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Quilting a Fictional Character from Real People (07/15)
Any Jew or Israeli reading this book will recognize much of the famous Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky in Baruch Kotler. This was apparently Bezmozgis' intention, and he drew on Sharansky's extremely vocal and high profile opposition to Israel's 2005 unilateral pullout from the Gaza Strip, including his resignation from the Knesset (the ...
The Winter Palace (07/15)
From 1711 until 1917, the Winter Palace was the home to Russian Tsars, Tsarinas and their families. The need for fortified residences was lessening in the 18th century, and the palaces reflected this shift. Three distinct Winter Palaces were built, torn down and rebuilt until 1754 when the fourth and final palace was created for Empress ...
Diving into the Spy's Psyche (07/15)
Inasmuch as most of the spies that have been interviewed, researched, quantified and statistically charted are those that have been caught, perhaps the psyche of a good spy is as elusive as spies themselves. Not to mention the fact that a 'good spy' is not so easily defined. There are many types of spies and many reasons for becoming one....
Who Was Shakespeare's Dark Lady? (07/15)
Despite possibly being the most famous and applauded writer that has ever lived, very little about William Shakespeare is known for certain. There are few contemporary accounts and the portraits that are generally held to be of him were all painted long after his death. His name is spelled differently in the few copies of his signature ...
Tim Winton (07/15)
Tim Winton, the author of
Eyrie, is that rare thing: a literary best-selling writer. While most American readers might still be getting to know this prolific author, he is as close to a national monument as person can get in his native Australia.
Born in 1960, Winton started work on his first novel at the age of just 19 when he was ...
The Somali Civil War: A Brief Overview (07/15)
Nadifa Mohamed's latest novel is set at the birth of a new conflict for Somalia and runs right up to the present day. To understand the whys and wherefores of Somali lawlessness is to gain insight into one of the most treacherous parts of the world.
In 1991, the country's socialist dictator Mohammed Siad Barre was overthrown, ...
The Cathars (07/15)
In the fight between the Atemporals and the Anchorites, The Bone Clocks frequently references the Cathars.
The Cathars were members of a religious sect of Christianity that flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries in southern France and northern Italy. They believed in a dualistic theory of religion, with good and evil on opposing ...
New Orleans' Spanish French Quarter (07/15)
Nestled on page 69 of Empire of Sin is a surprising blink-and-you-might-miss-it sentence in parentheses: 'Spain did, however, rebuild much of the central city after two devastating fires, which is why the architecture of the French Quarter is actually Spanish.'
In 1718, John Law, a Scottish financier who had established a private bank ...
What Is a Stone Mattress? (07/15)
A 'stone mattress' in the titular tale of this short story collection serves as a painful reminder of past events. It is also Margaret Atwood's nickname for fascinating geological formations called stromatolites.
Stromatolites (from the Greek 'stroma' = mattress/layer and 'lithos' = stone) are most easily described as living ...
The Grand Tour (07/15)
In David Nicholls' novel, Us, a couple sets out to show their son Europe as a parting gift before he heads to college. It's to be a Grand Tour, the mother tells her son, 'to prepare you for the adult world, like in the eighteenth century.' She explains that it was 'traditional for young men of a certain class and age to embark on a ...
The Extraordinary Brain of Henry Molaison (07/15)
One of the many stories from the history of research into memory and learning related by Benjamin Carey in How We Learn is the story of a man known to science and the world until his death in 2008 only by his initials, H.M.
When Henry Molaison of Hartford Connecticut, born in 1926, was 27 years old, he agreed to undergo brain ...
A Big Year for Dystopias (06/15)
When Emily St. John Mandel was auctioning her novel, Station Eleven, in 2013, she was worried that the world was sick of dystopian fiction. 'When I started writing, there were a few literary post-apocalyptic novels, but not quite the incredible glut that there is now…I was afraid the market might be saturated.' Luckily for Mandel, ...
The Space Shuttle Program (06/15)
In Leaving Orbit, Margaret Lazarus Dean celebrates the utilitarian model of spaceflight as imagined by the Shuttle program, which was initiated in 1981.
