Dignitas (12/13)
At the center of Me Before You is an intensely emotional and ethical debate about assisted suicide; and in particular, of the assisted-death organization, Dignitas, which plays a primary role in the story. Dignitas, founded near Zurich, Switzerland in 1998, has as its motto 'to live with dignity – to die with dignity.' The ...
Restitution and Restorative Justice (11/13)
Tara Conklin's novel The House Girl weaves two stories together: 17-year-old Josephine, a slave who flees a tobacco farm in West Virginia in 1852, and Lina, a lawyer seeking reparations for the descendants of African American slaves in 2004. While the idea of reparations is not new, it has gained more of a spotlight within the last decade...
Contemporary Movements Based in the Past (10/13)
Jared Diamond's question, 'What can we learn from traditional societies?' is one Westerners have been asking in a Utopian spirit for generations, looking for ways to revivify our cultural practices and trying revisionist experiments to reverse the damage civilization does to our health and psyches. It's a tricky exercise, since there are ...
China's One-Child Policy (10/13)
The scavenger in The Scavenger's Daughters adopts many unwanted Chinese girls and adds them to his growing family. The casting away of girls has been noted as one of the many devastating impacts of China's one-child policy.
More than 30 years ago, China implemented a program where couples were allowed to have only one child with some ...
Ashley X (10/13)
One of the stories Solomon tells in Far From The Tree is about Ashley X (the last name is to protect identity), a disabled girl whose story generated a lot of controversy about disability and its treatment.
Ashley X, born in 1997, was diagnosed in infancy with static encephalopathy, a brain disorder that is similar to cerebral palsy. ...
The Tenets of Communism (09/13)
Communism is an economic and philosophical theory that can be summed up by a phrase made popular by the 'father of communism,'
Karl Marx: 'From each, according to his ability, to each according to his need.'
In its ideal form, all property is held in common; there is no private ownership. There are also no class divisions, and equal ...
America's Commercial Bail Bond Business (09/13)
In The Prophet Adam Austen is a licensed commercial bail bondsman. It is a profession unique to only two countries in the world, the United States and the Philippines (a former U.S. colony).
Other countries use a variety of methods to ensure that defendants will show up for a court date. For example, in the UK, in the case of ...
The West Country & Council Estates (07/13)
J. K. Rowling grew up in England's West Country, which is an informal term used to embrace the southwestern part of England, the peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean. The West Country doesn't have any rigid borders but generally includes the counties of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset. A looser definition also includes all...
The Women's Refugee Commission (06/13)
Mary Anne Schwalbe was a woman of many careers. She was a high school teacher; head of admissions at Harvard; and a founder, and later, director of the
Women's Refugee Commission. Her work with the WRC was something she was passionate about through the end of her life.
Founded in 1989 (and initially called the Women's Commission), the ...
Morocco's Fossil Industry (06/13)
The Forgiven is, in part, a wonderful travelogue which explores deep into the heart of Morocco, in particular into the lives of the Moroccan fossil diggers.
Morocco is rich in a variety of fossils and because parts of the country's
Anti-Atlas mountains (a part of the Atlas mountains also called Lesser Atlas or Little Atlas) date back ...
Conversion Therapy (06/13)
Two thirds of the way through The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Cam's aunt sends her away to God's Promise: a Christian School and Center for Healing. Its mission is to help 'adolescents yearning to break free from the bonds of sexual sin and confusion by welcoming Jesus Christ into their lives.' How does God's Promise achieve what it ...
Improvised Explosive Devices (04/13)
An Improvised Explosive Device (IED) is an inexpensive, low-tech weapon designed to cause death or injury to enemy forces. The British Army was the first to call such homemade bombs IEDs in the 1970s, referring to the fertilizer and Semtex explosives used by the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
Although IEDs have become a ...
The Young Pioneers (04/13)
Memoirist Wenguang Huang was once a member of China's communist youth organization, which, during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), was known as The Little Red Guard. The group was originally formed by the Communist Party of China in 1949 as The Youth and Children of China Movement, but in 1953, it was renamed The Young Pioneers - the ...
