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Trinacria (02/19)
Auntie Poldi, in Mario Giordano's Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions, is intrigued when she encounters an unusual tattoo on the murder victim. It's Sicily's trinacria, an heraldic-style image whose origins linger in the shadows of Greek mythology.
Heraldry (the art of devising and displaying armorial insignia) may have begun on the ...
Chateau-sur-Mer (02/19)
The Windermere estate where the contemporary arm of The Maze at Windermere is set, is modeled after one of the historic Newport mansions, Chateau-sur-Mer. Until the Vanderbilts' Breakers mansion came on the scene in the late nineteenth century, the Chateau was the most palatial estate in Newport known for its Victorian architecture ...
Glaciers and Landscape (02/19)
In Grist Mill Road, readers are treated to a mini lesson in how glaciers can shape landscape. Chatter marks, cobbles, and glacial erratics are all terms we come across in the story. What are they and how does a glacier alter the landscape over the ages?
When a large and heavy object moves very very slowly it has the potential to ...
Notable Female Indian Filmmakers (02/19)
At one point in Love, Hate, and Other Filters, Maya's best friend Violet tells her that love is 'a part of who you are, not an object you can film and capture in different kinds of light.' Maya is used to viewing the world - including her own life - through the lens of film. She wants to be a documentary filmmaker, and Ahmed's novel ...
Creative Blocks (01/19)
Many writers, artists, and other creatives experience the occasional block – an inability to create or a sudden lack of ideas for moving forward with their work. Both Alex and Christine deal with this issue in Tessa Hadley's Late in the Day, and for Alex the block spans many years. The term creative block was coined in 1947 by Dr. ...
The Birth of Moving Pictures (01/19)
Although the main characters in Melanie Benjamin's historical novel The Girls in the Picture are just breaking into the nascent film industry in the early 1900s, actual moving pictures had been around for decades. It all began in the United States, shortly after the American Civil War.
In the early 1870s, British born Eadweard ...
Spartan Mothers (01/19)
In Mothers of Sparta, author Dawn Davies compares herself and her decisions about her son to those made by mothers in Ancient Sparta.
Sparta was a city-state in Greece that reached its pinnacle in the 5th century BCE. Its name, now and then, conjures up the image of powerful warriors that thrived on austerity and deprivation. Its ...
Scotland Yard (01/19)
In Charles Finch's The Woman in the Water, set in 1850, amateur private detective Charles Lenox works closely with Scotland Yard to solve a pair of murders. At twenty-three, he is barely older than the law enforcement agency.
Established in 1829 by an Act of Parliament introduced by then Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel, the London ...
Syrian Culture: A Rich, Layered Legacy (01/19)
The voices and stories of Syrian refugee experiences are not the only thing drowned out by the international news agencies' overwhelming focus on conflict, war, and death tolls. Underneath the tragedy, now literally buried beneath the rubble in many cases, is a cultural legacy that has spanned centuries and empires. The empires that ruled...
Albanian Communism (01/19)
Bashkim Hasani, who is Elsie's boyfriend and Luljeta's father in Xhenet Aliu's novel Brass, was born in an Albanian work camp, one of many which were set up under Communist rule.
The Albanian Communist Party was founded in 1941 with the help of Yugoslavia's communist leader, Josip Tito. An Albanian communist politician, Enver Hoxha, ...
Yemen's Nobel Laureate Tawakkol Karman (01/19)
In The Monk of Mokha, there's a scene in which Mokhtar is assigned to be a translator for visiting Yemeni Tawakkol Karman, who is guest lecturing at UC Berkeley Law School. Tawakkol is the first Yemeni woman, in fact the first Arab woman, ever to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She was honored for her nonviolent activism during the...
Australia's National Parks (01/19)
In
Force of Nature, a group of women on a work retreat become lost in Australia's Giralang Ranges. While the Giralangs are fictional, Australia is home to thousands of national parks and conservation reserves. According to the
National Parks website; "these areas protect a huge variety of environments – from deserts to ...
