Note: The key icon
indicates member-only content.
Learn more about membership.
Saint Malo (12/14)
History of Saint Malo
The siege and subsequent burning of Saint Malo during World War II is intrinsically bound to the island's history. Saint Malo is a scenic and historic port city nestled in the crook of Brittany's arm on the North coast of France. According to '
St-Malo an independent travel guide,' Saint Malo was founded in the 1st...
Martha's Vineyard (12/14)
E. Lockhart's We Were Liars takes place on fictional Beechwood Island. It is just east of Martha's Vineyard, and is reminiscent of it.
Martha's Vineyard is located just seven miles off of the coast of Cape Cod. It is triangular shaped, and is about nine miles wide and 26 miles long at its farthest points - with over 120 miles of ...
A Brief History of Saab Cars (12/14)
A Man Called Ove inexorably links the man and his cherished Saab. Ove's first vehicle, inherited from his father at age 16, was a restored green 1949 Saab '92, a two-door coupe, the distinctive Swedish automobile manufacturer's first production car. Ove's devotion and brand loyalty to the company's Swedish roots is so steadfast that he ...
The Solomon Islands (11/14)
The little-known Solomon Islands are a particularly unusual frame of reference for a work of contemporary fiction. By contrasting New England and Oceania, The Bird Skinner sheds light on a fairly obscure culture.
The Solomon Islands is an archipelago of about 900 islands located in Melanesia, a subregion of Oceania in the western ...
The Constellations (11/14)
There are currently eighty-eight officially recognized and named constellations. According to one astronomy website there are, '14 men and women, 9 birds, two insects, 19 land animals, 10 water creatures, two centaurs, one head of hair, a serpent, a dragon, a flying horse, a river and 29 inanimate objects.' (Some constellations include ...
Somatization (11/14)
Somatization—the conversion of a mental state (such as depression or anxiety) into physical symptoms—is extraordinarily common, according to Dr. Brendan Reilly, who writes about it (among other health concerns) in his book One Doctor: Close Calls, Cold Cases, and the Mysteries of Medicine.
This broad medical term encompasses ...
The Post World War II German Black Market (11/14)
To say that by the end of World War II Germany was in tatters is a massive understatement. Infrastructure services were at a standstill, craters gaped where centuries-old buildings had once stood, the economy was based upon currency – the Reichsmark – that was essentially worthless. Worse, the government was forced to ration ...
Urban Aquaculture (11/14)
Fan, the protagonist in On Such a Full Sea, works in a large fish tank. She tends to the fish that are being bred and makes sure the system is working in fine form. Such farms are part of B-Mor's economic system and the output they generate is shipped to the Charters beyond B-Mor's gates.
As the temperature of oceans continues to rise...
How the Word "Ghost" Got Its Spelling (11/14)
David Crystal is a prolific scholar of linguistics who specializes in language pathology, phonetics, and linguistic disability.
What I admire most about Crystal's scholarship in Spell It Out is its humanity. He never loses sight of language as a form of human expression—whether through orthography or pronunciation.
Consider for...
Down Syndrome (11/14)
In Where The Moon Isn't, the protagonist's brother, Simon Homes, has Down syndrome.
Down syndrome is the most common genetic abnormality being present in one of every 691 births in the United States. All humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes. Down's is caused when the 21st set has a partial or a whole extra copy, which means that ...
The Raw Food Movement (11/14)
One of the avant-garde trends in American cuisine explored in Anything That Moves is the growth of the raw food movement. Raw foodists believe that cooking destroys critical enzymes from food needed for good health and digestion. So everything - milk, meat, vegetables, grains - is consumed raw. Special co-ops around the country deliver ...
Take A Book, Leave A Book—The Little Free Library Movement (11/14)
In Lorrie Moore's story 'Wings,' the main character K.C. goes for a walk and meets an elderly man building what looks like a little bird feeder at the end of his driveway. He tells her it's a Book Nook, that he's going to put books inside for people to take, like a little library. A little free library.
