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The Treetop Philosopher (04/12)
Although Nothing's protagonist, Pierre, seems to withdraw from the world, he is not necessarily a nihilist (one who believes in nothing). When he tells the other children he is 'contemplating the sky, and getting used to doing nothing,' and urges them to 'enjoy the nothing that is,' his attitude is reminiscent of the French novelist and ...
The Symbolism of Doves (04/12)
Alice Hoffman's The Dovekeepers shows us a world where doves, in addition to serving day-to-day purposes, represent so much more. Along with their close cousin, the pigeon, doves make up the bird family Columbidae. And while they're often thought of as bright white birds, with over 300 species, they actually come in all shapes and sizes....
The Mansions of Newport, Rhode Island (03/12)
During the
Gilded Age (1865-1914), America experienced a boom in railroad tycoons and oil barons, and a great deal of wealth was concentrated in the real estate of Newport, Rhode Island. Wealthy families like the
Vanderbilts and
Astors flocked to Newport each summer, and as their appreciation for the New England coast grew, they built ...
The Mothers' Bridge of Love (03/12)
Xinran founded a charity in 2004 called
The Mothers' Bridge of Love (MBL),
which aims to build understanding between adopted Chinese children growing up around the world, their adoptive parents and their birth culture. The following letter, abbreviated from the
original, written by an adopted girl to her unknown birth-mother, ...
Key Players in Afghanistan & Pakistan (03/12)
Some of the best parts of
The Taliban Shuffle are Barker's encounters with various Afghan and Pakistani high officials, all of whom are fairly eccentric characters. But, inevitably, it becomes difficult to keep track of their names and positions. Here is a short list of some of the figures met in the book.
...
The Unreliable Narrator (03/12)
In Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, Tony Webster admits that he may not be a reliable narrator. He acknowledges that it's probably impossible to tell, objectively, the story of your own life, and that it's therefore up to the reader to question or validate his authority.
The idea of the unreliable narrator has long been ...
Coxey's Army (03/12)
In John Sayles's
A Moment in the Sun, Hod Brackenridge's colorful past is marked most deeply by his participation in a working class uprising. A group of men, inspired by
Populist rhetoric, hijack a train car in an attempt to bring their economic grievances to the nation's capital.
Turn-of-the-century America was fraught with class ...
Pho : A Vietnamese Delicacy (03/12)
In Camilla Gibb's novel
The Beauty of Humanity Movement, Old Man Hung is the resourceful owner of a rickety pho stand, and, in many ways, he holds the community together throughout Vietnam's political turmoil, one bowl at a time.
Pho (pronounced '
fuh') is a Vietnamese rice noodle soup that is eaten at any time of day (breakfast, ...
The Gila National Forest (03/12)
As a fire lookout, Philip Connors called New Mexico's Gila National Forest home. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, in 1924 this nationally protected area was established (at the advocacy of conservationist Aldo Leopold) as 'the first designated wilderness in the country.'
This means that 'there are no ...
Akademgorodok (03/12)
One of the most fascinating byproducts of the Russian planned economy is the academic town of Akademgorodok (Ah-kah-DYEM-gor-oh-dok) in Siberia. It is approximately 30 kilometers south of the larger Siberian city of Novosibirsk (No-VO-see-beersk), and is the setting for some of Red Plenty's most riviting stories, featuring a genetics and ...
Glasgow's International Exhibition of Science, Art and Industry (1888) (03/12)
Jane Harris sets her novel Gillespie and I at a time when Scotland felt it was ready for its close-up. The International Exhibition of Science, Art and Industry took place in Glasgow from May to November in 1888 at Kelvingrove Park on the banks of the River Kelvin (image below, left). It was the country's bid for prominence in the ...
Kevin Brockmeier (03/12)
Kevin Brockmeier has received the Borders Original Voices Award, three O. Henry Awards (one, a first prize), the PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Grant. He was also named one of Granta Magazine's 'Best Young American Novelists'. He is known for his imaginative interpretations of modern life, his emphasis on the wonders ...
