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A Red Herring (06/14)
A large part of the fun in reading The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair is in Joel Dicker's use of red herrings. A 'red herring' is a literary device that is used to keep one from reaching the correct conclusion, or to divert the reader's attention from the more important details. Quebert's plot is full of them, crafted to make each ...
Marshalsea Prison (06/14)
A fragment of a wall is all that is left of Marshalsea Prison.
But Charles Dickens has made sure that its memory lives on. His father was imprisoned in Marshalsea Prison in 1824. He owed forty pounds to a local baker (about 3000 pounds today). Charles scurried around the city trying to collect money on his father's behalf but it was ...
Smallpox (06/14)
In I Am Pilgrim, the villain attempts to infect a large number of people with a genetically engineered version of smallpox — a deadly disease completely eradicated by 1977.
Smallpox is caused by the variola virus, which is believed to have been around since approximately 10,000 BCE. As it progresses, victims develop a rash ...
The Scopes Trial (06/14)
Biology professor Andrew Waite (the protagonist in
The Explanation for Everything) had a predecessor in John Scopes, a 24-year-old high school teacher who decided to teach the theory of evolution in his Dayton, Tennessee high school classroom defying a then newly implemented state law banning this practice. The year was 1925, a time when ...
Child Musical Prodigies Past and Present (06/14)
A music prodigy is a child, 12 or under, whose talent is considered on a level and competitive with skilled adult musicians. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is still deemed one of the greatest child music prodigies—born in 1756, he started playing harpsichord at age three. By the age of five he was accomplished at reading and playing music ...
The Special Operations Executive (06/14)
Christine Granville worked for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), an organization set up to assist European resistance movements and according to Winston Churchill, 'to set Europe ablaze.' The SOE was formed from three different but overlapping units: a propaganda unit known as Department EH run by a Canadian newspaper magnate; ...
Five Things You Might Not Know About Neil Gaiman (06/14)
- Before he began to write novels that would earn him public recognition, Gaiman wrote comic books and graphic novels. The Sandman graphic novels (1989-1996), initially published by D C Comics and later by Vertigo, were particularly...
Forough Farrokhzad, An Icon In The History Of Persian Literature (06/14)
One of the most compelling and tragic characters in And The Mountains Echoed is a beautiful, intelligent woman named Nila. She's modern and independent, and feels trapped by Afghani society but eventually moves to Paris where she becomes a poet of some renown. This made me curious about other women poets from similar backgrounds, in ...
Douglass and O'Connell: An Unlikely Friendship (05/14)
One of the historical events that frames TransAtlantic is Frederick Douglass's visit to Ireland. Douglass was an escaped slave and later became a champion abolitionist. In late 1845, he visited Ireland as part of a two-year lecture tour through Ireland, Scotland and England. Douglass had escaped seven years earlier and had published his ...
The Heatwave of 1976 (05/14)
The heatwave described in the novel is based on an actual one that took place in the summer of 1976 in Britain, which was preceded by a dry period that began the previous year. At the time this had been the
driest 16-month period in over 250 years. Though there was some rain during that summer, it was so little and sporadic that it didn't...
West African Religions: Voodoo & Juju (05/14)
June 13, 2013
headline in
The Daily Mail: 'Six arrested over voodoo prostitution ring in Nigeria after gang branded women with irons then forced them to sell sex.'
It appears that Antonio Hill's novel
The Summer of Dead Toys could not be more timely in its depiction of sex traffickers in Spain preying on young Nigerian girls. ...
Food Deserts (05/14)
In Save Yourself, Patrick Cusimano works at Zoney's, a 24-hour convenience store in a small fictional town in Pennsylvania called Ratchetsburg. He finds his candy-striped uniform and the sterile atmosphere of the place stifling, yet work here is one of just a few options for town residents. From what Braffet describes, it seems like Zoney...
The Hokey Pokey (05/14)
You put your right foot in
You put your right foot out
You put your right foot in
And you shake it all about.
You do the Hokey Pokey
And you turn yourself around
That's what it's all about!
The Hokey Pokey is a timeless circle game, played by millions of children in millions of circles across many, many miles. But ...
A Discovery of African Literature (05/14)
How Emmanuel Sigauke Found African Literature and Founded a Magazine
A conversation between Naomi Benaron and Emmanuel Sigauke
Emmanuel Sigauke is a Zimbabwean writer. He is an English professor at Cosumnes River College in Sacramento California and is the editor of the on-line Munyori Literary Journal which has published the work...
Micronesia (05/14)
In
The People of The Trees, Perina and Tallent journey to the fictional Micronesian states of U'ivu and Ivu'ivu. While these particular islands are fictitious, the region of Micronesia, literally 'small island' in Greek is composed of thousands of small islands in the western Pacific Ocean, north of Australia.
From 1947, most of ...
Food Waste (05/14)
Food waste, one of the key issues underlying Jonathan Miles's
Want Not, is a problem that is beginning to draw more attention worldwide. Every year American households and retailers throw away 40 million tons of usable food. In early 2013 the UK Institution of Mechanical Engineers issued a
report, entitled 'Global Food; Waste Not, Want ...
