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Joan of Arc in Many Forms (02/18)
In Yuknavitch's near-future vision, a character inspired by Joan of Arc seems poised to be the savior of an all-but-doomed Earth. Yuknavitch is far from the first writer and artist to be inspired by the fifteenth-century French heroine. Images of Joan of Arc have appeared in opera, film, literature, art, and even video games and ...
Betelgeuse (02/18)
In Edgar and Lucy, author Victor Lodato often uses the symbolism of stars, especially Betelgeuse.
Betelgeuse is a star in the Orion constellation, one of the most easily recognized groups of stars in the night sky. Orion's Belt consists of of three stars (also known as the Three Kings or the Three Sisters). Betelgeuse, officially ...
Che Guevara (02/18)
Next Year in Havana is partially set during the Cuban Revolution (1953-1959). Che Guevara (1928-1967) was one of the Revolution's central figures. Although he does not appear directly in Next Year in Havana, the cause he fought for forms the backdrop to much of the story.
Born Ernesto Guevara de la Serna in Rosario, Argentina, ...
My Thoughts About Fredrik Backman's Books (02/18)
As I noted in my review of
Beartown, I've read all of Fredrik Backman's works that have English translations. In fact, I was lucky enough to be one of the first early readers of his debut novel,
A Man Called Ove. I realized then that I was witnessing the birth of an amazing talent and, to date, he hasn't ever let me down. Unfortunately, ...
Complications - The Mechanical Watch Variety (02/18)
In Hannah Tinti's novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, Hawley and Jove are sent to recover an antique watch, a priceless item stolen from a crooked boxing promoter and now in the hands of a thief-survivalist living on an island off Washington's coast. The watch has many complications, the term used for any mechanical watch ...
Christina's World (02/18)
Andrew Wyeth's painting Christina's World, the subject of A Piece of the World, was initially met with little fanfare, and its critical reception was lackluster. Nevertheless, the painting, which features Christina Olson reaching toward her home in the distance, was purchased during its first showing at a New York Gallery in 1948 by ...
Body Snatching (02/18)
Whitehead's well-researched novel The Underground Railroad offers glimpses into numerous phenomena characterizing the often-brutal experiences of black Americans in the early nineteenth century, both in the South and the North. In one section, Whitehead profiles a group of Boston-area body snatchers, spurred by demand for cadavers in the ...
Breathtaking Butterflies (02/18)
Night of Fire frequently references butterflies, often ethereal, almost infinite in variation, and miraculous in their metamorphosis: '...the butterfly's resurrection was different: the winged angel risen from a worm...It showed that anything could become anything.' It's as though Thubron wants to remind us time and again that we can ...
The Bardo (02/18)
The word bardo comes from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and means 'in-between.' It refers to a transitional state when one's awareness of the physical world is suspended. According to
Spiritualtravel.org the concept is an 'umbrella term which includes the transitional states of birth, death, dream, transmigration or afterlife, meditation...
Disenfranchisement and Voter Suppression (02/18)
Despite the fact that voting in a federal election is a primary and vital constitutional right held by American citizens over 18 years of age, the playing field for voters is not equal from one state to another.
In Fortress America, Elaine Tyler May argues that disenfranchisement holds individuals back from contributing to their ...
Can Organ Transplants Change Who You Are? (01/18)
A staggering number: over 34,000
organ transplants were performed in the U.S. in 2017 alone. Another staggering number: 115,000 people are currently waiting for life-saving organ transplants in the U.S. As the medical techniques and success rates continue to improve, organ transplants are quickly becoming a tremendous lifeline for some of...
The Bathroom Bills (01/18)
The joys and perils of raising a transgender child are beautifully brought to life in Laurie Frankel's This is How it Always Is. The question of where Poppy should go the bathroom when at school is a sensitive issue.
In the United States, since 2013, more than 24 state legislatures have proposed so-called 'Bathroom Bills' with the ...
Eastern State Penitentiary (01/18)
The catalyst for Long Black Veil takes place within the ruins of Eastern State Penitentiary, located in the heart of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Now remade into a museum and identified as a National Historic Landmark, the former prison stood unattended and in shambles from its closing in 1971 until 1994.
