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Amnesia (02/12)
Amnesia, also known as 'amnestic syndrome,' refers to a person's inability to retrieve memories or pieces of information from the brain and occurs when the areas of the brain responsible for recovering stored information become compromised by physical or psychological damage.
Several structures located deep within the brain, such ...
Andre Dubus - Father & Son (02/12)
It can be confusing enough when members of the same family share a profession. It gets even more confusing when they share the same name, as is the case with father and son authors Andre Dubus and Andre Dubus III.
Andre Dubus was born into a Cajun-Irish Catholic family in 1936 Louisiana, the youngest child of Katherine (Burke) and Andr...
Treating Pedophiles (02/12)
Margaux Fragoso says in the afterword of Tiger, Tiger that one of the reasons she wrote the book was to bring attention to the need for treatment of pedophiles. The current system focuses on the treatment of the child victims, and punishment for the perpetrators. As a victim herself, she believes the best thing would be to find a way ...
Lysley Tenorio (02/12)
Lysley Tenorio (pronounced LESS-lee ten-OH-rio) is the winner of several awards, including the
Whiting Writers' Award, the Nelson Algren Award, and a Pushcart Prize - and fellowships from Phillip Exeter Academy, The MacDowell Colony,
Yaddo, the University of Wisconsin, and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. He earned his MFA ...
Mountain Gorillas of Africa (02/12)
One of the main characters in Audrey Schulman's
Three Weeks in December - an American
ethnobotanist named Max who has Asperger's Syndrome - finds herself in East Africa searching for a medicinal plant. Along the way, she follows a family of exquisite mountain gorillas that have somehow escaped local poachers and finds that she has an ...
Chef Gabrielle Hamilton's Restaurant: Prune (02/12)
As a child, Gabrielle Hamilton's mother called her by the pet name Prune, and today the moniker appears in pink letters on the door of her thriving restaurant of the same name, located at 54 East 1st Street in New York City's East Village, established in 1999.
The East Village has a rich history of both rebellion and creative vision...
China Miéville (02/12)
China Miéville (pronounced mee-AY-vill) has taken the science fiction world by storm in his relatively short tenure as a published author. He is the winner of three Arthur C. Clarke awards, two British Fantasy Awards, four Locus Awards, a Hugo Award, and a World Fantasy Award - not to mention he's received numerous nominations for ...
Henry James (02/12)
Henry James (1843-1916), the prolific American writer of the late 19th/early 20th century, was known to pick up ideas for his stories from dinner party conversations. Colm Tóibín puts this bit of knowledge to use in his short story 'Silence', when he has fictional character Lady Gregory share a secret with James as they sit next...
The Gaza Strip (02/12)
The Gaza Strip is the smaller of the two Palestinian territories (the West Bank being the larger). It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea on the east, and by Egypt in the southwest, with Israel surrounding it on all other sides. It is just 25 miles long and 7.5 miles across at its widest (
map). This narrow strip of land is home to ...
Treatment of the Mentally Ill (02/12)
In Andrew Taylor's The Anatomy of Ghosts, while recovering from his ordeal, Frank Oldershaw is first held at a home for the mentally disturbed. Although the process used to treat him there seems brutal and oppressive to modern sensibilities, for the time period it was considered quite advanced and progressive.
Throughout the ...
Fort Hood (01/12)
If you've never been on a military base, you might be surprised, upon reading You Know When the Men Are Gone, at just how extensive Fort Hood, Texas, is. It's a small city unto itself, complete with all the services and conveniences that mean its residents never really have to leave if they don't want to. As Siobhan Fallon illustrates...
Next Generation Nepal (01/12)
According to
Next Generation Nepal's website, the 1996-2006 Nepalese civil war between government forces and the insurgent Communist Party of Nepal claimed 12,000 lives and devastated the economy; and, in remote areas of the country, the Maoist rebels used intimidation and even murder to control villages and abduct children into their ...
