With his three critically acclaimed novels\, Chang-rae Lee has established himself as one of the most talented writers of contemporary literary fiction. Now\, with The Surrendered\, Lee has created a book that amplifies everything we've seen in his previous works\, and reads like nothing else. It is a brilliant\, haunting\, heartbreaking story about how love and war inalterably change the lives of those they touch.
June Han was only a girl when the Korean War left her orphaned\; Hector Brennan was a young GI who fled the petty tragedies of his small town to serve his country. When the war ended\, their lives collided at a Korean orphanage where they vied for the attentions of Sylvie Tanner\, the beautiful yet deeply damaged missionary wife whose elusive love seemed to transform everything. Thirty years later and on the other side of the world\, June and Hector are reunited in a plot that will force them to come to terms with the mysterious secrets of their past\, and the shocking acts of love and violence that bind them together.
As Lee unfurls the stunning story of June\, Hector\, and Sylvie\, he weaves a profound meditation on the nature of heroism and sacrifice\, the power of love\, and the possibilities for mercy\, salvation\, and surrendering oneself to another. Combining the complex themes of identity and belonging of Native Speaker and A Gesture Life with the broad range\, energy\, and pure storytelling gifts of Aloft\, Chang-rae Lee has delivered his most ambitious\, exciting\, and unforgettable work yet. It is a mesmerizing novel\, elegantly suspenseful and deeply affecting.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T151913Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100314T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100314T000000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/rebecca-skloot-immortal-life-henrietta-lacks URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/rebecca-skloot-immortal-life-henrietta-lacks SUMMARY:Rebecca Skloot - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks DESCRIPTION:Her name was Henrietta Lacks\, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors\, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture\, they are still alive today\, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale\, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine\; uncovered secrets of cancer\, viruses\, and the atom bomb’s effects\; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization\, cloning\, and gene mapping\; and have been bought and sold by the billions.
Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown\, buried in an unmarked grave.
Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey\, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells\; from Henrietta’s small\, dying hometown of Clover\, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters\, faith healings\, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today\, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.
Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death\, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials\, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows\, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is 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 are made of.
Over the decade it took to uncover this story\, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah\, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions\: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister\, Elsie\, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine\, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance?
Intimate in feeling\, astonishing in scope\, and impossible to put down\, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery\, as well as its human consequences.
Join us for an undead discussion by two authors of zombie young adult fiction\, Carrie Ryan and Adam Selzer. Meet the brains behind the braaaaains of these exceptional novels. Educators\, fans of horror fiction\, writers\, and teens are all welcome to attend this unique event.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T151913Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100316T003000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100316T003000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/jose-castro-urioste-and-what-have-you-done URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/jose-castro-urioste-and-what-have-you-done SUMMARY:Jose Castro Urioste - And What Have You Done? DESCRIPTION:___
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T151913Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100319T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100319T000000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/nell-irvin-painter-history-white-people URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/nell-irvin-painter-history-white-people SUMMARY:Nell Irvin Painter - The History of White People DESCRIPTION:Eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter tells perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history. Beginning at the roots of Western civilization\, she traces the invention of the idea of a white race-often for economic\, scientific\, and political ends. She shows how the origins of American identity in the eighteenth century were intrinsically tied to the elevation of white skin into the embodiment of beauty\, power\, and intelligence\; how the great American intellectuals- including Ralph Waldo Emerson-insisted that only Anglo Saxons were truly American\; and how the definitions of who is "\;white"\; and who is "\;American"\; have evolved over time. A story filled with towering historical figures\, The History of White People closes an enormous gap in a literature that has long focused on the nonwhite\, and it forcefully reminds us that the concept of "\;race"\; is an all-too-human invention whose meaning\, importance\, and reality have changed according to a long and rich history.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T151913Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100406T233000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100406T233000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/elif-batuman-possessed-adventures-russian-books-and-people-who-read-them URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/elif-batuman-possessed-adventures-russian-books-and-people-who-read-them SUMMARY:**POSTPONED** Elif Batuman - The Possessed\: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them DESCRIPTION:THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED. WE APOLOGIZE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE.
No one who read Elif Batuman’s first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. “Babel in California” told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages\, Batuman managed to misplace Babel’s last living relatives at the San Francisco airport\, uncover Babel’s secret influence on the making of King Kong\, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable\, comic\, humane\, ironic\, charming\, poignant\, and completely\, unpretentiously full of love for literature.
Batuman’s subsequent pieces—for The New Yorker\, Harper’s Magazine\, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation\, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford\, Switzerland\, and St. Petersburg\; retrace Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus\; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying\; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva.
Love and the novel\, the individual in history\, the existential plight of the graduate student\: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors\, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience\, combining fresh readings of the great Russians\, from Pushkin to Platonov\, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.
END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR