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Understanding and Countering Science Denial (04/19)
According to Robert P. Crease, science denial is a personal rejection of only those specific scientific findings that conflict with an individual's political, economic or personal/religious beliefs. The Workshop and the World by Robert P. Crease looks at science denial throughout history and offers a synthesis that outlines: 1) the ...
Refugee Resettlement in Sweden (03/19)
Camilla Grebe's novel focuses on Sweden as a haven for asylum seekers. The ongoing crisis of refugees from Syria has been particularly visible in Sweden, which accepted more than 160,000 migrants (primarily from Syria but also from Afghanistan and Iraq) in search of asylum in 2015 alone, the most of any other country per capita. Since the...
The Stonewall Riots and the Movement for LGBTQ Equality (03/19)
In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, the Stonewall Inn was raided by the New York City Police Department, ostensibly for operating without a liquor license. This was a flimsy pretense, however, since the New York State Liquor Authority (SLA) refused to grant liquor licenses to any bar that served homosexual customers, and the ...
The Spanish Inquisition (03/19)
The Spanish Inquisition ultimately affects modern-day characters in Gateway to the Moon. The inquisitorial system (derived from the Latin word inquisitio 'to inquire'), is one in which the court actively investigates a case rather than simply being an impartial referee--in short, the court acts as detective, prosecutor and judge. ...
The Nigerian Civil War (03/19)
In Speak No Evil, Uzodinma Iweala's protagonist, Niru, says that his father 'reminds us constantly that if he could walk ten miles to get sardines and tinned tomatoes for his family during the war, dodging low-flying Nigerian fighter plans that made a sport of strafing hungry refugees, then there is nothing he or we can't do.' ...
On the Front Line of Transracial Adoption (03/19)
The protagonist and her husband in Rumaan Alam's novel That Kind of Mother are a white upper middle-class couple who adopt a black infant. They love and raise him alongside their own biological son, and treat them as brothers. Race plays a key role in almost every aspect of their lives. The story takes place in Washington DC in the ...
Indian Muslim Marriage Ceremonies (03/19)
A Place for Us, Fatima Farheen Mirza's debut novel about a Muslim family of Indian descent, begins with a wedding. Marriage is an important part of the Muslim culture and is mandated by the Quran. While all that is required to be legally married is a simple ceremony involving the bride and groom, two Muslim witnesses and a male guardian ...
The League of Women Voters (03/19)
Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947), the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) when Tennessee voted on the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, was instrumental in getting the act passed. During the 1920 NAWSA convention, she proposed a national League of Women Voters—six months before the ...
The Importance of Diverse Fantasy Spaces (03/19)
'Children have a right to books that reflect their own images and books that open less familiar worlds to them…for those children who had historically been ignored – or worse, ridiculed – in children's books, seeing themselves portrayed visually and textually as realistically human was essential to letting them ...
Quotations and Cultural Influence of Alice Roosevelt (03/19)
Alice Roosevelt (1884-1980), daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt and the central figure of Stephanie Marie Thornton's American Princess is not widely remembered in the public consciousness today, but during her lifetime she was an ever-present fixture in the press. This was particularly the case during her father's presidential term,...
Fingerprint Alteration (03/19)
In Joseph Knox's noir thriller The Smiling Man, the police can't identify the murder victim because the man had gone to extremes in order to conceal his identity. Clearly a person in an occupation that required anonymity, he had resorted to perhaps the ultimate means of operating under the radar of law enforcement authorities. He had ...
How to Get a Green Card (03/19)
Like millions of others, several of the characters in Luis Alberto Urrea's The House of Broken Angels emigrated from Mexico to the United States, some illegally, some following U.S. protocol to obtain permanent residency. Immigration has become a particularly contentious topic over the last few of years but most of us have little ...
Drancy Internment Camp (03/19)
Although only a small portion of The Balcony takes place during World War II, its effects on Benneville and the estate affect the arc of the story and its characters. At the beginning of the novel, Brigitte, the au pair, learns that the current owner of the estate, Olga, had Jewish parents who moved there during the Occupation. While they...
Black Incarceration and Sentencing (03/19)
In
An American Marriage, Roy is wrongly accused of rape and receives a twelve-year sentence. His only crime, Jones writes, was to be a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Indeed black men suffer on both counts: they are incarcerated more often than their white counterparts and receive longer sentences.
According to the ...