Human Trafficking in North Korea (03/13)
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (
UNODC), 'Human trafficking is a crime against humanity. It involves an act of recruiting, transporting, transfering, harbouring or receiving a person through a use of force, coercion or other means, for the purpose of exploiting them. Every year, thousands of men, women and ...
What a Way To Go (03/13)
In a passage on suicide, Winterson remarks that 'when natural gas was introduced in the 1960's, the British suicide rate fell by one-third.' I thought that perhaps she was using some creative math for dramatic effect, but a little research revealed that she wasn't exaggerating at all. Here's a summary of the way things were in Great ...
Accepting Death and Dying Well: Additional Resources (03/13)
One cannot finish Dr. Byock's book without resolving, as much as possible, to take responsibility for one's own death and to become deeply involved in the experiences and medical treatments of those we love who are dying.
His website,
www.dyingwell.org, provides readers with additional information and helpful resources on the topic of...
Refugees in the United States (02/13)
The 1951 Refugee Convention which established the UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, defines a refugee as someone who 'owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to...
The Locavore Food Movement (02/13)
In his preface to Birdseye, Mark Kurlansky faces the issue of whether or not Clarence Birdseye made what we eat better: 'Eating frozen food instead of fresh represents a decline in the quality of food. But very often people are eating frozen food when they would have been eating canned, in which case frozen is an improvement.' Kurlansky ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 Julia Tuttle Causeway Sex Offender Colony (07/12)
Lost Memory of Skin revolves around a colony of convicted sex offenders residing beneath the Archie B. Claybourne Causeway, which connects the city of Calusa, Florida with the bordering Great Panzacola Swamp. Banks's vivid descriptions bring these fictional locations to life, and though they are imaginary, both the city and the colony ...
Freeganism (06/12)
In The Astral, the Quirk's daughter Karina is a practicing 'freegan' - a term that comes from a fusion of the words 'free' and 'vegan' (although not all freegans are vegans) - and as such, she chooses to eschew conventional consumerism.
Often referred to as 'dumpster divers,' freegans generally believe that western society throws ...
Thailand's Political Turmoil (05/12)
In Colin Cotterill's
Killed at the Whim of a Hat, protagonist Jimm Juree makes this tongue-in-cheek assessment of Thailand's political climate:
'Politics used to be a lot more complicated before the recent introduction of the English Premiership system of colored shirts, which helped no end to know who was who. The yellows, headed ...
The Mothers' Bridge of Love (03/12)
Xinran founded a charity in 2004 called
The Mothers' Bridge of Love (MBL),
which aims to build understanding between adopted Chinese children growing up around the world, their adoptive parents and their birth culture. The following letter, abbreviated from the
original, written by an adopted girl to her unknown birth-mother, ...
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 ...
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 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 ...
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 United States Marine Corps (06/11)
The United States Marine Corps (USMC) serves as a force-in-readiness within the United States security structure. Among other branches of the US military, it is unique in its ability to rapidly deploy a combined-arms task force to almost anywhere in the world within days. It is capable of entry into hostile or dangerous situations from ...
Runaways (03/11)
Nobody knows why Nora Lindell, the main character of Pittard's novel, went missing 30 years ago, but one theory is that she ran away.
Below is some information on modern-day runaways:
Runaways vs throwaways
A runaway episode is either when a child leaves home without permission and stays away overnight; or a child who is ...
Death Row Syndrome (02/11)
According to
Amnesty International's 2009 report, the USA's 37 legal executions in 2008 placed it fourth in the world after China (1718), Iran (346) and Saudi Arabia (102). However, this ranking needs to be taken with a pinch of salt as it does not adjust for population size; and does not take into account additional executions that may ...
Nurses, Nannies, Governesses, Tutors, and Companions: A Taxonomy (02/11)
The childcare arrangements of the nineteenth-century British upper crust have spawned a dynasty of classic literary characters. Can you tell your nursemaids from your nannies, your tutors from your governesses?
Nurse was in charge of the nursery regime - the diapers, the baths, and, especially in the case of the wet nurse, the ...
