Foster Care (05/20)
In Kathryn Glasgow's How to Make Friends with the Dark, 16-year-old Tiger learns that her mother is dead, and almost equally upsetting, she can't even go somewhere familiar to stay while she figures out how to adjust to being an orphan; with no known father or other relatives, she is relegated to the legal responsibility of the state of ...
The Controversy of Capital Punishment (04/20)
In David R. Dow's thriller, Confessions of an Innocent Man, the protagonist is sentenced to death for the murder of his wife. Since the murder is committed in Texas, one of the 30 U.S. states that still allows capital punishment, he is sent directly to death row. There he awaits his execution among the 200+ other residents. From 1976 to ...
Why Young Adults Are Choosing the Suicide Option (03/20)
Two decades before I was born, a cousin of mine entered seminary and killed himself within the week. No one in the family discussed it. He was dead. No need to talk about why. But death by suicide has undergone a radical cultural shift. It is no longer absurdly kept secret.
In Sally Rooney's Normal People, Connell fantasizes about ...
History of the First Lady (02/20)
Courting Mr. Lincoln by Louis Bayard describes the budding romance between future President Abraham Lincoln and the woman who would become his wife and First Lady, Mary Todd.
Although the role of the President of the United States is described in depth in the US Constitution, the 'job' of First Lady is one that has evolved over the ...
Student Debt (02/20)
In Sounds Like Titanic, author Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman recalls the extreme lengths she went to in order to fund her education, including selling her eggs and touring the country with a crooked classical music composer. The price of tuition for a 4-year private college in the United States was, on average, $34,740 for the 2017-2018 ...
Nonviolent Activism (02/20)
In Watch Us Rise by Renee Watson and Ellen Hagan, high school juniors Chelsea and Jasmine learn that 'art is never just art,' so they decide to 'use art to make a statement, to create change.' The girls experiment with multiple forms of activism, sometimes with guidance, and even misguidance, from teachers, mentors, community leaders, ...
The Five Confucian Virtues (02/20)
In Yangsze Choo's The Night Tiger, the two main characters, Ji and Ren, are named for two of the five virtues that make up the ethical system of Confucianism. Confucianism is a spiritual/philosophical tradition born out of the teachings of Chinese philosopher Confucius (who is believed to have lived circa 551-479 BCE), and it has been ...
Property Ownership, Race and Upward Mobility (02/20)
In The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers, Bridgett M. Davis explains how property ownership was the key determinant in creating opportunity and prosperity across generations of her family. However, historically, there have been hefty barriers to property ownership for people of color in the United ...
U.S. Support of Totalitarian Regimes in Central and South America (11/19)
The setting of Idra Novey's Those Who Knew is an unnamed island with a contentious intertwined relationship with its neighbor to the north, which supported the regime of a brutal dictator years before the events of the novel take place. The latter country would appear to represent the United States, and the circumstances reflect the ...
Finding Employment After Prison (10/19)
In Sugar Run, the principal protagonist Jodi McCarty has just been released from prison after serving a nearly 20-year term. She finds life as a free woman more difficult than she imagined, largely due to her inability to find gainful employment. This is a common issue with newly released inmates, and one of the leading causes of ...
Poverty is Expensive (10/19)
Contrary to many deeply guarded beliefs about people living in poverty in the United States, most who can't afford the necessities of life are, in fact, employed.
The United Way calls these people Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed (ALICE). More than 34.7 million families in the United States (10.6%) fell into this category in ...
Maternity Leave in America (10/19)
Early on in The Golden State, Daphne details the havoc wrought upon her life by her university job's standard maternity leave policy, per state regulations: 'six weeks off at 50 percent of your salary.'
Surprisingly, her California university's meager policy ranks among the best in the nation. The Family and Medical Leave Act...
Living Off the Grid (09/19)
In Jonathan Lethem's The Feral Detective, New York City journalist Phoebe Siegler ventures into the often perilous world of people living a hardscrabble existence in a California mountain range. She is trying to find a college-age girl who may have become enthralled with the notion of a life independent of modern society and its ...
Persecution of Dissidents in Putin's Russia (09/19)
The political activists in A Terrible Country live in fear of arrest due to the threat of harsh sentences and even bodily harm that is frequently the result of protesting the Putin regime. Putin has a long history of silencing his detractors, using both legal and illegal means, with many critics ending up imprisoned in a gulag (a forced ...
Deaths of Despair (09/19)
The deceased was a middle-age white man who liked to be called Horsey. A working-class Ohioan who left school after 11th grade, he toiled as a mechanic, then as a laborer and then he bounced around from job to job, barely making a living until he died of an opiod overdose. His death wasn't unusual. In 2015, Princeton economists Anne ...
Real-Life Nowhere Girls (09/19)
According to the
New York branch of the National Organization for Women, 93% of juvenile sexual assault victims know their attackers. 60% of those assaults are never reported. Only 16.3% of men who are accused of rape will be prosecuted with only 3% spending a single day in jail. 18.8% of black women will report sexual assault in their ...
Gender Bias in the Field of Law (05/19)
The protagonist of Jeanne Winer's
Her Kind of Case is a criminal defense attorney who has been in the legal profession for over 30 years.
While female lawyers aren't rare, law is still an area where women are underrepresented (as are minorities of both genders). According to a 2016
New York Bar Association report, women make up just 25...
Universal Basic Income (05/19)
Author Alissa Quart argues in her book Squeezed, that a Universal Basic Income is one possible solution for job insecurity, particularly for stay-at-home parents and domestic workers who are often shut out of the economy and for workers whose jobs may be phased out due to automation.
But what exactly is UBI? Basically, it's a program ...
Refugee Resettlement in Sweden (03/19)
Camilla Grebe's novel focuses on Sweden as a haven for asylum seekers. The ongoing crisis of refugees from Syria has been particularly visible in Sweden, which accepted more than 160,000 migrants (primarily from Syria but also from Afghanistan and Iraq) in search of asylum in 2015 alone, the most of any other country per capita. Since the...
On the Front Line of Transracial Adoption (03/19)
The protagonist and her husband in Rumaan Alam's novel That Kind of Mother are a white upper middle-class couple who adopt a black infant. They love and raise him alongside their own biological son, and treat them as brothers. Race plays a key role in almost every aspect of their lives. The story takes place in Washington DC in the ...
The League of Women Voters (03/19)
Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947), the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) when Tennessee voted on the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, was instrumental in getting the act passed. During the 1920 NAWSA convention, she proposed a national League of Women Voters—six months before the ...
The Stonewall Riots and the Movement for LGBTQ Equality (03/19)
In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, the Stonewall Inn was raided by the New York City Police Department, ostensibly for operating without a liquor license. This was a flimsy pretense, however, since the New York State Liquor Authority (SLA) refused to grant liquor licenses to any bar that served homosexual customers, and the ...
How to Get a Green Card (03/19)
Like millions of others, several of the characters in Luis Alberto Urrea's The House of Broken Angels emigrated from Mexico to the United States, some illegally, some following U.S. protocol to obtain permanent residency. Immigration has become a particularly contentious topic over the last few of years but most of us have little ...
Black Incarceration and Sentencing (03/19)
In
An American Marriage, Roy is wrongly accused of rape and receives a twelve-year sentence. His only crime, Jones writes, was to be a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Indeed black men suffer on both counts: they are incarcerated more often than their white counterparts and receive longer sentences.
According to the ...
School Shootings & Conspiracy Theorists (02/19)
Rhiannon Navin's novel Only Child is in part inspired by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that took place on 14 December 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut. On that date, 20-year-old Adam Lanza murdered his mother at their home and then drove to the school, fatally shooting 20 six- and seven-year-old children and six adult staff ...
Uncle Sam Needs You: America's All-Volunteer Military (02/19)
The United States military draft ended under Nixon in 1973 as the Vietnam conflict wound down. Since then, recruitment has been entirely voluntary. Aspiring soldiers usually go through an enlistment process, like Matt Young did in Eat the Apple. Service choices include: Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, Air Force, or National Guard.
...
Scotland Yard (01/19)
In Charles Finch's The Woman in the Water, set in 1850, amateur private detective Charles Lenox works closely with Scotland Yard to solve a pair of murders. At twenty-three, he is barely older than the law enforcement agency.
Established in 1829 by an Act of Parliament introduced by then Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel, the London ...
Albanian Communism (01/19)
Bashkim Hasani, who is Elsie's boyfriend and Luljeta's father in Xhenet Aliu's novel Brass, was born in an Albanian work camp, one of many which were set up under Communist rule.
The Albanian Communist Party was founded in 1941 with the help of Yugoslavia's communist leader, Josip Tito. An Albanian communist politician, Enver Hoxha, ...
The Keystone XL Pipeline (01/19)
The Keystone Pipeline is a 36-inch-diameter oil pipeline between Alberta, Canada and Texas. It transports 550,000 barrels of crude oil from Canada to refineries and distribution centers in the United States every day. It was constructed in three phases, with the first – stretching to southern Nebraska and then across to two ...
The NSA and its Affiliates (10/18)
The
National Security Administration (NSA) is the direct descendant of the group established to decode enemy communications during WWII featured in
Code Girls. Established by U.S. President Harry Truman in 1952, the NSA is the government agency responsible for signal intelligence — 'Intelligence derived from electronic signals and ...
Hurricane Katrina's Racial Implications (10/18)
New Orleans was, and is, a city with a majority African-American population (nearly 67% in 2005), and the racial implications of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina have come to define the way many people think of the storm. 68% of the storm's nearly 700 victims were black, as were an overwhelming number of those whose homes ...
Where Do Terrorists in the US Come From? (09/18)
As detailed in Lalehi Kadivi's novel, A Good Country, the Boston Marathon Bombing took place on April 15, 2013. Three people were killed and over 260 others were injured including at least 16 who lost limbs. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tzarnaev, two brothers aged 24 and 19, had manufactured home made bombs contained in pressure cookers which ...
The Life and Times of a Human Smuggler (08/18)
We have heard a lot about illegal immigration in the past few months – it is a hot topic of discussion and debate, vast amounts of time and money are spent on controlling, limiting or shutting it down across the border between the US and Mexico. However, there are many stories of migrants who make it across: Isabel Allende's In the ...
