My Favorite Reads Giveaway Hop

This hop is hosted by I Am A Reader Not A Writer and Rachelle’s Writing Spot

What is a hop?  At the end of this page you will see a list of links to other blogs.  Each participating blog is hosting their very own giveaway. You will find lots of variety among the prizes such as gift cards, books or other interesting items for book lovers.  There are over 100 blog participating in this hop so your chances of winning something cool are really good.  Please read the rules before entering.  After you finish this one hop on over to the others and enter to win.  Hop, hop, hop.  All giveaways end on June 6th.

What can you win?  There will be one US winners for this giveaway of a paperback copy of my favorite book this year.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

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.
Giveaway Rules
Open to US Residents
1 Paperback Copy of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Must enter via Raffleopter

a Rafflecopter giveaway

 

Why I Love Wednesday

Reflections of a Bookaholic

Mocha Girl Alexis from Reflections of a Bookaholic started a Wednesday Meme called Why I Love Wednesday.  What is a Meme you ask?  According to wikipedia…The term “Internet meme” refers to a catchphrase or concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the Internet, largely through Internet-based email, blogs, forums, Imageboards, social networking sites and instant messaging.  Basically, a topic from the meme host (Alexis) is posted on participating blogs with blog authors answering it on their site (here).

The topic this Wednesday is… Humorous Reads

I just finished a great audiobook called Beauty Queens by Libba Bray!  It was a hilarious satire on pageants and pageant women.  I laughed so much in the car driving to work I know people thought I was insane.

What are some of your favorite books that made you laugh out loud?  Spit out your tea while reading?  hheeeheeehhee!!

May Reading Challenge Check In!

Enoch Pratt Free Library book wagon during visit to Dallas Street, BaltimoreIt the end of May!

Most of you all signed up back in December for various reading challenges.  Remember?  Did they fall off like New Years Resolutions usually do about this time of the year if not sooner.
Have you been keeping up with your reading?  Or do you have to play catch up?

My Reading Challenges for 2012 are:

POC (People of Color) Reading Challenge - I have read 6 out of 9 books by people of color

Audiobook Challenge - I have listened to 9 out of 12 audiobooks

Dusty Bookshelf Challenge - I have read 4 out of 10 books on my dusty bookshelf

TBR (To Be Read) Pile Challenge – I have read 8 out of 10 books on my TBR list

Goodreads.com Reading Challenge - I have read/listened to 24 books out of my goal of 35 books for the year

My  personal goal of losing 30 lbs by June - A BIG FAIL!! (Updating that goal to December) :)

If you are like most people (and me) your challenges and resolutions fell off into the waste side around January 10th.  If not sooner!  But there is no reason why you can’t start again today.  There are so many reading challenges that are open all year. Check out Goodreads.com and A Novel Challenge.  At Novel Challenges there is a reading challenge for every kind of book out there. Picture Books, Audio Books, Non Fiction, Thick Books,  Short Stories.  Everything!!  Mocha Girl Sidne has a great one too.  The Versatile Reading Challenge 2012

So go to the comments section below and start bragging about your goals and how you are doing with them.  Or let us know you need a cheerleader to help get your motivation a kick-start.

Let’s make 2012 AMAZING!!

Quote It!

Review: The Lost Years

Author:  Mary Higgins Clark
Genre:  Mystery Fiction
Publisher:  Simon & Schuster
Release Date: April 3, 2012

Paperback: 304 pages

Buy The Book: The Lost Years

Book Description

In her long career as America’s most beloved suspense writer, Mary Higgins Clark’s The Lost Years is her most astonishing and dramatic novel to date. At its center is a discovery that, if authenticated, may be the most revered document in human history—“the holiest of the holy”—and certainly the most coveted and valuable object in the world.  Dr. Jonathan Lyons, a seventy-year-old biblical scholar, believes he has found the rarest of parchments—a letter that may have been written by Jesus Christ. Stolen from the Vatican library in the fifteenth century, it was assumed to be lost forever.

Under the promise of secrecy, Jonathan attempts to confirm his findings with several other biblical experts. But on the eve before his own murder, he confides to Father Aiden O’Brien, a family friend, that one of those whom he trusted most is determined to keep it from being returned to the Vatican.

The next evening Jonathan Lyons is found shot to death in his New Jersey home. His daughter, twenty-seven year old Mariah, finds her father’s body sprawled over his desk in his study, a fatal bullet wound in the back of his neck, and her mother, Kathleen, an Alzheimer’s victim, hiding in the study closet, incoherent and clutching the murder weapon. The police suspect that Kathleen, who in her lucid moments knows that Jonathan was involved with a much younger woman Lily Stewart, has committed the murder.

But Mariah believes that the key to her father’s death is tied to another question: Where is the missing parchment? Whom, among his close circle of friends, might he have consulted? And did one of them kill to keep possession of the letter?

What Mariah doesn’t know is that there was an eyewitness to the murder, someone whose unwise attempt to blackmail the killer begins a new circle of death, with Mariah as the ultimate target of one person’s obsession with a priceless historical treasure.

With all the elements that have made her a worldwide bestseller, Mary Higgins Clark’s The Lost Years is at once a breathless murder mystery and a hunt for what may be the most precious religious and archeological treasure of all time.

Mocha Girl Book Bloggers

My Little Pocketbooks

Mocha Girl Reviews

Mocha Girl Rochelle: Greetings to my Mocha Girls I have been reading The Lost Years this book has kept me in suspense, I would think that I had solved who the guilty party was only to keep reading and discover not lol pretty good easy read. Tempe Chapter, Rochelle

Mocha Girl Yvette: I’m reading it too! It’s pretty good. Can’t wait to discuss with the group.

Mocha Girl Alysia: The book is a quick read and I thought the overall storyline was interesting. What would people and the church do if there was a real letter from Jesus in existence? Mary Higgings Clark throws that out there with an affair and a murder. I liked the pace of the book and I actually thought I knew what was going to happen in the end.

Did you read The Lost Years?  What did you think of the book?  Leave your review in the comments section below.
Please use the 1 click Review as well.  Pick one of the following selections for your overall feeling of this months book.

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