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Two Post-Apocolyptic Novels Set Outside of the US (10/14)
After I finished reading The Last Man Standing, I became curious about post-apocalyptic novels written by authors from countries outside of the United States. A rather lengthy and frustrating Internet search led me to science fiction conventions around the world, prizes awarded, and books that have been translated into English. It also ...
Millerism (10/14)
Belle's aunt and uncle followed the preachings of William Miller, a New York farmer and the founder of Millerism. They believed Miller's prophecy that Jesus would return to earth in 1844.
Miller's idea was not profound — or original. The notion of the Second Coming is a core tenet of Christianity. Though the idea is central,...
PTSD and TBI (10/14)
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) are being called the 'signature injuries' of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. These conditions are closely related, but are, in fact, vastly different.
PTSD is a psychological response to a traumatic event. While most associate the term with military combat, any ...
McCarthyism (10/14)
In 'The Unknown Soldier,' one of the stories in Molly Antopol's The UnAmericans, a young actor, Alexi Liebman, has to serve jail time because he comes under suspicion that he is a member of the American Communist party. This fictional account is based on very real events that took place in the United States.
Throughout the 1940s and ...
Mo Yan and the Nobel (10/14)
Mo Yan is the pen name of Guan Moye. Born 17 February 1955, Guan was the fourth child of farmers in Gaomi township in Shandong province in the northeast part of China. He
says of his childhood:
'When I started forming memories, it was the most difficult time in China's history. Most people were starving at the time. People led a tough ...
A Look at Dyslexia (09/14)
DYS- (bad, Greek) LEXIA (language, Greek)
A German ophthalmologist named Rudolph Berlin coined the word dyslexia in 1887 to describe patients who, in spite of normal intelligence, had extreme difficulties with reading. Scientific discussion of the phenomenon of what was also called 'word blindness' emerged in the late nineteenth ...
Rose O'Neale Greenhow (09/14)
Though Rosetta is a fictional character in I Shall Be Near To You, some of the people she encounters as an enlisted soldier are not. When Rosetta guards Rose O'Neale Greenhow in the Old Capital Prison, we are given some insights into a fascinating, historical figure.
Born in Maryland in 1817, Greenhow was an ardent secessionist. ...
Vocational Rehabilitation (09/14)
Part of what brings together the characters in Tumbledown is their participation in a vocational rehabilitation program—in this case, training in an assembly-line setup designed to teach them to work on an actual factory floor. As portrayed in the novel, this type of work not only offers patients (modest) financial compensation, it ...
Creating Music from Science (09/14)
In Orfeo, the protagonist Peter Els sees many similarities between gene structures and music. 'Genomics was right now learning how to read scores indescribably beautiful,' Powers writes. And while the book talks about an entire segment of study that is called 'biocomposing' with its own dedicated journal and conference, research reveals ...
The American Road Trip Book (09/14)
Readers who wish to travel America without leaving the couch have always had a vast tradition from which to cull. While you may prefer to watch the mountains and the desert going by from the back of a horse (
Lonesome Dove) or atop a raft (
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), the most common way to go is, of course, by car.
From Route 66 ...
The Voyage of the Damned (09/14)
One of the subjects raised often throughout
The Lion Seeker is the difficulty Jews faced leaving Europe as WWII ramped up. The voyage of the
MS St. Louis, sometimes referred to as 'The Voyage of the Damned,' is referenced in passing.
After
Kristallnacht – 'The Night of Broken Glass' – on November 9-10, 1938, many Jews ...
Reading Wodehouse in Mumbai (09/14)
Growing up in an extremely cramped one-bedroom apartment on the bottom floor of a multi-rise building in Mumbai, I was looking for one thing — escape. And while India had been independent for just around 25-odd years at that time, the vestiges of colonialism remained. Try as we might, my friends and I could never bring ourselves to ...
The U.S. Military-Industrial Complex (09/14)
In The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, you can see the United States' complex diplomatic and espionage mechanisms at work. As the cliché goes, freedom is expensive. The vastness of this network is complemented by a parallel one, the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex, a term coined by President Eisenhower to cover the many industries, ...