The Chernobyl Disaster (05/14)
In All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, the Chernobyl disaster acts as the primary backdrop against which the story unfolds. Darragh McKeon describes the accident and the horrific aftermath in moving detail.
The disaster took place more than twenty-five years ago, on April 26, 1986, Situated about 88 miles north of Kiev in Ukraine, which...
Abalone Fishing (05/14)
In Past the Shallows, the boys' father is an abalone fisherman off the southern Tasmanian coast. Abalone are gastropods—single-shelled molluscs—similar to snails, but with a more flattened shell. Other than their size and respiratory pores—large holes near the edge—their outer shell is often unremarkable. However, ...
Javier Marías (05/14)
'A veces escribo para averiguar qué escribo' (Sometimes I write to discover what I write). So says Javier Marías—native of Madrid, and highly acclaimed novelist who has been widely tipped as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Marías is a translator (to Spanish) of authors such as Faulkner, Yeats,...
Acting Talent Agencies (05/14)
A talent agency is an organization that represents talent – actors, musicians, writers etc – and pitches their clients' talents to appropriate organizations. For example, a Hollywood talent agency will pitch or plug a particular actor on roles for upcoming movie projects. Talent agencies work closely with production companies ...
Creating a Sense of Place (05/14)
In
Visitation Street Ivy Pochoda puts us smack in the middle of a place like few authors can.
'Music from Coffey Park is rolling down Visitation Street, signaling the kickoff of Old Timers Day on the backside of the neighborhood. Overnight, families from the projects have staked out plots of the park, jockeying to get prime real ...
The Rosetta Stone (05/14)
In The Riddle of the Labyrinth, Margalit Fox describes the challenge of decoding Linear B: 'An unknown script used to write an unknown language is a locked-room mystery: Somehow, the decipherer must finesse his way into a tightly closed system that offers few external clues. If he is very lucky, he will have the help of a bilingual ...
The Ethical Will (05/14)
The author of Happier Endings believes that creating an ethical will is an important part of facing and diminishing the fear of death. She includes an appendix with prompts designed to inspire readers to at least begin this potentially intimidating document, and then to work on it a little bit at a time. An ethical will differs from the ...
Buzzard's Bay (05/14)
Elizabeth Graver's novel is set on a (fictional) point jutting out into Buzzards Bay, which borders Massachusetts and is tucked in between the southwest coast of Cape Cod, Plymouth and Bristol Counties on the mainland. New Bedford, which was the world's leading whaling port in the nineteenth century, is the most major city on the bay.
...
Popular Science Journalism (04/14)
Gulp is a book about the digestive system. Describe it this way and your friends are probably unlikely to read it. But if they're aware of the ways Mary Roach approaches her content by incorporating anecdotes, focusing on the unusual details, and including the memorable characters who have peppered her research, the whole experience ...
The Church Universal and Triumphant (04/14)
The inspiration for The Shelter Cycle came from the author, Peter Rock's experiences with the
Church Universal and Triumphant, a religious sect he came into contact with while working on a sheep and cattle ranch near Yellowstone Park in the early 1990s.
The Church Universal and Triumphant is a religious organization founded in 1975 ...
The Maasai People (04/14)
One of the reasons Richard Crompton's Hour of the Red God is so appealing is that he delivers different, fresh characters who have a strong sense of (and often struggle with) their cultural identity. The star of the book, Detective Mollel, was born into and raised within the Maasai tribe, one of Africa's semi-nomadic, cattle-herding ...
Afghanistan: Parsing the Players (04/14)
Westerners often hear news reports of groups known as the Mujahideen, the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda. It can be easy to confuse or merge them in one's thinking, but they are of course separate organizations with differing histories, goals and characteristics.
The Mujahideen
The Mujahideen (singular mujahid) comes from the word jihad, which...
The Zero-Sum Game: A Mathematical Metaphor with Legs (04/14)
In Give and Take, Adam Grant takes pains to demonstrate that many cold-hearted business transactions actually have a human side – that there is more at stake in contract negotiations, say, than the bottom line. He emphasizes the complexity of the give-and-take in business relationships by pointing out that such negotiations are 'not ...
Somali Immigration to Lewiston, Maine (04/14)
Years ago, when we were vacationing in Maine, we drove through the city of Portland and I spotted a lady holding a child by the hand. She was dressed in an extremely colorful hijaab and that riot of color really stood out in my mind – I was reminded of that flash of color after I put down The Burgess Boys.
The civil war that ...
The Missing (04/14)
According to the FBI's
National Crime Information Center, 678,860 people were reported missing in 2011. The suspected cause of a disappearance was only recorded in about half of all cases. Of these, 3% were adults; 96% were juvenile runaways, about 1% were abducted by a non-custodial parent, and 0.1% abducted by a stranger. It should be ...