The Tiger Mother Media-Storm (01/12)
In addition to her book
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua's
Wall Street Journal article entitled, '
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior' (which is excerpted from
Tiger Mother but does not fully represent the message of the book) has created quite a stir in the media, and has inspired hundreds of opinionated articles and blog postings ...
Madame Tussauds Wax Museum (01/12)
The well-known tourist attraction and wax museum, Madame Tussauds, had its start in the streets of Paris just before the French Revolution.
Dr. Philippe Curtius, Madame Tussaud's mentor, opened his first
cabinet de cire (wax exhibition) in Paris in 1770. It proved so popular that he was forced to move to larger accommodations twice and ...
On the Path to the Newbery Medal (01/12)
Moon Over Manifest began as a story the author clearly needed to hear. Her inspiration was a line in
Moby Dick that also influences Abilene: 'It is not down in any map; true places never are.'
On her
website Vanderpool explains, 'That really sparked my imagination. What is a true place? It conjured up ideas of home. Having lived ...
The Yoshiwara: Edo's 19th Century Red Light District (01/12)
Katherine Govier's
The Printmaker's Daughter is historical fiction based on the real-life Japanese printmaker,
Hokusai - best known for his
ukiyo-e* series
entitled
Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji - and his daughter, Ei.
The character Ei spends much of her early life in the Yoshiwara, or red light district, of Edo (...
Tomas Tranströmer (11/11)
Tomas Tranströmer was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1931, and spent his career as a psychologist. The author of a dozen books of poetry, Tranströmer is the most renowned Scandinavian poet since World War II. His poetry has been translated into more than fifty languages. In 2011, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature 'because...
Historic Chicago in Bright and Distant Shores (11/11)
In
Bright and Distant Shores, Dominic Smith references some of the historic people and events that helped shape Chicago around the turn of the 20th century. Read on for more information about these fascinating institutions:
- Hull House - a resource for new immigrants to the U.S. established by two women in 1889. They offered a ...
Mental Health and Memoir (11/11)
We live in a memoir-saturated era in which it often seems that nearly everyone has written a story about their experiences with substance abuse, parental neglect, the ravages of fame, and trips to the psychiatric ward. This glut makes it easy to dismiss memoirs as the overheated fabrications of narcissistic attention-seekers, and ...
Religion in China (11/11)
Religion in China is a hard topic to pin down. The country has been officially atheist since 1949 - a policy that was rigorously enforced through the early years of the People's Republic of China but was relaxed in the 1970s.
Since 1978 the Constitution of the People's Republic of China has guaranteed 'freedom of religion' and the ...
The Frontiers of Alzheimer's Research (11/11)
The
World Alzheimer Report estimates that there are upwards of 35 million people living with dementia worldwide, two-thirds of whom are women, with Alzheimer's accounting for about two-thirds of cases. By 2050 it is expected that 115 million people will be living with dementia.
In the United States there are approximately 5.3 million...
Books in Translation (11/11)
In a now-infamous statement preceding the awarding of the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature to French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, Swedish Academy member Horace Engdahl remarked that the publishing climate in the United States had grown 'too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big ...
Chinese Immigration to the USA (11/11)
During much of the second half of the 19th century, the Union Pacific Railroad (UP) was able to maintain a monopoly on coal production because it controlled the only means of transportation into the Western territories. Thus it owned and operated all the coalmines, fixed coal prices to its own benefit and was able to establish its ...
Who is Cath Crowley? (11/11)
A Little Wanting Song left me wanting to know more about author Cath Crowley, but the biographical information immediately at hand was a little light, so I did some digging....
Cath Crowley is an Australian children's author. She was born in 1971 and grew up in a rural part of Victoria (
SE Australia) with three brothers and a dog.
...
Gullah Culture (11/11)
The Gullah (known as Geechee in Georgia and Florida) are descendants of West African slaves, whose numbers today range from 200,000-500,000.
The Gullah region traditionally extends along the coast from SE North Carolina, through Georgia to Northern Florida, including the Lowcountry region and its Sea Islands (see map at bottom left).