Desegregation Bussing (11/10)
In 1954, the United States Supreme Court handed down its judgment for
Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas. In their landmark unanimous (9-0) decision, the Court stated that 'separate educational facilities are inherently unequal', and thus ruled segregation to be a violation of the
Equal Protection Clause of the&#...
Illegal Drug Use in the USA (11/10)
The primary protagonist in Crossers is the head of a powerful Mexican
drug cartel specializing in the sale and distribution of both marijuana and
cocaine.
Illicit narcotics have been smuggled across the Mexican border into the United
States for decades, and the illegal drug market in the United States is one of
the most ...
A brief history of borders (08/10)
Most of us take it for granted that every person on earth is the citizen of a nation
state, but this is a relatively recent concept.
Take Europe for example. Although there had long been empires that stretched across large tracts of land, up until the Middle Ages Europe was essentially made up of multiple city states. Indeed, the ...
Yom Ha'atzmaut & Al-Nakba (07/10)
There have long been Jewish communities in Palestine, but populations saw particularly rapid growth as Jews fled European pogroms during the 19th century. A large wave of immigration, mainly from the Russian Empire began in 1881 and continued up until the start of World War I. During this period, known as the First and Second Aliya ...
Irish Travellers (06/10)
Among themselves, Travellers refer to themselves as Pavees. To
outsiders they are often referred to as pikeys, knackers or tinkers (the latter
two descriptions refer to traditional crafts in which they were employed,
rendering animals and tin-smithing; the first two are considered particularly
derogatory). In Irish, they are...
Aboriginal Land Rights (06/10)
Carpentaria is essentially a novel about the clash of cultures, told from the perspective of
the Aboriginal people of Australia. Just as the book illustrates, there is still debate in Australia about who can legitimately claim rights to the land - indigenous Australians, or descendants of the original European settlers. From the ...
American Labor on the Docks (03/10)
The Miles Archer character in Gores's novel has earned his tough-guy reputation by helping quell labor unrest on the docks of Seattle, in part by outing 'Wobblies.' For the unfamiliar, this plot line may be a bit confusing, but it is historically accurate, and adds welcome color to the novel's setting.
The history of American labor is ...
Missing Children (01/10)
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
posts the following U.S. Department of Justice statistics on
taken
children:
- 797,500 children (younger than 18) were reported missing in a one-year
period of time (approximately 2,185/day), but the majority of these were quickly found.
- 203,900 children were the victims of ...
Spy Agency Acronyms (11/09)
Like many spy thrillers, The Spanish Game is awash in an alphabet soup of acronyms. Below is a brief translation for the uninitiated.
MI5: 'Military Intelligence, Section 5.' Formed in 1909, MI5is a UK counter-intelligence and security agency which concentrates its efforts mainly on security issues within the UK (approximately equivalent...
Teenage Boys and Reading: Did you know? (09/09)
In 2005, The Washington Post published an article titled '
Why
Johnny Won't Read' that explored a worrisome trend:
'From 1992 to 2002, the gender gap in reading by young adults widened considerably. In overall book reading, young women slipped from 63 percent to 59 percent, while young men plummeted from 55 percent to 43 percent.'
The ...
American Slavery in the Seventeenth Century (09/09)
Toni Morrison locates her novel at a moment of transition in American
history, the moment when, to use the historian Ira Berlin's terms, a society
with slaves became a slaveholding society. British colonialists had owned
African slaves ever since the founding of Jamestown, but in the beginning of the
seventeenth century, slavery ...
Theory of Surveillance: The Panopticon (09/09)
The Panopticon was proposed as a model prison by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), a Utilitarian philosopher and theorist of British legal reform.
The Panopticon ('all-seeing') functioned as a round-the-clock surveillance
machine. Its design ensured that no prisoner could ever see the 'inspector' who
conducted surveillance from the ...
Immersion Journalism (09/09)
Factory Girls is an example of immersion journalism. Immersion
journalism involves more depth than traditional newspaper reporting, which is
limited by column space and time, and includes less of the reporter's own
thoughts and reactions to events. Classic examples include Truman Capote's
In Cold Blood (1966), Joan Didion's
...
