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The Bloomsbury Group (01/16)
While Vanessa And Her Sister focuses on artist Vanessa Bell and her writer sister, Virginia Woolf, it also places them in the larger context of the famous Bloomsbury Group, which was a set of intellectuals who debated radical ideas about society, ethics and a host of other issues. Founding members included Virginia Woolf and her siblings ...
Keys of All Kinds (01/16)
On a wall in his home in A Pleasure and a Calling, William Heming hangs the keys to all the houses he's sold, copies made from the originals that their residents still use. He can go in those houses, no matter if the owners are home or not. It makes for disquieting reading, but also inspires curiosity about what types of keys exist.
...
The Naked Mole Rat (01/16)
In Ten Million Aliens, Simon Barnes describes many unusual creatures, one of which is the naked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber).
The naked mole rat, also known as the sand puppy or desert mole rat, is a rodent, although it's more closely related to porcupines, chinchillas and guinea pigs than to either moles or rats. These animals are...
Migrant Smuggling (01/16)
The Jaguar's Children is based on a real-life example of migrant smuggling gone awry. Unfortunately such incidents are becoming increasingly common around the world.
It's important to note that there are differences between migrant smuggling and human trafficking even if there might be overlap between the two kinds of ...
The Hawala System (01/16)
In A Man Of Good Hope, many monetary transactions are carried out by the informal system known as hawala. At its most basic, hawala is a method of money transfer that is used to send remittances without using standard channels such as banks. While the system made headlines shortly after 9-11, where it was alleged that hawala was used to ...
Victims of Poaching (12/15)
Travel literature has contributed immeasurably to many people's understanding of foreign lands and cultures they might not otherwise visit – or even become aware of. One of the many contributions of travel writers – such as William deBuys, author of The Last Unicorn – has been to raise awareness of the global epidemic of...
Tim Johnston - A Carpenter Who Builds Houses and Stories (12/15)
In 2007, Tim Johnston's father asked him if he would go to his new house in the Rockies and do the finish work. Johnston made his living as a carpenter at the time, and since 2006 his father had been asking him to do the job. Johnston wasn't writing at the time; he was contemplating, instead, that he might never write again, and so he ...
Aviation in 1937 (12/15)
Flora Saudade, one of the primary protagonists in Martha Brockenbough's
The Game of Love and Death is an aviatrix. The novel takes place in 1937, a year that was full of aviation inventions and adventures. Here are a few highlights:
- January 19 – Howard Hughes (pilot, businessman and investor) set a new world record, flying from...
Make Room for Ducklings? (12/15)
We did not write a featured review or beyond the book article of
The Nature of The Beast so here is an earlier 'Beyond the Book' written for
How The Light Gets In. We also have an informative article about why Quebec speaks French written for
Bury Your Dead (#9).
In her
review of
How The Light Gets In for
The Washington Post, Maureen ...
Interpol and Red Notices (11/15)
The title Red Notice refers to one of the many alerts issued by Interpol, the world's largest international police organization.
The idea of an international police force was originally proposed at the First International Criminal Police Congress in Monaco in 1914, although the organization didn't come into being until an initiative ...
Congo and Dirty Minerals (11/15)
In The Laughing Monsters, Denis Johnson shows that Africa has been exploited for minerals for a good long time. 'This time we concern ourselves with metals and minerals,' points out the main character, Roland Nair, trying to explain his mission that takes him from Sierra Leone to Congo.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is ...
The Cost of Hunting for Treasure (11/15)
In The Marauders, Lindquist, the one-armed treasure hunter, needs only his pirogue (a small boat) and a metal detector to search the swamps of Barataria, Louisiana for the rumored treasure of renowned and revered pirate Jean Lafitte. That's it. And he's had that old metal detector for many years, so his expenses are low. But treasure ...
The Psychology of Debt (11/15)
In Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld, Jake Halpern examines the afterlife of a debt once it has been declared 'bad.' But is there ever such a thing as a 'good' debt?
What would you do if you won a million dollars? Would you buy that grand house you've always dreamed of? Or the big sports car? ...
