“The Women of Chateau Lafayette” (2021) by Stephanie Dray follows three women through four wars. One thread that connects the novel’s characters is Chavaniac, or the Chateau Lafayette, the marquis de Lafayette’s childhood home. Another thread is the women’s commitment to Lafayette’s ideals of freedom. The three women of Chateau Lafayette include Adrienne, a noblewoman, Beatrice, a former dance-hall girl, and Marthe, an orphan.

Adrienne and Gilbert Lafayette married in 1774 when she was 14 and he was 16 years old. Three years later, a pregnant Adrienne sent her husband to fight in the American Revolutionary War. While in America, Lafayette made a name for himself as a hero. He then brought his ideals of freedom for everyone to France where they were met with mixed results. Dray’s book then follows Adrienne through the turmoil of the French Revolutionary period.

Socialite Beatrice Astor-Chandler worked to support France before the U.S. entered WWI. She used her connections to raise large amounts of money to purchase supplies for the French soldiers. Eventually she and her husband purchased Chavaniac, turning it into an orphanage.

Marthe was raised at the Chavaniac orphanage during the latter part of WWI, then went on to teach at the orphanage. She used her artistic talents to make her corner of France a better place in spite of WWII and the Nazi presence in France.

If you don’t like reading a book that moves through different time periods, this is not the book for you. The chapters are short, and rotate through each woman. Sometimes the women are tackling similar issues through the rotation, including relationship trials and facing down enemies. Each woman has her own distinct personality. 

I found all three of the women’s stories equally interesting, so I didn’t enjoy one storyline more than another. However, I did read “The Women of Chateau Lafayette” with a Wikipedia tab open. I discovered Chavianic is a real place, and further explored the history of some of the more remarkable characters.   

The author was kind enough to include an Author’s Note explaining which characters were real (most of them were), and which events actually happened. “As in all my historical novels, the most outrageous bits are true,” says Dray.

I would recommend “The Women of Chateau Lafayette” by Stephanie Dray to anyone who enjoys women-centric historical novels, particularly those that happen during war-time. You can find this title at the Gering Public Library on the shelf next to “America’s First Daughter” which Dray wrote about Patsy Jefferson Randolph. Dray joins a number of authors writing about women during war-time, including Lauren Willig, Martha Kelly, and Kate Quinn.

I am not sure when Walter Isaacson started researching “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing and the Future of the Human Race” but it takes a lot of research to fill a 500 page book. Jennifer Doudna (and Emmanuelle Charpentier) received the Nobel Prize for developing a genome editing tool called CRISPR.

Isaacson did a lot of research. He spoke to most of Doudna’s colleagues, her competitors and some detractors as well. “The Code Breaker” is thorough, covering chemistry, scientists, patents, biotechnology, biohackers, genetic editing and ethics among other topics. Isaacson took the time to understand the science behind CRISPR well enough to explain it to the general reader.

CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. It has to do with DNA. This phrase will be like RADAR, an acronym where most people understand what it means without remembering exactly what it stands for.

It started with the discovery that single cell bacteria had developed a way to protect themselves from viruses. Bacteria can alter the DNA in viruses, leaving a virus unable to infect the bacteria. Learning how bacteria can fight off viruses helped researchers in Doudna’s lab develop a gene editing tool called CRISPR. “Just as bacteria have spent millennia evolving ways to develop immunity to viruses, perhaps we humans should use our ingenuity to do the same.”

With the human genome mostly decoded by 2003, genes for specific diseases could be isolated. CRISPR has been used to “correct” DNA for debilitating diseases like sickle cell disease. Researchers are currently developing ways to use CRISPR to cure many other diseases.  “The evolutionary process cares little about what happens to us after we have children and get them to a safe age, so there are a whole bunch of middle-aged maladies, including Huntington’s and most forms of cancer, that we humans would want to eliminate, even though nature sees no need to.”

CRISPR was waiting for a chance to shine when a novel coronavirus hit the scene. It was immediately obvious that this technology could be put to use to develop a vaccine for Covid-19.

I enjoy reading science-y books. There is a lot of complicated science involved with the development of CRISPR. Isaacson goes to great lengths to break down each concept into understandable language. He starts at the beginning and each idea builds on the one before. I understood each concept long enough to see how it supported the next concept. I don’t remember a lot of the science now- it’s been nearly a month since I read the book. I understood it while I was reading it and that is what was necessary.

One thing Isaacson stresses throughout the book is how science builds on itself. A discovery by one person makes a discovery by another person possible. While Doudna and Charpentier won the Nobel, their work was made possible by many other scientists. 

You can find “The Code Breaker” by Walter Isaacson at the Gering Library. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in understanding how the Covid vaccines were rapidly developed using science discovered in 2011. CRISPR is what the future of medicine will look like. It’s a big book, but it’s a big subject. If you enjoy “The Code Breaker,” Isaacson has written biographies of several people, including Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo daVinci, Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein. He followed up his biography of Jobs with a book on the digital revolution. All of these books are available at the Gering Library.