Best-Selling Author, Mary Doria Russell Speaks at Twinsburg Library

Mary Doria Russell, author of the NY Times Bestseller ‘Doc’, spoke to a full house at the on Jan. 12.

Russell is familiar with Twinsburg, as she edited her first novel The Sparrow in the local , a place where she “didn’t have to think about cleaning the bathtub.”

Russell is a native of Chicago, Illinois and the daughter of a Navy nurse and a Marine Corps drill sergeant. She spent her early elementary years at Sacred Heart Catholic School and went on to graduate from Glenbard East High School in Lombard, Illinois, where her father was Dupage County’s five-term sheriff.  Dr. Russell then turned her sights on some very serious educational endeavors, receiving degrees in cultural anthropology at the University of Illinois; social anthropology at Northwestern University in Boston and a doctorate in biological anthropology at the University of Michigan.  She arrived in Cleveland to teach gross anatomy at the Case Western Reserve University School of Dentistry. 

After preparing the groundwork for a life of the Academic, Russell opted to write.  In 1996 she completed her first novel, The Sparrow, a science fiction book dealing with a first contact with aliens. Two years later the sequel Children of God. Her next novel, A Thread of Grace published in 2005 told the story of the Italian Resistance during World War II and the fate of Jewish Refugees escaping Nazi persecution.  In 2008 she published Dreamers of the Day, which focused on the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference in which the course of the Middle East was determined.

Russell combined impeccable and exhaustive research with her ability to create sympathetic characters in her latest book, Doc, that will remain with you long after the last page is turned. The novel is currently being turned into an HBO miniseries with Ron Howard personally directing the pilot.