The Lathi (09/14)
Throughout Pink Sari Revolution, the stick carried by the Gulabi Gang is referred to as a pink-painted 'baton.' More accurately it is a lathi – a traditional Indian weapon, made of bamboo, with a long history of martial use.
Lathi (pronounced LAH-tee) literally means 'bamboo stick' in Hindi. It is widely considered to be one ...
Ten Classic Children's Novels for Winter (09/14)
The Twistrose Key is full of frozen landscapes inspired by Norwegian winters – sleighs, ice caves, and sled runs, plus a good place to take the chill off with a mug of hot mulled cider. Here is a list of ten other novels for children that will give readers a good dose of frost and snow, either as inspiration for getting through the ...
Gun Safety Etiquette (09/14)
One of the early scenes in The Infinite Moment of Us, has Wren visiting a shooting range with her best friend Tessa, and P.G., Tessa's new boyfriend. Although Wren doesn't like guns; she 'hated their ugliness, and she hated what they did,' she has a good time and finds the experience surprisingly thrilling and exciting. This unexpected ...
Yuyachkani (09/14)
The theater group Diciembre, in At Night We Walk in Circles, sounds a lot like Peru's award-winning independent theater collective, Yuyachkani. Launched in 1971, the group's essential pillars have been political performances, theatrical experimentation and performances steeped in indigenous culture.
Yuyachkani is a Quechua word that ...
Battle of the Aleutian Islands (09/14)
In The Wind Is Not A River, the protagonist, journalist John Easley, finds himself on the Aleutian island of Attu in April 1943, when the Battle of the Aleutian Islands is taking place.
We've all heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the precipitating event that led the United States to fight in World War II...
Bipolar Disorder (09/14)
In
Em and the Big Hoom, Imelda Mendes ('Em') suffers from bipolar disorder, a condition formerly known as 'manic depression' that about
2.4% of people around the world
have been diagnosed with at some point in their lifetime.
Bipolar disorder manifests itself as extreme highs and lows in mood, with these swings being far more severe ...
Popular Latin Dances (09/14)
I thought the references to Latin dances woven throughout Meg Medina's Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass were an effective way to illustrate Piddy's struggles with understanding her own physicality as well her place as an individual within her community. Besides the cultural connotations, dance can be a powerful way to express emotion ...
The Isle of Lewis (09/14)
If you look at a map of the United Kingdom, you'll find Scotland at the top and, to the west, a cluster of islands which are known as the Hebrides (pronounced heb-ree-dees). The islands are split into two groups - the Inner Hebrides and the Outer Hebrides. The islands in the Inner Hebrides lie close to the Scottish mainland, so close that...
Operation Carpetbagger (08/14)
They flew by night, predominantly during the 'moon period,' when there was sufficient moonlight to navigate by. Their airplanes were painted black to avoid detection, and they flew at dangerously low altitudes, often as low as 2,000 ft. The first flights were with modified B-24D Liberators; later, C-47s, A-26s, and British Mosquitos were ...
White Flight (08/14)
In We Are Not Ourselves, Eileen Leary moves to a three-family home in Jackson Heights in Queens, New York, which, even as she watches, becomes increasingly diverse. 'Supposedly it was the most ethnically diverse square mile in the world. Someone more poetically inclined might find inspiration in the polyphony of voices, but she just ...
The Wonderful World of Fictional Settings (08/14)
In
Enon (as in his 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
Tinkers), Paul Harding constructs and describes the fictional New England town of Enon, complete with a chronicling of its multi-generational history, descriptions of its homes, woods and native plants, and stories of those buried in its cemetery.
Generally speaking, the setting of ...
Screaming Bloody Murder (08/14)
To paraphrase an old poem, 'Twas a balmy summer afternoon,' July 5, 2011 to be exact. I was enjoying a peaceful lunch with a dear friend at an outdoor cafe in Portland, Oregon, when my cell phone rang and my usually placid, always refined eighty-nine year old mother screeched: 'It's not guilty on all counts, and Nancy Grace is having a ...