These Little Free Libraries are ...
James Tiptree Jr. (11/14)
In The Blazing World, the protagonist Harriet Burden's notebooks often include references to female artists, writers and intellectuals who struggled for recognition in male-dominated circles. One of the writers she mentions is James Tiptree Jr., an award-winning science fiction author who turned out to be a woman named Alice Bradley ...
Archaeopteryx: The Link Between Dinosaurs and Birds (11/14)
In S. J. Gazan's The Dinosaur Feather, when Professor Lars Helland, a cantankerous PhD advisor at the Institute of Biology in Copenhagen, is found dead in his office, the police soon discover a copy of PhD student Anna Bella Nor's thesis on his lap…covered in blood. Her controversial paper puts to rest a major scientific debate ...
Mars, the Red Planet (11/14)
Andy Weir's The Martian is set on the red planet, the fourth from the sun, which has been part of human consciousness since people first started observing the night sky. Its distinctive red color sets it apart from the other celestial objects. The oldest known star map, found in the tomb of 18th dynasty Egyptian architect Senenmut (who ...
Teens and Feminism (11/14)
In an
interview at
Book Riot, A. S. King (
Glory O'Brien's History of the Future, 2014) says:
I am still a believer in the original feminism. You know the one - the one that simply wanted equal social, political, and economic rights for women. I love men. I love other women. I love people. I don't think feminism means we have to ...
Tipping the Scales (11/14)
It is estimated that two-thirds of the population of both the United and Great Britain are either overweight or obese. Statistics that show the average American female has size 14 measurements. In Britain, the average woman has a size 16 body (which is equivalent to a US size 14.) The waist measurement of the average American and British ...
Surprising Facts About The Pill (10/14)
The pill wasn't an accident, but it was a surprise.
The birth-control pill has been labeled the most important invention of the twentieth century, but no drug company, no university, and no government agency wanted anything to do with it in the beginning. The pill never would have been developed if not for a small group of radicals ...
Hydroelectric Power: Run-of-the-River Projects (10/14)
The Wallcreeper shows how complicated even seemingly benign environmental projects can be.
For example, the hydroelectric projects discussed in
The Wallcreeper are what are known as run-of-the-river. They are smaller and carried out without the creation of dams. ROR stations are seemingly benign and widely
perceived as less ...
The St. Petersburg of Shteyngart's Memories (10/14)
St. Petersburg is known for its gorgeous architecture and rich history. A few of these sights, outlined below, are described in Little Failure.
The Smolny Convent
In his memoir, Gary Shteyngart recalls coming upon a coffee-table book at a bookstore in New York City, St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars, with the 'baroque blue ...
Six Authors and Alcohol (10/14)
Olivia Laing's second book, The Trip to Echo Spring explores the lives of six twentieth century American authors who all coped with alcoholism in their lives and careers. Some information about each of these troubled, talented men:
F. Scott Fitzerald (1896 - 1940)
Fitzgerald is best known as a novelist who portrayed, and indeed coined...
A Glimpse at a Few Former Astronauts (10/14)
Before we learn that the professor in Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation has been hired by a rich, failed astronaut to ghostwrite a book about the space program, she observes her baby daughter laughing at ...
Famous Men – and the Women Next to Them (10/14)
Above All Things, Tanis Rideout's debut novel, is about a man, his wife and his other great love – a 29,000 foot mountain. Rideout explores Ruth Mallory's point of view in Above All Things; her love for George Mallory, her acceptance of his passion for Mount Everest and her deep grief at losing her husband to the hulking mountain. ...
Your Brain on Literature (10/14)
Reading quiet, literary fiction, like
Someone, nudges us towards contemplation and self-examination. But according to a recent
study conducted at the New School for Social Research in New York, it may do even more. This much-publicized study, 'Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,' concludes that reading literary fiction can ...
