Child Welfare Services - Falling Through the Cracks (11/17)
In A List of Cages, even though fourteen-year-old Julian displays all the symptoms of an abused child – missing school, frequent lies, keeping friends at arm's length, poor grades, etc. – he doesn't receive the attention he needs from his teachers or his school district's social services. The authorities ask the ...
Americans with Disabilities (11/17)
In the story 'No Place for Good People,' one of the short stories in Homesick for Another World by Otessa Moshfegh, a lonely widower takes a job overseeing the daily needs of three men with 'moderate developmental disabilities.' Despite his personal problems, the protagonist is able to see these men as 'reasonable enough people.' This ...
Building a Wall Between Impartiality and Personal Opinion (10/17)
The protagonist in The Boat Rocker, Feng Danlin, is a journalist who prides himself on being impartial in his reporting and principled about expressing his opinion. Throughout the book he wrestles with the importance of maintaining objectivity. He researches facts and scrupulously reports his findings, calling out fraud where he sees it.
...
A 2015 Snapshot of the Global Refugee Crisis (10/17)
Go, Went, Gone is set in Berlin during the thick of the ongoing international refugee crisis. Germany and many other countries have become a destination for those who leave home for reasons of violence, conflict, persecution, human rights violations, poverty, and war.
The historic event, now termed the Global Refugee Crisis or European...
Age of Consent (10/17)
The age of consent, according to western law, is the age at which a person is capable of agreeing to engagement in sexual activity. Stephen Robertson, in his
article 'Age of Consent Laws', states: 'Narrowly concerned with sexual violence, and with girls, originally, since the 19th century the age of consent has occupied a central place in...
Food Insecurity and Education (09/17)
There is no question that Little's life is affected by both his circumstances and the environment he lives in – and the Pierce, Idaho in which Hoffneister sets Too Shattered For Mending is not a figment of his imagination, but a real place, which means that it isn't a question of if there are real teens with the same ...
Hospice Care (09/17)
Hospice is a medical specialty that focuses on end-of-life care for individuals and support for their families. Its roots come from the Latin for hostis meaning stranger, and more specifically from hospitem meaning a guesthouse - from these roots we also get hospital, hotel and hospitality.
The idea of caring for those suffering from ...
The Cult of Personality (07/17)
In Julian Barnes' The Noise of Time, Dmitri Shostakovich notes that under Stalin, '[Russians] would listen to [Stalin's] insane daily insistence that all was for the best in the best possible of worlds, that Paradise had been created, or would be created quite soon…when a few more saboteurs had been shot. That happier times ...
Late 19th Century Texas (07/17)
Paulette Jiles' News of the World takes place in late 19th century Texas. Much of the state's land was untamed and rugged, but in this time between the end of the Reconstruction and the beginning of the Progressive Era, Texas changed and grew, as did much of the western frontier and the New South.
It was the era of cotton, cattle and ...
Immigration to Australia (07/17)
Author Stephanie Bishop's maternal grandparents left England for Australia in 1965. Her grandmother was reluctant to make the move and never truly warmed to the country. Their experience forms the basis of
The Other Side of the World. (Bishop's
Guardian article gives the whole story.)
Beginning in the latter decades of the eighteenth ...
Community Gardens (05/17)
In The Garden of Small Beginnings, the book's heroine becomes involved in a community garden.
A community garden is generally a piece of public land set aside for use by individuals who don't have the real-estate or resources to create gardens of their own. Although the idea of a shared planting space has been around for centuries, ...
Multigenerational Homes (05/17)
In
We Are the Ants, Henry Denton's maternal grandmother, Nana, lives with him. Early on, it's clear that Nana has Alzheimer's and lives with his family because she can no longer live on her own. Henry is very fond of her and although she has moments of clarity, she is becoming a challenge:
Nana's forgetfulness was...
Restoration Path (05/17)
In his memoir Boy Erased, Garrard Conley discusses both his struggle to come to terms with his homosexuality and his parents' attempt to return him to heterosexuality through Love in Action (LIA), which was renamed Restoration Path in 2012. According to the program's website, 'Restoration Path is a Christian discipleship ...
The Pew Research Center (04/17)
In
Agnostic, author Lesley Hazelton states: 'The most respected polls on faith and belief are run by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which has been taking the pulse of both the American and the international soul, as it were, since 2001.'
According to their
website, 'Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that ...
India's Partition and Its Lingering Effects (03/17)
At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, Britain withdrew from India and the country split into two so as to form an independent Muslim country to the north-east and north-west of India. Although the British withdrew essentially without incident, the decision to partition India set off a tsunami of violence and what is considered the...
What Teenagers Value (03/17)
Siobhan Vivian's YA novel, The Last Boy and Girl in the World, tells the story of Keeley Hewitt, who is a normal teenager except for one thing: her world is falling apart. Torrential rains are causing trees to crash and houses to crumble, and adults in the community are doing everything they can to protect the place that they call ...
Housing Choice Voucher Program: Does it Work? (03/17)
In Evicted, one of the solutions that Matthew Desmond recommends is the expansion of the government Housing Choice Voucher program. Called Section 8, this aid was created by Congress in 1974, and is different from public housing in that the latter restricts participants to only certain locations and buildings – the infamous Robert ...