...
The Best Years of Our Lives (11/11)
Alice Bergstrom, one of the characters in Sunset Park, is writing her dissertation on the film The Best Years of Our Lives. Almost everyone in the book has either seen it already or watches it with her so she can add their reactions to her observations. Auster draws many parallels between the story in the film and the story of his ...
Heterochromia (11/11)
Pearl has one brown eye and one blue eye. Amiel says to her that this means '
tu eres de dos mundos. You are of two worlds.' Pearl's uncle says it means that she can see fairies and peaceful ghosts.
But what is it exactly?
Heterochromia simply means a difference in coloration and is caused by a relative excess or lack ...
The Reader Organisation (11/11)
Rarely have I been as excited about an organization as I am about
The Reader Organisation, a British-based group whose mission is to bring about a reading revolution. A reading revolution!
'The work we do,' says The Reader Organisation, 'is driven by a love for great literature and a strong belief that shared reading is a deeply ...
The Controversy Over Bullfighting (11/11)
Bullfighting - drenched in symbolism, embedded in tradition - is as synonymous with Spanish culture as flamenco dancing and paella. It is a centuries-old blood sport to beat all blood sports with its ceremonial battle to the death between man and beast. An uneven playing field? Perhaps. Only recently, thousands of stunned fans, both in ...
The Doctors' Plot (11/11)
The Betrayal is loosely based on a series of investigations that took place toward the end of Joseph Stalin's rule in 1953, formally known as 'The Doctors' Plot.' This bizarre scheme wrongfully accused nine prominent Moscow doctors - the majority of whom were Jewish - of coordinating the deaths of high-ranking Soviet Party members. Rather...
Menno Simons and the Mennonite Church (10/11)
Menno Simons was an Anabaptist religious leader born in 1496 in Witmarsen (the Netherlands). Although he was not the founder of this branch of religion, he was a very important figure in the organizing of the Dutch Mennonite church, and his followers became known as Mennonites.
According to the
Global Anabaptist Mennonite ...
Siberian Sampler (10/11)
Ian Frazier encounters a diverse range of Siberian foodstuffs on his journey, from the salmon he helps to catch in the Bering Sea off Chukotka, to the linty sausage he pulls out of his luggage time after time on a long train trip. Here is a sampling of morsels from the culinary landscapes Frazier explores.
Ukha – A brief ...
Checking Facts (10/11)
Deadly Spin unravels misinformation surrounding the contentious topic of American health care. Considering that Wendell Potter has shown how difficult it is to uncover the truth about such a widely discussed issue as this, where can the average citizen turn to find unbiased facts? Some suggestions include:
PolitiFact
This website ...
The Nature Conservancy (10/11)
Proulx purchased the square mile of land that she named 'Bird Cloud' from
The Nature Conservancy, an organization incorporated in the USA in 1951 with a mission to take 'direct action' to save threatened natural areas. The non-profit now has a presence in all fifty American states as well as in more than thirty other countries. It is ...
Noirmoutier (10/11)
A Secret Kept is set primarily in Paris and Noirmoutier (pronounced 'nwar mooteeay'), an island off the Atlantic coast of France in the Loire region. A popular tourist destination for both beach-lovers and history buffs, Ile de Noirmoutier (literally 'island of black monastery') has several claims to fame:
It is home to La Bonnotte...
The Symbolism of Ravens (10/11)
Raven Summer begins with a raven beckoning to Liam to follow him. He flies a bit ahead, stops, calls to Liam - Jak jak! Jak jak! - and then flies a bit ahead again. Like this, the raven leads Liam to the abandoned baby. What is the symbolism of this loud, large beaked, black bird?
Ravens figure prominently in many legends from ...
The Legacy of Alexander the Great (10/11)
Alexander III of Macedon (356–323 BC), popularly known as Alexander the Great, was one of history's most successful military commanders. He is reputed to have never lost a battle, and his tactics are still studied in military academies. He successfully challenged the Persian Empire, the largest, most powerful kingdom ...
