Typhoid Mary | Destroying Angel | 2

The Ebola virus is greatly feared, but not well understood. Ebola virus has appeared only a handful of times and, despite being highly infectious, it has never spread to become a full-blown epidemic. However, Ebola’s brutal attack on victims’ bodies, astronomical kill rates, and ability to mutate make it a constant potential threat.

The Hot Zone explores how Ebola and its family of viruses affect humans, the history of known outbreaks, and the possibility of a future epidemic.

Why is tuberculosis—a completely curable disease—still killing over 1.6 million people annually? In Everything Is Tuberculosis, best-selling novelist and YouTube educator John Green confronts this troubling paradox, revealing how social inequality, stigma, and systemic failures allow a preventable tragedy to continue. After meeting a teenage TB patient in Sierra Leone, Green embarked on a mission to understand and combat humanity’s deadliest infectious disease.

Our guide distills Green’s exploration of TB’s scientific, historical, and social dimensions into a framework for understanding this global crisis. We discuss his insights into how TB persists along lines of poverty and power, and how a combination of medical innovation, social change, and political will could end the epidemic. We also connect Green’s ideas to sources of hope—from fungi in peat bogs that could yield new antibiotics to lessons from Black medical justice movements—providing other perspectives on how we might respond to this ancient disease.

Fever 1793 details the yellow fever plague in Philadelphia a decade after the Revolutionary War through the eyes of young 14-year-old Matilda Cook. With great respect for historical accuracy and a keen voice, Laurie Halse Anderson describes the fear and decay that destroyed the nation’s capital and killed thousands of people in three months. Anderson’s keen attention to human emotions and connections lifts this coming-of-age story from the depths of darkness to the light of courage and survival.

Over a half-century after the civil rights movement sought justice for African Americans, prominent movements such as Black Lives Matter continue fighting to expose and resist injustice. In this social landscape, Bryan Stevenson’s message is timely: The US justice system consistently denies justice to society’s most vulnerable members.

In his 2014 book, Just Mercy, Stevenson examines the justice system’s pervasive failures toward marginalized populations, especially Black Americans. To illustrate these failures, Stevenson discusses numerous criminal cases, most prominently the 1989 case of Walter McMillian, a Black man wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Alabama.

In this guide, we’ll discuss Stevenson’s analysis of the McMillian case and his evidence of extreme punishments doled out more broadly by the justice system. Moreover, we’ll consider Stevenson’s diagnosis of the root problems with the American conception of justice and his suggestions for repairing it. We’ll also examine arguments from other sources about how to improve the justice system and provide further context for the cases that Stevenson cites.

In 1951, a 30-year-old African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks entered Johns Hopkins Hospital to be treated for cervical cancer. In a matter of months she was dead, overcome by her cancer’s malignancy. Her cancer cells, however, would prove immortal—and change medicine forever.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells the story of Henrietta, her family, and her incredible cells. Tracking both the scientific advances owed to “HeLa” cells and the struggles of Henrietta’s descendants, author Rebecca Skloot leads readers through the history of cell research, the ethical implications of scientific study, and the human story of a poor and ailing family whose matriarch contributed to some of 20th-century science’s greatest achievements.

Fever 1793 details the yellow fever plague in Philadelphia a decade after the Revolutionary War through the eyes of young 14-year-old Matilda Cook. With great respect for historical accuracy and a keen voice, Laurie Halse Anderson describes the fear and decay that destroyed the nation’s capital and killed thousands of people in three months. Anderson’s keen attention to human emotions and connections lifts this coming-of-age story from the depths of darkness to the light of courage and survival.

Maid is Stephanie Land’s memoir of her struggle to make ends meet as a single mom by working as a housekeeper and relying on government assistance. Since Maid was published, it has been adapted into a popular, critically acclaimed Netflix miniseries.

Beyond being a personal narrative, Maid is also a broader social commentary on the American “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality. Land does backbreaking labor under difficult conditions while caring for her daughter and studying to get a college degree—yet circumstances beyond her control keep her mired in poverty. From domestic abuse to flawed government policies, the obstacles that Land must overcome are overwhelming. By the end of the memoir, while she hasn’t yet fully escaped her situation, she has begun to make a better life for herself and her daughter.

Our guide provides background information, research, and statistics on the key themes, bringing context to Land’s personal experience as it relates to the larger population of Americans experiencing poverty and abuse.

In 1951, a 30-year-old African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks entered Johns Hopkins Hospital to be treated for cervical cancer. In a matter of months she was dead, overcome by her cancer’s malignancy. Her cancer cells, however, would prove immortal—and change medicine forever.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells the story of Henrietta, her family, and her incredible cells. Tracking both the scientific advances owed to “HeLa” cells and the struggles of Henrietta’s descendants, author Rebecca Skloot leads readers through the history of cell research, the ethical implications of scientific study, and the human story of a poor and ailing family whose matriarch contributed to some of 20th-century science’s greatest achievements.

Fever 1793 details the yellow fever plague in Philadelphia a decade after the Revolutionary War through the eyes of young 14-year-old Matilda Cook. With great respect for historical accuracy and a keen voice, Laurie Halse Anderson describes the fear and decay that destroyed the nation’s capital and killed thousands of people in three months. Anderson’s keen attention to human emotions and connections lifts this coming-of-age story from the depths of darkness to the light of courage and survival.

In 1951, a 30-year-old African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks entered Johns Hopkins Hospital to be treated for cervical cancer. In a matter of months she was dead, overcome by her cancer’s malignancy. Her cancer cells, however, would prove immortal—and change medicine forever.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells the story of Henrietta, her family, and her incredible cells. Tracking both the scientific advances owed to “HeLa” cells and the struggles of Henrietta’s descendants, author Rebecca Skloot leads readers through the history of cell research, the ethical implications of scientific study, and the human story of a poor and ailing family whose matriarch contributed to some of 20th-century science’s greatest achievements.