The author cites a visit to...
A Slew of Southern Writers (01/18)
Mary Miller's Always Happy Hour is set in the south, but many will see it as something other than true southern fiction. The protagonists are too internalized, too walled off from the southerness – the land, the people, the ethos of pride, racial discord, and defeat – that is the beating heart of most great southern fiction...
The Father of Microbiology (01/18)
The discovery of microbes – those single-celled organisms that exist by the millions in a drop of water, blood, or tiny patch of any living tissue – was a game-changer, scientifically speaking. The once-preposterous notion of invisible creatures inhabiting our world opened the door to understanding how germs infect the body, ...
The Big Dry - Rivers and Drought in Australia (01/18)
The Big Dry was a nine-year drought experienced in Southeastern Australia from 2003 to 2012. The region suffered the most severe dry period in recorded history and assumptions made by early pioneering colonists – that there would always be wet periods in these lands – began to be questioned. The alternative, that there might be ...
Operation Valkyrie (01/18)
The events of The Women in the Castle are set off by a failed attempt at assassinating Adolf Hitler conducted by the husbands of the main characters and their fellow resisters. This is based on the real-life July Plot, also known as Operation Valkyrie.
The plan was organized and executed in 1944 by high-ranking German military ...
The Boy Scouts of America (01/18)
The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) plays a significant role in
The Hearts of Men. The youth organization was in the news in 2017, beginning to adapt to current social mores.
The New York Times reported on January 31, 2017: 'Reversing its stance of more than a century, the Boy Scouts of America said on Monday that the group would begin ...
Pachinko (01/18)
'If you are a rich Korean, there's a pachinko parlor in your background somewhere,' Min Jin Lee writes in her novel Pachinko. Several of her Korean characters end up working in pachinko parlors, despite their differing levels of education and their previous experience.
Pachinko is essentially an upright pinball machine. Gamblers ...
The Art of Glassmaking (01/18)
At one point in Glass House, Brian Alexander describes his childhood experience of peering into one of the glass manufacturing plants in his home town: 'Nuns had spent years engraving images of hell on my imagination. The flames shooting out of the squat stack on the roof, the white-red glow of the furnace inside, the gray shadows of the ...
Castaways on the Antipodes Islands (01/18)
In The Mannequin Makers, a mysterious character called The Carpenter finds himself shipwrecked on a tiny island, part of the Antipodes Islands that lie several hundred miles south of New Zealand. He has no idea where he is, beyond being lost somewhere in the Southern Ocean. The island which he describes as the 'lemon wedge' (and his ...
Keeping Wolves as Pets in the United States (01/18)
In Helen Benedict's novel Wolf Season, a character illegally keeps pet wolves behind a fence on her upstate New York property. At first her neighbors don't believe she actually has wolves – they think it's just a rumor passed around by children – but when they realize the wolves are real they become alarmed and look for legal ...
Blackface in Performance (01/18)
Early in Zadie Smith's novel Swing Time, the narrator shows a friend a clip from the 1936 Fred Astaire musical by the same name. She doesn't have her glasses on the first time she watches it so is startled when she realizes that Astaire performs a solo dance referred to as the 'Bojangles of Harlem' in blackface.
Music and dance had ...
Moonshine Mania (12/17)
In If the Creek Don't Rise, Sadie Blue's husband earns his money making and selling moonshine. The trouble caused by alcohol and illegal business is a theme that runs throughout the story. The term moonshine comes from the illicit nature in which it has historically been brewed, in the dark, under cover of 'moon shine.' Moonshine has made...
Paul Gauguin: A Flawed Artist (12/17)
In Castle of Water, one of the characters is headed to the Marquesas Islands, part of French Polynesia, because he wants to pay his respects to the renowned French painter, Paul Gauguin, who breathed his last there.
Paul Gauguin was born in 1848 in France to a French father and a mother with mixed French and Peruvian heritage. While ...
