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Baltimore's Storied Past (05/19)
Clock Dance, like many of Anne Tyler's novels, takes place in Baltimore, Maryland. The largest city in the state, Baltimore is home to over 600,000 residents, or 2.8 million people including the entire metro area. Located just 40 miles northeast of Washington, D.C. on the Patapsco River close to where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay, ...
Universal Basic Income (05/19)
Author Alissa Quart argues in her book Squeezed, that a Universal Basic Income is one possible solution for job insecurity, particularly for stay-at-home parents and domestic workers who are often shut out of the economy and for workers whose jobs may be phased out due to automation.
But what exactly is UBI? Basically, it's a program ...
Literary Resistance in Sudan (05/19)
Leila Aboulela's books, including the story collection Elsewhere Home, illuminate modern life in Sudan, sharing bits of culture and geography alongside the experiences of faith and human relationships. The author joins in the tradition of Tayib Saleh and other fiction writers who've brought the Sudanese diaspora experience into Western ...
Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations (05/19)
The title of M.T. Anderson's
Landscape With Invisible Hand, (and perhaps its protagonist's name), contains a reference to the theories of the Scottish economist
Adam Smith, whose landmark 1776 work
The Wealth of Nations laid the groundwork for modern free-market economic theory. To laypeople, Smith may be best known for his ...
The Flamingo Hotel (05/19)
The Flamingo Hotel, opened by Bugsy Siegel in 1946, where Esme spends her teenage years, was the third gambling establishment to open on the Strip. It is now Las Vegas' oldest hotel.
The hotel had been the brainchild of Billy Wilkerson, who envisioned a European-style hotel and casino, a far cry from the rustic, western-themed ...
Who Was Ngungunyane? (05/19)
One of the most interesting characters in Mia Couto's Woman of the Ashes never formally makes an appearance – the emperor, Ngungunyane, the Lion of Gaza. Who is this powerful figure who ruled the Gaza empire (which encompassed southeastern Zimbabwe and southern Mozambique.) What led to his triumphs and, finally, to his downfall?...
The Lewis and Clark Expedition (05/19)
Carys Davies' novella West, is set a decade after the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition. Protagonist John Cyrus Bellman's obsession with journeying into the West echoes the ambitions and objectives of the famous adventurers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark who desired to explore the unknown American frontier and detail what they found ...
The Intricacies of Interwoven Cultural Identities (05/19)
You Bring the Distant Near is successful, in large part, because of the way Mitali Perkins reveals the many, many intricacies of cultural identities, quietly challenging a western sense of the immigrant as stereotypical 'other.' She makes many references to Bengali culture, sometimes called Bangla culture, which plays a large part in how ...
Greyhound Racing (05/19)
In Michael Ondaatje's novel
Warlight, the narrator assists with 'importing a dubious population of unregistered foreign dogs' into England for the sport of dog racing.
Modern dog racing is an outgrowth of an older sport called 'coursing,' in which dogs hunt game by sight instead of using their sense of smell (hounds as a category are ...
India's Chipko Andolan (05/19)
In The Overstory, a few of the characters become environmental activists in order to save the wealth of forests in the American West and Pacific Northwest. In the novel, Richard Powers refers to many save-the-trees efforts around the globe, including the Chipko Andolan in the 1970s in the Himalayan region of India.
Chipko Andolan ...
Saddam Hussein (04/19)
Saddam Hussein, Iraq's dictator, ruled the country with an iron fist under the guise of numerous grandiose titles including President and The Knight of the Arab Nation, for nearly twenty-five years (1979-2003). In The President's Gardens, the character Ibrahim's most surreal job is to bury the people killed by the President...
A Brief History of The New People's Army (04/19)
A large part of protagonist Geronima de Vera's backstory in Elaine Castillo's novel, America is Not the Heart, is entwined with the communist rebellion group, The New People's Army, a real-life collective that continues to forcefully oppose elected Philippine governments.
The New People's Army (NPA) is the armed wing of the Communist ...
The National Film Board of Canada (04/19)
The title of Heather Smith's novel,
The Agony of Bun O'Keefe, is inspired by a 27-minute documentary called
The Agony of Jimmy Quinlan [see full film below], which was produced by the
National Film Board of Canada in 1978. The film chronicles the effort of Quinlan, one of 5,000 people living on the streets in Montreal, to get ...
