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The Bombing of Berlin (05/13)
Berlin, Germany's capital city, was home to more than four million citizens at the start of WWII.
Between 1940 and 1945, the city was the target of 363 air raids, with an estimated 20,000 civilians killed during the period. The most significant and organized series of raids occurred from November 1943 to March 1944.
The ...
Rum-Running in Prohibition Era Florida (05/13)
Prohibition in the United States began on January 1920 when the 18th Amendment, ratified the previous year, took effect. It ended with the passing of the 21st Amendment on December 5, 1933, which repealed the 18th. Illegal liquor was, of course, produced and sold during this time. It was typically lousy stuff; poor quality drink made, ...
Sources for Stem Cells (05/13)
At the heart of The Laws of Gravity is cord blood - full of potentially life-saving cells. But what is it exactly?
Cord blood is the blood left in the umbilical cord and the placenta after a baby is born and the umbilical cord is cut. Typically, this blood is discarded along with the cord and placenta. Cord blood, though, is full of ...
Cast of Characters (05/13)
Henry VIII
King of England 1509-1547
Painted by Hans Holbein in 1536
German painter Hans Holbein made his reputation in Basel, designing wood blocks for book printers, and painting portraits and commissions for churches. Despite his relative success, the disturbed conditions of the Reformation led him to doubt his ...
Welcome to Norvelt, PA (05/13)
'Our dear little Norvelt was founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, who knew common people like us wanted equality...'
The town of Norvelt, Pennsylvania, one of 99 subsistence homestead communities created during the Depression for unemployed workers, is a character in Jack Gantos's
Dead End in Norvelt. According to the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,...
The Invention of the Ballpoint Pen (05/13)
It's called an Eterpen, a truly wonderful thing, no messy ink to refill and it dries instantly. He said they have ordered 30,000 of them for the RAF to use in the air (for navigation calculations) and a grateful RAF officer recently smuggled out of France had given one of the samples to Peter, who'd given it to the sergeant, who gave...
A Brief History of Ghana (05/13)
The modern country of Ghana is named after the kings of a medieval civilization in West Africa, the Wagadugu Empire. Later absorbed into the Mali Empire, they were a significant power in trans-Saharan trade, with their capital city on the southern edge of the desert being a major port-of-call for traders and political movers and shakers. ...
Track Racing and the Velodrome (05/13)
The first velodrome was built around 1870 in Brighton, England. The word velodrome derives from velocipede (Latin: fast foot), which is the term used to describe any human-powered land vehicle with one or more wheels; and drome, from the Latin dromus meaning racecourse.
There are thousands of velodromes in the world, both indoor and ...
What is Noir? (05/13)
Emily St. John Mandel's writing includes essences of old-fashioned noir. But what is noir?
'Roman noir' is a French expression that literally translates as 'black novel.' Historically, the term was used to describe Gothic novels set in the UK, however, its contemporary usage refers to an American invention - the hardboiled thriller. ...
Kevin Powers, the Poet (05/13)
Kevin Powers started writing poems and stories at about the age of 13. He began writing poetry about war a year or two after his discharge from the Army as a way to process his own experiences while in Iraq, and eventually decided to take classes to develop his talents. Powers graduated in 2008 with a bachelor's degree in English from ...
What is Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy? (05/13)
Muscular Dystrophy encompasses a a group of usually inherited disorders that involve increasing muscle weakness and loss of muscle tissue over time. Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a rapidly worsening form of the disorder that affects only males. The usual cause is a defective gene carried by the mother, but about one-third of cases ...
The Battle of the Chosin Reservoir (05/13)
Korea suffered under a brutal Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945. After Japan's defeat in World War II, Korea was divided along the 38th Parallel, with South Korea falling under the jurisdiction of the United States, and North Korea under the Soviet Union. Reunification was the stated ultimate goal, but when North Korea attacked South ...
The Novels of Anna Quindlen (05/13)
Anna Quindlen's memoir
Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake has received rave reviews from BookBrowse readers, but it is just one of her many beloved books; check out the list below for more information on her novels:
Every Last One (2010):
Mary Beth Latham is first and foremost a mother, whose three teenaged children come first, ...
The Influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile on Thomas Day (05/13)
Wendy Moore illustrates the various cultural influences that led to Thomas Day's peculiar experiment. Among these are the Pygmalion myth (later popularized in George Bernard Shaw's play by that name, as well as the musical, My Fair Lady, based on Shaw's play) and, perhaps most influentially, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's book, Emile, or On ...
Fraudulent Money-Making Schemes (04/13)
In The Dream Merchant, Jim made his money in fraudulent ways. Aided by his business partner Marvin Gessler, who was the mastermind of the fraud, Jim made millions through elaborate pyramid schemes.
Pyramid schemes rely on recruiting buyers who then recruit other buyers and so on. The original buyer, the con man, needs other buyers ...
The Year, 1961 (04/13)
Ordinary Grace is set in the Midwestern United States in 1961. Although it was a time of peace and prosperity for much of the country, many important events were taking place around the world that year:
- January 20:
43-year-old John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th President of the United States, still the youngest person ever...
Tulsa, the "Oil Capital of the World" (04/13)
In A Map of Tulsa, the protagonist Jim Praley, can't ignore the city's relationship with oil. His girlfriend, Adrienne Booker, is born into a wealthy oil family and Jim remembers 'an issue of National Geographic my dad kept, from the '78 oil crisis. Tulsa was on the cover, an aerial photograph of the refineries, lit up like...
A History of Sanibel Island (04/13)
In Kathy Hepinstall's Civil War-era novel,
Blue Asylum, Iris Dunleavy is sent to live in the Sanibel Asylum for Lunatics on Sanibel Island, Florida for the 'act of defying [her] husband.' Though the area is now considered a mecca for lovers of sea shells (
SanibelHistory.org estimates that the resident population of about 6000 swells by ...
Lighthouse Keepers (04/13)
In Margot L. Stedman's The Light Between Oceans, Tom Sherbourne takes a job as a lighthouse keeper in Janus Rock, Australia, a place where 'the supply boat comes once a season and shore leaves are granted every other year at best...' But what exactly do lighthouse keepers do? What purpose do they serve?
Generally speaking, a ...
Improvised Explosive Devices (04/13)
An Improvised Explosive Device (IED) is an inexpensive, low-tech weapon designed to cause death or injury to enemy forces. The British Army was the first to call such homemade bombs IEDs in the 1970s, referring to the fertilizer and Semtex explosives used by the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
Although IEDs have become a ...
A Brief History of the Armenian Genocide (04/13)
The word 'genocide' was coined in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish Polish legal scholar, although it didn't enter common usage until the Nuremberg trials (the criminal prosecution of those responsible for the Holocaust). The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as 'any of the ...
The Young Pioneers (04/13)
Memoirist Wenguang Huang was once a member of China's communist youth organization, which, during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), was known as The Little Red Guard. The group was originally formed by the Communist Party of China in 1949 as The Youth and Children of China Movement, but in 1953, it was renamed The Young Pioneers - the ...
Daniel Kahneman (04/13)
Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who, along with
Amos Tversky, revolutionized economic theory in the 1970s and is widely regarded as one of the world's most influential living psychologist.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1934 to Lithuanian Jewish parents, Kahneman grew up in Paris, during which time his father was taken by ...
How the Evolution of Board Games Demonstrates Changing Social Mores (04/13)
Jill Lepore's new book takes its title from The Mansion of Happiness, a nineteenth century board game that demonstrated Christian morality. Like children's literature of the time, such didactic games were quite popular, but are also timeless: one such board game, The Game of Goose, has origins in ancient Egypt!
Originally marketed ...
The Myths Series (04/13)
A. S. Byatt's
Ragnarok is the most recent addition to
The Myths series, published in the UK by Canongate and around the world by various publishers. Launched in 2005, The Myths series has brought together remarkably talented authors to put their own stamp on ancient myths from around the world, including many that are familiar to Western ...
