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Italy's Role in World War II (02/13)
Italy's
role during WWII can seem puzzling, as the country gave the appearance of switching allegiances more than once during the course of the conflict, at times ostensibly siding with the Axis powers, at others supporting the Allies. This contradiction, though, can be seen as a reflection of a volatile period in Italy's history, as ...
A Message of Hope from King Peggielene Bartels (02/13)
In an
inspirational letter to readers, Peggielene Bartels (aka King Peggy) outlines her goals as the new King of Otuam, Ghana. She begins by stating that:
An important part of my mission as King of Otuam is to bring empowerment to women. I truly believe that the future of Africa lies in the hands of its women... My main mission is...
The Girl Scouts of the USA (02/13)
Although many elements - from her grandma's letters, to her mother's hopes, to her friends' expectations - help shape Rory's understanding of what it means to be a girl in her small community, one institution does more than any other to shape Rory's perception of American girlhood: the
Girl Scouts of the USA.
The Girl Scouts of ...
Introverts and the Internet (02/13)
I wasn't surprised when Susan Cain's book, Quiet, mentioned that introverted people often thrive in the online world and are actually more likely to share personal information there than extroverts. I, for example, though unquestionably an introvert, enjoy reviewing books for BookBrowse, have profiles on several social networking sites, ...
The Abenaki People (02/13)
One of the main characters in Kieran Shield's The Truth of All Things, Perceval Grey, is of Abenaki descent, a key point in the novel. The Abenaki (ah-buh-nah-kee) tribe is one of the many distinct tribes that make up the larger Algonquian (al-GON-kee-un) Nation of North America. (It is important to note that the Algonquian Nation, should...
An Interview with Ramona Ausubel (02/13)
In a thoughtful and personal interview, BookBrowse reviewer
Kim Kovacs talks with Ramona Ausubel, debut author of
No One is Here Except All of Us:
It seems like you hit a mental roadblock after researching your family history, mired in facts that wouldn't form into a novel. In an interview with Penguin you said that you 'got closer...
German Americans (02/13)
It might surprise you to learn that in the latest census, 51 million Americans
self-identified as having German ancestry (estimates suggest that about 1/3 of these are of German ancestry alone, the rest are of partial German ancestry). That's a whopping 17% of the population, more than any other heritage group - over 13 million more than...
The Real-Life Jakob Kuisl and the Life of an Executioner (02/13)
Oliver Pötzsch spent his early years in Bavaria, listening to stories about his family from his grandmother. He says that when he was five or six, she told him that he was a direct descendant of a family named Kuisl, who were employed as executioners. He was too young then to even know what an executioner did, but it sparked a ...
A Quick Guide to Egyptian Dynasties (01/13)
One of the most difficult things to keep straight about ancient Egypt is its dynastic chronologies, thirty-three families of rulers over thousands of years, full of contradictions, inaccuracies, and outright lies. To offer some assistance I have included an incomplete list of the important dynasties, with a few details about each period; ...
Mad Cow and Foot and Mouth Diseases (01/13)
In Graham Swift's novel, Wish You Were Here, the Luxton family twice loses their dairy herds to mass slaughter in the wake of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and Foot and Mouth Disease
(FMD) outbreaks. Two very distinct and separate diseases, BSE and FMD, when they surface in agriculture, can be utterly devastating to farmers and ...
Saskatchewan (01/13)
The vast prairies of Saskatchewan, where one can easily be 'unimaginably bored' are the perfect setting for Richard Ford's Canada. Bordering Montana and North Dakota, it is one of two Canadian provinces that is completely landlocked (Alberta is the other one) and has no geographical features distinguishing its boundaries. It is over 250,...
A Literary Inspiration: Ernest J. Gaines (01/13)
In a
letter to readers, Wiley Cash describes what it was like working with the inspirational Ernest J. Gaines at a fiction workshop in Lafayette, Louisiana. He writes:
I began writing A Land More Kind Than Home while working on my Ph.D. at the University of Louisiana, where I spent five long years sweating, celebrating Mardi Gras, ...
Leoš Janáček (01/13)
Most of Haruki Murakami's novels reference Western music, and 1Q84 is no exception. Czech composer Leoš Janáček's symphonic poem Sinfonietta features prominently throughout.
Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) was born in Hukvaldy, Moravia, in what was once known as the Austrian Empire. He is considered one of the...
Tokyo's Trains (01/13)
Once known as Edo and renamed in the late 1860s, Tokyo - the capital of Japan - is a densely populated metropolis that has over 12 million inhabitants in the city proper and approximately 36 million people in the larger metropolitan prefecture. Located in the Kant? region, it is comprised of 23 wards, as well as 62 municipalities, which ...
Socialist Realism (01/13)
The fictional character of Bruno Krug gained international fame with a literary blockbuster The Orphans of Neustadt, but when we meet him at the beginning of his story, he is busy writing simple stories - called the Factory Gate Fables - about life in Actually Existing Socialism. These stories represent typical literature in the U.S.S.R ...
Ethnology (01/13)
Ethnology is a section of anthropology that analyzes the differences between religion, language, technologies and other social structures of people as categorized by race, nationality or ethnicity. Its goals are broad – to understand the history of human beings and the creation of our various social norms (as defined by race, ...
Scottish Gypsies/Travellers (01/13)
One of the plot details in
Beneath the Abbey Wall involves a family of Travellers whose histories twine with the murder victim's – Jimmy McPhee, and his mother Jenny McPhee, a highly regarded storyteller.
In Scotland, the Traveller population is referred to by the government as Scottish Gypsies/Travellers (distinct from
...
Origins of the Israeli National Anthem (01/13)
Shortly before the Second World War ended and the horrors of the Holocaust slowly came to a close, Jews from all over Europe were housed in 'displaced persons' camps. These camps gave refuge to Jews who no longer had a place to call home - not Poland, not Austria, not Germany, and not even the new home state created for them, Israel.
...
Domestic Service in Early 20th Century Britain (01/13)
In Britain in the early twentieth century, occupational options were few for women. Up until World War I, domestic service constituted the largest single employment for English women, even ahead of factory work. The 1901 census shows that approximately 40.5% of the working adult female population worked in service, to which must be added ...
Quilting As Hobby and Metaphor (01/13)
In Home, Cee learns to quilt while recovering from a near-fatal run-in with a doctor who used poor, black women as experimental subjects in his research. After returning to her hometown, her neighbors keep her company in her sickroom and, with their help, she makes her first quilt. She also starts to put together the broken pieces of her ...
Seoul, South Korea (01/13)
Located on the southern half of the Korean peninsula between the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan, South Korea (or, officially, The Republic of Korea) is a democratic country approximately the size of Indiana. It was created in 1948, after the second World War, following a lengthy period of annexation and occupation by the Japanese. South ...
Parents of Young Killers (01/13)
Parents of young adults who are accused of murder are confronted with an intense emotional minefield and have, in many cases, reported experiencing feelings ranging from guilt and shame to horror and despair. Susan Klebold, whose son Dylan, alongside classmate Eric Harris, carried out the massacre of 13 people at
Columbine High School in ...
Castaway Literature (01/13)
When human beings are torn from society and forced to fight for survival, our true nature is often revealed. With very clear threats to life and limb, and without any need to account for our actions when laws become irrelevant, we can revert to our primal instincts for personal survival. But to what extent is a person willing to go in ...
R.J. Palacio's Inspiration for Wonder (12/12)
Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse.
This is Auggie's statement on page one of Wonder about the appearance of his face. R.J. Palacio (whose real name is Raquel Jaramillo... Palacio is her mother's last name) makes a very conscious choice not to explore Auggie's disfigurement head-on, and I think it's a good one. Instead, she...
The Evolution of Achilles (12/12)
The name Achilles has become synonymous with great strength and invulnerability, however to the ancient Greeks it had quite a different meaning. 'Achilles' itself is a Westernization; the hero's name is better translated Akhilleus and pronounced 'a-hee-LAY-us,' and is of unknown and possibly pre-Greek origin. It is a combination of two ...
Slave Healers in the Antebellum South (12/12)
Slave Healers in the Antebellum South
Polly Shine's arrival at the Satterfield's plantation is a remarkable sight to the slaves in Jonathan Odell's The Healing as she was a 'bought' slave, not bred on the plantation, and she was a costly purchase. Their astonishment continues when, soon after her arrival, she starts to give orders ...
Recommended Reading on North Korea (12/12)
Adam Johnson's
The Orphan Master's Son introduces many readers to the complex history and multi-layered culture of North Korea. If you'd like to learn more about the political and social climate of this country, allow us to suggest the following books:
Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick: Demick's nonfiction work offers a remarkable ...
Reactions to The Rwandan Genocide (12/12)
While the Hutu and Tutsi clans have been in Rwanda for centuries, it was after the Belgian colonialists took over the country in 1916 that categorizations into Hutu and Tutsi were made more explicit through the use of ethnic identity cards. The minority Tutsi were largely favored for government jobs early on in the colonial government and...
Ukiyo-e and its Place in Japan (12/12)
The Japanese gardener Nakamura Aritomo in The Garden of Evening Mists is an accomplished ukiyo-e artist. This art form, like most others, was a product of time and place but ukiyo-e was especially so.
Hundreds of years ago (1615-1868) the Tokugawa shoguns ruled Japan according to a strict class-based, hierarchical society. They made ...
Hemingway's Leading Ladies (11/12)
Paula McLain's novel, The Paris Wife, centers on the relationship between Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson. However, over the course of his life (1899-1961) Ernest Hemingway married four different women, each unique and interesting in her own right:
Elizabeth Hadley Richardson: Born on November 9, ...
The Steampunk Aesthetic (11/12)
Furnaces, circuits, and laboratory paraphernalia; 'gasometers, gauges, air pumps, and troughs of... galvanic fluid'; clocks and submersibles - these are the trappings of nineteenth-century science at work throughout The Technologists. These are also the elements that make up the aesthetic side of the 'Steampunk' movement - Victorian ...
A Brief History of Bicycles Through WWII (11/12)
In The Undertow, the second-generation Billy Hastings makes a name for himself as a racing cyclist in the years between World War I and World War II and goes on to serve in a vital detachment of bicycle soldiers on D-Day in 1944. Bicycle racing had already accumulated a long history by the 1920s and military groups all over the world, ...
Transgender Teens and Bullying (11/12)
Teens are already subject to a lot of stress, but transgender teens face myriad additional challenges. According to PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), a majority of LGBT kids (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) are bullied and harassed in school. In fact, 74% of students polled heard the words faggot and ...
Ron Rash - Poet and Novelist (11/12)
Ron Rash was born in Chester, South Carolina, in 1953, grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, and is a graduate of Gardner-Webb University and Clemson University. In 1994 he published his first book, a collection of short stories titled The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth. Since then, Rash has published four collections of poetry, ...
Snegurochka (11/12)
Snegurochka
The Snow Child is based on a Russian fairy tale,
Snegurochka. As told in the English versions (Arthur Ransome's '
Little Daughter of the Snow,' from
Old Peter's Russian Tales and Andrew Lang's '
Snowflake,' from
The Pink Fairy Book), a childless couple builds a girl out of the snow in a fit of playfulness, and she comes to ...
Human Population Control (11/12)
In Bergman's story 'Yesterday's Whales,' Lauren faces a tough decision when she discovers she's pregnant. Lauren and her boyfriend Malachi are proponents of 'voluntary human extermination,' and as such have signed a 'No Breeding Pledge.' Malachi, in fact, is the founder of a non-profit called Enough with Us, a population control ...
DID and Art Therapy (11/12)
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) 'is a dissociative disorder involving a disturbance of identity in which two or more separate and distinct personality states (or identities) control the individual's behavior at different times. When under the control of one identity, the person is...
Yangzom Brauen: Actor, Activist, Author (10/12)
Born to a Tibetan artist and a Swiss anthropologist, Yangzom Brauen (pronounced YAHNG-zom Bhrown) gained an appreciation for the arts at a young age.
She attended school at Europe's prestigious University of Theater and Music in Bern and was soon thereafter cast in a local television program, Manne Zimmer, on the National Swiss ...
La Giaconde (The Mona Lisa) (10/12)
An early 16th century oil painting by
Leonardo da Vinci,
The Mona Lisa is believed to have been created between 1503-1507 in Florence (though it is rumored that da Vinci did not actually complete it until 1519, just before his death in France). The painting is probably inspired by Lisa Gherardini, the wife of an Italian merchant. In 2005,...
Clockwork (10/12)
At the heart of Angelmaker is an immensely intricate clockwork device. When we hear the word 'clockwork' we generally think of old-fashioned non-digital timepieces. The term, however, refers to any mechanical device that uses a combination of springs and gears to function. In addition to wind-up watches and clocks, wind-up toys, old ...
Google Translate (10/12)
It is a universally acknowledged truth that Google has changed the world we live in, and one of their newer features,
Google Translate, is also likely to have a big impact on the future of language and translation.
Traditionally, mechanical translation has relied on systematic matching of word meanings between languages, and reordering...
The Hundred Years' War (10/12)
Joan of Arc's successes on the battlefield helped to end the series of battles known today as the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453). Essentially, the series of battles were dynastic conflicts between the Plantagenets in England and the Valois in France. In the 1330s, both Houses claimed rights to the vacant French throne, but these claims ...
Biography in Verse (10/12)
As reviewer Marnie Colton points out in her
blog post at BookBrowse, biographies in poetry form allow for freedom of expression that a more constraining non-fiction prose form might not. Marnie calls the biography-in-verse 'a dynamic form that allows poets to revisit the lives of their subjects through imagery, rhythm, and metaphor ...
The Funny, Frightening, Lyrical, Odd, and Very Talented Kelly Barnhill (10/12)
Kelly Barnhill is a very cool person. I don't know her personally, but you can just tell about some people.
She is a mother of three, a teacher, and a writer (and probably a million other things too). She has written poetry and short stories for adults, non-fiction books for children and, now, her first middle grade debut novel, ...
Amos Oz (10/12)
In the story 'Strangers,' two characters have a discussion about how writers choose their subject matter. 'There are some subjects and motifs that a writer comes back to again and again because apparently they come from the root of his being.'
There is nothing more true that could be said about Amos Oz, Israel's best known novelist...
The Novels of Paul La Farge (10/12)
According to an article in
Time Out Chicago (August 2011), 'Paul La Farge might be the greatest American writer you haven't read, but now there's no excuse.' He has been constructing a solid home for himself in American letters since his first published novel in 1999.
With a flavor of European modernism,
The Artist of the Missing...
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