Fiction Books Research Articles

An Interview with Tony Ardizzone

Tony Ardizzone was born and raised on the North Side of Chicago and is the author of eight books of fiction. His most recent work includes the novel The Whale Chaser and an interconnected story collection set in Rome, By the Fountain of the Four Rivers. He has also written the novels In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu, Heart of the Order, and In the Name of the Father, as well as the story collections Larabi's Ox: Stories of Morocco, Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood, and The Evening News. Ardizzone's writing has been awarded the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award for Fiction, the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Pushcart Prize, the Virginia Prize for Fiction, the Milkweed Editions National Fiction Prize, the Bruno Arcudi Literature Prize, the Lawrence Foundation Award, as well as two individual artist fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Authorship of the Original Doctor Who Library and Lotka’s Law

ABSTRACTThe Doctor Who Library forms one of the longest running and most extensive fiction book series for children and young people, and its role in promoting literacy within these groups in the 1970s and 1980s was very considerable. This article investigates the authorship of the Library’s 159 volumes, which, almost without exception, are novelizations of the serials making up the original version of Doctor Who that ran on British television between 1963 and 1989. The article explores how far authorship patterns are consistent with Lotka’s Law and the kinds of tendencies that are highlighted by Bradford’s Law. Although the relationship between the number of Doctor Who books and the number of the authors responsible for them does not accurately reflect the statistical proportions stated by Lotka’s Law, the general patterns inherent in the Law do indeed prevail.

En pos de Juan Rulfo by Pol Popovic Karic

Reviewed by: En pos de Juan Rulfo by Pol Popovic Karic Douglas J. Weatherford Popovic Karic, Pol. En pos de Juan Rulfo. Monterrey/México DF: Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey/Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 2015. Pp. 268. ISBN 978-6-07401-983-4. On the centennial of Juan Rulfo's birth in 1917, Pol Popovic Karic's En pos de Juan Rulfo is one of many publications that can be expected on the Jalisco native's creative canon. Popovic Karic envisions his efforts in personal terms and begins with a letter to the iconic author "para cumplir, en cierta medida, con mi frustrado deseo de comunicarme con él" (11). En pos de Juan Rulfo is, nonetheless, a fairly standard anthology of twelve independent essays whose organizational glue is an exegesis of the narrative of one of Latin America's most significant writers. The anthology deals almost exclusively with Rulfo's two canonical works, dedicating about the same amount of space to an analysis of Pedro Páramo as to selected stories from El Llano en llamas, including "La herencia de Matilde Arcángel," "El día del derrumbe," "Nos han dado la tierra," "La Cuesta de las Comadres," "El hombre," "Es que somos muy pobres," "En la madrugada," "Talpa," and "Macario." Popovic Karic discusses Rulfo's second novel, El gallo de oro, only briefly in the first chapter, he does not mention Rulfo's photographic or filmic production, and he steers clear of the author's biography. The critic explores Rulfo's first published novel in chapters titled "Las mentiras en Pedro Páramo," "Los embaucadores enredados en Pedro Páramo," "El momento inicial de Pedro Páramo," "La fragmentación y la continuidad en Pedro Páramo," and "Los caminos hacia Pedro Páramo." Rulfo's collection of short stories is the focus of essays titled "El cartesianismo en 'El día del derrumbe,'" "La ingenuidad en El Llano en llamas," "La sensibilidad y la sensualidad: 'En la madrugada,'" "El calor y el agua [End Page 695] en El Llano en llamas," and "Las voces en 'Macario.'" Two additional chapters, "La ironía en la obra de Juan Rulfo" and "Los hijos en la obra de Juan Rulfo," examine both books of fiction. Although En pos de Juan Rulfo is less than groundbreaking, it is still an enjoyable exploration of one critic's distinctive journey through Rulfo's literary canon, with insights that make it worth the effort for Rulfo specialists and aficionados. Popovic Karic typically grounds each essay in a critical or theoretical concept (e.g. irony, otherness, Cartesianism, fragmentation, among others) while limiting each bibliography to a small handful of readings. Although such an approach is likely to please some readers, the anthology could benefit from a more proper acknowledgement of and dialogue with other critics who have considered similar issues in published research. Enthusiasts of Rulfo's literature will find that Popovic Karic often challenges and enlarges our understanding of Pedro Páramo and El Llano en llamas and will appreciate the new insights gained by reading his work. And yet there are moments when one might question the author's interpretation of the world that Rulfo fictionalized. In his examination of the sons of Pedro Páramo, for example, Popovic Karic suggests that "Pedro se apropia de su destino desde la temprana edad . . ." (66). Another reading of the novel might envision Rulfo's youthful Pedro as a still vulnerable individual who has yet to be converted by anger and loss into the "rencor vivo" that Abundio Martínez describes. To be sure, the ambiguity of these classics of Mexican literature allows each reader a certain freedom of analysis and it is Popovic Karic's ability to question our understanding of those texts that this review has already praised. It is likely, however, that readers of En pos de Juan Rulfo will find other interpretations with which they simply will not agree. One perplexing example is found in "Las mentiras en Pedro Páramo" where the author identifies "una confusion topográfica relacionada con la inclinación del camino" (42) as one of the novel's untruths. The narrator of Pedro...

