Background information to enrich your reading and understanding of the best recent books.

In ancient times rape was seen as a reward to the victors; for example, there are a number of references in the Old Testament/Hebrew Scriptures to acts of mass rape by conquerors, and plenty in Roman and Greek history.

In modern times mass rape has been increasingly used as a premeditated terror tactic by invading armies. According to ...

With an average elevation of 14-16,000 feet (sources differ), it's the highest nation on earth (by comparison, the highest mountain in the 48 contiguous states is Mt. Whitney at 14,494 feet)

Five of Asia's great rivers including the Indus, Mekong and Brahmaputra have their headwaters in Tibet.

Nearly half the world's population lives ...

Map For Lost Lovers explores many issues within the Muslim community, including the central theme of honor killings. According to Amnesty International, an average of 2 women are killed each day in Pakistan for 'betraying the honor of the family' (the reasons for this loss of honor could range from infidelity, including being the victim ...

According to a BBC Interview with Rimington, there is no exact equivalent to MI5 in the USA - the nearest equivalent is what used to be called the Foreign Counter Intelligence arm of the FBI. She goes on to say that 'MI5 is a civilian intelligence service with no powers of arrest or any other police ...

The armonica is a musical instrument constructed of graduated glass bowls with holes and corks in the center. It was invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1761. He was inspired to create it having heard a concert played on wine glasses! For a time armonicas were all the rage, Marie Antoinette (who, incidentally, historians say never did utter ...

To research this series, Paver spent time with a guide in the forests of Finland (some Finnish forests are still much as they would have been 6,000 years ago). She learned how the people lived by studying archaeology; and to understand what they might have thought she studied many groups including:

• The San ...

The Kurt Wallender series is set primarily in Mankell's native Sweden.  You'll find Sweden in the north of Europe between Finland and Norway. With a population of about 9 million, a landmass about the same size as California and a stable population, most people enjoy a good quality of life (albeit cold...

The first person of European descent to discover the location that is now Las Vegas was a young Spanish scout named Rafael Rivera in the early 1700s. Spanish traders en route from Santa Fe to Pueblo de Los Angelos, traveling along the Spanish Trail, sought a route through the valley in the hope of cutting a few days off the journey, ...

Wessex was one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in what is now England. With the reign of Alfred (871-99) and the halting of the Danes, the King of Wessex became the King of England. In the 10th century Alfred's descendents gradually acquired firm control over all England, including the Danelaw (parts of north ...

Liberia is a tiny country on the west coast of Africa which was claimed by the USA in the early 19th century for the purposes of repatriating free blacks back to Africa.  The 'American Colonization Society' was supported by two very different groups: abolitionists who wanted to free African slaves and their descendants and &#...

Background: The Ottoman Empire ruled large tracts of central Europe for about 450 years, until it was defeated by the Turkish nationalists in 1918.  The Turks were led by Mustafa Kemal, whose story forms just one of the many threads in this tapestry of a book.  Although I obviously cannot endorse either, I ...

Burma - now Myanmar - is located in South East Asia, west of Thailand, and borders Thailand, China, India, Laos and the Indian Ocean. It's total land area is about the size of Texas.

During much of the 19th Century and early 20th century, it was administered as a province of India by the British. In 1948 it attained independence and ...

The Higgs particle was first hypothesized by the Scottish scientist Peter Higgs in 1964.  After taking a weekend walk in the Cairngorm Mountains he returned  to his laboratory in Edinburgh on Monday and declared to his colleagues that he had just experienced his 'one big idea' and now had an answer to the mystery of ...

Cuba is the largest country in the Caribbean - 780 miles long, 140 miles at its widest point, with a population of about 11 million, and infant mortality, life expectancy and literacy rates on a par with the USA (6.45 deaths per 1,000 live births, 77 years life expectancy, 97% literacy rate). It suffered a severe economic recession in the...

The Sahara Desert is the second largest desert on earth - the largest being Antarctica.  It covers more than 3.5 million square miles of North Africa (the entire land area of the USA would fit inside it).  The Arabic word for desert is sahara (or zahara depending on the phonetic translation).

Like all parts of our planet, the ...

Afghanistan's strategic position between Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent has made it an area of conflict for millenia. 

The Soviet Union intervened in 1979 to prop up a pro-communist regime, but after they withdraw many years later the ...

Elisabeth Kubler Ross was born in 1926 in Zurich, Switzerland and died of natural causes in 2004 in Arizona. Her ground breaking and bestselling book, On Death and Dying, (1969) did much to change the treatment of terminally ill patients.  She was compelled to write it while working as a doctor in hospitals in New York, Colorado and ...

Zimbabwe (formerly known as Rhodesia) is a landlocked nation in the southern part of Africa surrounded by the countries of Zambia, Botswana, Mozambique and South Africa.

According to the CIA Factbook, its population is approximately 12 million.  Per capita income is $1,900 and the % of those with AIDS/HIV is...

Oral Lee Brown was born in Mississippi in the early 1940s.  She is the ninth of twelve children born to 'old-fashioned farming folk' who grew cotton and corn.  Today she lives in Oakland, California.

Although California reports an official graduation rate of 87% to the Federal Government using a Federal ...

Paulo Coelho was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the city where he now lives. In 1970, after deciding that law school was not for him, he traveled through much of South America, North Africa, Mexico, and Europe. Returning to Brazil after two years, he began a successful career as a popular songwriter. In 1974, he was ...

Trezza Azzopardi was born in Cardiff, Wales, and lives in Norwich, on the East coast of England.  

As a little girl growing up in Cardiff, Trezza would listen to her Gozitan father recount tales and describe the heat haze in Malta.  Her first novel, The Hiding Place, published in 2000, is the ...

Tracy Dahlby is a former managing editor of Newsweek International and an expert in the affairs of Asia, where he lived for thirteen years, serving as Tokyo bureau chief for the Washington Post and Newsweek. He is also a regular contributor to National Geographic magazine.&...

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was originally compiled on the orders of King Alfred the Great in approximately A.D. 890. It was subsequently maintained and added to by generations of anonymous scribes until the middle of the 12th Century. Because of this, the accuracy of the entries for the first few centuries should be taken with a pinch of ...