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Teens and Feminism (11/14)
In an
interview at
Book Riot, A. S. King (
Glory O'Brien's History of the Future, 2014) says:
I am still a believer in the original feminism. You know the one - the one that simply wanted equal social, political, and economic rights for women. I love men. I love other women. I love people. I don't think feminism means we have to ...
Tipping the Scales (11/14)
It is estimated that two-thirds of the population of both the United and Great Britain are either overweight or obese. Statistics that show the average American female has size 14 measurements. In Britain, the average woman has a size 16 body (which is equivalent to a US size 14.) The waist measurement of the average American and British ...
Surprising Facts About The Pill (10/14)
The pill wasn't an accident, but it was a surprise.
The birth-control pill has been labeled the most important invention of the twentieth century, but no drug company, no university, and no government agency wanted anything to do with it in the beginning. The pill never would have been developed if not for a small group of radicals ...
Hydroelectric Power: Run-of-the-River Projects (10/14)
The Wallcreeper shows how complicated even seemingly benign environmental projects can be.
For example, the hydroelectric projects discussed in
The Wallcreeper are what are known as run-of-the-river. They are smaller and carried out without the creation of dams. ROR stations are seemingly benign and widely
perceived as less ...
The St. Petersburg of Shteyngart's Memories (10/14)
St. Petersburg is known for its gorgeous architecture and rich history. A few of these sights, outlined below, are described in Little Failure.
The Smolny Convent
In his memoir, Gary Shteyngart recalls coming upon a coffee-table book at a bookstore in New York City, St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars, with the 'baroque blue ...
Six Authors and Alcohol (10/14)
Olivia Laing's second book, The Trip to Echo Spring explores the lives of six twentieth century American authors who all coped with alcoholism in their lives and careers. Some information about each of these troubled, talented men:
F. Scott Fitzerald (1896 - 1940)
Fitzgerald is best known as a novelist who portrayed, and indeed coined...
A Glimpse at a Few Former Astronauts (10/14)
Before we learn that the professor in Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation has been hired by a rich, failed astronaut to ghostwrite a book about the space program, she observes her baby daughter laughing at ...
Famous Men – and the Women Next to Them (10/14)
Above All Things, Tanis Rideout's debut novel, is about a man, his wife and his other great love – a 29,000 foot mountain. Rideout explores Ruth Mallory's point of view in Above All Things; her love for George Mallory, her acceptance of his passion for Mount Everest and her deep grief at losing her husband to the hulking mountain. ...
Your Brain on Literature (10/14)
Reading quiet, literary fiction, like
Someone, nudges us towards contemplation and self-examination. But according to a recent
study conducted at the New School for Social Research in New York, it may do even more. This much-publicized study, 'Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,' concludes that reading literary fiction can ...
Dirty Realism (10/14)
David Vann fits into an American literary tradition that has been around since the 1960s, but was only given a name in 1983. Bill Buford, former editor of Granta literary magazine, coined the term 'dirty realism' to characterize two trends in American fiction: a tendency toward simplified language, largely free from adverbs or flowery ...
The Mystery of Duffy's Cut (10/14)
Before 2004, hikers passing through the woods in Chester County, Pennsylvania in the vicinity of Malvern would have encountered a granite block enclosure with no identifying marker. Perhaps they would have puzzled a moment before walking on. Perhaps they would have heard an odd sound or even caught a glimpse of a specter dancing on the ...
New Zealand's Gold Rush (10/14)
The Luminaries is set in the New Zealand town of Hokitika during the nineteenth century gold rush. Hokitika is located on the west coast of New Zealand's South Island, which is one of three areas in the country where gold was found to be in sufficient quantity to mine.
Rumors of gold in a small part of New Zealand's North Island ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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,...
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. ...
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 ...
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 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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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.'
...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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