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The Power of Polaroid Photography (02/20)
Once upon a time, long before digital photography became commonplace, the only way to instantly see the results after taking a photo was by using a Polaroid instant camera. In Lost Children Archive, the narrator gives her stepson a Polaroid camera for his tenth birthday. He takes photos during their trip, and a series of Polaroid images ...
Nonviolent Activism (02/20)
In Watch Us Rise by Renee Watson and Ellen Hagan, high school juniors Chelsea and Jasmine learn that 'art is never just art,' so they decide to 'use art to make a statement, to create change.' The girls experiment with multiple forms of activism, sometimes with guidance, and even misguidance, from teachers, mentors, community leaders, ...
History of the First Lady (02/20)
Courting Mr. Lincoln by Louis Bayard describes the budding romance between future President Abraham Lincoln and the woman who would become his wife and First Lady, Mary Todd.
Although the role of the President of the United States is described in depth in the US Constitution, the 'job' of First Lady is one that has evolved over the ...
Student Debt (02/20)
In Sounds Like Titanic, author Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman recalls the extreme lengths she went to in order to fund her education, including selling her eggs and touring the country with a crooked classical music composer. The price of tuition for a 4-year private college in the United States was, on average, $34,740 for the 2017-2018 ...
Black Women's Bravery During the Civil War (02/20)
Historian Shelby Foote called the Civil War, 'the crossroads of our being.' It defined humanity and the principles that govern American morality. With freedom as the one virtue worth fighting for, it is no wonder that women of color chose to walk the tightrope of danger and secrecy and participate in the war. Cathy Williams – a real...
Female Viking Warriors (02/20)
In Andrew David MacDonald's novel
When We Were Vikings, the heroine becomes inspired to take charge of her life when presented with a magazine article about physical evidence of a female Viking warrior. The article refers to
an archeological dig from the late 19th century in Birka, Sweden that unearthed the 10th century grave of a ...
The History of the Sunset Strip (02/20)
Titular character Daisy Jones from Taylor Jenkins Reid's novel Daisy Jones & The Six comes of age in the 1970s, visiting rock clubs on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. This 1.6 mile stretch of music venues, nightclubs, restaurants and retail stores on Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard has a long, fascinating history full of intrigue, and ...
Women's Suffrage in Early 20th Century America (02/20)
Serena Burdick's
The Girls with No Names is set amidst a quiet yet fierce swell of social unrest that builds as we move towards the book's climax. Though the official inception of the US suffrage movement is typically traced back to a women's rights convention held in
Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, it reached a fever pitch in the early ...
The Shape-Shifting Monsters of African Lore (02/20)
Stories of shapeshifters have permeated literature and art from the beginning of civilization. Therianthropy, or the changing of a human into an animal, is perhaps the most commonly known trope of the shapeshifting genre, with illustrations of such changes dating back all the way to 13,000 BC.
In his novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, ...
Young Adult Dystopian Novels (02/20)
In Tehlor Kay Mejia's debut novel We Set the Dark on Fire, men marry two wives – one Primera, who is logical and controlled, and one Segunda, who is beautiful and passionate. However, when Dani, a young Primera, joins the resistance as a spy, she becomes determined to invert the whole system. Dystopian novels, while often set in ...
The Five Confucian Virtues (02/20)
In Yangsze Choo's The Night Tiger, the two main characters, Ji and Ren, are named for two of the five virtues that make up the ethical system of Confucianism. Confucianism is a spiritual/philosophical tradition born out of the teachings of Chinese philosopher Confucius (who is believed to have lived circa 551-479 BCE), and it has been ...
Property Ownership, Race and Upward Mobility (02/20)
In The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers, Bridgett M. Davis explains how property ownership was the key determinant in creating opportunity and prosperity across generations of her family. However, historically, there have been hefty barriers to property ownership for people of color in the United ...
Recent Reinterpretations of Pride and Prejudice (02/20)
Unmarriageable might be the first version of Pride and Prejudice set in Pakistan, but it's hardly the only creative retelling of this classic novel. Fortunately for fans of Jane Austen, several other imaginative reworkings of her beloved novel have been published recently - perhaps a Jane Austen book club could tackle any or all of these ...
