Summary:

Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA is the biography of the scientist whose research James Watson and Francis Crick needed to elucidate the structure of the DNA molecule.  Even though the discovery has had profound implications for modern medicine, Franklin's contribution to it almost remained obscure.

In 1968 Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) became visible to the world beyond a small circle of scientists when Watson published The Double Helix (1968), his "personal account" of puzzling out DNA.  If not for Watson's self-incriminating candor about stealing glances at Franklin's research, we might not know how crucial her lucid x-ray diffractions of hydrated DNA were to him and Francis Crick.  However, the account that indirectly acknowledged Franklin's contribution to their work represented her in a patronizing caricature.  Since ovarian cancer took her life a decade before Watson's memoir appeared, others have been left to respond to his version of the DNA story and representation of his female colleague.  Among Franklin's defenders, Brenda Maddox offers the most complete and insightful restoration of the scientist, her research, and her life. 

Maddox's biography draws from not only the many scientific archives and personal papers of scientists Franklin worked with in England, Europe, and America, but also from previously undisclosed letters written by Franklin, her friends, and her family.  Maddox also interviewed Franklin's relatives.  Doing so allowed her to position Franklin's life within the history of her close, extended Anglo-Jewish family, generations of wealthy London publishers and bankers who experienced discrimination.  This history does more than belie some of Watson's hasty assumptions about Franklin's background.  It creates a biography of a complex woman who negotiated biases as a citizen and a scientist.     

The biography is divided into three parts.  The first narrates the story of Franklin's childhood, rigorous education, and successful career before accepting the fateful research post at King's College, London.  She's known for thinking skeptically and working mathematically.  Yet early on she showed an aptitude for three-dimensional thinking and for understanding crystalline structures.   As an undergraduate at Cambridge she speculated about a "'Geometrical basis for inheritance'" (56).

The second section concentrates on the 27 months at King's when she worked uneasily with Maurice Wilkins, who showed her revelatory x-rays of DNA to Watson.   This balanced account of a controversial episode in the history of science offers evidence that Franklin was close to drawing the same conclusion about the structure of DNA that Watson and Crick rushed into print.  This section also accessibly explains the molecular biology of her day and the painstaking physical and intellectual intricacies of making and interpreting x-rays of crystalline molecules. 

The third section reminds us that Franklin had a very productive, though short career after leaving DNA to others.  She directed research programs for the study of plant viruses, and she investigated the polio virus shortly before she died.  Respected scientists, including Crick, praised her research.   Many, unlike Wilkins, liked working with her.  More than 40 years after viewing what's known as Franklin's Photograph 51, Watson publicly acknowledged that seeing it "'was the key event'" in understanding the geometry of DNA (316).  (See the note on Photo 51 below.)        

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Summary:

'Smut: Two Unseemly Stories' consists of two novellas, 'The Greening of Mrs Donaldson' and 'The Shielding of Mrs Forbes'.   Both are slight but well-observed and nimbly narrated stories about sex and manners.   

In 'The Greening of Mrs Donaldson', a newly widowed woman has to make ends meet; she takes in lodgers (initially a medical student and her boyfriend) and finds herself employed at a local medical school as a standardized or simulated patient (a patient instructor), joining several other stalwart characters in feigning illnesses and ailments for the educational benefit of training doctors.  When her tenants do not have the money to pay their rent, they find another way of reimbursing Mrs Donaldson.  'The Shielding of Mrs Forbes' is about the marriage of vain handsome Graham Forbes to a wealthy, although not particularly beautiful, woman, much to the frustrated dismay of his mother.  In both novellas, secrets about sex and surprising erotic arrangments threaten the measured, middle class lives of the Donaldson and Forbes families.  

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Summary:

In this series of six linked stories the narrator, Sara Boyd, weaves together stories of loss: her father's death when she was twelve, her husband's diagnosis of terminal kidney cancer, her mother's recurrent descent into mental illness, and even the death of a beloved dog. The stories merge in ways that reinforce the notion that new griefs bring up old ones, and that the trajectories of mourning are unpredictable and sometimes surprising in the conflicting currents of emotion they evoke. Sara doesn't present her life only in terms of losses, but the losses frame the story in such a way as to suggest that while key losses may not trump all other life-shaping events, they do organize and color them. The mother's mental illness is, in its way, a crueler loss than the death of Sara's beloved father, since hope of recovery keeps being dashed. Her siblings and children are marginal characters, but enter the stories enough to develop complex family contexts of caregiving.