Apartheid and Race Relations in South Africa (10/11)
Apartheid ('separateness',
pronounced 'apar-tate' in Afrikaans, although many English speakers say 'apar-tide') was a government-enforced system of racial segregation instituted in South Africa (
map) in 1948. Control of the government at that time was held by White
Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch colonists who started to arrive in ...
Deborah Ellis (10/11)
Deborah Ellis has been all over the world. And she hasn't just visited places, she's done things. Big things. She went to Pakistan to help at an Afghan Refugee Camp; she went to Israel and the Ghaza Strip to talk with Israeli and Palestinian children; and she went to Malawi and Tanzania to spend time with children orphaned by AIDS. ...
Everyday Magic in The History of Love (10/11)
Although Nicole Krauss's three books to date would not be classified as magical realism (a style, according to Wikipedia, wherein, 'normal occurrences… are presented in a straightforward manner, which allows the 'real' and the 'fantastic' to be accepted in the same stream of thought') there is in her books an element of the magic ...
Lady Duff Gordon (10/11)
Born on June 24, 1821, Lucie Duff Gordon was the daughter of
John Austin, a former army man and legal scholar, and Sarah Austin (daughter of John Taylor of Norwich), a respected translator. Lucie was schooled in Germany during her early years, and demonstrated an aptitude for languages. As an only child, she was frequently in the ...
Religious Snake Handling (10/11)
Pentecostalism is a sect of Christianity that originated in rural areas of the USA in the early 1900s. Members believe that baptism in the Holy Spirit results in a personal experience of God, but salvation requires that they practice the teachings of Jesus Christ. They take every word of the Bible as literal truth and act on those ...
Waste Not, Want Not (09/11)
Every day Americans waste enough food to fill the Rose Bowl football stadium.
Food waste makes up as much as 25% of what's in America's landfills.
Household recycling of items like aluminum, glass, and plastic increased 400% in the decade to 1999; meanwhile, only 2.5% of eligible food waste is composted.
The average family of four ...
The Perfect Pie (09/11)
Joyce Maynard always seems to incorporate fresh produce and cooking into her stories, with a special affinity for baking. A scene in
The Good Daughters includes freshly baked biscuits from scratch and ripened strawberries, while the preparation of a peach pie in
Labor Day provides one of the most poignant moments in the book.
...
Robert Graves and the White Goddess (09/11)
What is Robert Graves doing, you might ask, in a book about rowdy teen boys? His presence is pervasive from the very first chapter, when the mysterious and beautiful new geography teacher, Aurelie, talks to Howard the Coward about how to get his history students engaged with the First World War:
'You should read them ...
When is blue green, and when is it grue? (09/11)
Deutscher has much to say about the color 'blue': its presence or absence in a language or culture, its sister-color, 'green' with which it combines as a single hue in some languages, and notes that it is the color most difficult for children to learn.
Did you know?
- Many languages do not have separate terms for blue ...
The Team of Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis (09/11)
Husband and wife Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis live in a neighborhood in Forest Park, a 5000 acre northwestern wilderness on the edge of Portland, Oregon. To Colin and Carson, who spend hours and hours walking through the forest, it
feels like its own country, vastly different from, yet so close to, the city. This is the inspirational...
Practice Babies (09/11)
All it took was the unexpected image of a cute, bare-bottomed baby to set the wheels of
The Irresistible Henry House in motion. While Lisa Grunwald was researching another book, she happened upon an online exhibition detailing the history of Cornell University's home economics program which ran from 1900-1969. Originally ...
Hard-boiled vs. Noir (09/11)
Hard-boiled fiction arose in the United States in the aftermath of WWI, and gained popularity and refinement in the years leading up to WWII. The popular genre was a direct reflection of the pessimism, uncertainty and disillusionment sweeping the country in the wake of gangster-driven crime, political scandal and economic crisis, and ...
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