Who is Candy Gourlay? (03/12)
Perhaps Candy Gourlay writes about dismantling the walls between people because she has chosen to scale them, push on them, and break them down for herself.
Candy tells a
story about leaving Manila, where she spent much of her childhood, to live in England. Her two youngest brothers (she is one of six siblings) were just little guys...
Selected Books by Julian Barnes (03/12)
Julian Barnes can rightfully be called a prolific author, having published nineteen books, more than twenty short stories, and over one-hundred essays and reviews! He has also written four novels under the pseudonym
Dan Kavanagh, a mysterious, steer-wrestling, gay-bar-bouncing personality who, 'devoted his adolescence to truancy, ...
Dr. Nick Trout (02/12)
Veterinary surgeon and
New York Times bestselling author
Dr. Nick Trout is beloved among readers and is often compared to the late English veterinary surgeon James Herriot, author of the classic memoir
All Creatures Great and Small. In an interview with
Boston Magazine, Dr. Trout describes his feelings about this comparison:
I grew ...
Coney Island (02/12)
As a budding magician in Haley Tanner's novel
Vaclav & Lena, young Vaclav dreams of performing for the crowds on Coney Island. Synonymous with roller coasters and
Nathan's hot dogs, Coney Island is a unique piece of the New York City metropolitan area (located in the southernmost region of Brooklyn) and has a fascinating
Construction ...
Amnesia (02/12)
Amnesia, also known as 'amnestic syndrome,' refers to a person's inability to retrieve memories or pieces of information from the brain and occurs when the areas of the brain responsible for recovering stored information become compromised by physical or psychological damage.
Several structures located deep within the brain, such ...
Andre Dubus - Father & Son (02/12)
It can be confusing enough when members of the same family share a profession. It gets even more confusing when they share the same name, as is the case with father and son authors Andre Dubus and Andre Dubus III.
Andre Dubus was born into a Cajun-Irish Catholic family in 1936 Louisiana, the youngest child of Katherine (Burke) and Andr...
Treating Pedophiles (02/12)
Margaux Fragoso says in the afterword of Tiger, Tiger that one of the reasons she wrote the book was to bring attention to the need for treatment of pedophiles. The current system focuses on the treatment of the child victims, and punishment for the perpetrators. As a victim herself, she believes the best thing would be to find a way ...
Lysley Tenorio (02/12)
Lysley Tenorio (pronounced LESS-lee ten-OH-rio) is the winner of several awards, including the
Whiting Writers' Award, the Nelson Algren Award, and a Pushcart Prize - and fellowships from Phillip Exeter Academy, The MacDowell Colony,
Yaddo, the University of Wisconsin, and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. He earned his MFA ...
Mountain Gorillas of Africa (02/12)
One of the main characters in Audrey Schulman's
Three Weeks in December - an American
ethnobotanist named Max who has Asperger's Syndrome - finds herself in East Africa searching for a medicinal plant. Along the way, she follows a family of exquisite mountain gorillas that have somehow escaped local poachers and finds that she has an ...
Chef Gabrielle Hamilton's Restaurant: Prune (02/12)
As a child, Gabrielle Hamilton's mother called her by the pet name Prune, and today the moniker appears in pink letters on the door of her thriving restaurant of the same name, located at 54 East 1st Street in New York City's East Village, established in 1999.
The East Village has a rich history of both rebellion and creative vision...
China Miéville (02/12)
China Miéville (pronounced mee-AY-vill) has taken the science fiction world by storm in his relatively short tenure as a published author. He is the winner of three Arthur C. Clarke awards, two British Fantasy Awards, four Locus Awards, a Hugo Award, and a World Fantasy Award - not to mention he's received numerous nominations for ...
