Mud, Microbes, & Medicine: How a Curious Anthropologist Got to the Boardroom

Elizabeth Reed Aden

For fans of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Lab Girl, an arresting memoir that chronicles a young woman’s journey from remote island research to Big Pharma and the boardroom.Elizabeth “Betsy” Aden, a twenty-something anthropology student, is clinging to academia as a safety net—until she’s offered a grant to spend the summer on a remote island in Melanesia, famously home to cannibals. Adventure calls, and Betsy doesn’t hesitate. Once she arrives, though, reality no running water, no electricity, and no Western medicine. Inspired by her experiences, Betsy returns to school with a new perspective and changes her field from cultural anthropology to biomedical anthropology. Driven by a new purpose, she returns to Melanesia for two years to study the transmission hepatitis B and sets up an ingenious field laboratory to collect and test blood samples.  Back at home, resourceful and determined Elizabeth successfully navigates the complicated “boys club” of academia. She explores teaching and advertising and finds a fit in biotech from which she builds a career in Big Pharma. That choice, along with her tenacity and willingness to take risks, propels Elizabeth on a meteoric rise to the senior executive suite in a large Swiss company and into the boardrooms of scrappy biotech companies. With electric detail and candid honesty, Mud, Microbes, and Medicine is a testimony of resilience and resolve in the face of challenges so large and unimaginable, you will wonder how Elizabeth’s story could even be true.

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Pageboy

Elliot Page

Pageboy is a groundbreaking coming-of-age memoir from the Academy Award-nominated actor Elliot Page. A generation-defining actor and one of the most famous trans advocates of our time, Elliot will now be known as an uncommon literary talent, as he shares never-before-heard details and intimate interrogations on gender, love, mental health, relationships, and Hollywood.

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The Thursday Murder Club

Richard Osman

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders. But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron might be pushing eighty but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves. Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it's too late?

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The Last Stitch (The Witches' Weave #1)

Chantelle N. Kerr

One magical pendant. Two enemies bound by fate. A love that could unravel history itself. When Oxford graduate student Lily Whitmore inherits her grandmother's mysterious hourglass pendant, she's catapulted into Victorian England, where magic is forbidden and those who wield it are erased from existence. But Lily isn't just any time traveler. She's a Weaver, capable of rewriting the very threads of fate. Enter August Hawthorne: witch hunter, sworn to erase Weavers from existence. Cold. Calculating. Devastatingly beautiful. And bound by duty. Every clash between him and this mysterious woman strips away another layer of his merciless exterior, revealing the tortured soul he's desperate to hide. He should be her hunter. Instead, the witch he's sworn to destroy is unraveling everything he believed about magic, duty, and himself. As magic bleeds from the world around them, Lily faces an impossible choice: embrace her power and save the Weavers, knowing she'll never see home again, or let magic die forever and watch the man who owns her heart become just another casualty of history. Some threads bind tighter when pulled. And some enemies are destined to become everything.

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Pageboy

Elliot Page

Pageboy is a groundbreaking coming-of-age memoir from the Academy Award-nominated actor Elliot Page. A generation-defining actor and one of the most famous trans advocates of our time, Elliot will now be known as an uncommon literary talent, as he shares never-before-heard details and intimate interrogations on gender, love, mental health, relationships, and Hollywood.

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The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she lived and made love with her husband, Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now… Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.

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