Cigarette Smuggling to New York City (08/18)
In Joan Silber's Improvement, one of the characters starts a cigarette-smuggling venture after getting out of Rikers prison.
A carton of cigarettes might cost around $55 in Virginia but close to double that in New York City because of steep taxes. New York state has the highest state tax on cigarettes and New York City imposes an ...
Domestic Workers in the US (07/18)
Bridget, the Borden family's Irish maid in See What I Have Done, is a young woman who came to the United States with visions of making a decent living and maybe one day getting married. Sadly, young immigrant women with limited skills and education were more often than not put to work as domestic help. Sadder still, with no union or ...
The Benefits of Mentorships (06/18)
Renee Watson's excellent Young Adult novel Piecing Me Together follows the life of a high school junior. Jade, who is African American, receives a scholarship to a new, predominantly white school, and finds herself feeling alone. Her guidance counselor approaches her with information about participating in a mentorship program ...
Nudge Theory (06/18)
In Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, the protagonist's lack of knowledge or understanding of social norms and conventions evokes sympathy, and leaves her lonely and isolated, at odds with the world. She expresses bafflement at many, and rightly so – they simply do not make sense. But social norms are not just cultural oddities ...
The Rise of the Prison-Industrial Complex (05/18)
The Graybar Hotel makes one reflect on the incarceration rates in the United States and the reason for its explosion over recent decades.
Readers might remember the George H. W. Bush vs. then Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis presidential campaign. It has been argued that two commercials truly sealed Dukakis's fate: The ...
Prison Labor (05/18)
In Sing, Unburied, Sing, Pop serves time at the notorious Parchman prison in Mississippi, the maximum security state penitentiary. While a prisoner, he toils in the cotton fields. 'I'd worked, but never like that,' he recalls. 'Never sunup to sundown in no cotton field. Never in that kind of heat. It's different up there. The heat. Ain't ...
A Brief Look at the American Communist Party and Labor Unions (05/18)
America prospered at the turn of the 20th century, but that prosperity wasn't reflected in working conditions or compensation for laborers. Many on the left felt the American Federation of Labor leadership was corrupt and began to support Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party. There was then a further schism, created by those who felt...
American Brain Drain (05/18)
'Brain Drain,' aka 'Human Capital Flight' refers to the exodus of educated, professional adults from locations that fail to provide them with the means of achieving success and fulfillment. As a consequence, the communities these individuals leave behind often suffer economic and cultural stagnation. The phrase's origin lies in the ...
The Origins of the Kashmir Dispute (05/18)
The Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan occupies center stage in
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and is a conflict that traces its roots back to the Indo-Pak partition (for more about the partition, see
Beyond the Book for
An Unrestored Woman).
When the British left India in 1947, Kashmir was not an Indian state, but was ...
Detention Centers (05/18)
In Lisa Ko's The Leavers, one of the female characters is abruptly transported to the fictional Ardsleyville immigration detention center. She is interned in an unheated room with other women, glaring lights on overhead 24/7. She's fed inedible mush, given minimal time outside, and is usually shackled. No attempts are made to secure her ...
Teach For America (04/18)
While finishing her undergraduate degree in 2004,
Reading with Patrick author Michelle Kuo connects with a recruiter from
Teach For America (TFA), which led her to teach in rural Arkansas. Each year, Teach For America places more than 5,000 pre-K – 12th grade teachers in high-need rural and urban schools across the United States ...
Texting and Driving (03/18)
Over the years, technology has provided many wonderful enhancements to our lives. However, with these perks, we've also found problems. Perhaps we are too consumed by our helpful gadgets. It's nearly impossible to have down time anymore. We've forgotten the meaning of patience. Do we even still appreciate the peace that ...
The History of Homosexuality in Ireland (03/18)
In The Heart's Invisible Furies, author John Boyne traces the evolving acceptance of homosexuality in Ireland through the life of his main character, Cyril Avery.
Historically speaking, The Republic of Ireland has a conservative reputation, but homosexuality was actually accepted and accounted for in the set of medieval laws known ...
Ten Facts about the New York City Police Department (03/18)
In
Proving Ground, Blauner's modern noir mystery, the colossus that is the New York City Police Department, one of the largest civil law enforcement entities in the world, is a supporting character in its own right.
Here are ten fascinating facts about the NYPD:
- NYPD has over 49,000 employees of which 34,000 are uniformed ...
Disenfranchisement and Voter Suppression (02/18)
Despite the fact that voting in a federal election is a primary and vital constitutional right held by American citizens over 18 years of age, the playing field for voters is not equal from one state to another.
In Fortress America, Elaine Tyler May argues that disenfranchisement holds individuals back from contributing to their ...
The Bathroom Bills (01/18)
The joys and perils of raising a transgender child are beautifully brought to life in Laurie Frankel's This is How it Always Is. The question of where Poppy should go the bathroom when at school is a sensitive issue.
In the United States, since 2013, more than 24 state legislatures have proposed so-called 'Bathroom Bills' with the ...