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Summary:

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, directed by Stephen Daldry, features an all star cast including Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, Max Von Sydow, Zoe Caldwell and John Goodman, but the true star is Thomas Horn as ten year old Oskar Schell who loses his father on 9/11.  The film opens at his father's funeral; Oskar refuses to leave the limousine-- the coffin is empty, and without his father's body to mourn, death remains an abstraction.

Oskar refers to 9/11 as the "worst day."  First to arrive home on 9/11 from early dismissal at school, he hears the last phone messages from his father who is waiting for the firemen to rescue him.  Before his mother comes home, he swaps the answering machine to keep the messages hidden from his mother and grandmother, possibly to protect them from hearing the anguish in his father's voice or to preserve the special relationship he had with his father.  In a flashback we learn that Fred Schell, an amateur scientist, is concerned about his son's timidity. To help Oskar overcome his shyness, he invents searching expeditions that require Oskar to talk with others. One involves a search in Central Park for clues to the lost sixth borough of New York City.  Oskar's skill at tracking clues comes into play when he finds a key labeled "Black" in his father's belongings and begins a search that he hopes will lead him to discover something his father meant for him. 

The film is adapted from the novel of the same title by Jonathan Safer Foer.  The storyline has been streamlined for the screenplay, but the emotional turbulence that permeates the lives of the Schell family is exquisitely portrayed.  Sandra Bullock as the grieving widow must deal with her son's rage that it was she who was spared instead of her husband.  Despite her overwhelming grief, she watches over Oskar in a way that allows him to experience the search on his own, and it is only later that he discovers that she watched his every move, out of love.  Oskar will never get his father back, but he is able to come to terms with the loss and to move ahead with his father's silent encouragement always close at hand.

Max von Sydow plays Oskar's long lost grandfather, a character that was fully developed in the novel but not in the film. For instance, his refusal to speak, answering questions with a "yes" and "no" tattooed on either hand and writing on a pad for more explicit responses, remains a mystery that begs for further explanation.

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Summary:

The story of race-car driver Denny Swift, as told by his appealing dog, Enzo, is his death-basket memoir. Denny’s tale of woe seems endless. His wife, Eve, dies of a brain tumour and he is in a struggle with her parents for custody of his daughter Zoë. Making matters worse, he is falsely accused of raping a minor by a 15 year-old who has a crush on him.

Enzo would love to intervene. However, he is frustrated by his inability to speak and his lack of opposable thumbs—but he sees clearly the worth of his master and the need for careful perseverance—like racing in the rain.

 

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Summary:

In 1964, newly minted doctor, Barry Laverty, begins practice as the young assistant of crusty, seasoned, Dr. Fingal O’Reilly, in the small, Northern Irish village of Ballybucklebo. At first he thinks his new boss is fierce and unprofessional. But soon, Barry uncovers the sadness in the older doctor’s past and realizes that O’Reilly has excellent, clinical acumen. If he bends the rules, it is usually for the best.

Over the course of a month they face the ordinary struggles of general practice with Barry slowly learning the ropes: appendicitis in a child, a rushed delivery, pneumonia combined with heart failure, hypothyroidism, unwanted pregnancy, and stroke. And of course, the more minor staples of headache, cuts, and scrapes.

Not everything turns out well. Barry misses a diagnosis and cannot stop blaming himself, but his admission of the error to the patient’s wife is an important step in his education. The patients, however, leave the practice.

Social factors such as poverty, discrimination, and corruption of local officials pervade each vignette.

Barry also meets the beautiful Patricia—a survivor of polio—whose desire to pursue a career in civil engineering seems to pose an obstacle until all is happily resolved in the end.

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Summary:

Mija, a 66 year-old woman, is raising her daughter's grumpy teenaged son and trying to make ends meet with a part-time job as a maid for an elderly, wealthy man who has suffered a stroke.

She finds herself searching for nouns, and after consulting a doctor, is told bluntly that she has early Alzheimer's disease.

Perhaps because of her preoccupation with language, she joins a poetry class and strives to write, listening carefully to the poet-instructor's philosophical advice on vision and creativity. Throughout the film, she carries a little notebook with her and pauses to write her thoughts about flowers, beauty, birds, and apples.