Before Shuttle, during the 'heroic' era of spaceflight, small capsules were launched into space on the backs of rockets and disintegrated over the ocean upon the rockets' reentry and ...
Stockholm Syndrome and Child Sex Abuse (06/15)
During a bank holdup in Stockholm, Sweden in 1973, two men held four people hostage for six days. Over that time period the hostages bonded with the captors and vice versa. The hostages eventually even believed that their captors were actually their protectors, keeping the police from hurting them. It is rumored that one of the hostages ...
The Tiny World of Cabinet Houses (06/15)
Like Nella in
The Miniaturist, the real Petronella Oortman ordered a cabinet house to be made in 1686 to the exact scale of her own home. It can still be seen today in the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Petronella's cabinet house was elaborate, gilded with silver and inlaid with tortoise shell, but this was not a unique purchase for a ...
Yaddo Artists' Retreat (06/15)
Rebecca Makkai makes clear in her dedication that although nothing in
The Hundred-Year House is based on her stay at
Yaddo, a creative artists' retreat in Saratoga, New York, the book is indebted to the time and space they gave her to write it. Like Laurelfield, it was once a privately held estate.
Yaddo was founded in 1900 by ...
Novels Analyzing Musical Talent and Life (06/15)
The characters in Racculia's novel attempt to understand the nature of musical talent and the ways in which it emerges or disappears to impact happiness. The following novels investigate the interaction of musical gifts and the pursuit of a fulfilled life:
Sight Reading by Daphne Kalotay
Kalotay's first novel was about ballet and ...
Montana's Journey To Statehood (06/15)
Much of Lin Enger's novel,
The High Divide, is set in the Montana Territory of the late 1880s. ('The High Divide' is an area of mountain ranges that crosses the Continental Divide between eastern Idaho and western Montana. It includes a small portion of the
Badlands.) The Lewis and Clark expedition passed through what is now Montana in ...
Anti-Miscegenation Laws (06/15)
According to the 2010 census, the number of mixed-race and mixed-ethnic couples in America
grew by 28% from 2000 to 2010. At one time marrying outside one's race was considered, at best, controversial, but a 2007 Gallup poll
cites 87% of Americans as approving of the practice. Such levels of acceptance were not always apparent, however, ...
From Spy to Author (06/15)
Several men have worked for the British Intelligence services and have gone on to have successful writing careers.
John Michael Ward Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris (aka Michael Ward) (1908-1988) was the author of 17 thrillers, detective and spy novels between 1952 and 1982. He was born in Haywards Heath, Sussex, and educated at ...
The Two North Poles (06/15)
In the Kingdom of Ice concerns an ill-fated 19th century expedition to the North Pole.
There are actually two North Poles — a geographic North Pole and a magnetic one. The geographic North Pole is recognized as the northernmost point on the earth's surface, and is the axis point around which the earth spins. It's 450 miles north ...
Multi-generational Portraits of Family (06/15)
The Blessings is a novel, but it's also a portrait —an ensemble in which assorted members of three generations reveal various complexities and challenges. Here is a handful of other books that also offer multi-generational stories about family.
Charming Billy by Alice McDermott won the National Book Award in 1998. It opens at ...
The Queen Bee (06/15)
The structure of a honeybee hive is both fascinating and highly complex — a pod of thousands of female worker bees, a few hundred male drones in the summer and, at the epicentre, the queen.
As a former queen begins to fail (i.e. ceases to lay eggs due to age or illness), workers will make special, larger queen cells in which ...
Women In the U.S. Civil War (06/15)
Historians have documented some 400 cases of women serving as men in the American Civil War (see our
review and Beyond the Book for
Liar, Temptress, Solider, Spy).
Motives for their enlistment varied widely, although it would seem that most
enlisted to stay with family; many were concerned that their husband, father, brother or son ...
Law Enforcement and Retirement (06/15)
What is more stressful for a law enforcement officer? Facing a bunch of drunk, angry, armed motorcycle gangsters or facing retirement? The Storm Murders' protagonist, retired Montreal Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars would think the latter.
