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3. Beyond the Book: Pulau Bidong Refugee Camp

Every time we review a book we also explore a related topic. Here is a recent "beyond the book" article for Dragonfish by Vu Tran

In Dragonfish, Suzy writes about leaving Vietnam with her daughter, and arriving on an island before finally being resettled in the United States. She was one of many boat people, and this aspect of the story might well be modeled after Vu Tran's real-life experiences where he and most of his family were refugees at Pulau Bidong before passage to Oklahoma. It was only in Oklahoma that Tran met his father for the first time.

Situated off the northeast coast of Malaysia, Pulau Bidong (Pulau means Island in Malay) was largely uninhabited until shortly after the fall of Saigon in April 1975 when the first refugees from Vietnam, a boatload of 47 people, made the hazardous 10-hour trip across the South China sea to travel a distance of nearly 700 miles. Barely one square kilometer in area, the island, about a 40-minute boat ride from mainland Malaysia today, saw a steady influx of refugees mainly from 1978 ....continued

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5. Beyond the Book: The History of Ice Cream

Every time we review a book we also explore a related topic. Here is a recent "beyond the book" article for The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street by Susan J. Gilman

A year ago, the big hullabaloo among residents in my city of Henderson, Nevada was the arrival of Blue Bell Ice Cream from Texas. It is a godsend for the Texans who live here, and a curiosity for the rest of us. Beforehand, supermarkets like WinCo had signs announcing it was coming. The anticipation would not, could not, melt. And then, it was here. And it was good. Especially their Buttered Pecan flavor.

Blue Bell was established in Brenham, Texas in 1907, beginning life as a creamery for excess cream from farmers in the area. At that time, the end product was butter. A few years later, they began making ice cream and delivering it by horse and wagon. But, of course, Blue Bell did not invent ice cream. Who did?

Let's go further back in time. Back to the second century B.C. There, Alexander the Great liked honey and nectar over ice and snow. But that's not ice cream. How about the Roman Empire, 54-86 A.D.? Emperor Nero dispatched runners to get snow from the mountains so he could put juices and fruits on them. But that's still not ice cream. In the late 13th century, Marco Polo came back to Italy from the Far East, bearing a recipe for what we know as sherbet. It is said that Catherine de Medici, who married the future King Henri II, introduced ice cream to the French in the 16th century. But the truth of these early accounts is that there isn't a lot of historic basis to them and many were likely dreamed up by nineteenth century salesmen to sell ice cream. ... continued

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