Car Crashes in Middle Grade and Young Adult Literature (11/15)
In a controversial
article in
The Wall Street Journal in June 2011, 'Darkness Too Visible,' Meghan Cox Gurdon lamented that the world of young adult literature has become too dark – a forest thick with loss, pain, death, and the gruesome details that describe them all. She offered the suggestion that such books might introduce teens...
Medical Tourism (11/15)
Internal Medicine is but one view of the U.S. medical system. According to
The Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation looking to foster a better health care system in the USA, the U.S. ranked last in a survey of healthcare in 11 developed nations - behind Canada, ranked at #10, and way behind Germany & Netherlands in a tie at #5, with ...
Child Abandonment Syndrome (11/15)
Throughout the novel,
Lila, the protagonist suffers a deep ongoing shame resulting from early childhood abuse and neglect. Although it is never articulated in the story, there is a name for this response: Child Abandonment Syndrome.
In a 2010
article published in a blog, 'The Many Faces of Addiction,' for
Psychology Today, Claudia ...
Charles Rennie Mackintosh ("Mr. Mac") (11/15)
Mackintosh (1868–1928), one of the central characters in Esther Freud's Mr. Mac and Me, was one of 11 children born to a police superintendent and his wife in Glasgow, Scotland. Early on he showed promise as an architect, winning the 1890 Alexander Thomson Traveling Studentship, which funded his travel around Europe to study classic...
A History of Fresco that Leads to Francesco del Cossa (11/15)
Early Fresco Painting
Ali Smith's How to Be Both was inspired by a book she found about frescoes. Fresco, meaning 'fresh' in Italian, is the technique of painting in water-based pigment on wet plaster so that the plaster, paint and wall fuse into a single entity. The earliest known examples date from c. 1500 BCE, on the island of Crete, ...
North Korea's Pyongyang University of Science & Technology (11/15)
Dr. Kim Chin-Kyung (aka Kim Jin Kyong, James Kim) is the founder of both the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST) and its older sister institution, the Yanbian University of Science and Technology (YUST) in China. It is at PUST that Suki Kim worked on assignment as an English teacher.
Born in 1935 in Seoul, Kim was a ...
The "Normal" Kid in the Family (11/15)
In All the Major Constellations, Andrew, the 17-year-old protagonist, throws himself into his summer job as a laborer when his life becomes unmanageable. The heavy outdoor work where he toils alongside grown men becomes a safe refuge of physical exertion.
One day, over bag lunches, he unloads the sum of all his current problems –...
Troubles in Southern Memoirs (11/15)
Barry Moser's We Were Brothers presents his troubled relationship with the South. He shares his positive memories of his childhood filled with games and conversation, but what he seems to remember the most, now in his later adulthood, are the times of strife – those moments of conflict and bigotry.
Anyone familiar with ...
The Marx and Engels Family Members (10/15)
In Mrs. Engels, Gavin McCrea brings the families of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx to life, pitching the reader into the action with little biographical backstory. The lives of these characters are interesting to learn about, within and beyond the time span covered in the novel.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels (1820-...
Old English (10/15)
The phrase 'Old English' might seem like a quaint way to refer to any works in English that we now consider 'old' – Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer, et al. But in fact Old English – the language whose rhythms and vocabulary inspired Paul Kingsnorth's novel The Wake – would be unrecognizable by readers and speakers of the ...
The Battle of Stalingrad (10/15)
Berlin, August 20th, 1942
My dear Peter,
The Fuhrer has just announced that we are to take Stalingrad. To hear it from our leader's lips is thrilling. Imagine it, Peter, a German Empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Volga. It is beyond anything I could have hoped for. The man is truly a genius.
And you are to be part ...
Brookline: Boston's Streetcar Suburb (10/15)
Many of the stories in Honeydew are set in the town of Godolphin, an imaginary suburb of Boston that bears a great deal of resemblance to Pearlman's home town of Brookline.
Brookline, first settled in 1638 and incorporated as an independent town in 1705, is what's commonly known as a 'streetcar suburb,' a residential community ...