The Potential Dangers of Consumer DNA Testing (02/20)
Early on in Inheritance Dani Shapiro agrees to order a DNA test through Ancestry.com along with her husband after he suddenly becomes interested in genealogy. The results of Shapiro's kit happened to be life changing, upending everything the memoirist thought she knew about her family history. Her experience is extraordinary, but there ...
Immunoassay: A Medical Diagnostic Test (02/20)
As reported in John Carreyrou's book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, Elizabeth Holmes's company Theranos produced a device that it claimed could run a medical diagnostic test called an immunoassay on a very small amount of blood.
An assay is a procedure for measuring the amount of, or presence of, a specific ...
Hadrian's Wall: Remains of a Fallen Empire (01/20)
Sarah Moss' novel Ghost Wall is set in Northumberland, Britain where Emperor Hadrian (AD 76-138) ordered his troops to build a wall about AD 122 when the region was under Roman rule. It's estimated that the wall was built over a six year span by at least 15,000 men. Excavations reveal that many sections of the wall were originally ditches...
The Black Panther Party (01/20)
In October of 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale of Oakland California founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which later became the Black Panther Party. Although the Party disbanded in 1982 only 16 years after its creation, it remains one of the largest and most controversial black revolutionary organizations in history. ...
Cattle Ranching in Australia (01/20)
Jane Harper's The Lost Man takes place on a cattle station in the Australian Outback. Cattle stations function quite differently than American or European beef cattle ranches. Many are extremely large; the territory devoted to raising the livestock is generally hot and arid, producing little vegetation, and so an immense area of land is ...
The Story of the Samaritans (01/20)
Many people are familiar with the phrase 'good Samaritan' from the parable in the Bible from which the phrase is derived, but who are the Samaritans? What was their place in history?
In her sprawling historical novel, The Parisian, Isabella Hammad draws attention to this ancient religion. She teases their story, but leaves you wanting ...
An Organ Donation Reading List (01/20)
Readers curious to learn more about organ transplantation after finishing surgeon Joshua D. Mezrich's memoir on the subject have a wealth of options to choose from; here are five recommendations, two fiction and three nonfiction:
Fiction:
The Tell-Tale Heart by Jill Dawson
Fifty-year-old Patrick is a philandering professor with a ...
Escalating Wildfires in the Western U.S. (01/20)
On June 5, 2013, lightning struck dead spruce trees 15 miles south of Pam Houston's ranch, sparking what would become known as West Fork Complex – one of the largest wildfires in Colorado history. West Fork Complex eventually consumed over 100,000 acres in Colorado and became one in a long and growing list of recent wildfires that ...
Leprosy (01/20)
In Daughter of Moloka'i by Alan Brennert, the main character is forcibly taken from her mother and put up for adoption because her mother was diagnosed with leprosy. Also called Hansen's Disease, leprosy affects a person's skin and peripheral nerves causing a loss of sensation and tissue degeneration. Those impacted may experience the ...
How the Cure for Tuberculosis Led to the Development of Anti-Depressants (01/20)
Sometimes inventions are derived by chance. In The Inflamed Mind: A Radical New Approach to Depression, Edward Bullmore notes that the first antibiotic treatment of tuberculosis (TB) led to the creation of the world's most widely used antidepressant drug: Prozac.
Tuberculosis is an infectious bacterial disease that most severely ...
Earworms: Why Do We Get Songs Stuck in Our Heads? (01/20)
In one of The Wrong Heaven's most memorable stories, the narrator feels she is gradually losing her mind when she cannot get the song 'Hand in My Pocket' by Alanis Morissette out of her head. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as an 'earworm.' The word has a multi-strand history: Apparently, in ancient times, dried and ground earwigs...
Time-Slip Novels (01/20)
The Heavens is not an easy novel to categorize, but on at least one level, it participates in a category of fantasy literature called a 'time-slip' novel, in which a character travels between two or more separate timelines. The mechanism for the shift in time varies, but can be reading letters, doing research, traveling through a doorway ...
