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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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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
...
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, ...
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 ...
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.
...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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, ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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, ...
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...
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 ...
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,...
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 Ozarks (10/12)
The region known as 'The Ozarks' sprawls across southern Missouri as well as parts of northwestern and north central Arkansas, spilling over into Oklahoma and a small corner of Kansas. In area it's about the size of the state of Tennessee, in topography it's similar to the Appalachian region with rolling hills, plateaus (e.g. the ...
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...
The Day Literature Made Headlines (10/12)
Before there was the fatwa, there were protests, bans, and deaths. The first inkling of controversy came just before the book's publication, when an Indian journalist broke the publishing embargo on writing about a book before it is available for sale. Madhu Jain's article, 'An Unequivocal Attack on Religious Fundamentalism,' was ...
Forward Operating Bases and Their Place in Military Strategy (10/12)
David Abrams' novel Fobbit is set primarily at Triumph, a fictional Forward Operating Base (FOB) in Baghdad, Iraq.
Almost always very close to the action, FOBs are secure areas where military operations are planned and front-line soldiers are fed and housed when off duty. FOBs can be low-tech: generally tents or bunkers surrounded by ...
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, ...
Centenarians' Birthday Celebrations Around the World (09/12)
While many of us assume that the key to a long life is health and happiness, recent studies from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine suggest that reaching the 100-year mark is a complex blend of genetics, environment, optimism, and emotional wellbeing. Given that recent U.S. census data shows that centenarians make up approximately 0....
The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (09/12)
The Memoirs of Catherine the Great
Robert K. Massie constructed his biography of Catherine the Great relying heavily on material from her memoirs (now published by Random House under the title
The Memoirs of Catherine the Great), which provided him with rare, honest views of an eighteenth century royal's life.
These memoirs ...
Roe vs. Wade (09/12)
The United States started adopting laws restricting abortion in the early 1800s, ultimately outlawing it in most states by the turn of the century. Interestingly, at the time, abortion wasn't proscribed as a moral issue the same way it is today; it was criminalized primarily because it was a dangerous practice with very high mortality ...
IG Farben Industries (09/12)
Auschwitz was a huge complex that covered 40 square kilometers (25 square miles) near the town of Oswiecim, Poland. It was comprised of three sections: Auschwitz I, the base camp and central office; Auschwitz II, aka Birkenau, a concentration camp and crematorium; and Auschwitz III, aka Monowitz or Monowitz-Buna, a labor camp adjacent to...
Type Design and Printing (09/12)
These days, typefaces are designed using computer programs such as
Macromedia Fontographer, but in the early days of type, each was made by hand using basic tools. There were three products that together formed the backbone of the process by which type was developed: the mold, the matrix, and the final piece also known as a 'sort.'
To...
Prominent Victorian Writers (09/12)
Madeleine Hanna, heroine of
The Marriage Plot, is enthralled with the tidy, thoughtful novels of the nineteenth century. Here are three prominent Victorian writers and information about their literary styles that will make the experience of reading Eugenides's story all the more pleasurable.
George Eliot (1819-1880)
Born with the ...
Polar Creepiness in Early Sci-Fi Novels (09/12)
Uncharted expanses of polar ice are blank pages for science fiction writers to drool over, and many frozen landmarks spring to mind when trolling the genre.
What better place to locate creepy caves, secret lairs, and unexplained phenomena? A closer look through the early literature of science fiction reveals that polar ...
Schrödinger's Cat (09/12)
One classic thought experiment (i.e. an experiment that is purely theoretical but could never be actually carried out) that plays a pivotal role in I Married You for Happiness is the famous case of Schrödinger's cat. 'Something else about a cat,' Nina recalls. 'Something she can never quite grasp. Tell me again, she whispers to ...
Victorian Grandeur and its Fate (09/12)
'What do you think, Ralph?' said George. 'For or against the egregious grotesqueries of the Victorians?'...
'I suppose what I feel,' said Revel, after a minute, 'well, the grotesqueries are what I like best, really, and the more egregious the better.'
'What? Not St. Pancras,' said George. 'Not Keble College?'
'Oh, when I ...
Foster Care Statistics in the U.S. (09/12)
As she discusses in the book trailer below, the author, Summer Wood, was once a foster parent of four young boys (ages eight months through four years) in addition to having three boys of her own. This unplanned experience, she says, is what her novel Wrecker grew out of - the exploration of what happens to a child after he is taken from...
The Devotion of a Hafiz (09/12)
In American Dervish, Hayat is distraught over the behavior of his parents as they break with many of the teachings and traditions held in the Quran*. Fearing for their afterlife, Hayat sets out to become a hafiz, or one who memorizes the Quran by heart.
Originally, memorization of the teachings of the Quran were preferable to the...
Obama in Europe (09/12)
'Poor old Sarkozy,' Addie remarks at one point in This Is How It Ends. 'Poor Angela Merkel. They all seem so dowdy now, by comparison. It's like we all went to the movies in the middle of the afternoon and spent two hours swooning over George Clooney. Then we came home and found the husband sitting on the couch with his beer belly.' She's...
Shakespearean Themes in The Night Circus (08/12)
The use of magical motifs in Erin Morgenstern's debut novel, The Night Circus, helps make it a unique and fascinating read.
But the literary device is by no means new. Magic can be found in some of the oldest, most revered pieces of literature throughout history, as in William Shakespeare's The Tempest. In fact, his play served ...
Norwich, England (08/12)
In John Boyne's The Absolutist, twenty-one-year-old Tristan Sadler takes a train from London to Norwich, England to deliver a package of letters to Will Bancroft's sister. Norwich, a city located along the River Wensum in eastern England, is the county seat of Norfolk and was once one of the largest, most populated towns in England, ...
What Is a Meme? (08/12)
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a meme (pronounced meem) is, 'n. An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation'. A meme is a nugget of meaning, the smallest building block of an idea, the basic unit of culture. What a gene is to biology, some say, the meme is to ...
Introducing Bryn Greenwood (08/12)
Bryn Greenwood grew up in the minute Kansas town of Hugoton; ten blocks by ten blocks. After escaping to college, earning three degrees (a BA in English, a BA in French Literature, and an MA in Writing) and making up stories all the while, she completed her first novel and sent it out to agents. Ten rejections, eight other novels, and ...
