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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 ...
Kenneth Lochhead's "Flight and Its Allegories" and the Gander International Airport (01/17)
If you flew on a transatlantic flight at some point in the mid-twentieth century, odds are you found yourself at Gander International Airport in Gander, Newfoundland, on at least one leg of your journey. For years, before the advent of wide-body jets with higher fuel capacity, Gander was the main refueling stop for aircraft bound for the ...
What's That Mess in the Mess Hall? (01/17)
'The chow hall was a big white magnet north of the shopping gulch, a massive canopy that seemed to hover over the pale sands. Part circus tent, part martial pretense, it was ringed by blast walls and protected by counterbattery radar. It could serve over a thousand soldiers at a time and up to fifteen thousand a day, not including the ...
Arts Education Empowers Youth with Disabilities (01/17)
Aristotle once said, 'Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.' Those words were uttered nearly 2,400 years ago, but they are still relevant today. Education that gives meaning is the kind of learning that we remember. Today, art education is one place where teenagers learn about the world surrounding them ...
Mohammad Mossadegh (01/17)
In Gardens of Consolation, one of the main characters becomes a supporter of Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, who served from 1951 – 1953 until he was ousted in a coup d'état backed by the American CIA and the British SIS.
Mossadegh was born in Tehran in 1882 into a well-connected ...
Dorothea Dix: Passionate Advocate for the Mentally Ill (01/17)
One of the main themes in A Question of Mercy is mental illness. And if you search for information on its history in the United States, the name Dorothea Dix keeps appearing.
In 1802, Dorothea Dix was born into a reportedly unhappy home in Hampden, Maine. Her parents were neglectful alcoholics: her mother was incapacitated by severe ...
The Jazz Age: A Quick Tour (01/17)
A Certain Age is set in the 1920s in America, known as the Jazz Age.
The author F. Scott Fitzgerald whose novel, The Great Gatsby was one of the defining publishing events of the decade, labeled the Jazz Age so because jazz as a music form became increasingly popular during this time especially in big cities like New York and Chicago.
...
The Farallon Islands (01/17)
The Lightkeepers is set on the Farallon Islands, which are officially part of the city of San Francisco. Even though they are located just about thirty miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge, the islands are quite remote. 'There is nowhere more alone than the Farallon Islands,' Geni writes in The Lightkeepers, 'The rest of the world might ...
The Hotel Metropol (12/16)
In
A Gentleman in Moscow, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is sentenced to live the rest of his life within the walls of his current residence – Moscow's
Hotel Metropol.
One of the oldest hotels in Russia, the Metropol was originally named the Chelyshy after its owner, Pyotr Chelyshev, who opened the facility as a bath house and ...
Jim Crow Laws (12/16)
Patrick Phillips' non-fiction book Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America examines a specific rape and murder of a white girl that occurred in 1912, in Forsyth County, Georgia. It also examines, more broadly, the South during that time. Following the end of the Civil War and the passage of Constitutional Amendments Thirteen ...
A Brief Recent History of Belarus (12/16)
The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko deals with the aftermath of Chernobyl and is set in a hospital in Belarus.
While most of us think of Belarus as a part of the now fragmented Soviet Union, the country has a colorful history of being handed back and forth between Poland and Russia for centuries. Belarus was part of Poland (which ...
Lung Cancer (12/16)
The late Paul Kalanithi, a non-smoking neurosurgeon, was diagnosed with squamous cell lung cancer. When Breath Becomes Air is his autobiography.
'Cancer' is a name given to a collection of diseases in which a set of cells in the body begin dividing abnormally and without stopping. Unlike their healthy counterparts, cancer cells lack ...
Reiving (11/16)
In the 14th century, the land on either side of the border between England and Scotland became known as the 'Border Country' or 'The Borders.' This area, where Fair Helen is set, was frequently used as a thoroughfare by English and Scottish armies, and consequently the residents were constantly impoverished as the militias sought to ...
A Funambulist By Any Other Name (11/16)
It seems that as long as there have been human beings and rope there has been the urge to string that rope between two posts or trees or buildings or things of any sturdy sort and walk - heel to toe - across the span.
For the ancient Greeks it held the appeal of balance offset by danger and, of course, the physical challenge. Though ...
Ancient Apartment Buildings (11/16)
Fishbowl is set in a high-rise apartment building.
The contemporary apartment building has evolved over hundreds of years to its current avatar, sleek structures fashioned with high-tech materials and serviced by powerful elevators.
It is believed that the first apartment buildings were built by the Romans two thousand years ago...
Flash Floods (11/16)
Flash flooding is a constant concern in The Never-Open Desert Diner.
A flash flood is a sudden release of water that inundates an area, and is differentiated from a normal flood by its duration; by definition, a flash flood lasts less than six hours. Although they can occur under a wide variety of circumstances they're especially ...
Thorstein Bunde Veblen (11/16)
The economist Thorstein Bunde Veblen, a frequent point of reference (and the main character's namesake) in Elizabeth McKenzie's The Portable Veblen, was born in Wisconsin in 1857. Veblen is famous for the concept of 'conspicuous consumption,' or spending more on things than they are worth to make a show of one's class.
He was the ...
Diego Velázquez's Contemporaries (11/16)
Diego Velázquez (1599 - 1660) was a painter in the court of Spain's Philip IV during the Spanish Golden Age (Siglo de Oro), a period influenced by the Italian Renaissance, during which the arts flourished throughout the country. The exact dates of the Spanish Golden Age vary by commentator, but it began no earlier than 1492 with ...
Prohibition in Vermont (11/16)
Press, the protagonist of In the Country of the Blind, lives in Vermont near a forgotten trail that rum-runners used to smuggle alcohol into the United States during Prohibition. 'The Nobel Experiment,' as the 18th Amendment to the Constitution was called, was an attempt at social engineering lasting from 1920 to 1933.
Section 1 ...
Bat Mitzvah (11/16)
One of the stories in Robert Oldshue's November Storm is about a 12-year old girl who is about to become a Bat Mitzvah. Most people have heard of a Bar or Bat Mitzvah – a Jewish rite of passage; a time when boys and girls are formally welcomed into the adult community. The word mitzvah means commandment or law, as well as good deed; ...
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