Money Laundering (01/19)
A high stakes money laundering scheme is at the core of Steve Cavanagh's legal thriller The Plea. Eight billion dollars in illicit cash is flowing through the accounts of a Manhattan law firm that enjoys a solid gold reputation. The United States federal government is hot on the case, but nailing the parties involved at just the ...
Literary Inmates (01/19)
'Strangler Bob', one of the more memorable stories in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, is set entirely within the squalid confines of an American prison. As far as we know, Johnson himself never spent any time in jail; the story is a testament to the power of imagination shorn of experience.
Throughout history though, there have been ...
Tidbits from Timekeepers (01/19)
Simon Garfield's
Timekeepers, is a book about our obsession with time. It is chock filled with the ways our lives revolve around it, the instruments we use to manage it, and some people's odd perspectives on it. Here are five quirky, fun facts from the book:
1. The Oxford English Dictionary keeps a
list of frequently used nouns. The ...
Chastleton House (01/19)
The Wychwood of Lucy Hughes-Hallett's novel Peculiar Ground, an English estate built in the 1600s, sets the stage for the personal intrigues of characters spanning several centuries and generations. Secluded from the rest of the public, the estate and its enclosed garden are also symbols of social divisions and how they often trap people....
Sidewalk Chalk (01/19)
In C. J. Tudor's thriller The Chalk Man, twelve-year-old Eddie and his friends create a secret language using stick figures drawn with chalk. The story takes place in 1986, but of course chalk games have been around for a lot longer than that.
Chalk has too. The word chalk comes from the latin calx, which means limestone. Limestone is ...
The Keystone XL Pipeline (01/19)
The Keystone Pipeline is a 36-inch-diameter oil pipeline between Alberta, Canada and Texas. It transports 550,000 barrels of crude oil from Canada to refineries and distribution centers in the United States every day. It was constructed in three phases, with the first – stretching to southern Nebraska and then across to two ...
Nur Jahan: Mughal Empress (01/19)
Because of her father's important position, Mehr received an excellent education. At the age of 17 she was married to a Turkish soldier named Sher Afgan, the governor of Bihar. They had one child together, Ladli Bagum, born in 1605. (Some sources claim Ladli was Mehr's step-daughter).
A bit of debate circles the next phase of Mehr's ...
Herbalism (12/18)
Educated author Tara Westover's Idaho family runs
Butterfly Express, a successful business selling essential oils and other herbal remedies. Her mother, LaRee Westover, trains herbalists and is the author of a book on herbalism,
Butterfly Miracles with Essential Oils. Throughout her childhood, Westover was treated with foraged herbs ...
The Special Olympics (12/18)
In
Ginny Moon, the protagonist's participation in the Special Olympics plays an important part in the storyline.
The Special Olympics is the world's largest sports organization for individuals with intellectual disabilities. From its modest start as a summer camp in 1962, the Special Olympics now offers competition in more than ...
The Rise and After Effects of Communism in the Soviet Union (12/18)
The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben Macintyre untangles the case of Soviet Union/KGB agent turned British/MI6 spy, Oleg Gordievsky. However, little attention is given to why and how The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formed and to what extent its realities aligned with the
communist...
The Internet Era: Did You Know? (11/18)
In
How the Internet Happened, author Brian McCullough provides details about the visionaries and startups that created the modern iteration of the Internet, giving his account character and dimension and providing a more complete picture of Internet-era history. Here are a few such details:
- The term 'information superhighway' didn'...
Cats in Japanese Culture (11/18)
The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa is set in Japan, a country where felines are held in high esteem.
Cats first arrived in Japan around 500 CE as stowaways on ships returning from China, where the animals had already been domesticated for centuries. They were quickly adopted in Buddhist temples by the resident monks, who ...
The Hunt That Came First: Moby Dick (11/18)
And the Ocean Was Our Sky is a re-imagining of Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Ness's text is a very experimental adaptation of Melville's, and one need not know Melville's text to understand it. However, some background on this American classic – recognized widely as a Great American Novel – may well ...
