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The Rise and Fall of the Khmer Empire (04/17)
The Khmer Empire was a powerful state in South-East Asia that existed between 802-1431 AD. At the height of its power, it covered modern-day Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and southern Vietnam. Made up of 90 provinces, its capital Angkor was, at one point, a thriving city of over one million people. The empire was founded upon extensive ...
A Florida Reading List (04/17)
Sarah Gerard's
Sunshine State celebrates her coastal Florida upbringing. We've chosen five more books that also showcase Florida.
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
Ava Bigtree is 12 and reeling from her mother's death. She and her siblings participate in the family business, a gator-wrangling theme park on Swamplandia!, their (fictional...
The United Arab Emirates (04/17)
Temporary People is set largely in the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven states located on the Persian Gulf. Each of the seven, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, and Umm al-Qaiwan have their own local governments, which are overseen by a federal president in Abu Dhabi, the nation's capital. The current ...
The Pew Research Center (04/17)
In
Agnostic, author Lesley Hazelton states: 'The most respected polls on faith and belief are run by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which has been taking the pulse of both the American and the international soul, as it were, since 2001.'
According to their
website, 'Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that ...
The Best FLOTUS? (04/17)
In 2014, for the fifth time in 31 years, the Siena Research Institute conducted its
survey of historians, political scientists and scholars, aimed at identifying the 'best' First Lady of the United States. Each presidential spouse was ranked on a scale of one to five in ten different categories ranging from Background, to Courage, to ...
Jewish Children Smuggled to Safety (04/17)
When Germany invaded The Netherlands in May 1940, few could have imagined the horrors that would follow, including the murder of about three-quarters of the estimated 140,000 Jews living in the country before the war. Almost as soon as occupation began, resistance groups formed to oppose German dictates.
When Ollie, a central character...
Queen Caroline (04/17)
The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins is set during the eighteenth century in England, the time when King George II and his wife, Queen Caroline, ruled Great Britain. As reviewer Becky H. says, in the novel, 'the picture presented of Queen Caroline is delightful — and convincingly nefarious.'
Queen Caroline was a native ...
A Maritime Reading List (04/17)
The North Water is a gritty, graphic novel about 19th-century whaling. Here are a few additional maritime adventures.
Rush Oh! by Shirley Barrett
In this rollicking debut novel, Mary Davidson, an Australian whaler's daughter, looks back at 1908 – a catastrophic whaling season but her first chance at romance. At 19 she is ...
Notable Women in the Suffragette Movement in 20th Century Britain (04/17)
In her novel, The Hourglass Factory, Lucy Ribchester has included some notable figures and episodes from the history of the women's suffrage movement in early 20th century Britain.
Emmeline Pankhurst
Emmeline was born in Manchester, England in 1858, to a family with radical political leanings. At the age of twenty-one, she married ...
False Memory (04/17)
One of the primary plot drivers for What Lies Between Us is the concept of false memory.
As the term implies, false memory is when a person recalls an event or a detail that has not happened or is untrue in some particular way. While research into why false memory takes root is still being conducted, a number of factors have been ...
Nestinarstvo or Ritual Fire-Dancing (04/17)
Nestinarstvo, or ritual fire-dancing, plays an important role throughout Stork Mountain.
The practice, which involves walking barefoot across burning coals, is specific to the Strandja Mountain region in southeast Bulgaria, an area that shares both borders and cultural ties with Greece. Indeed, it's believed that the rite originated ...
A Selection of Literary Prizes (04/17)
Lucy Wood, the author of Weathering, won a Somerset Maugham Award, named after the famous author.
What does it take to get a literary prize named after you? Some amount of money and/or influence in the literary world, to be sure, but also a personal connection to the prize being offered and its specific criteria. Here are a few ...
India's Partition and Its Lingering Effects (03/17)
At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, Britain withdrew from India and the country split into two so as to form an independent Muslim country to the north-east and north-west of India. Although the British withdrew essentially without incident, the decision to partition India set off a tsunami of violence and what is considered the...
Creatures from Japanese Mythology (03/17)
Two of the monsters that haunt the island of Kokoro-Jima in the novel The Emperor Of Any Place are borrowed from traditional Japanese mythology.
Jikininki might remind many readers of zombies. In The Emperor of Any Place, they devour the bodies of deceased soldiers who have washed ashore on Kokoro-Jima, but what they are hungry for ...
Crow Facts and Bird Group Names (03/17)
In Elizabeth Church's debut novel, The Atomic Weight of Love, Meridian Wallace studies crow behavior over the course of decades. The Corvid family – which includes crows, rooks, magpies, ravens, and jays – is often considered to have the highest intelligence and most remarkable habits in the bird world. Here are some facts ...
Emotional Support Animals (03/17)
In Spill Simmer Falter Wither, One Eye provides a lot of emotional support to Ray.
Anyone who has owned a pet knows how much they can contribute to emotional well-being — studies at University of Missouri's College of Veterinary Medicine's Research Center for Human and Animal Interaction show that interacting with ...
The Joint Family in India (03/17)
In Ghachar Ghochar, the narrator lives in a joint family, and it is really this sociological unit that has been the mainstay of Indian life for centuries.
A joint family is defined as a unit of extended members of a family all living together under one roof, who also cook and eat together. Usually driven by patriarchal order, the ...
Little Saigon Enclaves (03/17)
The name 'Little Saigon' is often given to an area where there are a large number of people of Vietnamese origin. When The Refugees author Viet Thanh Nguyen arrived in the United States in the mid '70s at the age of four, he lived in a refugee camp and then with a couple of sponsor families in Pennsylvania before being reunited with his ...
The Odyssey (03/17)
The New Odyssey brings to mind the original epic with which this book has many parallels. Literary works don't come much more venerable or influential than The Odyssey, a 12,000-line poem written in ancient Greek and composed sometime in the eighth century B.C.E. Granted, it's likely not every contemporary reader's favorite work (although...
Housing Choice Voucher Program: Does it Work? (03/17)
In Evicted, one of the solutions that Matthew Desmond recommends is the expansion of the government Housing Choice Voucher program. Called Section 8, this aid was created by Congress in 1974, and is different from public housing in that the latter restricts participants to only certain locations and buildings – the infamous Robert ...
What Teenagers Value (03/17)
Siobhan Vivian's YA novel, The Last Boy and Girl in the World, tells the story of Keeley Hewitt, who is a normal teenager except for one thing: her world is falling apart. Torrential rains are causing trees to crash and houses to crumble, and adults in the community are doing everything they can to protect the place that they call ...
Malta During World War II (03/17)
The island country of Malta, one of the key settings in Chris Cleave's Everyone Brave is Forgiven, might be tiny, but its location between Italy and North Africa, halfway between the Strait of Gibraltar and Egypt, has made it a strategically important naval base for hundreds, if not thousands, of years - including during World War II.
...
Seva in Sikhism (03/17)
In
The Year Of the Runaways, most of the men are Sikhs as is Narinder Kaur, the only woman character. Sikhism (see Beyond the Book for
A Moment Comes) is an integral part of Narinder's life and it is through practicing one of its central tenets, service or 'seva,' that she comes to be Randeep's wife.
While most religions ...
The Maze Prison and Its Most Famous Inmate (02/17)
In
High Dive, Jonathan Lee references many aspects of '
The Troubles,' a term used to describe the turbulent decades in Northern Ireland between 1960 and 2000. At issue was a territorial challenge: the overwhelmingly Protestant Loyalists wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom while the nationalists and mainly Catholic republicans were...
German Reunification (02/17)
In his memoir All Tomorrow's Parties, Rob Spillman, the son of American expat musicians, includes a flashback to his childhood in Germany. He paints a bleak portrait of East Berlin in the 1970s, with its worthless currency, 'sour-faced' military guards, secret police, and drab institutional architecture. It is not surprising that by the ...
How Is Mental Illness Passed through Families? (02/17)
In Imagine Me Gone, John and his son Michael, both struggle with mental illness.
Significant research has been conducted to search for the genetic basis for mental disorders. Family linkage and twin studies are particularly revealing. At present, there is no simple answer as to how mental illness might pass through families; ...
The Town of Rye (02/17)
The charming town of Rye rests in the county of East Sussex near England's south coast. Rye's recorded history can be traced back to before the Norman Conquest of 1066. For many centuries it was an important port town set in a naturally formed bay. But this changed in the 13th century when a combination of major storms led to its main ...
Vikings on the Isle of Man (02/17)
One of the main storylines of Merrow involves the arrival of a man, Ulf, who Auntie Ushag, using her native Manx language, calls a 'wiggynagh,' or what we'd call a Viking. Like many elements of the novel, this has a basis in historical fact, since the Isle of Man has a significant history of Viking exploration and settlement.
...
Kendra's Law (02/17)
While the City Slept is a searing indictment of the mental health system in the United States, showing step-by-step how the failure of an overworked, underfunded bureaucracy led to a likely preventable human tragedy.
Among the many challenges communities face is in ensuring that those experiencing mental illness get proper ...
Early African American Authors (02/17)
In
Ginny Gall, the main character is an avid reader who aspires to be much like the black authors he admires. A few early African Americans writers are listed below.
Top, from left to right: James Weldon Johnson, Harriet Wilson, William Wells Brown
Bottom, from left to right: Jessie Fauset,W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar
...
The History of Newspaper Horoscopes (02/17)
In Tender, Catherine Reilly takes up a job writing horoscopes, the kind that you routinely find in newspapers, generic enough to possibly apply to a wide swath of people, yet specific enough to make the individual reader feel like it was written just for him or her.
The word horoscope comes from the Greek words hõra (time or hour...
Dr. Ian Stevenson (02/17)
Sharon Guskin's debut novel,
The Forgetting Time, explores reincarnation – specifically children who seem to experience it. In an
interview about her research, she explains that after stumbling across a book about Dr. Ian Stevenson and
his intense research of children and reincarnation, she was hooked.
Ian Stevenson (1918-2007) ...
Henry Morgenthau Sr. (02/17)
In The Hundred Year Walk, author Dawn MacKeen mentions observations made by non-Turkish individuals who were unwilling witnesses to the Armenian Genocide. One person she cites several times is Henry Morgenthau, Sr. (1856-1946), who was the United States Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916, and as such bore witness to ...
The Golden Record (02/17)
In Mr. Splitfoot, Samantha Hunt's new novel of ghosts, cults and motherhood, two characters fall in love while listening to the Golden Record.
Voyager spacecrafts 1 and 2 launched from Earth in 1977 and continue to travel further away from our planet, transmitting information back through the Deep Space Network. Theirs is an ...
Early-onset Alzheimer's (02/17)
'Dementia in its varied forms is not like cancer, [which is] an invader. But Alzheimer's is me, unwinding, losing trust in myself, a butt of my own jokes and on bad days capable of playing hunt the slipper by myself and losing. You can't battle it, you can't be a plucky 'survivor'. It steals you from yourself.'
This is ...
Internment Camp Newspapers (02/17)
In Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds, Harry Fukuhara, his sister Mary, and his niece Jeanie were forced into internment camps built to house people of Japanese descent who were living in the United States during World War II. Over 127,000 Japanese Americans, mostly from the West Coast where ...
The Kung Tribe (02/17)
Africa's Kalahari desert might seem an unlikely model for American society. But the Kalahari—a sparsely populated swath of sun-baked bushland that boasts temperatures regularly above 100 degrees during the day and just a few inches of rainfall every year—is home to a tribe of nomadic people called the Kung (part of the San ...
