Reading together since 1878, the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle has remained a leader in adult education through quality programming. Each summer, the CLSC chooses at least nine books of literary quality and invites the authors to Chautauqua present their work to an audience of approximately 1,000 readers.

The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance by Dan Egan is a selection for Week Three: What We Got Wrong: Learning from our mistakes.

The story of phosphorus spans the globe and vast tracts of human history. Phosphorus has played a critical role in some of the most lethal substances on earth: firebombs, rat poison, nerve gas. But it’s also the key component of one of the most vital: fertilizer, which has sustained life for billions of people. As Egan harrowingly reports, our overreliance on this vital crop nutrient is today causing toxic algae blooms and “dead zones” in waterways from the coasts of Florida to the Mississippi River basin to the Great Lakes and beyond. Egan also explores the alarming reality that diminishing access to phosphorus poses a threat to the food system worldwide—which risks rising conflict and even war.

Horse by Geraldine Brooks is a selection for Week Five: Our Greatest Challenges (That We Can Actually Do Something About).

Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, far from the glamor of any racetrack. 

 New York City, 1954. Martha Jackson, a gallery owner noted for taking risks, becomes obsessed with a nineteenth-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.

 Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse—one studying the stallion’s bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.

Dances: A Novel by Nicole Cuffy is a selection for Week Nine: Rising Together: Our Century of Creativity and Collaboration with Wynton Marsalis.

At twenty-two years old, Cece Cordell reaches the pinnacle of her career as a ballet dancer when she’s promoted to principal at the New York City Ballet. She’s instantly catapulted into celebrity, heralded for her “inspirational” role as the first Black ballerina in the famed company’s history.   Haunted by the feeling that she doesn’t belong, she begins to unravel the loose threads of her past. Cece is faced with a choice that has the potential to derail her career and shatter the life she’s cultivated for herself, sending her on a pilgrimage to both find her brother and reclaim the parts of herself lost in the grinding machinery of the traditional ballet world.

Apple: (Skin to the Core) by Eric Gansworth is a combined CLSC and Young Reader selection for Week Six: Exploring the Transformative Power of Music with Renee Fleming.

In Apple: (Skin to the Core), Eric Gansworth tells his story, the story of his family—of Onondaga among Tuscaroras—of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist who balances multiple worlds. Eric shatters that slur and reclaims it in verse and prose and imagery that truly lives up to the word heartbreaking.

Chautauqua Institution has announced The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human (Scribner) by Siddhartha Mukherjee as the 2023 winner of The Chautauqua Prize. 

Awarded annually since 2012, The Chautauqua Prize celebrates a book of fiction or literary/narrative nonfiction that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and to honor the author for a significant contribution to the literary arts. As author of this year’s winning book, Mukherjee receives $7,500, and will be presented with the Prize during a celebratory event and public reading at 5 p.m. EDT Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2023, in Chautauqua’s Hall of Philosophy. 

Mukherjee’s book, the first Prize winner so extensively dedicated to the hard sciences, stands apart in the tradition of doctor-writers due to the poetic, almost cosmic tone of its language, said Sony Ton-Aime, the Michael I. Rudell Director of the Literary Arts at Chautauqua Institution. 

“I have read authors who write about science with such verve and beautiful prose, and I have read scientists with deep command and knowledge on their subject matters, but never have I seen the two collide so well,” Ton-Aime said. “Siddhartha Mukherjee has made centuries of serious scientific knowledge accessible to everyone through lively and masterful prose. This makes The Song of the Cell the perfect book to win the Prize this year, as it undoubtedly is a richly rewarding reading experience and is a significant contribution to our world that will stand for ages.” 

The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human begins in the late 1600s, when the Pulitzer Prize-winning author introduces us to English polymath Robert Hooke and Dutch cloth merchant Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. The two men looked down their handmade microscopes and saw something that introduced a radical concept that altered biology and medicine forever. It was the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units — “cells,” Hooke christened them — that build our organs, our physiology and our selves. The Song of the Cell tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. In his exploration — both panoramic and intimate — of what it means to be human, Mukherjee uses his expertise to make “a very important and complex topic accessible,” one Prize reader said. “Mukherjee is a phenomenal writer and storyteller,” another shared, who, in his “wonderful book,” “… has a way of explaining concepts in an interesting way that entices one to keep reading.”   

Since first appearing on bookshelves in October 2022, The Song of the Cell has been named a New York Times Notable Book and a “Best Book of the Year” by publications and organizations as diverse as The Economist, Oprah Daily, BookPage, Book Riot and the New York Public Library, among others. It was the winner of the 2023 PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences from the Association of American Publishers. Since 1976, the PROSE Awards have recognized best-in-class scholarly publications and publishers who produce books, journals, and digital products of extraordinary merit that make a significant contribution to a field of study. 

For The Song of the Cell to be lauded in critical, academic, and mainstream circles alike, noted Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill, indicates both the book’s depth and breadth, and its author’s mastery of his craft. 

“Dr. Mukherjee has spent his medical career probing further and further the question of our most minuscule components, and how they impact the full scope of our bodies and our being. It is work that is both microscopic and sweeping; infinitesimal and magnificently infinite,” Hill said. “Similarly, his literary career is a natural extension of this path. Dr. Mukherjee’s writing is at once academic and accessible. Beyond that, he makes the complex compelling, conveying the hard science of the cellular into grand, almost mythic prose that encompasses the largest questions of philosophy and humanity. With this approach, he inspires and empowers his readers toward a greater understanding of the science of our lives.” 

Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Gene: An Intimate History, a No. 1 New York Times bestseller; The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction; and The Laws of Medicine. He is editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013. Mukherjee is an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. Widely published, his articles have appeared in journals and periodicals that include Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker.