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”

from Rebecca Skloots website:

About The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

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, from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia, to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew. It’s a story inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we’re made of.

Winner of several awards, including the 2010 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the 2010 Wellcome Trust Book Prize, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Award for Excellence in Science Writing, the 2011 Audie Award for Best Non-Fiction Audiobook, and a Medical Journalists’ Association Open Book Award, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was featured on over 60 critics’ best of the year lists.

A meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Pember Library and Museum will be held on Thursday, October 23. This month only, the board will meet on the fourth Thursday. This is a regular meeting and open to the public.

Every other Wednesday,   6-8PM at the Pember Library, 33 West Main, Granville: Pat Oathout will teach quilling. Pre-registration is not required, materials provided. For information, call 518-642-2525.

Pember Presents Taradiddle ……….. STRANGE SURPRISES

What happens when a greedy witch goes one step too far?  Why is the Snow Queen so fond of marshmallow on her hot chocolate?  Who is that knocking on the Old Woman’s door?  And what could a simple garden vegetable possibly do to put a whole village in an uproar?

Linda will have crafts and fun for the kids at 11 AM. Then join storytelling duo Taradiddle at the Pember Library on October 25 at 12 Noon to learn the strange and surprising answers to these questions in a fun program for the whole family.  Everyone’s invited to join in at a Taradiddle event, and whether the mood is slightly scary or seriously silly, audiences leave with smiles on their faces and maybe even a new tale or tune to pass along.