Book #120 – Digital Fortress by Dan Brown

When you hear the name Dan Brown, you probably think of the DaVinci Code and Robert Langdon. However, this book chosen to represent Maryland does not have the blockbuster symbologist, but rather takes place in the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade. There were only 3 books set in Maryland on the list, and I decided to go with Digital Fortress despite being split between the NSA building and Spain. So, while I’m sure my relatives from Baltimore will be slightly mad about me not choosing something from their city, there unfortunately wasn’t a whole lot of selection.

The story follows power couple Susan, a cryptographer for the NSA, and David, a linguistics professor as they tackle two different parts of a mysterious encryption known as Digital Fortress. David is sent to Spain to recover the belongings of the genius behind the encryption, while Susan works in the depths of the NSA HQ trying to figure out why their code breaker can’t break Digital Fortress. So, if you pick up Digital Fortress, be prepared for a bit of code speak from the late 90s, early 2000s when the NSA was still fairly unknown.

Book #131 – The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Over the summer of 2015, Knoxville’s STEM program assigned this book to the incoming freshmen. One mother objected on the grounds of “pornographic” content, due to the description of how Henrietta discovered her cervical cancer, and the mentions of her husband’s sleeping around. The author weighed in on the challenge in a September 2015 statement that made national news. The last publish on it was that the school was investigating the challenge, but did allow their teachers some level of autonomy when selecting reading lists.

The book itself was published in 2010 and is a mixture of the author’s research into how HeLa cells were found and developed, and the story of Henrietta and her family. In a statement by the author, she had not originally intended to include the story of the Lacks’ family, but after speaking with Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, the author knew she would have to include the family’s story. HeLa, a seemingly immortal strain of cancer cells, has been integral in cell research for decades, and this book details how it all started, and the consequences of that research.