World War II's "War Brides" (01/20)
News of Our Loved Ones is a poignant tale of family and loss during World War II. The story follows members of the Delasalle family and their close friends, focusing in particular on Geneviève, the eldest daughter. Geneviève's story stretches from her hometown of Caen, France to Paris, and then eventually to America as she makes...
Shakespeare and the Double Entendre (01/20)
In Benet Brandreth's The Spy of Venice, William Shakespeare is a brilliant wordsmith but still a young man with all of a young man's appetite for adventure and women. He's witty with a rapier-like pen and rakish sense of humor. But wait. Many people reading Shakespeare's plays might doubt that the Bard of Avon had much...
The Unhappy Paradox of Black Soldiers in World War I (01/20)
One of the central characters in Lyndsay Faye's The Paragon Hotel is a Black Pullman train porter who had served in the United States Army in World War I. Not unlike most veterans today, he was rightfully proud of both his rank and service to the country. Regretfully, his postwar country was not as proud of his service – or that of ...
Journalists on the Front Lines (01/20)
Hundreds of journalists and photographers have been killed in the line of duty, including Marie Colvin whose life story is told in
In Extremis. The international
Committee to Protect Journalists has been tallying data since 1992. As of 2018, more than 1,300 journalists have died while reporting on the job with more than 600 additional ...
Animal Sounds in Different Languages (01/20)
In Babel: Around the World in 20 Languages, Gaston Dorren writes about how Korean includes separate words for different kinds of meows. One word refers to the ordinary cry, and a different word is used to describe a more urgent vocalization. With this information, Dorren illustrates how sounds are indicative of a language's idiosyncrasies...
The Restoration of Dorothy's Ruby Slippers (01/20)
Finding Dorothy is the fictionalized story of Maud Gage Baum, the wife of L. Frank Baum of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz fame. Through dual narratives, Elizabeth Letts explores the lives of the Baums and the inspirations that led Frank to pen his famous novel, while also featuring Maud's fight to see her husband's work honored as it was ...
Gaudeamus Igitur (So Let Us Rejoice) (01/20)
The title of the novel Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko comes from a verse in the Latin song popularly known as Gaudeamus Igitur ('So Let Us Rejoice'). The work's lyrics urge their audience to enjoy all the pleasure they can because all will end too soon, and they also praise the student lifestyle. Although most often considered...
Robespierre's Reign of Terror (01/20)
Edward Carey's Little spans some of the most turbulent years in French history. A particularly ghastly chapter focuses on the Reign of Terror, during which little Marie, the novel's protagonist, spends months fearing for her own life and that of her family. Over two centuries later, the French Revolution calls to mind scenes of ...
Zār Exorcism (01/20)
Throughout Celestial Bodies there are a smattering of references to zār exorcisms, but little detail is given on what these ceremonies actually are. What becomes apparent, though, is that many al-Awafi villagers look forward to these gatherings.
For one character in the book, these exorcisms become a source of entertainment which...
The Great Dismal Swamp Maroons (12/19)
A central storyline in Ta-Nehisi Coates' novel The Water Dancer focuses on slaves attempting to flee the South to the free states of the North. Many runaways had to endure long journeys on foot and unimaginable dangers along the way, including the high-risk possibility of being re-captured and returned to their owners to be severely ...
The Pack Horse Library Project (12/19)
The WPA (
Works Progress Administration) established the Pack Horse Library Project in Eastern Kentucky during the Great Depression. The program, which was championed by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, employed librarians who delivered books and other reading materials to patrons on horseback, working to both create employment and improve ...
Memoirs by First Ladies (12/19)
Michelle Obama's memoir Becoming has been a huge success by all standards, and she joins a long and illustrious list of former First Ladies who have written memoirs. The appeal is obvious: who wouldn't want to know more about the women who've stood beside the President of the United States, acting as confidant, support system, and ...
