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Touring New York City (09/10)
Everyone knows New York! Even if you've never visited you've probably read about it in books such as
Jonathan Letham's (which are all set in the City). If you haven't read about it, the chances are that one of the countless TV shows such as
NYPD Blue,
Friends, and
Sex and the City has introduced you to a variety of its streets, apartment ...
Contemporary Saints (09/10)
Los Angeles artist
J. Michael Walker thinks a lot like Antonia Labella, heroine of
The Possibilities of Sainthood. In the summer of 2008 he exhibited a series of large portraits of saints whose names are commemorated in the roads and streets of many Los Angeles neighborhoods. Each large, ink on paper portrait portrays a ...
Trotsky in Mexico (09/10)
Kingsolver's fictional protagonist, Harrison Shepherd, spends much of his life brushing up against the lives of real people, including the Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera who played host to Leon Trotsky in the 1930s. Undoubtedly, you know of Trotsky, Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist, but did you know that he spent...
The Chinese Zodiac (09/10)
Author Alison Goodman models her concept of the twelve energy dragons of good fortune after the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, and pig. Falling in an established order within the cycle, the animals, according to legend, once bickered over who would head the ...
Comfort Women (09/10)
Carmen's experience as a comfort woman in Los Baños was not an uncommon one for southeast Asian women during World War II. The system of brothels began in 1932. In the early stages, volunteer Japanese prostitutes were used until Japan's military expansion made it difficult to get volunteers. At this point, the military turned to ...
wolf Hall: Cast of Characters (09/10)
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 financial future and ...
Beijing (09/10)
Many of Yiyun Li's stories revolve around her childhood home of Beijing, China's capital city. Beijing (meaning Northern Capital) is one of China's
four great ancient capitals, alongside Nanjing (meaning Southern Capital), Xi'an (meaning Western Peace) and Luoyang (known during the Tang dynasty as Dongdu, meaning Eastern Capital).
...
John Clare - A Little Known English Poet (09/10)
The Quickening Maze is based on real events in the lives of English poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson. Tennyson, better known as Lord Tennyson (even though he was well into his eighth decade before becoming a peer) will be familiar to most of us for a handful of his better known poems including
The Charge of the Light Brigade, one...
The Lost Boys (09/10)
While The Chosen One focuses primarily on the plight of Kyra, a young girl growing up in an unspecified polygynous fundamentalist community, it also explores the issue of the 'lost boys'.
The lost boys is a term used to describe young men raised within polygynous Mormon sects such as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter...
Yiddish (09/10)
Mandelman's novel is generously peppered with Yiddish words and phrases, complete with translations. There are other Yiddish words that require no translation having found their way into common English usage; words such as bagel, maven and klutz, have become so widespread that it would be difficult to spend a day without hearing, reading ...
Keith Thompson - Leviathan's Illustrator (09/10)
Keith Thompson, who contributed fifty illustrations for the interior of
Leviathan, began freelancing as an artist in high school. After graduating, he studied illustration and continued his freelance work. He has contributed art for books, video games, film, and television.
Preparing the Leviathan illustrations involved a year of ...
Studio Pottery (09/10)
One of the main characters in The Children's Book is Phillip Warren, apprentice to eccentric master of ceramics Benedict Fludd. While Fludd is a fictional creation, the kind of pottery being made in his house is in a style that came to be known, in the early 20th century, as Studio Pottery - that is to say pottery made by artists working ...
Uruguay (09/10)
Uruguay (
map
of South America) is home to about 3.5 million people about half of whom
live in or around the capital city of Montevideo. Montevideo was
founded by the Spanish in 1726 as a stronghold. Claimed by Argentina but
annexed by Brazil, the country won its independence in 1828 following a
500 day conflict.
Early 20th ...
A brief history of borders (08/10)
Most of us take it for granted that every person on earth is the citizen of a nation
state, but this is a relatively recent concept.