Cotopaxi - Ecuadorian Volcano (04/19)
Among other things, Crosley is a travel writer, and one of the most enjoyable essays in her new collection Look Alive Out There recounts her near-disastrous attempt to summit Cotopaxi, a volcano in Ecuador, more or less on a whim.
Cotopaxi, part of the Andes mountain chain, is the second-highest mountain in Ecuador (at 19,347 feet), ...
The Unarmed Police Force of Norway (04/19)
In Derek B Miller's
American by Day, which takes place in 2008, Oslo Chief Inspector Sigrid Ødegård doesn't carry a gun. She is a member of Norway's unarmed police force, one of nineteen countries worldwide with cops who don't carry guns. This is despite the
fact that Norway falls eleventh among first world ...
The Role of Race Relations in the 2013 Chicago School Closings (04/19)
When people talk about Chicago, the endemic violence inevitably comes up, along with a sense of helplessness about how to stop it. That helplessness leads to apathy, and the feeling that the neighborhoods torn apart by gun violence are forsaken, failed places. But this attitude is as much a cause as it is an effect of crime and violence. ...
Nat Turner's Rebellion (04/19)
One of Wideman's most vivid stories is centered around the confession of Nat Turner, an enslaved Virginia man who organized a revolt in 1831, involving upwards of 50 other slaves. The rebels killed 51 people (mostly slave owners and their families). The rebellion began in the late hours of August 21 when Turner and his fellow slaves ...
The Jinn of Senegal (04/19)
In Fisherman's Blues, Anna Badkhen takes us on a trip to the West African nation of Senegal. Although her primary focus is on the families who make their living in and around the ocean, another thread emerges - the fascinating stories of the jinn. The magical power of these equally magical creatures is described in stories of great ...
Eye-Gaze Computers (04/19)
Ruth Fitzmaurice's husband Simon, who had Motor Neurone Disease, communicated using a type of adaptive technology known as an eye-gaze computer. The author mentions its use as a critical part of their lives throughout her memoir, I Found My Tribe.
Adaptive technology is a subset of assistive technology and while the two terms are often...
Nainoa Thompson and Modern Day Wayfinding (04/19)
Although Sea People is largely written as a history focusing on Polynesia and its earliest inhabitants, it also introduces readers to the islands as a whole: the culture of the Polynesian people, the botany and wildlife of the many islands and the adventurous spirit of a people who loved exploration. This adventurous spirit, however, was ...
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 ...
Great Topiary Gardens (04/19)
Mike Muñoz might be a magician with a mower and a wizard with a weed whacker, but his real talent is topiary. If, like Mike, you thrill to see people, animals and mythical creatures carved from living trees and shrubs, here are a few great public topiary gardens to add to your itinerary.
Levens Hall, Cumbria, England
Regarded as ...
Ancient Cartography (04/19)
Mapmaking has been a vital part of human curiosity for millennia. The oldest known world map is the Babylonian Map of the World, also known as the
Imago Mundi, which dates back to the 5th century BCE. This early map is not alone. Archaeologists have found many map-like representations in caves, some of which even show images of star ...
Schizophrenia-focused Labs and Research Centers (04/19)
Like the lab where Grace and her father work in An Na's
The Place Between Breaths, scientists around the world are hard at work researching the causes of schizophrenia and investigating potential cures. Here are a few of the labs and research centers that include schizophrenia as one of their primary areas of inquiry:
Duke ...
Maggie O'Farrell – Life & Books (04/19)
Maggie O'Farrell was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and grew up in various locations across Wales and Scotland. When she was just eight she contracted encephalitis, an experience she describes in a chapter called 'Cerebellum (1980)' in her memoir, I Am I Am I Am. The illness did long term damage, leaving her physically weak and ...
Evelyn Nesbit and the "Trial of the Century" (04/19)
For her novel, A Death of No Importance, Mariah Fredericks borrows heavily from the story of Evelyn Nesbit and the violence that surrounded her life. What exactly happened to Evelyn Nesbit and how did she come to be a part of the 'Trial of the Century' as it later came to be known?
Nesbit was born Florence Evelyn Nesbit on December 25,...
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. ...
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,...
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 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 ...
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 ...
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 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 ...
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 ...