India: A Feast of Languages (12/19)
In Madhuri Vijay's novel
The Far Field, characters speak a variety of languages: Hindi, Kashmiri, English, Tamil and Urdu. India has a shimmering history as the crossroads of civilizations and cultures, so it's not surprising that its inhabitants speak many languages. The constitution of India recognizes
22 official languages, but a 2011 ...
The Barbershop and Black Male Bonding (11/19)
As a young teen, Michael (in David Chariandy's Brother) begins spending time at the neighborhood barbershop, Desirea's, with his older brother and his friends. In the book, just as in life, black men visit the barbershop not just for haircuts, but to share their personal lives, discuss current events, listen to music and just relax with ...
The History of Bowling (11/19)
Bowling as a sport is arguably more familiar than it is popular. Top competitors and heroes of the sport are not typically household names, yet most people have a basic understanding of how it's played. Even without famous athletes promoting it, bowling is a steady component of modern culture. However, there has been a decline in its ...
What We Know, and Don't Know, About Sleep (11/19)
In The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker, an illness is spreading that causes everyone infected to go into a deep sleep with heightened brain activity that is suggestive of dreaming. Sleep and dreams are central to the novel, but there is a lot we don't know about both.
Different stages of sleep can be assessed through the use of an ...
Imaginary Friends (11/19)
One of the most memorable characters in
The Adults is not one of the titular adults, but a four-foot-tall purple bunny named Posey. Posey is seven-year-old Scarlett's imaginary friend, and - like a real person - he has fears, desires and opinions. But how normal are imaginary friends?
A study from the University of Oregon suggests that...
The Korean War: A War with Many Names (11/19)
In Eugenia Kim's novel The Kinship of Secrets, sisters Inja and Miran are separated by the military action known in Western countries as the Korean War. Officially a 'police action' – war was never declared – it is frequently referred to as 'the Forgotten War' or the 'Unknown War,' as many Americans knew little about it due to...
Great Britain's First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (11/19)
Odette Sansom, heroine of Larry Loftis's book Code Name Lise, began her espionage career as a member of the FANYs – Great Britain's First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.
FANY was formed as 'an all-female volunteer organisation which deploys multi-faceted rapid response teams to support civil and military authorities in times of crisis' and...
U.S. Support of Totalitarian Regimes in Central and South America (11/19)
The setting of Idra Novey's Those Who Knew is an unnamed island with a contentious intertwined relationship with its neighbor to the north, which supported the regime of a brutal dictator years before the events of the novel take place. The latter country would appear to represent the United States, and the circumstances reflect the ...
An Interview with JP Gritton (11/19)
I took some time to ask the author about his background, and the origins and themes of
his unique and tightly-crafted debut novel, Wyoming.
Q: Could you tell me a little about yourself? Where are you from originally, where are you now, and how did you come to write this novel?
I was born in Boulder, Colorado, which was a funky,...
The History of Chinese Immigration in the United States (11/19)
Large-scale Chinese immigration to America began in the mid-1800s, partly in response to economic instability in China during the Taiping Rebellion, a civil war that lasted from 1850-1864. Like many others, Chinese immigrants were also drawn
by the California Gold Rush.
After the gold rush ended, many Chinese people stayed on in the U...
Dovey Johnson Roundtree (1914-2018) (10/19)
Dovey Mae Johnson Roundtree was an African American civil rights activist and attorney who secured one of the most significant victories against Jim Crow segregation, and broke the color barrier of the Women's Bar in Washington D.C. She also served in the Women's Auxiliary Corps during World War II and, in 1961, became one of a select few...
Swarthmore College (10/19)
Much of Kurt Eichenwald's memoir, A Mind Unraveled, takes place while he attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
Swarthmore is the product of a meeting of the Joint Committee of Friends (aka Quakers) in 1861. The liberal Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends pushed for the establishment of a co-ed school 'under the care of ...
Simone de Beauvoir (10/19)
Lucy Adler, the teenage protagonist in
The Falconer, is influenced by her older cousin, Violet, a painter and feminist who provides a model of independent womanhood (albeit an imperfect one). In one scene, Violet takes Lucy to a bookstore and buys her copies of French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir's seminal texts,
The Ethics of ...
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