Petra (06/18)
Petra, the ancient city that is one of the Seven Wonders of the World, features in The Confusion of Languages as one of the sights that Margaret longs to visit.
The remains of Petra, once a bustling city more than 2,000 years ago, were rediscovered in the early nineteenth century by a Swiss explorer, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. It is ...
Rastafarianism and Dreadlocks (05/18)
In the acknowledgments in Augustown, Kei Miller reveals that the novel was inspired by a story told to him by fellow poet Ishion Hutchinson, who had his dreadlocks cut off by a teacher when he was a young boy in Jamaica. Wearing dreadlocks and the ritual smoking of marijuana are two well-known practices in Rastafarianism, an Abrahamic ...
Marriage in the Catholic Clergy (05/18)
While Catholic priests are not permitted to be married, exceptions are made for those who convert after marriage, as was the case with Lockwood's father. This loophole was established in 1980 by Pope John Paul II, and as a result there are roughly 120 married Catholic priests in the United States. Celibacy in the Church is a longstanding ...
St. Petersburg by Other Names (05/18)
The subtitle of Caught in the Revolution is Petrograd, Russia, 1917 - A World on the Edge. Petrograd is more familiar to most today as St. Petersburg, a city that saw its name change three times in the 20th century.
It was founded in 1703 during the reign of Peter the Great for geopolitical reasons: he was looking for a way to keep ...
Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary (04/18)
What do the following people have in common? James Earl Ray, who assassinated Martin Luther King; Former NFL star quarterback Michael Vick; and Carl Panzram, a confessed serial killer who committed more than 20 murders.
If you have no idea, then congratulations – you've led a life of moral rectitude. Or, at the very least, you've...
Wigtown: National Book Town (04/18)
Located in southwest Scotland in the Dumfries and Galloway district, Wigtown, the setting of Catriona McPherson's novel Quiet Neighbors, became Scotland's National Book Town in 1998. The Wigtown website touts it as: 'A book lovers' haven…with over a quarter of a million books to choose from, old and new.'
This claim...
Staten Island Stats (03/18)
New York City consists of five boroughs: Brooklyn, The Bronx, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island. The latter is the home of Sgt. Denny Malone, the street-wise detective in Don Winslow's The Force. Denny may keep an apartment in Manhattan, but Staten Island is home. That's where he grew up. That's where he keeps his wife and ...
The Bardo (02/18)
The word bardo comes from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and means 'in-between.' It refers to a transitional state when one's awareness of the physical world is suspended. According to
Spiritualtravel.org the concept is an 'umbrella term which includes the transitional states of birth, death, dream, transmigration or afterlife, meditation...
Eastern State Penitentiary (01/18)
The catalyst for Long Black Veil takes place within the ruins of Eastern State Penitentiary, located in the heart of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Now remade into a museum and identified as a National Historic Landmark, the former prison stood unattended and in shambles from its closing in 1971 until 1994.
The author cites a visit to...
Castaways on the Antipodes Islands (01/18)
In The Mannequin Makers, a mysterious character called The Carpenter finds himself shipwrecked on a tiny island, part of the Antipodes Islands that lie several hundred miles south of New Zealand. He has no idea where he is, beyond being lost somewhere in the Southern Ocean. The island which he describes as the 'lemon wedge' (and his ...
Christian Science (11/17)
Christian Science was founded in 1894 by Mary Baker Eddy as a means of embracing 'primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing.' The foundational text is Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, published in 1875, which Emily Fridlund references several times in History of Wolves.
Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) grew...
The Sugar House (11/17)
In The Second Mrs. Hockaday, Susan Rivers' historical novel about the Civil War, Mr. Hockaday says to his new wife: '... there's an Armory in Holland Crossroads. A market hall in Traveler's Joy. In Charleston, it's the Sugar House. It's where servants are sent to be corrected.' This novel, of course, like all historical novels, is based ...