Make Room for Ducklings? (08/14)
In her
review of
How The Light Gets In for
The Washington Post, Maureen Corrigan writes: 'Penny's voice — occasionally amused, yet curiously formal — is what makes the world of her novels plausible. I can think of few other writers who could sidestep cuteness in a scene that features an elderly female poet and her pet duck.'
...
The Aleutian Islands: First Settlers (08/14)
As Glorious Misadventures shows, the vast amount of money to be made in the Aleutian Islands and western Alaska drew many adventurers and speculators, including the primary subject of the book, Nikolai Rezanov. The Aleut Region is a string of over 70 volcanic islands stretching more than 1,000 miles across the very northern part of the ...
Connection: The Wonder of the Ordinary (07/14)
John Muir said, 'When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.' In On Paper, Nicholas Basbanes centers on something – paper - and makes it a hub whose spokes can touch everything else on Earth.
Many micro-histories have been published in the last few years, and they are as ...
Sex! Now That I Have Your Attention... (07/14)
No doubt about it. There is something about sex.
In Amy Tan's The Valley of Amazement, sex is used as an instrument of power by the women protagonists. As Little Violet begins her career as a courtesan, she is given this piece of advice: 'Always remember, you are creating a world of romance and illusion...you must learn all the ...
Haiti's History of Lawlessness (07/14)
Since its independence in 1804, Haiti has struggled with lawlessness, due in large part to being a former slave nation that, after it won its independence, was left with the massive challenge of creating a stable and autonomous society while being actively isolated by the dominant trading nations of France, Britain and the USA.
Before...
Metaphorically Speaking: The Power of Metaphor (07/14)
In
Levels of Life, Julian Barnes creates an extended metaphor between the trials of hot-air ballooning and the experience of love found and lost. In one example he writes:
Grief is vertical – and vertiginous – while mourning is horizontal. Grief makes your stomach turn, snatches the breath from you, cuts off the blood ...
Hardboiled Detective Fiction: Literary Greats (07/14)
Even if it does veer off into other categories, The Search could be essentially classified as hardboiled detective fiction.
In the 1920s and early 1930s, Dashiell Hammett became the preeminent writer in the field. Until this time, detective stories were lumped in with the rest of 'crime fiction,' with the focus being on a plot that ...
The Republic of West Florida (07/14)
The Blood of Heaven is set primarily in West Florida during the early years of the 19th century. At the time, West Florida occupied part of what is now referred to as the Florida Panhandle, as well as sections of what are now Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama along the Gulf Coast. It was bordered by the Mississippi River to the west, and...
Linda Castillo's Kate Burkholder series (07/14)
Her Last Breath is the fifth book in the Kate Burkholder series. While readers have made it clear that it can be appreciated as a stand-alone book, story lines and character development are carried as threads running throughout the series. Here is a recap of the series for those who have read the other books, and a teaser for those who ...
An Interview with Author Ryan O'Neill (07/14)
Ryan O'Neill was born in Glasgow in 1975. He lived in Africa, Europe and Asia before settling in Newcastle, Australia, with his wife and two daughters. His fiction has appeared in The Best Australian Stories, The Sleepers Almanac, Meanjin, New Australian Stories, Wet Ink, Etchings, and Westerly. His work has won the Hal Porter and Roland ...
Mythic Fantasy: A Mirror World (07/14)
Mythic expression is humanity's first language. These myths, or to use a more contemporary synonym, metanarratives, are the stories that give purpose and meaning to a people, a way of understanding the seemingly random occurrences in the lives of individuals and communities. Whether these are expressed in clay statues, paintings on cave ...
David Lynch (07/14)
In Night Film, Marisha Pessl seems to take inspiration from a number of movie directors including Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick but the one whom the fictional Stan Cordova resembles the most is David Lynch.