Pilgrimages, Quests & Other Long Journeys (04/13)
In Rachel Joyce's debut novel, Harold Fry sets off on what the book title refers to as an 'unlikely pilgrimage'; but can his journey correctly be called a pilgrimage if it doesn't have a religious destination?
Although most of us probably think of a pilgrimage as having religious connotations, the word has its roots in the Latin ...
The Short Life of Siobhan Dowd (04/13)
The seed for A Monster Calls came from Siobhan Dowd (pronounced sh-vawn), a gifted writer who earned critical and popular success for her young adult fiction and received much praise for her work speaking out against censorship. She brought authors into underprivileged schools, made literature accessible to children around the globe, and ...
The World's Water Tables in Crisis (04/13)
In How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, the protagonist starts out in the water business by boiling tap water and selling it in plastic water bottles. Later on, he is approached by the country's Defense Department because it wants to build a reliable and safe water supply for the country. But the protagonist and the head honchos in the ...
The Budapest Offensive (04/13)
The stories in Tamas Dobozy's collection, Siege 13, look at some of the emotional and psychological consequences of the Budapest Offensive, one of the longest and deadliest military campaigns of World War II. Beginning in the autumn of 1944, the Budapest Offensive lasted though February 13, 1945. Budapest was officially surrounded on ...
Three New Zealand Authors of Note (03/13)
The Memory of Love is mainly set in New Zealand where Swedish author Linda Olsson spends half the year. She spends the other half in her native Sweden. Olsson's novels have enjoyed worldwide readership, something, she says that most New Zealand authors rarely experience. There are brilliant New Zealand writers, Olsson says, whom many in ...
The Economy of Post-World War II Europe (03/13)
Downing's portrait of post-World War II Europe highlights the wrangling that took place between political and economic leaders over who would get domain of which pieces of land, all rendered nearly unrecognizable by bombs. Indeed, history has told us that even during the thickest action of the world war these leaders kept themselves busy ...
What a Way To Go (03/13)
In a passage on suicide, Winterson remarks that 'when natural gas was introduced in the 1960's, the British suicide rate fell by one-third.' I thought that perhaps she was using some creative math for dramatic effect, but a little research revealed that she wasn't exaggerating at all. Here's a summary of the way things were in Great ...
Human Trafficking in North Korea (03/13)
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (
UNODC), 'Human trafficking is a crime against humanity. It involves an act of recruiting, transporting, transfering, harbouring or receiving a person through a use of force, coercion or other means, for the purpose of exploiting them. Every year, thousands of men, women and ...
Antigone and The Watch: A Comparison (03/13)
The Greek classic, Antigone (written by Sophocles around 440 BC, based on the older Theban legend), serves as the basis for the modern-day Afghan war story, The Watch. Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya makes no attempt to hide the fact and even invites comparisons, titling two chapters 'Antigone' and 'Ismene' after the two sisters in the tragedy. ...
The Darwin Awards (03/13)
Wendy Northcutt, who has a degree in molecular biology from the University of California at Berkeley, is the creator of the 'Darwin Awards,' pop culture's nod to Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest, awarded annually to one person voted to have 'improved our gene pool by removing themselves from it.' In other words, someone...
A Short History of Chechnya (03/13)
It is during her reporting in Chechnya, during the separatist wars that ravaged the country, that journalist and author Masha Gessen got deeply involved in the larger political context of both the war and Russian President Vladimir Putin's handling of it.
Chechnya lies to the south of the Russian Republic and is bound by ...
Howard Frank Mosher and The Kingdom (03/13)
The place with which Howard Frank Mosher is most associated is not actually his native home. Born in the Catskill Mountains in 1942, he moved to Vermont's 'Northeast Kingdom' (or as he calls it, 'The Kingdom') as a newlywed in 1964 to take up his first teaching post. According to the NEK (Vermont's Northeast Kingdom)
website, The ...
A History of New York's Great Fires (03/13)
In Lyndsay Faye's novel, The Gods of Gotham, a fire ravages lower Manhattan, setting the stage for her suspenseful historical mystery. In reality, New York City has fallen victim to more than one devastating blaze.
