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People, Eras & Events "Beyond the Book" Articles Written by BookBrowse Reviewers

People, Eras & Events

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Edgar Allan Poe's Marriage to Virginia Clemm (07/25)
Edgar Allan Poe looms over Fox—quite literally, in fact. Mr. Fox has a large bronze bust of Poe with a raven on his shoulder, a prize for winning a poetry contest, displayed in his office. But even beyond the bust, Poe recurs throughout the narrative. Not only does Fox become a detective story, a form Poe invented, Mr. Fox idealizes...
Tea's Role in World History (07/25)
Few plants have impacted world history as profoundly as Camellia sinensis, the tea plant. Jessica J. Lee, in her book Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging, describes how tea is integral to both seemingly disparate halves of her family tree—her Welsh paternal grandparents and her Taiwanese maternal family all loved tea and ...
Advertising for Brides in the 19th-Century American West (07/25)
The Californian Gold Rush, the American Civil War, and the lure of land expansion filled the 19th-century American West with men like Tom Rourke, the protagonist of Kevin Barry's The Heart in Winter. These men came to work as miners, farmers, or ranchers—but they often lacked companions to help with farm work, ensure the continuity ...
The Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992) (07/25)
Ruben Reyes Jr.'s Archive of Unknown Universes explores the impact of the Salvadoran Civil War by contrasting one alternative timeline that shows a decisive victory by the government with another that shows the war ending with revolutionaries overthrowing the government. In reality, the Salvadoran Civil War lasted 13 years, from 1979 to ...
The Angels of Mons (07/25)
Daniel Kraus's novel Angel Down is set on a WWI battlefield in France. After a particularly brutal shelling, Private Cyril Bagger is sent along with a small group of others to "take care of" someone shrieking nonstop in No Man's Land. Instead of a wounded comrade, however, he discovers what appears to be an angel. One of...
Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman (07/25)
In Girl, 1983, Linn Ullmann uses the tools of fiction to dissect a teenaged narrator's traumatic encounter with an older man. That narrator's biography has numerous parallels to Ullmann's own, including a turbulent adolescence divided among New York, Norway, and Sweden—the result of being the daughter of actress Liv Ullmann and ...
A Shooting Star of American Astronomy: Maria Mitchell (07/25)
The central mystery of Sarah Perry's Enlightenment concerns an astronomer, Maria Văduva, and Thomas's uncovering of her hidden scientific contributions. Many real-life historical women partook in exploration of the night sky and space only for their discoveries to be similarly buried or forgotten. One such woman was the nineteenth-...
The 1926 Bingham, Utah Avalanche (07/25)
The Very Long, Very Strange Life of Isaac Dahl by Bart Yates is written as a series of vignettes based on twelve days in the life of the main character, which include personal moments and historical events, both famous and lesser-known. One of these happenings is an avalanche that Isaac survives at the age of eight with his sister in the ...
Flag Bearers of the Civil War (07/25)
Anders, the protagonist of Dennard Dayle's How to Dodge a Cannonball, describes himself as a 'flag-twirler': he twirls flags for the Union, then the Confederacy, then the Union again. Throughout the novel, Anders name-drops increasingly baroque flag-twirling maneuvers, including the Sumter Two-Step, the Jackson Lift, and the Delaware ...
Sally Ride, First American Woman in Space (07/25)
Joan Goodwin, the protagonist of Taylor Jenkins Reid's novel Atmosphere, applies to NASA to be one of America's first female astronauts and is accepted to the program as part of Group 9. Group 8 (both in the book and in reality) included Sally Ride, the first American woman to travel into space.

Sally Kristen Ride was born in 1951 in ...
The Fires of 1970s New York City (06/25)
In her novel Remember Us, author Jacqueline Woodson draws from her own experiences growing up in 1970s New York. Her protagonist's hometown of Bushwick is plagued by housefires, landing it the callous nickname 'The Matchbox.'

Bushwick wasn't the only community affected by numerous fires at the time. Records show that by mid-1974, the ...
Nicky Calma, aka Tita Aida (06/25)
In Caro de Robertis' work of transcribed oral history, So Many Stars, one of the interviewees is Nicky Calma. She shares the story of how, along with others at the Filipino Task Force on AIDS, she created the drag persona of Tita Aida in order to educate the people in her community about HIV/AIDS.