Farmer Suicides in India (10/15)
The Lives of Others begins with a shocking murder suicide. A farmer, Nitai Das, kills his children and wife and then himself, out of sheer desperation resulting from abject poverty and hunger. The book's protagonist, Supratik Ghosh, decides to move to rural West Bengal, to help the plight of farmers caught in an endless cycle of debt and ...
Washington's Logging Industry (10/15)
Timber has been a key industry for Washington state since the Gold Rush of the 1850s. Ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, cedar, spruce, and hemlock trees once filled a tract of land from the Cascade Range to the Pacific Ocean. Seattle and the Puget Sound area provided much of the lumber that was shipped down to California.
Logging ...
Controversial Psychiatric Practices (10/15)
The fictional Wargnier Institute in Bernard Minier's The Frozen Dead is, put simply, 'a place where they lock up murderers who've been judged insane.' When psychologist Diane Berg learns about the 'treatment' programs offered, her fears and concerns escalate. The experience of observing a patient being 'evaluated' makes Commander Servaz ...
Trafficking in Antiquities (10/15)
In De Potter's Grand Tour, Armand de Potter uses his tourism business as a front to amass a large private collection of illicit antiquities: 'You could say that he had become a spy of sorts, on a self-contained mission to gather antiquities instead of secrets, with his travel bureau providing an excuse to visit places that were out ...
Conrad Wesselhoeft (10/15)
BookBrowse's Tamara Smith Interviews Conrad Wesselhoeft, Author of Dirt Bikes, Drones and Other Ways to Fly
Conrad Wesselhoeft worked as a tugboat hand in Singapore and Peace Corps Volunteer in Polynesia before embarking on a career in journalism. He has served on the editorial staffs of five newspapers, including The New York Times. He ...
Sarah Waters' Literary Influences (10/15)
Sarah Waters'
The Paying Guests belongs to an unusual mixture of genres. Here is a partial pedigree of the literary influences on its style and content:
First Half
- Postwar novels
As in the novels of Elizabeth Bowen and Elizabeth Taylor, Waters shows how the interwar period was a crossroads for women, with barriers of sex and class ...
More Civil War Women Fighters (10/15)
In addition to the four women profiled by Karen Abbott in Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy, many others had well-documented military careers. Some of these famous female soldiers include:
Frances Clalin enlisted as Jack Williams. A Minnesota farmer's wife and mother of three, Clalin signed up to be with her husband, Elmer. Her fellow ...
Patrick Blanc And the Vertical Garden (10/15)
In the past twenty years, planted walls and vertical gardens, one of the many innovations showcased in
The Human Age, have gone from novelty to mainstream, as part of the
reconciliation ecology movement that is working to preserve or increase urban biodiversity. All around the world, vertical gardens are creating dynamic ecosystems that ...
Baltimore's Literary History (10/15)
'Baltimore is warm but pleasant...I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.'― F. Scott Fitzgerald
When one thinks of literature and American cities, Baltimore may not immediately come to mind. While 'Charm City' might not have the apparent prestige of San Francisco or New York, Baltimore's ...
The Mütter Museum (10/15)
The author of
Dr. Mütter's Marvels, Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, has said that the inspiration for her book came from a school field trip taken to Philadelphia's
Mütter Museum. The museum got its start when the surgeon bequeathed a collection of interesting anatomical specimens to the College of Physicians with a ...
William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam (10/15)
'Self-taught civil engineers are probably as trustworthy as self-taught brain surgeons and self-taught airline pilots,' thinks Finn to himself in 100 Sideways Miles. He's thinking about William Mulholland, the engineer better known today as the namesake for Mulholland Drive, home to many famous actors and musicians and the inspiration for...
Fifteenth Century: Dawn of the Age of Invention (10/15)
The Black Plague had claimed as much as two-thirds of Europe's population in the 14th Century. Life seemed fragile at best, and people who could write felt like it was important to get things down in black and white, to record their stories for posterity. Furthermore, the Church, the medieval everyman's raison d'etre, had pretty...