Idaho—A Nonsense Name? (11/17)
In Idaho, Ann muses about a legend surrounding the state's name. She relates a delightful story about a delegate to Congress playing with a little girl named Ida lingering in the House chamber while others discussed proposed names for a new western territory. When the little girl runs away, the man shouts after her, 'Ida! Ho! Come back to...
Art on the London Underground (11/17)
The world's first underground railway opened in London in 1863 between Paddington and Farringdon stations using steam engines to pull gas-lit wooden carriages along the almost four-mile, 6-station, route. In its first twelve months, almost 10 million passengers were transported.
The early network was built in shallow tunnels and needed ...
The Isle of Harris and the Flannan Isles (11/17)
Acclaimed crime novelist Peter May is famous for a trilogy of novels set on the Isle of Lewis in the Scottish Hebrides, but in his latest outing, Coffin Road, he has moved his sights south, to the harder, rockier terrain of the Isle of Harris.
Although Lewis and Harris are always referred to as if they are two separate islands, they ...
African American Women and the Black Church (10/17)
In Brit Bennett's debut novel, the mothers are the elderly African African women who devote themselves to Upper Room, the black church in town. 'If we laid all our lives toes to heel, we were born before the Depression, the Civil War, even America itself,' they report.
The mothers in the book depend on the church for much of their...
Adoption From China (09/17)
In
The Fortunes, one of the main characters is adopting a baby from China. The U.S. Department of State reports that a
total of 76,026 children were brought from China to the USA through adoption between 1999 and 2015. Of these, 87.1% were female and 12.9% male – a result of China's historical one-child policy and the frequent ...
Bletchley Park (09/17)
Bletchley Park, the setting for Lucy Ribchester's
The Amber Shadows, is situated about an hour's train ride north of London. The estate has been turned into a
heritage museum open to the public since 1993.
Bletchley was originally a manor house on about 500 acres with rural outbuildings, but by the 1930s had fallen into disuse. The ...
The Native American Tradition of Winkte (09/17)
The two main characters in Sebastian Barry's Days Without End, Thomas McNulty and John Cole, are white soldiers who at various points dress up as women for entertainment or disguise. They are thus surprised but bemused when they take part in the Indian Wars and encounter the Native Americans' winkte or berdache tradition of men who dress ...
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (09/17)
Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution Through Painters' Eyes focuses on the ideal of a country-in-making and how the arts helped educate and manipulate its political leanings. In this drive for perfection, there was a need, once the Revolution was a success, to continue the young country's unique standing in the world by ...
Grupos Beta (09/17)
In the beginning of Lucky Boy, as Soli makes her way from Mexico to the United States, she spends several nights in a relief camp set up by Grupos Beta, a service agency operated by Mexico's National Institute of Migration (INM), that offers water, shelter, medical aid, and information to migrants at risk.
There are currently 22 Grupos...
The Tucson Samaritans (09/17)
'I feel sorrow. Anger. And sometimes a little desperation,' says Maria Ochoa, one of the people Sasha Abramsky interviews in his book, Jumping at Shadows. As a member of the Tucson Samaritans, a humanitarian group which aids migrants who cross the borders through the Arizona desert, she has reason to be. For more than a decade, she has ...
Gardens of Heligan (08/17)
The grounds of Black Rabbit Hall (In Eve Chase's eponymously named novel) are depicted as lush and untamed, a state of wildness that could be the site of enchantment or of danger. Several times Chase mentions 'giant rhubarb' growing wild in the woods around Black Rabbit Hall, a detail that immediately reminded me of a real Cornish garden ...
Belfast (07/17)
In So Say the Fallen, it is murder most foul in Belfast. Northern Ireland's capital city is as much a character in Neville's work as it is a place in the novel. It's where the author lives and, has been the home of a number of famous people; it is the birthplace of the Christian author and philosopher C. S. Lewis; John Wood Dunlop ...
London Fog (07/17)
Vyleta's Smoke draws inspiration from the very real issue of smog in Victorian London, the result of fog off the Thames river mixing with smoke from early industrialization and coal-burning fires in homes. This is hinted at when the novel's young protagonists are briefly hidden in a coal mine before making their way into the city. Making ...