The Sugar House (11/17)
In The Second Mrs. Hockaday, Susan Rivers' historical novel about the Civil War, Mr. Hockaday says to his new wife: '... there's an Armory in Holland Crossroads. A market hall in Traveler's Joy. In Charleston, it's the Sugar House. It's where servants are sent to be corrected.' This novel, of course, like all historical novels, is based ...
Americans with Disabilities (11/17)
In the story 'No Place for Good People,' one of the short stories in Homesick for Another World by Otessa Moshfegh, a lonely widower takes a job overseeing the daily needs of three men with 'moderate developmental disabilities.' Despite his personal problems, the protagonist is able to see these men as 'reasonable enough people.' This ...
The Sensational Murder That Rattled Victorian England (11/17)
In Ruler of the Night, David Morrell uses the first murder on a train as the starting point for the mystery set in 1855. Such a tragedy didn't actually occur until 1864, however, and the historical facts of the case are quite different than those penned in the novel.
The world's first public railway to use steam locomotion opened in ...
Talking About Grief With Teenagers (11/17)
Grief is hard to deal with at any age, but Benjamin Alire Saenz's novel The Inexpliable Logic of My Life reminds us just how much harder it can be when on the cusp of adulthood, especially when it is caused by the loss of a parent. Sal, Sam, and Fito each experience the loss of a parent or loved one in a different way, and the ...
Idaho—A Nonsense Name? (11/17)
In Idaho, Ann muses about a legend surrounding the state's name. She relates a delightful story about a delegate to Congress playing with a little girl named Ida lingering in the House chamber while others discussed proposed names for a new western territory. When the little girl runs away, the man shouts after her, 'Ida! Ho! Come back to...
Child Welfare Services - Falling Through the Cracks (11/17)
In A List of Cages, even though fourteen-year-old Julian displays all the symptoms of an abused child – missing school, frequent lies, keeping friends at arm's length, poor grades, etc. – he doesn't receive the attention he needs from his teachers or his school district's social services. The authorities ask the ...
Christian Science (11/17)
Christian Science was founded in 1894 by Mary Baker Eddy as a means of embracing 'primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing.' The foundational text is Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, published in 1875, which Emily Fridlund references several times in History of Wolves.
Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) grew...
Feed Sack Fashion (11/17)
In Dust Bowl Girls, Lydia Reeder notes that many, if not all, of the young women who lived on their families' Oklahoma farms wore dresses made from flour or feed sacks. At the time, before the ready availability of store bought or bakery products, farm women bought their flour in sacks of 25-100 pounds. Feed came in hundred-pound ...
Did You Know? Eight Alzheimer's Facts (11/17)
Joseph Jebelli's
In Pursuit of Memory is full of fascinating facts about Alzheimer's disease. We've picked out a handful you might not know already.
- The specific mutation associated with Alzheimer's disease was discovered on chromosome 21 in 1991. Because Down's syndrome also involves chromosome 21 (specifically, an extra copy of it ...
Art on the London Underground (11/17)
The world's first underground railway opened in London in 1863 between Paddington and Farringdon stations using steam engines to pull gas-lit wooden carriages along the almost four-mile, 6-station, route. In its first twelve months, almost 10 million passengers were transported.
The early network was built in shallow tunnels and needed ...
Arts, Artists and Authoritarianism (11/17)
In This is How It Begins, Ludka Zeilonka, art history professor and survivor of the World War II Nazi invasion of Poland, rescued a valuable painting from certain theft or destruction at the hands of the Germans. She has kept it hidden for over 70 years, protecting it and keeping its provenance intact for posterity. As an idealistic young...
Gustav Eiffel's Legacy (11/17)
While looking into the real personalities of the characters in Beatrice Colin's To Capture What We Cannot Keep, I came to realize just how enlightening this book actually is, simply because of the hints Colin gives us into a time in history about which most of us know only a tiny part. Yes, we all know the Eiffel Tower, but little about ...
Tell it to the Book-keeper (11/17)
'Want to know what a book-keeper's job is, boy?' he muttered. 'We keep the actors from ruinin' the play.'