Born in 1946 in Missoula, Montana to middle-class parents, Lynch had an itinerant childhood moving from state to state ...
Writers and the Fine Art of Self-Promotion (07/14)
Irish writer Nuala Ní Chonchúir wrote in a
blog for the Irish Writer's Centre:
The promotional end of things is not always fun for writers. We are often, by nature, solitary beings, preferring our own company – and that of our fictional friends – to that of real people. We are OK with being on our own, tapping out ...
Evin Prison (07/14)
Children of the Jacaranda Tree plants its story firmly in the tumultuous landscape of Iran in the 1970s and '80s. The Shah was overthrown in the late 1970s, and political activists were full of hope for a new kind of Iran. But it was to be a fleeting hope. The new Islamic Republic of Iran threw dissenters in prison, charging them with ...
Child Abduction Novels (07/14)
The sudden disappearance of a young child is certainly one of a parent's worst nightmares. It's probably no wonder, then, that the topic has been explored in a large number of novels, ranging from straightforward mysteries and thrillers to more literary approaches that use child abduction as a springboard for exploration of other topics. ...
Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and Company (07/14)
Many writers of 'The Lost Generation,' including Ernest Hemingway, spent a considerable amount of time in a Paris bookstore run by expat Sylvia Beach. Both Beach and her business offered considerable support to these artists, and in many ways were partly responsible for shaping the American literature of the generation.
Sylvia Beach ...
Rinse and Repeat: Laundry in the Nineteenth Century (07/14)
In Longbourn, the housemaid Sarah's frustration with the laundry would have been shared by anyone who cleaned clothes during the early 19th century. Our modern process of sorting, dumping into a machine, pouring in soap, and pressing a button is an embarrasingly wonderful diminution of this once complicated and time-intensive process.
...
Slow Medicine (07/14)
In Knocking on Heaven's Door, Katy Butler describes a relatively new movement in modern healthcare termed 'slow medicine,' and advocates urgently for its principles to be applied in hospitals and specialists' offices across the United States. The slow medicine ethos mimics that of the slow food movement; taking time and applying restraint...
The Family Pen (06/14)
Talent seems to flow through families. Bach's sons became important composers in their own right, and one,
Johann Christian, was considered by Mozart to be one of his musical fathers. Twice Nobel laureate Marie Curie was the mother of
Irene Joliot-Curie, who herself won the Nobel in chemistry in 1935. Philosopher and novelist Mary ...
Pablo Escobar and His Excesses (06/14)
If one of the first things that comes to mind when someone says the word 'Colombia,' is 'drugs,' that fault lies squarely on the shoulders of notorious drug mobster, Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria. Born in 1949 to a school teacher and a farmer, Pablo Escobar grew up in the suburbs of Medellin (
pronunciation) and turned to a life of crime ...
In Vino Veritas…? (06/14)
The list is long: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Marcel Proust, Charles Baudelaire, Jack London, F Scott Fitzgerald, Philip K. Dick, Edna St. Vincent Millay, O. Henry, William Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams…and many more. American writers Eugene O'Neill, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway,...
The Role of Jewish Women in American Communism (06/14)
While communism might be a dirty word today, its principles held a lot of appeal for the working poor in the United States for much of the 1920s through the 50s. The idea of a 'workers' revolution' akin to the Russian October revolution of 1917 didn't seem too far-fetched. The stock market crash of 1929 followed by the Great Depression ...
The Naxalites in India (06/14)
In The Lowland, Udayan Mitra, one of the two brothers in the story, gets pulled into India's nascent communist movement that kicked into high gear in the 60s, especially in the state of West Bengal where a fair portion of the novel is set.
The world's largest democracy has had brushes with communism for decades now, the origins of ...
The Cello (06/14)
Cello music plays a pivotal role in Rooftoppers. The cello is a string instrument played with a bow. It has four strings tuned to perfect fifths. It is an octave lower than a viola, and an octave and a fifth lower than a violin. The name 'cello' is an abbreviation of the Italian violoncello, which means 'little violone'.
Andrea ...
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