"I cannot say why it is so important that I make this daily record. Perhaps because I have been doing so for years on end? Or maybe – if I am being honest – it is because these markings of...
Read ReviewMartha 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 ...
Read ArticleFrancisco Maghabol has recently arrived in California from the Philippines, eager to earn money to send home to his family. But good job opportunities for Filipinos are scarce, and the threat of ...
Read ReviewThe Filipino Manongs and the Delano Grape Strike
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 ...
Read ArticleIn the aftermath of the 1860 presidential election, the divided United States began to collapse as South Carolina seceded from the Union, followed by another six Southern states. Among the countless ...
Read ReviewAs Erik Larson recounts in The Demon of Unrest, the first shots of the American Civil War were fired on Fort Sumter, off the coast of South Carolina, at 4:30 a.m. on April 12th, 1861. Thirty-six hours...
Read ArticleDaughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. Overall, First Impressions readers loved the book, awarding it an outstanding average rating of 4.8 ...
Read ReviewReal-Life Inspirations for Daughters of Shandong
Eve J. Chung's debut novel Daughters of Shandong focuses on the mother and daughters of a landowning family who flee China for Taiwan as a result of the Communist revolution in the late 1940s. ...
Read ArticleIt would be easy to describe The Avian Hourglass as "haunting" or even "dystopian," but neither of those words reflects the vastness of the longing that runs through it. This novel taps into a ...
Read ReviewRadio Astronomy and the Big Bang
The narrator of The Avian Hourglass wants to be a radio astronomer, a revelation that caused me to realize that I don't actually know anything about that kind of astronomy. (For a moment I thought it ...
Read ArticleIn this memoir, author André Aciman recounts his family's resettlement for a year in Rome due to President Nasser's expulsion of the Jews from Egypt in the 1950s and '60s. In a cramped Via Clelia...
Read ReviewNasser's Expulsion of the Jews from Egypt
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 ...
Read ArticleBig Holiday Wordplay 2024
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