Dirty Realism (10/14)
David Vann fits into an American literary tradition that has been around since the 1960s, but was only given a name in 1983. Bill Buford, former editor of Granta literary magazine, coined the term 'dirty realism' to characterize two trends in American fiction: a tendency toward simplified language, largely free from adverbs or flowery ...
The Mystery of Duffy's Cut (10/14)
Before 2004, hikers passing through the woods in Chester County, Pennsylvania in the vicinity of Malvern would have encountered a granite block enclosure with no identifying marker. Perhaps they would have puzzled a moment before walking on. Perhaps they would have heard an odd sound or even caught a glimpse of a specter dancing on the ...
New Zealand's Gold Rush (10/14)
The Luminaries is set in the New Zealand town of Hokitika during the nineteenth century gold rush. Hokitika is located on the west coast of New Zealand's South Island, which is one of three areas in the country where gold was found to be in sufficient quantity to mine.
Rumors of gold in a small part of New Zealand's North Island ...
Mo Yan and the Nobel (10/14)
Mo Yan is the pen name of Guan Moye. Born 17 February 1955, Guan was the fourth child of farmers in Gaomi township in Shandong province in the northeast part of China. He
says of his childhood:
'When I started forming memories, it was the most difficult time in China's history. Most people were starving at the time. People led a tough ...
Two Post-Apocolyptic Novels Set Outside of the US (10/14)
After I finished reading The Last Man Standing, I became curious about post-apocalyptic novels written by authors from countries outside of the United States. A rather lengthy and frustrating Internet search led me to science fiction conventions around the world, prizes awarded, and books that have been translated into English. It also ...
PTSD and TBI (10/14)
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) are being called the 'signature injuries' of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. These conditions are closely related, but are, in fact, vastly different.
PTSD is a psychological response to a traumatic event. While most associate the term with military combat, any ...
McCarthyism (10/14)
In 'The Unknown Soldier,' one of the stories in Molly Antopol's The UnAmericans, a young actor, Alexi Liebman, has to serve jail time because he comes under suspicion that he is a member of the American Communist party. This fictional account is based on very real events that took place in the United States.
Throughout the 1940s and ...
Millerism (10/14)
Belle's aunt and uncle followed the preachings of William Miller, a New York farmer and the founder of Millerism. They believed Miller's prophecy that Jesus would return to earth in 1844.
Miller's idea was not profound — or original. The notion of the Second Coming is a core tenet of Christianity. Though the idea is central,...
Rose O'Neale Greenhow (09/14)
Though Rosetta is a fictional character in I Shall Be Near To You, some of the people she encounters as an enlisted soldier are not. When Rosetta guards Rose O'Neale Greenhow in the Old Capital Prison, we are given some insights into a fascinating, historical figure.
Born in Maryland in 1817, Greenhow was an ardent secessionist. ...
Creating Music from Science (09/14)
In Orfeo, the protagonist Peter Els sees many similarities between gene structures and music. 'Genomics was right now learning how to read scores indescribably beautiful,' Powers writes. And while the book talks about an entire segment of study that is called 'biocomposing' with its own dedicated journal and conference, research reveals ...
The American Road Trip Book (09/14)
Readers who wish to travel America without leaving the couch have always had a vast tradition from which to cull. While you may prefer to watch the mountains and the desert going by from the back of a horse (
Lonesome Dove) or atop a raft (
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), the most common way to go is, of course, by car.
From Route 66 ...
Reading Wodehouse in Mumbai (09/14)
Growing up in an extremely cramped one-bedroom apartment on the bottom floor of a multi-rise building in Mumbai, I was looking for one thing — escape. And while India had been independent for just around 25-odd years at that time, the vestiges of colonialism remained. Try as we might, my friends and I could never bring ourselves to ...
The Voyage of the Damned (09/14)
One of the subjects raised often throughout
The Lion Seeker is the difficulty Jews faced leaving Europe as WWII ramped up. The voyage of the
MS St. Louis, sometimes referred to as 'The Voyage of the Damned,' is referenced in passing.
After
Kristallnacht – 'The Night of Broken Glass' – on November 9-10, 1938, many Jews ...