Take Europe for example. Although there had long been empires that stretched across large tracts of land, up until the Middle Ages Europe was essentially made up of multiple city states. Indeed, the ...
100 Years of Korean Immigration (08/10)
In 2008 there were more than 1.3 million people of Korean ancestry living in the United States, making Koreans the fourth largest group of Asian Americans, after Asian Indians, Chinese and Filipinos. As of 2000, roughly one-third of Korean Americans had been born in the United States, one-third are U.S. citizens born in Korea, and one-...
Sitting Shiva (08/10)
The word 'shiva' (pronounced SHIHvah) is derived from the Hebrew word sheva which means 'seven.' Sitting shiva means that the family of a loved one – usually reserved for the family of a deceased spouse, parent or child – gathers in that loved one's home for seven days. Friends and family visit to support the family as they take...
Birth Control and Childbirth in the 19th Century (08/10)
Dorothea Gibson’s daughter-in-law says, 'They (fathers) do not become dissolved into parenthood the way we [women] do.' Truer words may never have been spoken – at least as far as the 19th Century was concerned.
Dissolved? Dorothea (Dodo) Gibson floundered under the toll of eight closely spaced children plus several ...
Kristallnacht - a precursor to the holocaust (08/10)
While Philppe Claudel makes no explicit references to any historical event, a number of them clearly influenced his novel. A particularly poignant example comes when Brodeck is forced to flee the city where he attends university because nationalist thugs respond to a popular protest by smashing store fronts and savagely beating anyone ...
Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist (08/10)
Vice president Richard Nixon spars with Nikita Khrushchev during the former's visit to Moscow.
On the set of the film
Can-Can, Shirley MacLaine and Frank Sinatra gave the communist dictator a taste of good old fashioned American titillation.
K and wife Nina pose with the family of Iowa corn farmer Robert Garst whose deft ...
The Child-Wives of the Gods (08/10)
Wife of the Gods refers to a practice in Ghana known as trokosi. A trokosi is a young girl who is given to the village priest, also known as a fetish priest, to atone for a perceived sin committed by a family member; the custom is basically a form of sanctioned slavery. It is practiced primarily in the Volta region of ...
Beirut 39 - An anthology of writing by thirty-nine Arabic writers under thirty-nine. (08/10)
Beirut 39 derives its title from 'Beirut39', a group of thirty-nine writers of Arab heritage who were all born in or after 1970. The countries of origin represented in the anthology include Palestine, Saudia Arabia, Syria, Oman, Jordan, Sudan, Libya, Lebanon, and Egypt, among others.
These writers met for workshops, readings, and ...
A Short History of Tibet (07/10)
Tibet, a remote region along the southwestern border of China, sits at 15,000 feet above sea level between the Himalaya and Kunlun mountain ranges. The first recorded king of the region was Srong-btsan sgam-po, who is credited with introducing Buddhism to Tibet around 640 AD. He and his descendants ruled over a unified Tibet through the ...
Yom Ha'atzmaut & Al-Nakba (07/10)
There have long been Jewish communities in Palestine, but populations saw particularly rapid growth as Jews fled European pogroms during the 19th century. A large wave of immigration, mainly from the Russian Empire began in 1881 and continued up until the start of World War I. During this period, known as the First and Second Aliya ...
Nollywood - The Nigerian Industry (07/10)
Nigeria has long been renowned for its distinguished literary history, which features such world-famous authors as Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, and Wole Soyinka. What many Westerners don't know, however, is that Nigeria also boasts a thriving movie-making industry, dubbed Nollywood in homage to both Hollywood and Bollywood (India’s film ...
Cubism (c. 1907 - 1921) (07/10)
Asger inherits his love of art from Grandpa Askild, who paints in the Cubist style
pioneered by artists like
Pablo Picasso,
Georges
Braque, and
Juan Gris, influenced by
Paul Cezanne's later work. Although some art historians now credit the lesser-known Braque with creating the first Cubist paintings, Picasso's
Les Demoiselles d'...