Born in 1967 to a Catholic family in ...
The Handover of Hong Kong (06/25)
Ghost Girl, Banana takes place partly in Hong Kong in the summer of 1997, a setting intentionally chosen by the author for symbolic reasons, representing the inner conflict of the main character who is of Hong Kong descent but grew up in the UK, raised by her English father. This was the summer Hong Kong was 'returned' to the rule of the ...
Two Major Works that Shaped American (and Américan) Thought (06/25)
In America, América, historian Greg Grandin references two major intellectual works of history and philosophy that influenced the worldviews of peoples in the Americas and in Europe. These two books offer much in the way of understanding the evolution of both the United States and Latin America in relation to one another and are ...
Olivia de Havilland and the Studio System (05/25)
In the novella "Eve in Hollywood," in Amor Towles's Table for Two, Eve Ross becomes close friends with the actress Olivia de Havilland. It is 1938, and de Havilland's popular new film The Adventures of Robin Hood has just been released. All is not well in paradise, however, for the young star falls prey to blackmailers, ...
Jennicam and the Rise of a Life Lived Online (05/25)
If you think about internet influencers, you might first consider your favorite cookbook blogger, Instagram fashion icon, or YouTube content creator. But, as Sophie Gilbert notes in a chapter on the rise of reality television in her book Girl on Girl, the very first person who might stake a claim to that title is a woman who, back in 1996...
Chinese Science During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) (04/25)
May, the matriarch of Rachel Khong's Real Americans, is born into a poor rural Chinese family in the 1950s. Her fate is foretold by her mother's life: wake before dawn to cook breakfast, clean up after the men in the family, head to the rice paddies and toil until the time to head home to cook supper, rinse and repeat. It is backbreaking....
Elián González (04/25)
In Say Hello to My Little Friend, main character Izzy Reyes traveled by raft from Cuba to the United States in 2003 at age seven with his mother, who drowned during the trip. It is mentioned in the novel that his Tia Teresa exploits the sympathy of teachers who note the similarity of the circumstances between Izzy's journey and that of ...
Lucrecia the Dreamer (04/25)
The fictional heroine of Leigh Bardugo's novel The Familiar interacts with several characters based on people who really did live in Spain during the 16th century. One of these is a young woman based on the figure Lucrecia de León, also known as 'Lucrecia the Dreamer.' Like the main character Luzia, Lucrecia comes under government ...
Gender Fluidity and Trans Identity in the Old West (04/25)
The titular 'novel' from Torrey Peters' book Stag Dance takes place in an illegal logging camp in early 1900s Montana. During a cold and lonely winter, the lumberjacks there hold a dance, with some men designating themselves as women by placing a triangle of fabric between their legs, showing that they wish to be courted by the others. ...
Notable Female Boxers (04/25)
Rita Bullwinkel's novel Headshot depicts the intensity and intimacy of a girl's boxing tournament. Although women's boxing was only officially introduced to the Olympics in 2012 and was banned by the USA Boxing organization before 1993, accounts of women boxing date back to the 1700s. Here are just a few of the trailblazing women boxers ...
US Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins (04/25)
Becoming Madam Secretary by Stephanie Dray narrates the life of Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the first woman to serve in the US Cabinet. Perkins was a tireless supporter of workers' rights and is credited with drafting and lobbying support for some of the most critical parts of the New ...
The Silent Generation in The Usual Desire to Kill (04/25)
In 1951, Time magazine described the youth of the era in the following terms: 'The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence. With some rare exceptions, youth is nowhere near the rostrum. By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers & mothers, today's younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not ...
Artist Ana Mendieta (03/25)
The title character in Xochitl Gonzalez's Anita de Monte Laughs Last is closely based on the artist Ana Mendieta. Although Mendieta's shocking death at the age of thirty-five has overshadowed her artistic legacy in the public imagination, Mendieta was a rising star at the time of her death, and her creative work continues to hold ...
The Highland Clearances (03/25)
In Clear, the third novel from Carys Davies, an impoverished presbyterian minister reluctantly takes part in the Highland Clearances, a series of mass evictions that took place in the north of Scotland between 1750 and 1850, driven in part by the restructuring of British society during the Industrial Revolution and the collapse of the ...
Hertha Ayrton (03/25)
The friendship between Hertha Ayrton and Marie Curie is explored in Anne Michaels's multigenerational novel Held. Although Marie Curie is a household name, Aryton's fascinating life is likely unfamiliar to most readers.