Saint Kateri Tekakwitha (11/18)
In Future Home of the Living God, some of the inhabitants of the reservation that is home to Cedar's birth mother, encounter a vision of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, causing them to build a shrine in her honor. Tekakwitha was a devoted Catholic who was persecuted for her faith, and Cedar finds meaning in her suffering and inspiration in her ...
Becoming a Bone Marrow Donor (11/18)
In Happiness: The Crooked Road to Semi Ever After, the author's newborn has a rare blood disease and requires a bone marrow transplant to survive.
Bones have soft tissue at their core called marrow; marrow contains immature or undifferentiated cells known as stem cells. There are two main types of stem cell: one produces bone, ...
Vinyl Records (11/18)
Despite the many digital streaming options for listening to music, vinyl records are still popular with some listeners. Like Frank in The Music Shop, many music aficionados love the sound quality of vinyl records and nostalgia has increased their popularity. Vinyl records still comprise a noticeable portion of the market. According to the...
Drought-resistant Crops (10/18)
In the story 'The Auroras,' in Daniel Alarcon's collection
The King is Always Above the People, one of the characters is a woman who is studying drought-resistant crops.
Jill Farrant, one of the many scientists working in the field, points out that research has become even more urgent as climate change and an increase in population ...
Coma (10/18)
The central character in Sometimes I Lie by Alice Feeney is a woman in a coma.
A coma is defined as a prolonged state of unconsciousness during which a patient is completely unresponsive to stimuli such as light, sound or even pain. The person appears to be asleep but cannot be awakened.
The condition is generally caused by ...
The Loves of President and Mrs. Roosevelt (10/18)
Eleanor Roosevelt had long been a key figure in her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's, political career. When he became President, she transformed the role of the First Lady. She was a vocal and vociferous advocate for human rights and in particular, the rights of women and children. She wrote a popular newspaper column 'My Day,' and ...
The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon (10/18)
At one point in The Wife Between Us, the main character claims to have experienced Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. She states, 'It's when you become aware of something—the name of an obscure band, say, or a new type of pasta—and it seems to suddenly appear everywhere.'
The phenomenon (pronounced badder-mainhoff) is also known as...
Books Within Winter (10/18)
An integral part of Ali Smith's
Winter are the frequent allusions and references made to other excellent works of literature. Though it would be nearly impossible to catalog them all, here are a few.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Dickens' famous work is referenced from the very outset of
Winter in the opening line: 'God was ...
Helen Dunmore (10/18)
Helen Dunmore was born in Yorkshire, England in 1952. In a career spanning three decades she published fifteen novels, three short story collections, prize-winning children's fiction and twelve collections of poetry. Her final novel, Birdcage Walk, was published in 2017, as was her last poetry collection, Inside the Wave. Dunmore ...
Liberals Love Guns Too (10/18)
In his memoir, Let It Bang: A Young Black Man's Reluctant Odyssey With Guns, R.J. Young takes readers into his obsession with guns, and in the process explores race, guns and self-protection in the U.S.
But who exactly owns guns? While gun ownership skews strongly to rural white men who most likely vote Republican, the American ...
A Short History of Graphics & Comics (10/18)
In the
Beyond the Book feature that accompanies the review of the graphic novel
Home After Dark, there's a list of books to read – basically a graphic novel starter pack. The earliest on the list is
Maus, the Holocaust-as-cats-and-mice graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, published in 1986.
But go back eight years and you'll...
Holiday Survival Guide (10/18)
In Seven Days Of Us, Francesca Hornak has her characters quarantined for seven days during the holiday season; Days trapped with one's family is stressful enough, but the added pressure of "The Holidays" can really turn up the heat.
So why, one might ask, are the holidays a particularly stressful time for so many? ...
Stanley Milgram's Experiment (10/18)
Hubert Mingarelli's characters in A Meal in Winter have to dehumanize an entire race of people in order to justify carrying out Hitler's mass genocide during World War II. The narrator of the story even goes so far as to resent the Jews because of the very details that remind him of their humanity – 'a piece of embroidery, ...