Kendra's Law (02/17)
While the City Slept is a searing indictment of the mental health system in the United States, showing step-by-step how the failure of an overworked, underfunded bureaucracy led to a likely preventable human tragedy.
Among the many challenges communities face is in ensuring that those experiencing mental illness get proper ...
Parenting a Prodigy (11/16)
In Gilly Macmillan's The Perfect Girl, seventeen-year old Zoe Maisey is a musical prodigy. Her genius, Zoe says, is 'temptingly bright' to other people but she sounds a strong note of caution: 'Be careful what you wish for, because everything has a price.' Her mother and stepfather, she explains 'are disguising a level of ambition for ...
Perfecting Humanity - The British Eugenics Movement (10/16)
As mentioned in Anna Hope's historical novel The Ballroom, just over 100 years ago in 1912, London hosted the first International Eugenics Conference, an event attended by people who believed in the prevention of those deemed inferior – whom they labeled 'feeble-minded' – from reproducing. It was a categorization ...
Nigeria's Stance Against Homosexuality (09/16)
Over the course of Under the Udala Trees, the heroine, Ijeoma, discovers she's a lesbian, at first fighting her inclinations and trying to fit in, but later accepting that she's different from many of her peers.
Although homosexuals have gained more acceptance over the past decade in the United States and other Western countries, ...
Criminal Justice Theories (09/16)
In the second half of her memoir,
Riverine, Angela Palm uses terms she learned from her college criminal justice classes as headings to organize the material. Here's a closer look at a few:
The Broken Windows Theory
In 1982, social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling
proposed the broken windows theory to explain why ...
Homeless By Choice (09/16)
U.S. Marine veteran Peter Ash in The Drifter is homeless – well, houseless. By choice. While he has little money he is not a vagrant. He has skills and does odd jobs. Outdoor jobs. Because Peter is incapable of staying indoors for any amount of time. This incapacity is a consequence of his military tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan ...
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (07/16)
In
Bull Mountain, one of the main characters is a special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, commonly known as the ATF.
The ATF
website states the organization is the oldest tax-collection agency in the United States. It was initially part of the U.S. Treasury and traces its roots back to 1789, when ...
On Becoming a Private Investigator (03/16)
In Honky Tonk Samurai, private investigative agency owner, former police lieutenant Marvin Hanson decides to sell the agency and go back to work for the police department. When he offers protagonists Hap Collins and Leonard Pine the opportunity to buy him out he's met with a certain amount of resistance. 'Us?' Hap says, 'You're ...
Admiralty Law (03/16)
Pirate Hunters, Robert Kurson's real-life tale recounts the struggle to locate and recover sunken treasure. The obstacles are numerous: little or no historical documentation, inaccurate maps, bad weather, and rival scavengers. Additionally, as the book makes clear, a formidable challenge faced by both amateur and professional salvagers of...
Farmers' Cooperatives (02/16)
As Michael Meyer's book,
In Manchuria, explains, in the village of Wasteland, 'Eastern Fortune is offering apartments in exchange for farmers' homes, which will be razed and the land converted to paddies.' It remains unclear exactly how much — if any — control the farmers will have over their plots of land. Will they ...
Colorism (02/16)
In the opening paragraph of God Help the Child, Toni Morrison gives voice to Sweetness, a woman describing herself as 'light-skinned with good hair, what we call high yellow,' who gives birth to a child with very dark skin. She says, 'It didn't take no more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs to realize something ...
Propaganda and its Uses (02/16)
A Kim-Jong Il Production is set in the North Korea of the 1970s when Kim Jong-Il was head of the Ministry of Propaganda. North Korea's motives might have been sinister, but propaganda — defined as information especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view &#...
The Hawala System (01/16)
In A Man Of Good Hope, many monetary transactions are carried out by the informal system known as hawala. At its most basic, hawala is a method of money transfer that is used to send remittances without using standard channels such as banks. While the system made headlines shortly after 9-11, where it was alleged that hawala was used to ...
Migrant Smuggling (01/16)
The Jaguar's Children is based on a real-life example of migrant smuggling gone awry. Unfortunately such incidents are becoming increasingly common around the world.
It's important to note that there are differences between migrant smuggling and human trafficking even if there might be overlap between the two kinds of ...
Interpol and Red Notices (11/15)
The title Red Notice refers to one of the many alerts issued by Interpol, the world's largest international police organization.
The idea of an international police force was originally proposed at the First International Criminal Police Congress in Monaco in 1914, although the organization didn't come into being until an initiative ...
The Psychology of Debt (11/15)
In Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld, Jake Halpern examines the afterlife of a debt once it has been declared 'bad.' But is there ever such a thing as a 'good' debt?
What would you do if you won a million dollars? Would you buy that grand house you've always dreamed of? Or the big sports car? ...
Trafficking in Antiquities (10/15)
In De Potter's Grand Tour, Armand de Potter uses his tourism business as a front to amass a large private collection of illicit antiquities: 'You could say that he had become a spy of sorts, on a self-contained mission to gather antiquities instead of secrets, with his travel bureau providing an excuse to visit places that were out ...