The Gaza Strip (02/12)
The Gaza Strip is the smaller of the two Palestinian territories (the West Bank being the larger). It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea on the east, and by Egypt in the southwest, with Israel surrounding it on all other sides. It is just 25 miles long and 7.5 miles across at its widest (
map). This narrow strip of land is home to ...
Treatment of the Mentally Ill (02/12)
In Andrew Taylor's The Anatomy of Ghosts, while recovering from his ordeal, Frank Oldershaw is first held at a home for the mentally disturbed. Although the process used to treat him there seems brutal and oppressive to modern sensibilities, for the time period it was considered quite advanced and progressive.
Throughout the ...
Henry James (02/12)
Henry James (1843-1916), the prolific American writer of the late 19th/early 20th century, was known to pick up ideas for his stories from dinner party conversations. Colm Tóibín puts this bit of knowledge to use in his short story 'Silence', when he has fictional character Lady Gregory share a secret with James as they sit next...
The Tiger Mother Media-Storm (01/12)
In addition to her book
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua's
Wall Street Journal article entitled, '
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior' (which is excerpted from
Tiger Mother but does not fully represent the message of the book) has created quite a stir in the media, and has inspired hundreds of opinionated articles and blog postings ...
Fort Hood (01/12)
If you've never been on a military base, you might be surprised, upon reading You Know When the Men Are Gone, at just how extensive Fort Hood, Texas, is. It's a small city unto itself, complete with all the services and conveniences that mean its residents never really have to leave if they don't want to. As Siobhan Fallon illustrates...
Madame Tussauds Wax Museum (01/12)
The well-known tourist attraction and wax museum, Madame Tussauds, had its start in the streets of Paris just before the French Revolution.
Dr. Philippe Curtius, Madame Tussaud's mentor, opened his first
cabinet de cire (wax exhibition) in Paris in 1770. It proved so popular that he was forced to move to larger accommodations twice and ...
Next Generation Nepal (01/12)
According to
Next Generation Nepal's website, the 1996-2006 Nepalese civil war between government forces and the insurgent Communist Party of Nepal claimed 12,000 lives and devastated the economy; and, in remote areas of the country, the Maoist rebels used intimidation and even murder to control villages and abduct children into their ...
The Yoshiwara: Edo's 19th Century Red Light District (01/12)
Katherine Govier's
The Printmaker's Daughter is historical fiction based on the real-life Japanese printmaker,
Hokusai - best known for his
ukiyo-e* series
entitled
Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji - and his daughter, Ei.
The character Ei spends much of her early life in the Yoshiwara, or red light district, of Edo (...
On the Path to the Newbery Medal (01/12)
Moon Over Manifest began as a story the author clearly needed to hear. Her inspiration was a line in
Moby Dick that also influences Abilene: 'It is not down in any map; true places never are.'
On her
website Vanderpool explains, 'That really sparked my imagination. What is a true place? It conjured up ideas of home. Having lived ...
Chinese Immigration to the USA (11/11)
During much of the second half of the 19th century, the Union Pacific Railroad (UP) was able to maintain a monopoly on coal production because it controlled the only means of transportation into the Western territories. Thus it owned and operated all the coalmines, fixed coal prices to its own benefit and was able to establish its ...
Religion in China (11/11)
Religion in China is a hard topic to pin down. The country has been officially atheist since 1949 - a policy that was rigorously enforced through the early years of the People's Republic of China but was relaxed in the 1970s.
Since 1978 the Constitution of the People's Republic of China has guaranteed 'freedom of religion' and the ...
Books in Translation (11/11)
In a now-infamous statement preceding the awarding of the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature to French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, Swedish Academy member Horace Engdahl remarked that the publishing climate in the United States had grown 'too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big ...
Mental Health and Memoir (11/11)
We live in a memoir-saturated era in which it often seems that nearly everyone has written a story about their experiences with substance abuse, parental neglect, the ravages of fame, and trips to the psychiatric ward. This glut makes it easy to dismiss memoirs as the overheated fabrications of narcissistic attention-seekers, and ...