Frame Narration and Ekphrasis (07/10)
Paul Auster frequently employs two particular literary techniques which, when combined, turn his novels into multi-layered stories with internal echoes and reverberations.
The first is a frame narrative, in which the main plot is a story, usually in the form of a manuscript, which is discovered and introduced by someone else. This ...
Russia’s Poetic Troika (07/10)
Born in Odessa, Russia in 1889,
Anna Akhmatova began writing poems at the age of 11, adopting her grandmother's surname because her father would not permit her to publish under his own. As a member of the Acmeist school of poetry, Akhmatova achieved celebrity along with her husband, Nikolay Gumilyov, who was executed in 1921 as a ...
Irish Travellers (06/10)
Among themselves, Travellers refer to themselves as Pavees. To
outsiders they are often referred to as pikeys, knackers or tinkers (the latter
two descriptions refer to traditional crafts in which they were employed,
rendering animals and tin-smithing; the first two are considered particularly
derogatory). In Irish, they are...
Lost and Stolen Treasures (06/10)
According to British journalist and art critic
Jonathan Jones, 'The most amazing thing is not how many masterpieces go missing or get destroyed but that something so fragile as art survives for any length of time at all.'
Yet the lead character of
The Bellini Madonna, Thomas Joseph Lynch, is counting on the fact that the mysterious work ...
Shariar Mandanipour (06/10)
Shariar Mandanipour's varied life began in the city of Shiraz, where he was born in 1956. In the 1970s, he participated in protests against the authoritarian rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; in the 80s, he volunteered in the Iran-Iraq war; and, since 2009, he has served as the chief editor for Asr-e Pandishanbeh (Thursday Evening), an ...
The Anti-Updikeans (06/10)
'I'd like to offer assurances that your reviewer is not one of these spleen-venting, spittle-spattering Updike-haters one encounters among literary readers under 40. The fact is that I am probably classifiable as one of very few actual sub-40 Updike fans.'
This quote comes from
an essay by David Foster Wallace, the upstart author of ...
Pancho Villa (06/10)
In Far Bright Star, Cavalryman Napoleon Childs is a member of an expedition sent to the Mexican border to apprehend bandit Pancho Villa.
Many details of Villa's life are unknown or in dispute. Scholars believe he was born José Doroteo Arango Arambula in 1877 (some sources indicate 1878 or 1879) in San Juan del Rio, Durango, Mexico....
Lev Grossman's Worlds (06/10)
Lev Grossman was born in 1969, the son of two English professors, and grew up in Lexington, MA, a placid little suburb of Boston. After obtaining a literature degree from Harvard and working towards a PhD in comparative literature at Yale, he gradually turned himself into a journalist and after a few years as a free-lancer, was hired...
Burma (06/10)
During the time covered in Burmese Lessons, the military government in Burma was known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). This name has since been changed to the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), but the behavior of the government has not changed. Since 1962, the ruling military regime has severely ...
Hurricanes (06/10)
The term 'hurricane' is believed to originate with the Carib people of the West Indies (after whom the Caribbean was named). Historians believe that the Carib word huracan was probably derived from the Mayan storm god, Hunraken or the K'iche god of thunder and lightning, Hurakan. K'iche (in Spanish Quiché) is a part of the Mayan ...
Aboriginal Land Rights (06/10)
Carpentaria is essentially a novel about the clash of cultures, told from the perspective of
the Aboriginal people of Australia. Just as the book illustrates, there is still debate in Australia about who can legitimately claim rights to the land - indigenous Australians, or descendants of the original European settlers. From the ...
A Beginner's Guide to Mountaineering (05/10)
Mountain climbing, or mountaineering, is the sport of attaining or attempting
to attain high points in mountainous regions, mainly for the pleasure of the
climb. Before the 18th century, climbing for sport was rare. Humans
did ascend high peaks, but generally only out of necessity or for religious
reasons (many ancient religions ...