Most who enter the field of law enforcement do so with intentions of public service and ...
Smells Like a Teen (06/15)
Nearly every character in Neil Smith's novel, Boo, is thirteen. Take a moment to remember back to when you were thirteen. First you might recall the sight of your thirteen-year-old self and your friends, maybe your old school. And then it hits you: that smell. It might not have been your body odor that so pungently fills the memory...
A Period of Mourning (06/15)
In The Gracekeepers, the Graces are caged birds left to starve to death, floating above the site where a dead person was put to rest in the sea. The death of the bird indicates when the family can stop mourning. Mourning the passing of a loved one is a natural and necessary process that has different rules, guidelines and rituals ...
Pastoral Works of Literature (06/15)
The Black Snow is advertised as Paul Lynch's take on the 'pastoral novel.' Such a characterization presumes some familiarity with the term, though given the fairly infrequent use of the pastoral mode in contemporary fiction, it's likely some readers might be unfamiliar with precisely what that means – and even literary critics can'...
The Literary Life of Edna O'Brien (05/15)
Edna O'Brien was born in 1930 in western Ireland, where her parents lived in a picturesque stone house called Drewsboro, built on the remains of a fancy country house her father had helped burn down so the British couldn't use it during the Irish War of Independence after World War I. Her father's family was wealthy, her mother's, poor. ...
The Rise of Las Vegas (05/15)
The story of Las Vegas's meteoric rise from desert backwater to world-class city provides the backdrop to Laura McBride's debut novel, We Are Called to Rise, in which four city residents' lives intersect in unpredictable ways. The characters have a wide range of opinions about their hometown. While Roberta and Bashkim love the bleak ...
Slave Quilts (05/15)
Among the many unifying symbols in all the intertwining relationships that course through The Invention of Wings, one of the most important concerns is not another person but a quilt.
'This a story quilt,' Mauma Charlotte tells her daughter Handful. 'My mauma made one and her mauma before her. All my kin in Africa...kept their history...
Brooklyn's Bushwick Neighborhood (05/15)
In The Snow Queen, Michael Cunningham sets many scenes in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, an area that's still working toward revitalization after decades of economic strife and urban turbulence.
Bushwick and the areas now known as Williamsburg and Greenpoint were originally one Dutch settlement, the Town of Bushwick. The land ...
Hurricane No-Name (05/15)
The Galveston hurricane of September 8, 1900, is still regarded as the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history, this devastating storm swept away everything in its path, left an estimated
10,000-12,000 dead and thousands more homeless. Residences and businesses were leveled; debris was tossed everywhere, and the smell of death ...
Photographer Brassai (05/15)
In Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, Francine Prose bases the character Gabor Tsenyi on real life photographer Gyula Halász. Known by the pseudonym Brassai, Halasz was born in 1899 in the Transylvanian (later Hungary, now Romania) city of Brasso. His father was a university professor of French literature and their family ...
Eddie Rickenbacker (05/15)
Ace pilot and race car driver, automotive designer and aviation pioneer, Eddie Rickenbacker was America's most successful aerial fighter in World War I. In addition to the official recognition and many awards he received for those achievements, he also wrote a comic strip, and enjoyed accolades from popular culture:
Ace Drummond was ...
The Painter, Charles Blackman (05/15)
In her author's note in The Golden Day, Ursula Dubosarsky writes that Charles Blackman, an acclaimed Australian modernist painter, was a particularly keen influence on the novel: '[My] greatest debt is to Charles Blackman's many astonishing, lush depictions of schoolgirls – enchanting, disturbing, and endlessly evocative.'
One of ...
American Women in the Military (04/15)
Both my grandmothers served in the United States army during World War I. Like Lauren (the protagonist in
Be Safe I Love You, a veteran soldier who has served in Iraq), they enlisted in order to seek a better future than offered in their small hometowns. They were among more than
20,000 nurses serving in the United States and overseas ...
The Jenny (04/15)
In Birdmen, Lawrence Goldstone describes how Glenn Curtiss diversified operations and courted a variety of vendors to deliver specialized engines and airplanes. Most notable amongst these were the JN series of airplanes built to fulfill an army request that both the engine and the propeller be at the front of the plane. Up until then ...
