Join the HSC leisure book club, Relax and Read, which is a complement to Read and Lead!
Relax and Read is sponsored by the Robert M. Bird Society, with Library faculty facilitating the book club.
Book Exchange
In 2015 BHSL Staff created a Relax and Read Book Exchange on the 4th floor of the Library in the Recreational Reading area. Turn to your left once you exit the elevator. If you see a book in the exchange you'd like to read take it and if you have a book you're finished with leave it, it's that simple.
Enjoy!
Program Overview
TheRelax and Read book club was introduced on the HSC campus in March 2016 as an opportunity for students, staff, and faculty to discuss books that are for leisure reading.
Vote for the next book selection by filling out our form: Book Suggestion Form
ALL BOOKS HAVE BEEN CLAIMED
Books for this semester are ready now!
The Three Steps to Participating:
For more information, please contact Payton-Patterson@ouhsc.edu, Bird Library staff
Not on the Health Sciences Center campus?
Join us at Goodreads!
https://www.goodreads.com/
Search for: OUHSC Relax & Read Book Club
Or visit: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/909854-ouhsc-relax-read-book-club
Before We Were Yours
Book Summary
Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge—until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents—but they quickly realize the dark truth. At the mercy of the facility’s cruel director, Rill fights to keep her sisters and brother together in a world of danger and uncertainty.
Aiken, South Carolina, present day. Born into wealth and privilege, Avery Stafford seems to have it all: a successful career as a federal prosecutor, a handsome fiancé, and a lavish wedding on the horizon. But when Avery returns home to help her father weather a health crisis, a chance encounter leaves her with uncomfortable questions and compels her to take a journey through her family’s long-hidden history, on a path that will ultimately lead either to devastation or to redemption.
Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country.
Source: Book Summary
Before and After
Book Summary
From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business at the Tennessee Children's Home Society in Memphis. She offered up more than 5,000 orphans tailored to the wish lists of eager parents--hiding the fact that many weren't orphans at all, but stolen sons and daughters of poor families, desperate single mothers, and women told in maternity wards that their babies had died.
The publication of Lisa Wingate's novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann's lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who knew little about their pasts gained insight into the startling facts behind their family histories. Encouraged by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the stories of fifteen adoptees in this book, many determined Tann survivors set out to trace their roots and find their birth families.
Before and After includes moving and sometimes shocking accounts of the ways in which adoptees were separated from their first families. Often raised as only children, many have joyfully reunited with siblings in the final decades of their lives. In Before and After, Wingate and Christie tell of first meetings that are all the sweeter and more intense for time missed and of families from very different social backgrounds reaching out to embrace better-late-than-never brothers, sisters, and cousins. In a poignant culmination of art meeting life, long-silent victims of the tragically corrupt system return to Memphis with Wingate and Christie to reclaim their stories at a Tennessee Children's Home Society reunion . . . with extraordinary results .
Source: Book Summary
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