Gigi Berardi- Bianca's Cure

Join us at Village Books and Paper Dreams for a reading of Bianca's Cure, a tale of female empowerment weaving together fact and imaginative storytelling!

"This book is for all the girls and women who were told they could never become a scientist because they were born female. Bianca's Cure will transport you back to the Renaissance where you will marvel at Bianca's grit, passion, and ingenuity. In the process, you might re-discover your own."

--Steffanie Strathdee, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Infectious Diseases & Global Public Health, UC San Diego. Author of The Perfect Predator: A Scientist's Race to Save her Husband from a Deadly Superbug.

In Bianca's Cure, a single-minded young woman uses charm and cunning to pursue early chemistry in a world controlled by men and filled with alchemy and superstition, religious dogma, and political treachery—including within her own family. Her cause is curing malaria, and her tool is artemisia—almost five centuries before the Nobel Prize was awarded in 2015 to a Chinese woman scientist for discovering a cure derived from the same bitter herb. The book probes what might have been, as Bianca's quest to turn alchemy into science and find a cure—in gardens, palaces, and sick houses—collides with a city's intensifying illness.

Gigi Berardi is a Fulbright scholar in Italy and professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham. She also teaches in Florence, Italy, the setting for Bianca's Cure. The author of more than 400 reviews and articles for print and broadcast media, her work has been endorsed by Forbes and Foreword Reviews, as well as leading authors in food writing and fiction.

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