Farmer Suicides in India (10/15)
The Lives of Others begins with a shocking murder suicide. A farmer, Nitai Das, kills his children and wife and then himself, out of sheer desperation resulting from abject poverty and hunger. The book's protagonist, Supratik Ghosh, decides to move to rural West Bengal, to help the plight of farmers caught in an endless cycle of debt and ...
The Shame of the Fathers (10/15)
In A Killing in Zion, Salt Lake City deputy sheriff Art Oveson is charged with apprehending and arresting members of a Mormon fundamentalist sect who commit the crime of polygamy. But fealty to the law is only part of what drives this Mormon's professional zeal. In his more thoughtful moments Oveson has to admit to himself that he has a ...
Boarding Schools in the UK (09/15)
The Secret Place is set on the grounds of an Irish boarding school, an educational institution where children live on campus while they attend classes.
Boarding schools have a rich history in Ireland and neighboring UK (The Republic of Ireland was part of the UK through the 19th century and up to 1922).
It is believed The ...
Ping Pong Diplomacy (08/15)
In A Map of Betrayal, Gary Shang is always looking for ways to bring the two countries he loves, China and the United States, together. He claims to be one of the prime drivers for a coup that has come to be called Ping Pong diplomacy, a series of table tennis (ping pong) games between the two countries that signaled a thaw in relations. ...
Diving into the Spy's Psyche (07/15)
Inasmuch as most of the spies that have been interviewed, researched, quantified and statistically charted are those that have been caught, perhaps the psyche of a good spy is as elusive as spies themselves. Not to mention the fact that a 'good spy' is not so easily defined. There are many types of spies and many reasons for becoming one....
Law Enforcement and Retirement (06/15)
What is more stressful for a law enforcement officer? Facing a bunch of drunk, angry, armed motorcycle gangsters or facing retirement? The Storm Murders' protagonist, retired Montreal Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars would think the latter.
Most who enter the field of law enforcement do so with intentions of public service and ...
Anti-Miscegenation Laws (06/15)
According to the 2010 census, the number of mixed-race and mixed-ethnic couples in America
grew by 28% from 2000 to 2010. At one time marrying outside one's race was considered, at best, controversial, but a 2007 Gallup poll
cites 87% of Americans as approving of the practice. Such levels of acceptance were not always apparent, however, ...
A History of Child Welfare Policy (04/15)
During the 19th century many children in the United Kingdom and the United States suffered from hardship, neglect, and abuse. Poor children in Victorian England had to work, frequently long hours and in dangerous conditions (in coal mines or textile mills, for example), in order to help financially support their families. In the U.S., the...
The Roots of American Environmentalism (04/15)
As Fagin shows readers through the specific events in Toms River, environmental and ecological concerns began to receive attention in American politics in the 1960s and 1970s. The creation of the Department of Environmental Protection (now the Environmental Protection Agency) was heavily encouraged, in part, by individuals across America ...
There is Nothing Like a Motherless Child (04/15)
According to an
article in
The Washington Times: 'In America, the number of single fathers has risen from 600,000 in 1982 to over 2 million in 2011, partially because of mothers leaving their families. In the UK, it is estimated mother (sic) are abandoning their children at a rate of 100,000 annually.' Although mostly anecdotal, that ...
Sabriye Tenberken and Braille Without Borders (03/15)
In her nonfiction book
For the Benefit of Those Who See, Rosemary Mahoney recounts her experiences at
Braille Without Borders, an international development organization that helps blind and partially sighted students gain independence, workplace skills, and professional training.
Founded in Lhasa, Tibet, the organization is the ...
The Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (03/15)
'In the mess of Central Asia there are as many sides as there are opportunities to steal a march,' Rahman writes in In The Light of What We Know. 'There are no sides to tell us who is doing what, for whom, and why, only exigencies, strategies, short-term objectives, at the level of governments, regions, clans, families, and individuals: ...
Smallpox and Xenophobia (03/15)
Frog Music is set in San Francisco in 1876, during a summer notable not only for its record-setting heat waves but also for its smallpox epidemic, one of many that plagued the United States during the nineteenth century even as efforts were being made to eradicate the disease through vaccination and inoculation. According to Donoghue's ...
U.N. Committee Presses Vatican Regarding Pedophile Priests (02/15)
In 2014, the Catholic Church took heat from a United Nations committee investigating its compliance with practices outlined in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (
UNCRC). The Convention, which establishes international standards for the civil, political, economic, social, health and cultural rights of children, was ratified in...
Key to a Long, Healthy Life: Friendship (01/15)
It turns out that the secret to enjoying a strong immune system, all but impervious to such annoyances as the common cold, inflammation and even heart disease, is 100% natural, organic, chemical-free, with no nasty side effects and – best of all – it's free. According to a New York Times
article, numerous studies have ...
Systematic Euthanasia (01/15)
In Motherland, one of the brothers, Ani, is a patient at a hospital in Hadamar, which was notorious for implementing the Nazis' systematic euthanasia program.
Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection had the unintended consequence of giving birth to Social Darwinism – determining the course of human evolution through...