Born in 1854 in Portsea, England, Hertha Ayrton was born as Phoebe Sarah Marks. Levi Marks, a clockmaker from...
The Social Impact of COVID-19 on Young Adults (03/25)
COVID-19 has had an immense impact on people of all ages, in all stages of life, and in all parts of the world. Mahogany L. Browne's novel A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe focuses on the various effects on young people's lives, which are still being felt and studied today. Along with the widespread death, disability, and ...
The Erasure of Eileen Blair from Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (03/25)
Readers might be forgiven if, in reading George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, they miss the fact that his first wife, Eileen Blair, was in Spain with him, working for the Republican resistance against Franco's fascist forces. As Anna Funder points out in Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life, when George does refer to her, he does not ...
The Plow That Broke the Plains: A Dust Bowl Documentary (03/25)
One of the protagonists in The Antidote is Cleo Allfrey, a photographer dispatched by the Resettlement Administration to document life in Nebraska's Dust Bowl. She and others in the book mention a similar, real-world project: a documentary titled The Plow That Broke the Plains.

The Plow That Broke the Plains was a controversial, ...
The Preppy Killer (03/25)
A crime that occurred in the summer of 1986 in New York City inspired Cynthia Weiner's A Gorgeous Excitement. On August 26, a cyclist discovered 18-year-old Jennifer Levin in New York City's Central Park, dead due to strangulation and half naked behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, badly bruised and with cuts on her face. She had been ...
A Brief History of Events Leading Up to the Russia-Ukraine War (02/25)
Victoria Amelina (1986–2023) was a Ukrainian novelist. She spent the last months of her life researching war crimes committed by Russian soldiers during their invasion of her country.

Those of us in the United States probably think of the Russia-Ukraine War as beginning on February 24, 2022, when Russian president Vladimir Putin ...
From Stagecraft to Spy Craft: Celebrity Spies (02/25)
The history of celebrities dabbling in espionage is a fascinating one. As Ronald Drabkin illustrates in Beverly Hills Spy, famous people often have opportunities to gather intelligence from high-value sources. Who would not want to socialize with a beautiful or handsome star?

One of the most audacious celebrity spies during World War ...
De Ondergedoken Camera: A WWII Resistance Group (02/25)
Song of a Blackbird is a dual timeline narrative that follows the lives of two young women, one in modern day and one during WWII. In 2011, Annick goes on a search to find her family's true history, her only clues a set of prints featuring buildings around Amsterdam signed by a mysterious 'Emma B.' And in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, the ...
The Jeju Uprising (02/25)
Han Kang's latest novel, We Do Not Part, delves into a dark part of Korean history known as the Jeju uprising, the Jeju massacre, or (in Korea) 'Jeju 4.3,' for the day it began. Jeju, Korea's largest island, located southwest of the Korean peninsula, is sometimes today called 'the Hawaii of Asia.' In the introduction to a recent article ...
A History of Strip Clubs in the United States (02/25)
In the novel Soft Core, protagonist Ruth works at a San Francisco club as a stripper, a profession with a long history in the United States. The first striptease acts in America were part of vaudeville shows at carnivals and burlesque theatres around the turn of the twentieth century. One early "disrobing act" by a trapeze ...
The Harlem Renaissance (02/25)
Tia Williams' novel A Love Song for Ricki Wilde contains flashbacks to the Harlem Renaissance, considered a golden age for Black culture and art in the United States. This movement, centered in Manhattan's Harlem neighborhood, took place between the 1910s and 1930s.

During the period known as the Great Migration, when large numbers...
A History of the Texas Rangers (01/25)
In Elizabeth Gonzalez James's novel The Bullet Swallower, a group of Texas Rangers pursue the protagonist, Antonio Sonoro, with maniacal zeal. The most dangerous member of the posse tortures and murders innocent civilians as a warning to Sonoro, crossing the Rio Grande and attacking Mexican citizens with impunity. Set in the mid-1890s...
Canadian Nurses in World War I (01/25)
Katherine Arden's The Warm Hands of Ghosts, in addition to focusing on the violence and trauma of the World War I trenches, is also about the female nurses who treated wounded soldiers.