A young girl in the grandson's class has committed suicide by drowning and Mija witnesses the mother's grief. From the girl's diary, the teachers and family learn that she had been repeatedly raped by six boys, one of whom is Mija's grandson.

The fathers of the other boys try to make a monetary settlement with the bereaved mother; they urge Mija too find an extraordinay amount money. In despair, she extorts the money from her employer as a "favour"-but the boy is utterly indifferent to her action, and in the end, is taken by the police anyway. Mija summons her daughter. She leaves a bouquet of flowers and the one poem that she managed to compose for her instructor to find at the last class. The daughter arrives to an empty home and we assume Mija has drowned herself.

 

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Summary:

In 1176, King Henry the II of England persuades the physician Adelia Aguilar to accompany his daughter, Princess Joanna, on her long journey from England to marry the King of Sicily. Adelia studied medicine in Salerno, but in the disbelieving, intolerant world of Northern Europe, she must hide her skills. She masquerades as the assistant of her own eunuch assistant, the Arab Mansur.  Her task is to protect and preserve the health of the princess. The King convinces her to make the journey by holding Adelia’s own infant daughter as a hostage.

The procession is troubled by a murderer, who could be trying to attack the princess or her doctor. Joanna falls ill, and Adelia diagnoses appendicitis, and then performs an operation to save her life. The question then arises whether or not her future husband will accept a bride with a surgical scar.

As in the other three novels, Adelia also uses her medical skills to solve the murders—a forensic pathologist avant la lettre. 

 

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Summary:

Helga Crane is a beautiful young teacher in Naxos, a southern American boarding school for black students. She is half Danish on her mother’s side, half African-American on her father’s side. Her only family is an aunt and uncle in Denmark.

Dr. Anderson, a distinguished black teacher professes love for her, but she feels stifled by him and the vision of their life ahead. She quits her job and flees to New York and the exciting cultural life of Harlem.

She thrives in that environment and men flock to her. There she meets James Vayle whom she likes and the Reverend Pleasant Green whom she does not—but once again, when Vayle proposes permanence, she flees to Copenhagen.

There, she spends an extended visit with her Aunt Katrina and Uncle Poul. At first the Danish couple are startled by her blackness, but they quickly adapt and enjoy the elevated status conveyed by having this intelligent, beautiful black woman in their world. Upon receiving another offer of marriage, Helga grows suspicious of her family’s use of her and flees once again.

She returns to America where she marries the Reverend Pleasant Green, although she doesn’t love him.  As babies come in succession, Helga develops severe post-partum depression. 

 

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Summary:

Aminata Diallo, called Meena, is born in mid-eighteenth-century Africa and leads a happy life with her Muslim parents. Her mother is a midwife and is teaching Meena her skills. But ruthless white men appear, killing her parents and imprisoning her. The eleven year-old girl is forced to march miles and miles to the sea. During the journey she makes friends with Chekura, a slightly older boy who seems to be employed by the white captors, but like Meena, has also been captured. They are kept at a fort, then herded on to ships and taken on an agonizing journey across the ocean.

Meena and Chekura are sold as slaves. They lose sight of each other and live on plantations in privation and squalor never knowing if they will be treated with kindness or cruelty. Meena is raped by an owner. She learns how to read and write English quickly (although her skill must be kept secret), and she is fascinated by maps, constantly plotting to return to Africa.

Meena and Chekura find each other and marry secretly - but soon they are separated. She has a baby girl. Her literary and midwifery skills are her salvation, and eventually she is sold to a Jewish duty inspector. He and his wife treat her well, and she and her child live in comfort, but the revolutionary war disrupts their world. Meena returns home one day to find that the Jewish couple have fled on ship to England, taking her daughter with them..."for her own good."

Meena moves to New York City, taking a room in a hotel and still intent on finding a way back to Africa. She writes the names and ages of the people clamoring to go to Nova Scotia as a reward for serving the British in the Revolutionary War: the original "book of negroes." The settlers arrive with hope and optimism, but they encounter more oppressions. Later she is lured by the attractive plan to build "Freetown" in Sierra Leone; again however, the promised resources never materialize and the fledgling community degenerates into crime and misery. Even Meena's attempt to find her original home is thwarted.

In 1802 London, as a frail elderly woman, the abolitionists treat Meena with reverence and curiosity. They encourage her to write her story, and there she finds her daughter again.

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