Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth’s Strout’s Pulitzer Prize winner, takes the reader to Crosby, Maine where we discover who Olive is through the eyes of her family and neighbors as told in thirteen separate stories.    We will meet at 7:30 on Thursday, Sept. 3rd to discuss the book.  For anyone interested in additional background about the book, you might want to check out some of the following:

New York Times Book Review and the Boston Globe review

Tom Ashbrook’s NPR Interview with the author (May 7, 2009).  During the interview, you find out that “Little Burst” was the first story she wrote.  It is a treat to hear Ms. Strout read and the callers include a young woman struggling with anorexia and a man who gave up a 35 year drug addiction.  It is a fascinating interview.

Random House has information about the author, a reader’s guide and an author Q&A on its website.

On the website for the book, there is an author interview and a reading guide.  There is a review in the Boston Globe along with a brief update of Kris and John’s trip in 2008.  Kris Holloway wrote a short article in the NY Times about having a dog while she lived in Mali.  It is yet another poignant story of the cultural differences!  A May 16th article in the NY Times deals with maternal mortality

Wikipedia has lots of background information on Mali as does the CIA World Factbook. 

As more women from sub-Saharan African countries end up in the offices of  European and North American countries, the health care professionals are having to deal with providing health care to women who have experiences female circumcision.  You might want to check out the article by Adriana Kaplan-Marcusan, Perception of primary health professionals about Female Genital Mutilation: from healthcare to intercultural competence.  Ball also has a review of the topic and how services have been developed services for women in the UK.

Another issue dealt with in the book is spouse abuse also covered in Rani’s article, An empirical investigation of attitudes toward wife-beating among men and women in seven sub=Saharan African countries.

Having enjoyed several of her other books, we selected Geraldine Brooks’s most recent book for June.  The book focuses on the  stories related to the “clues” left in the Sarajevo Haggadah and the story of Hanna Heath, a rare book conservator.  Both Lisa Fugard  and Janet Maslin wrote about the book in the New York Times.  Additional reviews can be found on ReviewsOfBooks.com.  Yale University has a website  with information and photos of various Haggadah.  High quality illustrations are also available on another website and maybe some of you will be able to identify some of the stories.  The colorful illustrations use the same background of blue or orange colored squares.  Geraldine Brooks’s website includes links to her NPR interview and a conversation among other resources.  Pioneers of Book Conservation discusses the careers of pre-eminent US and UK book conservators.

The first Children’s Hospital Reads Together program is planned for May 2009.  The planned events include Book Group discussions, a cooking demonstration, Psychiatry Grand Rounds and a staff panel presentation.  Make sure to enter the weekly trivia contest as each week we will award a gift card to the randomly selected winner.  The library has compiled some background information:

Wikipedia has some interesting information on the “bhalo nam” or good name and “dak nam” or nickname.  Apparently this is a tradition unique to Bengali families and not a common practice throughout India. 

New York Times Book Review

Book Group Guide

Author interview from PBS

A great blog on Bengali cooking

Information about Calcutta, India

If you have seen the movie (the library has a copy available for loan), you might be interested in this review.

Seattle, Portland created an extensive Toolbox when they read the book together in 2003.

There is an interesting piece in The Nation entited “The Constant Gardener”: What the Movie Missed which looks at the pharmaceutical industry and clinical trials.

Salon.com has a fairly scathing review of the book and the New York Times (there is no charge to login) review made comparisons to Dickens’ attempts to right some of society’s ills.

You can also find some recent articles such as: Peer review. Pfizer denied access to journals’ files (Science) and Guinea-pigging: healthy human subjects for drug safety trials are in demand. But is it a living?  (New Yorker).

Le Carre also wrote the forward to “The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World’s Poorest Patients” by Sonia Shah.

NPR has an interview with the author.