Emma thinks her sudden promotion to stage manager of her high school's drama department is a stretch in Molly Booth's debut novel Saving Hamlet but it is nothing like the crash course she receives when she finds herself in the ...
The Isle of Harris and the Flannan Isles (11/17)
Acclaimed crime novelist Peter May is famous for a trilogy of novels set on the Isle of Lewis in the Scottish Hebrides, but in his latest outing, Coffin Road, he has moved his sights south, to the harder, rockier terrain of the Isle of Harris.
Although Lewis and Harris are always referred to as if they are two separate islands, they ...
The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment (11/17)
In Perfect Little World, Dr. Preston Grind and his team of researchers conduct the 'Marshmallow Experiment' on the children living at the Infinite Family Project. A marshmallow is placed before a child and he/she has a choice: eat it right away, or wait fifteen minutes and receive two marshmallows instead of one. The experiment was ...
An Interview with Maxine Beneba Clarke (10/17)
Maxine Beneba Clarke came to fiction through poetry, both written and spoken word. She was born in Australia to a Jamaican father and Guyanese mother. Her parents immigrated to the UK before settling in Australia. Her books include a memoir, The Hate Race; a children's book, The Patchwork Bike; and the poetry collections Carrying the ...
The Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire (10/17)
Immigrants to New York City have always faced impediments in their efforts to assimilate. A new landscape, a new culture, and even a new language invariably pose challenges to the most determined recent arrivals. Often, the jobs available are at the lowest rung of the economic ladder, and especially in the days of unregulated workplaces, ...
Building a Wall Between Impartiality and Personal Opinion (10/17)
The protagonist in The Boat Rocker, Feng Danlin, is a journalist who prides himself on being impartial in his reporting and principled about expressing his opinion. Throughout the book he wrestles with the importance of maintaining objectivity. He researches facts and scrupulously reports his findings, calling out fraud where he sees it.
...
The Roots of the True Crime Genre (10/17)
As evidenced in her novel, Little Deaths, author Emma Flint is an aficionado of true crime. These books that chronicle the grim details of actual murders are written with a sensitive ear to readers' morbid curiosity about sensational crimes. The genre has been popular for centuries – people have long been willing to shell out cash to...
A 2015 Snapshot of the Global Refugee Crisis (10/17)
Go, Went, Gone is set in Berlin during the thick of the ongoing international refugee crisis. Germany and many other countries have become a destination for those who leave home for reasons of violence, conflict, persecution, human rights violations, poverty, and war.
The historic event, now termed the Global Refugee Crisis or European...
African American Women and the Black Church (10/17)
In Brit Bennett's debut novel, the mothers are the elderly African African women who devote themselves to Upper Room, the black church in town. 'If we laid all our lives toes to heel, we were born before the Depression, the Civil War, even America itself,' they report.
The mothers in the book depend on the church for much of their...
The November 2015 Paris Attacks (10/17)
On Friday, November 13, 2015, suicide bombers and gunmen launched coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris, France. Antoine Leiris's wife Hélène was among the victims.
The first sign of trouble came at the Stade de France, a stadium in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. On the night in question, France was playing Germany in an ...
Biosphere 2 (10/17)
In Oracle, Arizona, sits one of the more intriguing experiments in 'closed-system' science ever devised:
Biosphere 2, which forms the backdrop for the novel,
The Terranauts. Originally built to demonstrate that humans could construct and live sustainably for long periods in an artificially created world, the huge glass domes that make up ...
From Facebook Dabbler to Memoirist (10/17)
Glennon Doyle Melton, author of Love Warrior, started her writing career in 2009. Badly needing a break one day, the stay-at-home mother of three turned to Facebook, where she noticed several of her friends were participating in a series of posts called '25 Things About Me.' She immediately began sharing incredibly honest and personal ...
Age of Consent (10/17)
The age of consent, according to western law, is the age at which a person is capable of agreeing to engagement in sexual activity. Stephen Robertson, in his
article 'Age of Consent Laws', states: 'Narrowly concerned with sexual violence, and with girls, originally, since the 19th century the age of consent has occupied a central place in...
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