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Lifelong Learning through Literature
The Summer Reading program at Rollins was created with the purpose of engaging incoming first-year students to topics of leadership and citizenship. These challenge students' conceptions of the immediate world around them and to the larger world of which we are all an integral part.
Each student will be sent a copy of the Summer Reading selection and will be expected to finish the book before Fall Welcome Weekend starts in August. In addition to the Summer Reading, every incoming student is required to complete a substantive response to the summer reading book. Your RCC faculty member will give you more information on this project over the course of the summer.
The 2011 Summer Reading Book is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a
poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in
1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing
the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more.
Henrietta’s cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains
virtually unknown, and her family can’t afford health insurance.
Soon to be made into an HBO movie by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball, this New York Times bestseller takes readers on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers filled with HeLa cells, from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia, to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew. It’s a story 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’re made of.
Winner of the 2010 Wellcome Trust Book Prize
Named by more than 60 critics as one of the best books of 2010, including:
A Best Book of the Year at: O, The Oprah Magazine, Publishers Weekly,
Library Journal, Bookmarks Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist,
For more information about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, check out the following resources.