Slums (04/14)
According to the UN, the percentage of urban dwellers living in slums dropped 10% to 37% in the 15 years leading up to 2005. But before you break out into celebration, there's just one tiny catch - because of the rising population, the total number of people living in slums has actually increased substantially, and is expected to continue...
Speakeasies in the Age of Prohibition (04/14)
Prohibition came into effect in January 1920, one year to the day after the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified. It was a victory for the
Anti-Saloon League, which had campaigned since 1893 to outlaw alcohol in order protect women and children from the effects of drunken husbands and to increase productivity among workers.
But it was ...
Belief Systems Similar to the Helix (04/14)
In book reviews for Woke Up Lonely, Scientology is often invoked as a cultural reference for the Helix. The reasons for this are clear enough: both are worldwide organizations committed to individual and social change, both are led by one man who claims to have the secret to happiness, and both are largely suspected, by outsiders, to be ...
Sister Acts (04/14)
Photographs of famous historical women – from writers to activists to painters to doctors – cover every inch of wall space at 11 Hope Street, the setting for Menna van Praag's novel, The House at the End of Hope Street. Among them are two sets of famous sisters: Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell; and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and...
Ayumu, the Chimpanzee (04/14)
In Virginia Morell's Animal Wise, the reader learns many surprising things about a chimpanzee's skills. The book features one chimpanzee in Japan, Ayumu, who was has been extremely successful at sequence-memory tests. Ayumu lives with his mother Ai at the University of Kyoto's Primate Research Institute, headed by Professor Tetsuro ...
New York City in the 1970s (04/14)
Though
The Interestings spans several decades, most of the novel takes place in and around New York City in the 1970s. This decade was a low point for the city, which had been in a gradual economic decline during the 1960s with rolling blackouts, subway strikes, sanitation strikes, and riots (most notably the 1969
Stonewall Inn riots, ...
Life After Death (04/14)
In 2011 archeologists
uncovered Neanderthal skeletons, dating back about 50,000 years, that appear to have been intentionally buried with the arms folded so the hands are close to the head. This evidence, which shows respect for the dead, has led some to extrapolate that the Neanderthals had a sense of an afterlife. Scientifically ...
A Short History of Iceland (04/14)
The Republic of Iceland, the setting for Hannah Kent's debut novel
Burial Rites, has a deep and intriguing history.
- Located west of Scandinavia and just south of the Arctic Circle, the first confirmed settlement of Iceland was in the 9th and 10th centuries by Norsemen from Scandinavia and Scotland. Though questions remain about the ...
The Surprising Love Life of a Dictator (04/14)
Political power seems to be an eternally compelling aphrodisiac. Benito Mussolini was a legendary Lothario who is estimated to have experienced casual sexual relations during his years as a dictator with as many as 5,000 women. Italian archives contain the guest registers listing the arrival and departure times of these 'Fascist visitors,...
Subintentioned Death (03/14)
Ironically, the very thing that most parents hope for can turn out to be the very last thing that they want for their child. That is, most parents strive to raise a child who will, upon school graduation, get a job and move into his/her own place. But for this to happen the child must be ready to accept a certain amount of risk. After all...
Jules Verne: A Man Ahead of His Time (03/14)
February 8, 2013 would have been Jules Verne's 185th birthday. The acclaimed author is considered the father of science fiction and wrote many novels, some of the most well-known being Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, and, of course, Around the World in Eighty Days ...
Kiva.org Online Micro-Lending (03/14)
Founded in 2005, Kiva.org is a non-profit that uses the Internet and a global network of micro-finance institutions to allow people to make loans that will help alleviate poverty and create financial independence. Loans can be as small as $25. Once a loan is made, the lender receives updates. As the loan is repaid, the money is credited ...
A Short History of Typhoid (03/14)
Typhoid is a life-threatening illness caused by the bacteria
Salmonella Typhi. Approximately 400
cases are found in the U.S. per year (mostly due to traveling) but it is prevalent in the developing world where a staggering 21.5 million people are infected per year, and 200,000 of those people die. Here is a short history of its origins, ...
Polio in 1940s North Carolina (03/14)
In the fictional North Carolina mountain town at the heart of Gail Godwin's Flora, a 1945 polio scare takes the life of one child and paralyzes another while the community scrambles to contain the disease. These tragedies, which form part of the cultural fabric of Godwin's fictional world, echo real events that took place in rural North ...
African American Hair Styles Over the Years (03/14)
Ifemelu remarks that there is no better metaphor for race in America than black women's hairstyles, and the history of Afro-textured hair would seem to support her observation. In Africa, especially prior to the slave trade, hairstyles were used to communicate a variety of messages from status to identity to fertility. Dense, thick, clean...
American Expat Writers in Paris (03/14)
The period between the two World Wars was one of thriving creativity for many artists, and Paris with its bohemian lifestyle, its recognition of artists, and vibrant social life offered plenty of enticements to American writers. The fact that the United States passed Prohibition laws in 1920, banning the sale of alcohol, didn't hurt the ...
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