The Charkha (03/19)
In Girls Burn Brighter, the charkha, a kind of spinning wheel, is a means of self-sufficiency and independence for Poornima and Savitha. Savitha carries the scraps of the sari she made for Poornima across the world, as a reminder of the simple happiness the two girls found when weaving together.
The charkha is one of the oldest known ...
A Different California: The State of Jefferson (03/19)
Barbed Wire Heart is set in the wilderness forest of northern California. In a state widely known for its big money areas of Southern California and the Silicon Valley Bay Area, as well as its rich farmland in the center, the northern region—from Sacramento to the Oregon border—is starkly different in geography, economics, and...
Linked Short Stories (03/19)
Linked short stories, novels in stories, story cycles – these are terms for collections in which the stories are not all discrete pieces with separate worlds and characters. Instead, characters recur, whether subtly or overtly, and multiple stories have the same setting. What makes linked short stories so enjoyable, and what sets ...
Zoroastrianism (03/19)
One of the motivating factors for the various conflicts Zarin faces in Tanaz Bhathena's debut YA novel A Girl Like That, is that she is a Zoroastrian - a religion that is far less recognizable than some of the other major world religions such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, or Hinduism. This is because, though it is one of the ...
The Man Booker Prize Controversy (03/19)
While frequently framed as a challenging novel, Milkman has resonated with critics and readers alike since the work won the Man Booker Prize in October 2018. Expressing the thoughts of many book reviewers, Ron Charles of the Washington Post branded Anna Burns' third book 'the best last novel of [last] year' and 'something strange and ...
Dancing Bears (02/19)
The third section of Neel Mukherjee's A State of Freedom follows Lakshman, a young father taking care of two families in the slums of India. When one day Lakshman stumbles upon a stray bear cub wandering about the streets, he sees the animal as his golden ticket to earning a fortune by starting a dancing bear routine.
Dancing bears ...
A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies (02/19)
Sadness is a White Bird's cryptic title is actually a direct quotation from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's 1967 poem, 'A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies,' which forms part of his collection
The End of Night.
Did you feel sad? I asked.
Cutting me off, he said, Mahmoud, my friend,
sadness is a white bird that does not come near a ...
Uncle Sam Needs You: America's All-Volunteer Military (02/19)
The United States military draft ended under Nixon in 1973 as the Vietnam conflict wound down. Since then, recruitment has been entirely voluntary. Aspiring soldiers usually go through an enlistment process, like Matt Young did in Eat the Apple. Service choices include: Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, Air Force, or National Guard.
...
A Second Career as a Private Investigator (02/19)
In Walter Mosley's crime novel, Down the River Unto the Sea, the protagonist, Joe King Oliver, is a former NYC police detective who starts his own private investigative agency as a follow up career. In real life this choice is not uncommon.
Due to the generally early retirement opportunities within most public law enforcement ...
School Shootings & Conspiracy Theorists (02/19)
Rhiannon Navin's novel Only Child is in part inspired by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that took place on 14 December 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut. On that date, 20-year-old Adam Lanza murdered his mother at their home and then drove to the school, fatally shooting 20 six- and seven-year-old children and six adult staff ...
The Origins of Human-Canine Friendship (02/19)
Sigrid Nunez's The Friend reminds us of the power and beauty of the human-canine friendship. Many of us have witnessed the relationship first-hand – our dogs 'listen' to us, they comfort us when we are sad and they are the first to greet us when we come home – but where and when did it originate? How did the gray wolf ...
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 ...
Romani Fortune Tellers (02/19)
Chloe Benjamin's The Immortalists begins with four children visiting a fortune teller in New York in the '60s. The fortune teller is nameless. Her whereabouts is only gleaned from hearsay and neighborhood gossip. What's more, the psychic is said to regularly change address to avoid being detected by the authorities. Despite being shrouded...
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 ...
Brain Cancer in Childhood (02/19)
In Luke Allnutt's novel, We Own the Sky, five-year-old Jack Coates is diagnosed with a glioblastoma brain tumor.
According to the American Cancer Society, brain tumors are 'masses of abnormal cells in the brain or spinal cord that have grown out of control.' The American Brain Tumor Association estimates that 4,600 children and ...
Weathering Some of the Biggest Recorded Storms Ever (02/19)
In the afterword of
Winter Sisters, Robin Oliveira notes that she based the blizzard in the novel on one of the real-life deadliest blizzards in North American history, which took place in 1888. According to the
Life Science website, 'More than 400 people in the Northeast died during the Great Blizzard, the worst death toll in United ...
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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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, ...
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....
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 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...