The Exotic Animal Trade (02/17)
One of the side plots of Everybody's Fool by Richard Russo involves a town outsider illegally dealing in dangerous exotic reptiles. He rents an inexpensive apartment and hires one of the local residents to stay there during the day in order to receive packages, often marked as 'perishable.' The boxes are stored either in a highly air-...
A Brief History of Charm Bracelets (02/17)
Today's charm bracelet can trace its origins back to Neolithic times when small rocks and other items considered to have special powers to ward off evil were carried around. Charms worn by Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians and Hittites were created from lapis lazuli, rock crystal and other gems and inscribed with symbolic designs, ...
One True Thing (02/17)
Each of the chapters in Leslie Pietrzyk's short story collection features a young widow. The emotions the author expresses made me wonder what the author may have experienced herself – that is, which experiences were 'true.' In researching that question, I came across an article she'd written for Psychology Today, reprinted below, ...
Mothering Sunday and Mother's Day (01/17)
In the UK, 'Mothering Sunday' – the central event in Graham Swift's novel of the same name – dates back to at least the 16th century when Christians would go 'a mothering' to visit their 'mother church' once a year, where they had been baptized. For some, this would also be the day of the year when mothers were united with ...
The Our Gang Films (01/17)
One of the central characters in The Sellout is Hominy Jenkins, an elderly black man who was, in his youth, a lesser-known member of the group of child actors featured in the Our Gang series of short films. Hominy Jenkins might be fictional, but Our Gang was certainly not. Produced from 1922 to 1944 by comedy producer Hal Roach, the ...
Circadian Novels (01/17)
Nicola Yoon's The Sun Is Also a Star is an example of a circadian novel where the main action (except flashbacks, for instance) takes place all on one day. The most celebrated example is James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), set in 1904 Dublin on what has come to be known as 'Bloomsday,' June 16th. The protagonist, Leopold Bloom, mostly wanders ...
Secret Identities Revealed - Children of the Holocaust (01/17)
Of the many forms of resistance during WWII, some of the most fascinating and poignant stories involve hiding young Jewish children – including the most famous of them all, that of Anne Frank. While her story reached international acclaim, other tales went untold for decades, partially because many of them took place in countries ...
What is Jihad? (01/17)
In The Kindness of Enemies, Leila Aboulela's twenty-first century protagonist Natalie asks: 'How did this historical change in the very definition of jihad come about?' This question is developed thematically though the historical storyline in Aboulela's novel which features Imam Shamil, a mid-nineteenth century Muslim leader of mountain...
Sherman's March To the Sea (01/17)
Fallen Land is set during the end of the Civil War and describes a landscape in the aftermath of Major General William Tecumseh Sherman's clamp-down of Georgia through which he delivered one of the definitive end points of the war between Union and Confederate forces.
Fallen Land describes the ravages wrought by the General's tactics, ...
The Great Tulip Mania (01/17)
Since the beginning of time, humanity has been enchanted by – and paid a small fortune to possess – rare and beautiful objects: diamonds, gold, emeralds…and tulips.
At the peak of the 'Great Dutch Tulip Mania of 1637,' an event which is covered in The Confidence Game, the most desirable tulip bulbs commanded ...
Apex, North Carolina - One of the Best Places to Live in America (01/17)
When Dr. Clarice Watkins sets out to academically scrutinize one of the 'Best Places to Live in America,' she notes that the criteria for making the list include 'Good quality of life,' along with 'Quiet and safe.' For many years, Money magazine has compiled its own annual roundups of the 'Best Places to Live.' According to Money, their ...
The French Enlightenment (01/17)
The intellectually febrile period between the early 1600s and the late 1700s which saw an unsurpassed expansion in humankind's understanding of the world around us, particularly in the arenas of science (especially physics), and social and political philosophy, later came to be known as The Age of Enlightenment, also known as the Age of ...
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