The NSA and its Affiliates (10/18)
The
National Security Administration (NSA) is the direct descendant of the group established to decode enemy communications during WWII featured in
Code Girls. Established by U.S. President Harry Truman in 1952, the NSA is the government agency responsible for signal intelligence — 'Intelligence derived from electronic signals and ...
A Snapshot of the Adirondacks (10/18)
Alison McGhee tells her story in Never Coming Back against the backdrop of the wildly varied ecosystems of New York State's Adirondack Region, located in the most northern part of the state close to the borders of Canada and Vermont.
The Adirondacks cover an area of more than six million acres - a roughly circular area about 160 miles ...
The Education Revolution (10/18)
The term 'Renaissance man' means a polymath, or someone who excels at many fields. Few people earned that moniker as brilliantly as Leonardo da Vinci, who actually lived during the height of the Italian Renaissance. Making his accomplishments even more remarkable is the fact that he didn't receive much in the way of a formal education. ...
Notorious Female Serial Killers (10/18)
In Ali Land's debut, Good Me, Bad Me, Ruth Thompson is on trial for the heinous murders of multiple children. The case is notable not only for the particularly brutal nature of the crime, but also, in part, because Ruth is a woman, and society's perceptions of women who commit violent crimes is often skewed. We stereotype men as ...
The Looting of the National Museum of Iraq (10/18)
When looking back on the Iraq War, many American policy decisions stand out for their shortcomings, such as de-Baathification, which removed all experienced civil servants from government in one stroke; and disbanding the army, thereby leaving thousands of trained soldiers out of work and on the street. Another example, while less deadly,...
Hurricane Katrina's Racial Implications (10/18)
New Orleans was, and is, a city with a majority African-American population (nearly 67% in 2005), and the racial implications of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina have come to define the way many people think of the storm. 68% of the storm's nearly 700 victims were black, as were an overwhelming number of those whose homes ...
Sharecropping in the Post Civil-War Era (10/18)
The major characters in
The Twelve-Mile Straight grew up as sharecroppers.
Merriam-Webster defines a
sharecropper as "a tenant farmer…who is provided with credit for seed, tools, living quarters, and food, who works the land, and who receives an agreed share of the value of the crop minus charges." While farming ...
Mauritania (10/18)
In A Moonless, Starless Sky, author Alexis Okeowo profiles, among other heroes, anti-slavery crusader Biram Dah Abeid, who is a citizen of Mauritania.
This West African nation has a rich cultural history. Early settlements include Berber herders (an ethnic group indigeneous to Northern Africa) around the 3rd Century B.C., followed by ...
Floods in Myth and Legend (10/18)
The End We Start From takes place during a drastic, near-future flood that impacts London and its surrounding territory. During 2017, floods surged over many regions of the world. As the plausibility of future catastrophic flooding seems more and more likely, it is fascinating to take a look at how floods figure prominently in ancient ...
African-Americans Soldiers in the Civil War (10/18)
In 'Father Abe,' a short story in Five-Carat Soul, McBride mentions two all-black regiments that fought for the Union army during the Civil War — the 32nd United States Colored Infantry and the 9th Louisiana Colored Infantry.
When war broke out in 1861, African Americans were barred from serving, but this rule was set aside by...
The Benefits of Vaccines (09/18)
Vaccines are responsible for the global eradication of smallpox,
rinderpest, and soon, it is hoped, polio and measles. Despite the backlash against vaccines, which has caused the occasional reemergence of German measles and chickenpox, new scientific advances promise to tackle scourges like malaria, HIV and cancers.
The World Health ...
The History of the Typewriter (09/18)
Tom Hanks' short story collection Uncommon Type, puts his love for typewriters on display. Hanks has a personal collection of over one hundred machines, made up of nearly every make and model ever put on the market. For those who grew up in the digital age, typewriters may seem all but extinct, a relic of a past era. But at one time, ...
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