San Francisco's Palace Hotel (06/17)
One of the special things about Thanks for the Trouble is its strong sense of place, utilizing several San Francisco landmarks and other locales as a backdrop for Parker and Zelda's story. One of the most important settings is the historic Palace Hotel, which is where the novel opens and which also plays a pivotal role later.
...
A Brief History of Uganda (06/17)
Kintu is set in Uganda, a landlocked country in central Africa bordered by South Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and The Democratic Republic of Congo. It is home to approximately 39 million individuals (2015).
click for bigger image
Human activity in the region that is now Uganda dates back at least 50,000 years as evidenced by ...
Shanghai (05/17)
The Street of Eternal Happiness, or Changle Lu, is the subject of Rob Schmitz's book and also his home. It is located in Shanghai, which means 'City on the Sea' in Chinese. Shanghai is located on a delta of land on the country's eastern coast, where the Yangtze River empties into the East China Sea. Home to over 24 million people (2014), ...
The Kremlin (05/17)
'Kremlin' is the Russian word for a castle or fortified complex, and many Eastern European cities, including Novgorod, Smolensk and Kiev have one. Most people however, associate the Kremlin with the seat of the Russian government in Moscow.
The site of the Moscow Kremlin, a hill near where the Neglina and Moskva Rivers converge, shows ...
The Ashanti Nation and the Gold Coast Slave Trade (05/17)
Homegoing is set against the backdrop of the Gold Coast slave trade. Protagonists Efii and Esi, the two half-sisters, come from warring states in 18th century Ghana, the Ashantis and the Fantes.
The Ashanti Nation was a loose group of fiefdoms, an ethnic subgroup that was formed in 17th century Ghana as a trading coalition with the ...
The Old and New Towns of Edinburgh (05/17)
In The Strings of Murder, Oscar de Muriel's historical crime novel set in Victorian times, detectives, Frey and McGray crisscross a city that has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995. As someone who knows Edinburgh well - I was born and grew up there - I thoroughly enjoyed the novel. Abbeyhill, opposite the famous ...
The Rainbow Bridge (05/17)
The Rainbow Bridge spanning Tokyo Bay plays a fundamental role in Blue Light Yokohama. It becomes almost a character, as if the 800 meters (2,625 feet) spanning Tokyo's Shibaura Pier to Odaiba's waterfront is a metaphor for crossing the chasm between good (the enforcement of the law) and evil (murder).
But the double-deck ...
New York City's SoHo District (05/17)
Tuesday Nights in 1980 is set in the SoHo district of New York City, a neighborhood that was once far removed from the boutiques and arts destination it is today. SoHo is located in lower Manhattan and derives its name from its geography: South of Houston street and perhaps after its sister equivalent, Soho in London. It is widely ...
The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (04/17)
Consequence author Eric Fair first prepared for his role as an interrogator by enrolling in the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC).
According to its
website, the DLIFLC is the 'premier school for culturally based foreign language education and training, with classroom instruction, mobile training teams, and ...
Lourdes (04/17)
It might not be surprising to learn that about three million people a year visit the Taj Mahal, the world-famous opulent marble mausoleum in Agra, India. It is often referred to as the world's most beautiful building. But would you be surprised to discover that fully twice as many people a year visit a muddy, rocky cave on the site of a ...
The United Arab Emirates (04/17)
Temporary People is set largely in the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven states located on the Persian Gulf. Each of the seven, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, and Umm al-Qaiwan have their own local governments, which are overseen by a federal president in Abu Dhabi, the nation's capital. The current ...
Nestinarstvo or Ritual Fire-Dancing (04/17)
Nestinarstvo, or ritual fire-dancing, plays an important role throughout Stork Mountain.
The practice, which involves walking barefoot across burning coals, is specific to the Strandja Mountain region in southeast Bulgaria, an area that shares both borders and cultural ties with Greece. Indeed, it's believed that the rite originated ...