Protagonist Laura's point-of-view sections devote ample description to the sordid day-to-day of serving as a hospital nurse in WWI. Already sent away ...
Marco Polo (01/25)
Although Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities concerns itself with two real people, it is far from historical fiction. The Marco Polo who describes city after fantastical city to Kublai Khan broadly resembles the Venetian merchant and explorer of the 13th century: both traveled the Eastern world and (allegedly, in the real Polo's case) served...
Beloved Criminals (01/25)
In A Serial Killer's Guide to Marriage, Fox and Hazel are an attractive, wealthy, glamorous couple who kill others for sport. (But they only kill evil men, like rapists and child abusers—making them, in the reader's eyes, less serial killers and more vigilantes.) Their wealth and beauty offer them an inconspicuousness that lets them...
The Long and Exhausting Journey for Central American Migrants (01/25)
For seven years, anthropologist Jason De León followed low-level smugglers to understand the motivation, culture, hopes, and dreams of those guiding migrants to the US-Mexico border and beyond. De León documents their stories, some of which ended in death, in Soldiers and Kings. While his work is centered on the smugglers, a ...
Enslavement in Canada (01/25)
The nonfiction book Flee North recounts how activist and writer Thomas Smallwood encouraged the enslaved individuals he helped escape to relocate to Canada, where slavery was illegal, rather than remaining in the United States, where they might be returned to captivity if caught. Smallwood himself settled in Toronto with his family in ...
Iran Air Flight 655 (01/25)
On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes, a Navy missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, saw on its radar an Iranian aircraft. This aircraft was a passenger airplane, flying from Tehran to Dubai with 290 civilians on board, including 66 children. But the crew of the USS Vincennes identified the airplane as a fighter jet and fired two ...
The Cinema Rex Fire (12/24)
In the southwest of Iran lies a city called Abadan, over five hundred miles from the country's capital of Tehran, with a population of a little over 200,000. Despite its relatively quiet presence, it played a crucial role in sparking the Iranian Revolution of 1979. On August 19, 1978, Cinema Rex, a movie theater located in a working-class...
The Vietnam Women's Memorial (12/24)
In Kristin Hannah's The Women, nursing student Frances "Frankie" McGrath joins the Army Nurse Corps and is shipped overseas to serve as a combat nurse in the Vietnam War. Upon returning home, Frankie spends years running from her trauma until she eventually finds a way to share her experiences. At the end of the novel, she ...
The Filipino Manongs and the Delano Grape Strike (12/24)
Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay explores the lives of four generations of men in the Maghabol family. The family's patriarch, Francisco, leaves the Philippines to seek work in America in the 1920s. Francisco quickly discovers that the stories he's heard of a country full of acceptance and success for immigrants are fantasies. A ...
Midwifery in Colonial America (12/24)
Martha Ballard, the heroine of Ariel Lawhon's The Frozen River and a real-life 18th-century midwife, left behind a diary that remains one of history's best sources on midwifery in late colonial America. In addition to this work of historical fiction, Ballard is the subject of historical monographs and of a PBS special on her life. Along ...
Nasser's Expulsion of the Jews from Egypt (11/24)
Throughout Roman Year, André Aciman repeatedly and explicitly references the political policies of President Gamal Abdel Nasser as responsible for his Jewish family's refugee status in Rome for the period of the memoir's titular year. The number of Jews in Egypt is estimated to have been 75,000 to 80,000 at its height in 1948. From ...
The 1993 Russian Constitutional Crisis (11/24)
Patriot by Alexei Navalny covers the Russian opposition leader's life from his childhood in the USSR in the 1980s to his final days in an Arctic penal colony in 2024. One important moment in the development of his political consciousness that he outlines in his memoir is the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis, an event which eventually ...
Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oneg Shabbat Project (11/24)
Lauren Grodstein's novel We Must Not Think of Ourselves was inspired by the Oneg Shabbat Project, a World War II archive compiled and hidden by the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. Established and run by Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, the archive contained a wide variety of documents recording daily life in the Ghetto.

Ringelblum was born in ...
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