The Hawthorne Effect (04/15)
Nell Stone, anthropologist in Lily King's Euphoria, notices the Hawthorne Effect in her work. What is this? Where did it originate?
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Western Electric Company's management wanted to improve production at their Hawthorne Plant on the outskirts of Chicago, Illinois. So they hired Elton Mayo, a consultant or '...
A History of Child Welfare Policy (04/15)
During the 19th century many children in the United Kingdom and the United States suffered from hardship, neglect, and abuse. Poor children in Victorian England had to work, frequently long hours and in dangerous conditions (in coal mines or textile mills, for example), in order to help financially support their families. In the U.S., the...
The Death Railway (04/15)
Richard Flanagan's novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North is based on a terrible chapter from WWII: the construction, under Japanese supervision, of a railway between Thailand and Burma by Allied prisoners of war and local workers. The slave labor conditions and the tortures experienced by the forced laborers claimed the lives of 13,000 ...
The Roots of American Environmentalism (04/15)
As Fagin shows readers through the specific events in Toms River, environmental and ecological concerns began to receive attention in American politics in the 1960s and 1970s. The creation of the Department of Environmental Protection (now the Environmental Protection Agency) was heavily encouraged, in part, by individuals across America ...
The Four Yuan Masters (04/15)
The primary protagonist in The Ten Thousand Things is modeled after a real-life Chinese landscape painter and government official, Wang Meng.
After the Song dynasty was overthrown, many landscape painters working during the Mongol Yuan dynasty that followed formed part of the 'literati.' These were artists who worked solely on cultural ...
Seek What Hides: The Shadow (04/15)
Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Daniel Levine's Hyde deal with the experience of fragmentation or alienation in our human experience. This is not a new insight, but one that has baffled humanity for millennia. Plato saw two worlds - one ideal, good, and true, and the other material, ...
Carel Fabritius and The Goldfinch (04/15)
In Donna Tartt's new book, the protagonist, Theo Decker, comes upon an original seventeenth century painting, 'The Goldfinch'. The painting is one of Carel Fabritius' (Fub-reet-zee-us) most famous works. Fabritius (1622-1654) was one of Rembrandt's pupils. He worked from the Dutch city of Delft and produced only a small body of work ...
Tuberculosis and...Sherlock Holmes (04/15)
Did you know?
- At its height tuberculosis killed 1 in 7 people
- According to Thomas Goetz in The Remedy, TB may have been 'the most lethal disease in history, having claimed more than a billion lives since it was first identified in ancient Greece'
- Two-thirds of active cases of TB would end in death
- TB, like anthrax, is believed to ...
There is Nothing Like a Motherless Child (04/15)
According to an
article in
The Washington Times: 'In America, the number of single fathers has risen from 600,000 in 1982 to over 2 million in 2011, partially because of mothers leaving their families. In the UK, it is estimated mother (sic) are abandoning their children at a rate of 100,000 annually.' Although mostly anecdotal, that ...
Gillette: Steel and the First Disposable Razor Blade (04/15)
One of the chapters in Stuff Matters is devoted to steel, and Mark Miodownik mentions the Gillette safety razor blade and its inventor King Camp Gillette, as being responsible for the 'democratization of shaving.'
King (yes, that really was his first name) Gillette was born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, in the mid-nineteenth century to ...
Coming of Autumn (04/15)
Autumn of Age. Isn't that a beautiful phrase? It conjures the image of magenta and orange leaves falling from trees, and the landscape preparing to take stock for a season, quietly hunkering down, stripping itself of the old, and getting ready for the new.
In the First Impressions Review of Mimi Malloy At Last, by Julia MacDonnell, ...
Cryonics (04/15)
In John Corey Whaley's young adult novel, Noggin, 16 year-old Travis Coates undergoes a head transplant. Yes, a head transplant. As in his head is severed from his old body and reattached to a new body. Sounds like science fiction, right? It is…sort of. Cryogenics is the branch of physics that deals with the study of the production ...