The Joint Family in India (03/17)
In Ghachar Ghochar, the narrator lives in a joint family, and it is really this sociological unit that has been the mainstay of Indian life for centuries.
A joint family is defined as a unit of extended members of a family all living together under one roof, who also cook and eat together. Usually driven by patriarchal order, the ...
Little Saigon Enclaves (03/17)
The name 'Little Saigon' is often given to an area where there are a large number of people of Vietnamese origin. When The Refugees author Viet Thanh Nguyen arrived in the United States in the mid '70s at the age of four, he lived in a refugee camp and then with a couple of sponsor families in Pennsylvania before being reunited with his ...
Seva in Sikhism (03/17)
In
The Year Of the Runaways, most of the men are Sikhs as is Narinder Kaur, the only woman character. Sikhism (see Beyond the Book for
A Moment Comes) is an integral part of Narinder's life and it is through practicing one of its central tenets, service or 'seva,' that she comes to be Randeep's wife.
While most religions ...
The Town of Rye (02/17)
The charming town of Rye rests in the county of East Sussex near England's south coast. Rye's recorded history can be traced back to before the Norman Conquest of 1066. For many centuries it was an important port town set in a naturally formed bay. But this changed in the 13th century when a combination of major storms led to its main ...
Vikings on the Isle of Man (02/17)
One of the main storylines of Merrow involves the arrival of a man, Ulf, who Auntie Ushag, using her native Manx language, calls a 'wiggynagh,' or what we'd call a Viking. Like many elements of the novel, this has a basis in historical fact, since the Isle of Man has a significant history of Viking exploration and settlement.
...
Vikings on the Isle of Man (02/17)
One of the main storylines of Merrow involves the arrival of a man, Ulf, who Auntie Ushag, using her native Manx language, calls a 'wiggynagh,' or what we'd call a Viking. Like many elements of the novel, this has a basis in historical fact, since the Isle of Man has a significant history of Viking exploration and settlement.
...
The Maze Prison and Its Most Famous Inmate (02/17)
In
High Dive, Jonathan Lee references many aspects of '
The Troubles,' a term used to describe the turbulent decades in Northern Ireland between 1960 and 2000. At issue was a territorial challenge: the overwhelmingly Protestant Loyalists wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom while the nationalists and mainly Catholic republicans were...
The Kung Tribe (02/17)
Africa's Kalahari desert might seem an unlikely model for American society. But the Kalahari—a sparsely populated swath of sun-baked bushland that boasts temperatures regularly above 100 degrees during the day and just a few inches of rainfall every year—is home to a tribe of nomadic people called the Kung (part of the San ...
Internment Camp Newspapers (02/17)
In Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds, Harry Fukuhara, his sister Mary, and his niece Jeanie were forced into internment camps built to house people of Japanese descent who were living in the United States during World War II. Over 127,000 Japanese Americans, mostly from the West Coast where ...
What is Jihad? (01/17)
In The Kindness of Enemies, Leila Aboulela's twenty-first century protagonist Natalie asks: 'How did this historical change in the very definition of jihad come about?' This question is developed thematically though the historical storyline in Aboulela's novel which features Imam Shamil, a mid-nineteenth century Muslim leader of mountain...
Apex, North Carolina - One of the Best Places to Live in America (01/17)
When Dr. Clarice Watkins sets out to academically scrutinize one of the 'Best Places to Live in America,' she notes that the criteria for making the list include 'Good quality of life,' along with 'Quiet and safe.' For many years, Money magazine has compiled its own annual roundups of the 'Best Places to Live.' According to Money, their ...
The Farallon Islands (01/17)
The Lightkeepers is set on the Farallon Islands, which are officially part of the city of San Francisco. Even though they are located just about thirty miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge, the islands are quite remote. 'There is nowhere more alone than the Farallon Islands,' Geni writes in The Lightkeepers, 'The rest of the world might ...
.gif)
.png)