The Jardin des Plantes and the Changing Landscapes of Botanical Gardens (05/10)
The Jardin
des Plantes in Paris was the epicenter of naturalist research in the early 1800s and is currently one of the world's foremost botanical gardens. Built in 1626,
it was planted in 1635 as a medicinal herb garden for the King of France. It
was opened to the public in 1640, greatly expanded under superintendent G.L.L
...
A Short History of Barcelona (05/10)
Barcelona, Spain's second largest city after Madrid, is the capital of the
Autonomous Community of Catalonia in the North East of Spain (
map) and a major economic center for finance, business, media, arts and international trade. Its location on the Mediterranean coast brings it mild, humid winters and warm, dry summers. ...
A Short Lesson in Restaurant Terminology (05/10)
PERSONNEL
Chef: the cook in charge of a restaurant; from the French chef de cuisine, literally the head of the kitchen.
Executive Chef: sometimes called the head cook, he or she is the one responsible for running the food preparation in a kitchen, ordering food and supplies, making staff schedules, dealing with administrative tasks. ...
Baba Yaga (05/10)
In
A Long, Long Time Ago…And Essentially True, one of the
main characters, Beata, is constantly referred to by the nickname 'Baba Yaga.'
Baba Yaga is a popular figure in Slavic folk tales (
Slavic
language map). Also known as the 'Old Woman
of Autumn,' her origins can be traced back to the ancient Slavic goddesses of birth
...
John The Revelator, The Person and The Shng (05/10)
The title of Peter Murphy's book is taken from a traditional song about John of Patmos, the name given to the author of the biblical Book of Revelation, who identifies himself as living on the Greek island of Patmos. Scholars date Revelation to between AD 54 and 96 with most believing it
to have been written around AD 95.
In the 2nd...
The Burundian Genocide (05/10)
The 1993 Burundian genocide (which preceded the 1994 genocide in Rwanda) traces back to the end of Belgian colonial rule in the 1950s and 1960s and the
first Berudian genocide of 1972. Burundian history fits, like interlocking puzzle pieces, with that of its northern neighbor, Rwanda (
map of Central Africa).
Like in Rwanda, Hutus make ...
Charlie Chaplin & Sunnyside (05/10)
Not a whole lot is said about silent films these days. The Age of the Silver Screen seems to be as antiquated as the subject matter of many of its films: the original Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments, Intolerance, and Birth of a Nation to name a few. The reputed masters of the form could be counted on one hand, and actors and actresses ...
Vory Tattoos - the mark of a Soviet fraternity of criminals (05/10)
The vory developed a complex series of coded tattoos that are still employed by the vory today. The tattoos have a bluish color and are blurred-looking due to the poor quality implements used to create them. Ink inside the prisons is usually created by burning the heel of a shoe and mixing the soot with urine and shampoo. The tattoos ...
Ivan Mishukov - The boy who lived with a pack of wild dogs (05/10)
I was fascinated to learn that Eva Hornung's novel
Dog Boy was inspired by the real-life story of Ivan Mishukov, a four-year-old boy who decided to run away from his mother and her alcoholic boyfriend in 1996 in Moscow, and ended up living with a pack of wild dogs for approximately two years before he was rescued. In the book
Savage Girls...
Elise and Otto Hampel (05/10)
Every Man Dies Alone is inspired by
Elise and
Otto Hampel, a blue collar couple. Elise and Otto eluded the police and the Gestapo from September 1940-42, 'leaving hundreds of postcards calling for civil disobedience and workplace sabotage all over Berlin.'
One of the frequent subjects of the Hampels' postcards was the Winter Relief ...
Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America (04/10)
Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville was born in Paris on July 29, 1805. His parents, both of aristocratic background, narrowly avoided the guillotine during the aftermath of the French Revolution, and were exiled to England. They were later able to return to France during the reign of Napoleon. His father supported the Bourbon...
On the set of the film Can-Can, Shirley MacLaine and Frank Sinatra gave the communist dictator a taste of good old fashioned American titillation.