In 1609, Henry Hudson, a British explorer hired by the Dutch to find a faster route to 'the Orient,' followed what is ...
The Kwangju Massacre (03/13)
The family in Forgotten Country flees South Korea in the tumultuous wake of what many South Koreans consider to be the worst tragedy in Korean history since World War II - worse even than the Korean War. Indeed by all accounts the event that took place in May of 1980, known as the Kwangju Massacre, when hundreds of students and private ...
Accepting Death and Dying Well: Additional Resources (03/13)
One cannot finish Dr. Byock's book without resolving, as much as possible, to take responsibility for one's own death and to become deeply involved in the experiences and medical treatments of those we love who are dying.
His website,
www.dyingwell.org, provides readers with additional information and helpful resources on the topic of...
Food Writers (03/13)
In
An Economist Gets Lunch, Tyler Cowen frequently references writers who have shaped the way people think about the culinary arts. These writers are not chefs, but critics who look at the role food plays in modern society. The field has grown so popular that there are actually
specialist courses teaching the art of food writing. ...
The Afrikaans Language (03/13)
Afrikaans words or expressions are peppered throughout André Brink's novel, Philida. Brink started his career writing in Afrikaans, his native language, but switched to writing in English interspersed with Afrikaans which he uses to help maintain the authenticity of his characters. Many of the words can be puzzled out from the ...
826 National (02/13)
Erica Lorraine Scheidt is a long-time volunteer for the non-profit organization,
826 Valencia, headquartered in San Francisco. Her latest effort involves teaching a writing workshop for teens, called Chapter One. In the workshop teens focus on crafting the first chapters of their novels. Here is the description of the workshop:
Calling...
Changing Bedouin Life as Exemplified by the Al-Maria Family (02/13)
Bedouin life has been slowly changing from a traditional nomadic existence to a more settled permanent one. Al-Maria's family effectively illustrates this transition.
Al-Maria adjusts to her Bedouin family's ancient way of life precisely at the same time that its members must adjust to modernity. The family had been experiencing what ...
Refugees in the United States (02/13)
The 1951 Refugee Convention which established the UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, defines a refugee as someone who 'owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to...
The Locavore Food Movement (02/13)
In his preface to Birdseye, Mark Kurlansky faces the issue of whether or not Clarence Birdseye made what we eat better: 'Eating frozen food instead of fresh represents a decline in the quality of food. But very often people are eating frozen food when they would have been eating canned, in which case frozen is an improvement.' Kurlansky ...
The Cuban Missile Crisis (02/13)
For thirteen days in October 1962, the world was on the brink of nuclear war. U.S. spy planes had detected what appeared to be nuclear missile sites being built on the island of Cuba, just ninety miles off the coast of Florida. Soviet ships, originally designed to carry cargo such as lumber or food, had been outfitted to transport nuclear...
Sondesh (02/13)
In The Newlyweds, when Amina returns home to Bangladesh, her mother picks up a box of freshly-made sondesh from a reputed vendor to bring to Amina's aunt.
Bangladesh shares the Bengali language with the Indian state of West Bengal. Bengali sweets (mishti) are famous all over South Asia and sondesh is particularly well-known. Like ...
How the Introduction of Oil and Capitalism Affected Saudi Arabian Culture (02/13)
In
In the Kingdom of Men, Gin McPhee finds herself plopped inside an
ARAMCO (Arabian American Oil Company) compound in the 1960s, an oasis that is neither wholly American nor Arabic but is somehow an incongruous mashup within a country still grappling with the culture shock wrought by 20th century capitalism. But what did that culture ...
Courtroom Drama (02/13)
The thrill of watching a trial unfold - the impassioned speeches, quick-witted lawyers, surprise witnesses, the piecing together of clues, not knowing if justice will prevail - it can all make for exciting, and in some cases legendary, storytelling. 'Courtroom drama', a subgenre of 'legal drama', is a term used to describe dramatic ...
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