JOHN COY: Award-winning Minnesota writer hosts an interactive story time reading from his new children’s picture book, “The Secret of Fall,” which invites young readers to explore how and why leaves change color as well as learning something about themselves and their own beauty. Coy is the author of young adult novels, a middle-grade series and fiction and nonfiction picture books. 10:30 a.
m. Thursday, Aug. 1, Red Balloon Bookshop, 891 Grand Ave.
, St. Paul. Free, registration requested at: redballoonbookshop.
com/Storytimes . CARL ELLIOTT: Professor in the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics discusses his new book, “The Occasional Human Sacrifice.” Subtitled “Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No,” this is an examination of six cases of medical malpractice beginning with the infamous Tuskegee experiment on untreated syphilis that lasted for 30 years, through the lethal synthetic trachea transplants in Sweden, and an experiment involving withholding treatment from women with cancer.
His central questions are whether patients gave full consent. Woven into the narrative are Elliott’s personal experiences, including his uneasy feelings in medical school about being ordered to do procedures for which he was not fully prepared, such as a painful bone marrow biopsy and other invasive procedures. He thought it wrong that medical students were allowed to do pelvic exams on a sedated woman, and that a patient was told to sign a permission form whil.