The Shower Posse (10/15)
A Brief History of Seven Killings chronicles the rise of a Jamaican drug gang in the United States. This fictional organization seems to be loosely modeled after the real-life Shower Posse, a violent Jamaican gang linked with numerous killings, with strongholds in large American cities such as New York and Miami.
The origins of the ...
Saint-Pierre and Miquelon (10/15)
At one point in the novel, Moses Sweetland travels to a nearby island to stock up on supplies. While there, he is questioned by the French authorities and asked for his passport. Readers might do a double-take when they read this section — the island in question is only a few miles off the coast of Newfoundland, after all — ...
The Shame of the Fathers (10/15)
In A Killing in Zion, Salt Lake City deputy sheriff Art Oveson is charged with apprehending and arresting members of a Mormon fundamentalist sect who commit the crime of polygamy. But fealty to the law is only part of what drives this Mormon's professional zeal. In his more thoughtful moments Oveson has to admit to himself that he has a ...
The Hỏa Lò Prison (09/15)
Who would have ever guessed that Hỏa Lò, the notorious Vietnamese prison compound derisively dubbed the 'Hanoi Hilton' would become a tourist attraction? But that's what's happened, and the ironic, even troubling transition from a place of torture to a ticket-selling tourist trap provides the backdrop for David Freed's mystery ...
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (09/15)
All My Puny Sorrows takes its title from a line in a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834), who is considered by many to be the founder of the Romantic Movement in poetry. He is most famous for the poems Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Both his works and his literary criticism had huge influences on poets ...
What's In a (House) Name? (09/15)
Even in the 21st Century, to send a letter to the Queen of England one's envelope might be addressed simply: Her Majesty The Queen. Buckingham Palace. London. No street address or postcode is necessary. Her royal home has a name. As such it follows an ancient and still-popular British custom; naming one's house. While numbered ...
Konrad Adenauer (09/15)
We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon.
Amanda Eyre Ward's novel The Same Sky takes its title from this quote, which is attributed to Konrad Adenauer, who was the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1949-1966. Who was this charismatic leader?
Konrad Adenauer was born in Cologne, Germany...
Second-Wave Feminism (09/15)
In the early 20th century several strides were made for the advancement of women, including the right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. These victories were associated with what is commonly referred to as the first wave of feminism. After World War II, however, feminist causes waned, and by the 1950s the image of the...
Boarding Schools in the UK (09/15)
The Secret Place is set on the grounds of an Irish boarding school, an educational institution where children live on campus while they attend classes.
Boarding schools have a rich history in Ireland and neighboring UK (The Republic of Ireland was part of the UK through the 19th century and up to 1922).
It is believed The ...
Pele, Fire Goddess Of Hawaii (09/15)
In The Islands at the End of the World, Leilani's grandfather tells her, 'Pele's your guardian spirit, yeah? Goddess of lightning.' Leilani, who suffers from epilepsy, replies, 'Yeah. Goddess of the lightning in my head.'
Pele (pronounced 'pell-ay') is the fire goddess of Hawaii, and is powerful and even destructive. According to ...
Reducing the Use of Chimpanzees as Research Subjects (09/15)
Since the amount of shared genes between humans and non-human primates such as chimps is significant, the animals were once considered valuable test subjects in cutting-edge clinical studies. Essentially, because of this gene overlap, a trial medicine can be tested on a chimp and its subsequent effects used as a reliable signifier of that...
Syrian Refugees (09/15)
Unlike Laila, who is a member of the ruling family of her Middle Eastern country, most child refugees don't have the luxury of fleeing to a more hospitable country when their own plunges into war. While The Tyrant's Daughter is set in an unknown Middle-Eastern country probably closer to Iraq than Syria, the plight of the refugees in Syria...
Hurricane Katrina and the Danziger Bridge Incident (09/15)
After Hurricane Katrina hit and the levees failed, approximately 80% of New Orleans was under water. Sewage was everywhere, swollen dead bodies floated in the water and lined the streets, the heat was stifling, and – after a few days – it became clear that help was in no hurry to get there. Out of desperation to find food, water...
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