Vocational Rehabilitation (09/14)
Part of what brings together the characters in Tumbledown is their participation in a vocational rehabilitation program—in this case, training in an assembly-line setup designed to teach them to work on an actual factory floor. As portrayed in the novel, this type of work not only offers patients (modest) financial compensation, it ...
A Look at Dyslexia (09/14)
DYS- (bad, Greek) LEXIA (language, Greek)
A German ophthalmologist named Rudolph Berlin coined the word dyslexia in 1887 to describe patients who, in spite of normal intelligence, had extreme difficulties with reading. Scientific discussion of the phenomenon of what was also called 'word blindness' emerged in the late nineteenth ...
The Isle of Lewis (09/14)
If you look at a map of the United Kingdom, you'll find Scotland at the top and, to the west, a cluster of islands which are known as the Hebrides (pronounced heb-ree-dees). The islands are split into two groups - the Inner Hebrides and the Outer Hebrides. The islands in the Inner Hebrides lie close to the Scottish mainland, so close that...
Gun Safety Etiquette (09/14)
One of the early scenes in The Infinite Moment of Us, has Wren visiting a shooting range with her best friend Tessa, and P.G., Tessa's new boyfriend. Although Wren doesn't like guns; she 'hated their ugliness, and she hated what they did,' she has a good time and finds the experience surprisingly thrilling and exciting. This unexpected ...
Popular Latin Dances (09/14)
I thought the references to Latin dances woven throughout Meg Medina's Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass were an effective way to illustrate Piddy's struggles with understanding her own physicality as well her place as an individual within her community. Besides the cultural connotations, dance can be a powerful way to express emotion ...
Ten Classic Children's Novels for Winter (09/14)
The Twistrose Key is full of frozen landscapes inspired by Norwegian winters – sleighs, ice caves, and sled runs, plus a good place to take the chill off with a mug of hot mulled cider. Here is a list of ten other novels for children that will give readers a good dose of frost and snow, either as inspiration for getting through the ...
Yuyachkani (09/14)
The theater group Diciembre, in At Night We Walk in Circles, sounds a lot like Peru's award-winning independent theater collective, Yuyachkani. Launched in 1971, the group's essential pillars have been political performances, theatrical experimentation and performances steeped in indigenous culture.
Yuyachkani is a Quechua word that ...
The Lathi (09/14)
Throughout Pink Sari Revolution, the stick carried by the Gulabi Gang is referred to as a pink-painted 'baton.' More accurately it is a lathi – a traditional Indian weapon, made of bamboo, with a long history of martial use.
Lathi (pronounced LAH-tee) literally means 'bamboo stick' in Hindi. It is widely considered to be one ...
The U.S. Military-Industrial Complex (09/14)
In The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, you can see the United States' complex diplomatic and espionage mechanisms at work. As the cliché goes, freedom is expensive. The vastness of this network is complemented by a parallel one, the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex, a term coined by President Eisenhower to cover the many industries, ...
Battle of the Aleutian Islands (09/14)
In The Wind Is Not A River, the protagonist, journalist John Easley, finds himself on the Aleutian island of Attu in April 1943, when the Battle of the Aleutian Islands is taking place.
We've all heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the precipitating event that led the United States to fight in World War II...
Bipolar Disorder (09/14)
In
Em and the Big Hoom, Imelda Mendes ('Em') suffers from bipolar disorder, a condition formerly known as 'manic depression' that about
2.4% of people around the world
have been diagnosed with at some point in their lifetime.
Bipolar disorder manifests itself as extreme highs and lows in mood, with these swings being far more severe ...
The Aleutian Islands: First Settlers (08/14)
As Glorious Misadventures shows, the vast amount of money to be made in the Aleutian Islands and western Alaska drew many adventurers and speculators, including the primary subject of the book, Nikolai Rezanov. The Aleut Region is a string of over 70 volcanic islands stretching more than 1,000 miles across the very northern part of the ...