Historic Chicago in Bright and Distant Shores (11/11)
In
Bright and Distant Shores, Dominic Smith references some of the historic people and events that helped shape Chicago around the turn of the 20th century. Read on for more information about these fascinating institutions:
- Hull House - a resource for new immigrants to the U.S. established by two women in 1889. They offered a ...
The Frontiers of Alzheimer's Research (11/11)
The
World Alzheimer Report estimates that there are upwards of 35 million people living with dementia worldwide, two-thirds of whom are women, with Alzheimer's accounting for about two-thirds of cases. By 2050 it is expected that 115 million people will be living with dementia.
In the United States there are approximately 5.3 million...
Tomas Tranströmer (11/11)
Tomas Tranströmer was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1931, and spent his career as a psychologist. The author of a dozen books of poetry, Tranströmer is the most renowned Scandinavian poet since World War II. His poetry has been translated into more than fifty languages. In 2011, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature 'because...
The Reader Organisation (11/11)
Rarely have I been as excited about an organization as I am about
The Reader Organisation, a British-based group whose mission is to bring about a reading revolution. A reading revolution!
'The work we do,' says The Reader Organisation, 'is driven by a love for great literature and a strong belief that shared reading is a deeply ...
The Controversy Over Bullfighting (11/11)
Bullfighting - drenched in symbolism, embedded in tradition - is as synonymous with Spanish culture as flamenco dancing and paella. It is a centuries-old blood sport to beat all blood sports with its ceremonial battle to the death between man and beast. An uneven playing field? Perhaps. Only recently, thousands of stunned fans, both in ...
The Best Years of Our Lives (11/11)
Alice Bergstrom, one of the characters in Sunset Park, is writing her dissertation on the film The Best Years of Our Lives. Almost everyone in the book has either seen it already or watches it with her so she can add their reactions to her observations. Auster draws many parallels between the story in the film and the story of his ...
Gullah Culture (11/11)
The Gullah (known as Geechee in Georgia and Florida) are descendants of West African slaves, whose numbers today range from 200,000-500,000.
The Gullah region traditionally extends along the coast from SE North Carolina, through Georgia to Northern Florida, including the Lowcountry region and its Sea Islands (see map at bottom left).
...
Heterochromia (11/11)
Pearl has one brown eye and one blue eye. Amiel says to her that this means '
tu eres de dos mundos. You are of two worlds.' Pearl's uncle says it means that she can see fairies and peaceful ghosts.
But what is it exactly?
Heterochromia simply means a difference in coloration and is caused by a relative excess or lack ...
Who is Cath Crowley? (11/11)
A Little Wanting Song left me wanting to know more about author Cath Crowley, but the biographical information immediately at hand was a little light, so I did some digging....
Cath Crowley is an Australian children's author. She was born in 1971 and grew up in a rural part of Victoria (
SE Australia) with three brothers and a dog.
...
The Doctors' Plot (11/11)
The Betrayal is loosely based on a series of investigations that took place toward the end of Joseph Stalin's rule in 1953, formally known as 'The Doctors' Plot.' This bizarre scheme wrongfully accused nine prominent Moscow doctors - the majority of whom were Jewish - of coordinating the deaths of high-ranking Soviet Party members. Rather...
The Symbolism of Ravens (10/11)
Raven Summer begins with a raven beckoning to Liam to follow him. He flies a bit ahead, stops, calls to Liam - Jak jak! Jak jak! - and then flies a bit ahead again. Like this, the raven leads Liam to the abandoned baby. What is the symbolism of this loud, large beaked, black bird?
Ravens figure prominently in many legends from ...
Noirmoutier (10/11)
A Secret Kept is set primarily in Paris and Noirmoutier (pronounced 'nwar mooteeay'), an island off the Atlantic coast of France in the Loire region. A popular tourist destination for both beach-lovers and history buffs, Ile de Noirmoutier (literally 'island of black monastery') has several claims to fame:
It is home to La Bonnotte...
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