Book Discussion Group, Saturday, November 4, 2017, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Sycamore Row by John Grisham

Biography of John Grisham

Pulled from his official online biography: John Grisham was born in 1955 in Jonesboro, Arkansas. His father was a construction worker, and his mother was a homemaker. He received his law degree from the University of Mississippi in 1981. He set up his law practice in Southaven, Mississippi, a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee, specializing in criminal defense and personal injury litigation. In 1983, Grisham was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives, where he served until 1990.

Grisham was inspired to write his first novel, A Time to Kill, to which Sycamore Row is a sequel, while listening to the testimony of a 12-year-old rape victim and imagining what would have happened if her father had killed her assailants. He worked on this book in his spare time and finished it in 1987. It was finally published in 1988 with a printing of only 5,000 copies. By the time A Time to Kill was published, Grisham had already started on his second novel, and writing gradually became his life. He has averaged a novel a year since then, and nine of his novels have been made into movies.

The first video below is a routine book-plug appearance in which Grisham discusses Sycamore Row with the "CBS This Morning" crew. The second one is a BBC interview in which Grisham discusses his own personal struggles with racism, having grown up in the South when he did. I included it because it contains some political commentary I found interesting, given the way the most recent national election turned out.

Book Discussion Group Meeting, Saturday, October 7, 2017, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

Biography of Hope Jahren

1933 Strike at Hormel Plant in Austin, MN

As usual, extracted through painstaking research from the pages of Wikipedia (the usual caveats about accuracy and veracity apply):

Anne Hope Jahren was born in Austin, Minnesota on September 27, 1969. Her father taught science at a community college, and she has three older brothers. She completed her undergraduate education in geology at the University of Minnesota, graduating cum laude in 1991. Jahren earned her Ph.D in 1996 at the University of California, Berkeley in the field of soil science. Her dissertation covered the formation of biominerals in plants and used novel stable isotope methods to examine the processes. From 1996 to 1999, she was an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, then moved to Johns Hopkins University, where she stayed until 2008.

At Georgia Tech, she conducted pioneering research on paleoatmospheres using fossilized plants, and discovered the second methane hydrate release event that occurred 117 million years ago. She also spent a year on a Fulbright Award at the University of Copenhagen, learning DNA analysis techniques. While at Johns Hopkins, Jahren received media attention for her work with the fossil forests of Axel Heiberg Island. Her studies of the trees allowed her to estimate the environmental conditions on the island 45 million years ago. She and her collaborators analyzed depletion of oxygen isotopes to determine the weather patterns there that allowed large Metasequoia forests to flourish during the Eocene. Her research at Johns Hopkins also included the first extraction and analysis of DNA found in paleosol and the first discovery of stable isotopes existing in a multicellular organism's DNA. 

Jahren left Johns Hopkins for a full professorship at the University of Hawaii. Her research there focused on using stable isotope analysis to determine characteristics of the environment on different timescales. As of September 1, 2016, Jahren is a Wilson Professor at the University of Oslo's Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics, where she studies how living and fossil organisms are chemically linked to the environment. 

In the video below, Hope Jahren discusses Lab Girl with the PBS News Hour.

Themes from Lab Girl

Mass Spectrometry Analysis 

Mass spectrometry played a vital role in Hope Jahren's research. The following video purports to explain mass spectrometry and simplify it. I'm not sure I understand better now, but the narrator has a lovely accent.

This is a picture of berries from the hackberry tree, Jahren's first research subject.

A Lifelong Lab Partner 

Here is a picture of Hope Jahren and Bill Hagopian in their lab.

Here is a somewhat more recent picture of Bill.

Dogs and Road Trips

A picture of a Chesapeake Bay Retriever, the author's preferred canine companion.

A picture of "Stuckie," the mummified dog.

Monkey Jungle Island in Florida still exists. It'll cost you about $30 to get in.

One's Own Personal Tree 

The closest thing I had to a childhood personal relationship with a tree similar to the one Hope Jahren had with the spruce in her yard was what I was initially told was a "white walnut," but I later found out was a "paradox walnut," a cross between an American black walnut and an English walnut, which Luther Burbank developed to serve as a rootstock for English walnuts grown in California. It was tall and spreading enough to provide shade in the hot summers and strong enough to support a tire swing.

A paradox walnut, but not MY paradox walnut.