The First Two Libraries of the Society for Promotion of Rural Free Libraries-Reading Rooms in the Tomsk Province (the first decade of the 20th century)

There is considered the preparatory work of the Council of the Society for promotion of rural free libraries-reading rooms in the Tomsk province on promotion among the rural population of the idea of benefit of libraries. There is described in details the opening of the first libraries of the Society for promotion — in Sudzhensk and Novo-Kuskovo of the Tomsk district of the Tomsk province. For the first time there is restored in detail the age and educational structure of their readers, who were mainly the students of the local village schools and those who attended these institutions in that time. There are shown the main indices of the first months of libraries’ operation and circulation of books by departments. There is given the comparative characteristics of the readers’ interests. Fiction literature was of the greatest demand in both libraries: fiction books were taken by more than half of the visitors of libraries. Books of spiritual and moral content, as well as on history and geography were also of interest to the rural readers. For the first time it was calculated the readability — the number of books, which took to read one visitor during the certain period of time as a whole, as well as per one month on average. On the basis of several years reports of the Council of the Society for promotion there is traced the further fate of these libraries and revealed quantitative indicators of their work. Basing on study of the reading circle of the villagers, there is made conclusion on the insufficient extent and depth of penetration of modernization processes in Siberian village.

The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque by Libby Murphy

Reviewed by: The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque by Libby Murphy Cecilia Benaglia (bio) Libby Murphy. The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 304 pages. Many accounts of life in the trenches during World War I written by French combatants share a certain air de famille, which is due not only to the similar conditions and objective situations they narrate, but also to the type of humanity these texts describe. Libby Murphy' The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque proposes to read the common traits shared by numerous World War I fictional books, and in general by cultural artifacts from this period, through the notion of the picaresque. In her book, Murphy approaches the picaresque not as a historically bound genre in which modern writers would inscribe their work, but rather as an "ethos," or as a "way of life" that she describes in the following terms: "(one) based on self-preservation through resourceful improvisation, making do, and accepting conditions as they are, rather than trying to change them" (2). If this mood was so common in the literature and the culture of the Great War, it is because it offered writers, journalists and common civilians an alternative narrative path to the traditional language of heroism. In Murphy's own terms, the picaresque provides them "an alternative imaginative framework to tragedy and victimization—a framework for surviving conditions as they are" (3). In all the novels that represent this "way of life," we encounter modern incarnations of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish picaro; despite inevitable variations, these figures maintain something in common: an acceptance of the world as it is, a pragmatic attitude aiming at surviving amidst disastrous situations and an immunity in the face of violence and abuse. The book is divided into eight chapters; each of them deals with a specific aspect of the war picaresque. Along with detailed analysis of novels belonging to the "canon" of First World War literature, from Voyage au bout de la nuit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline to Les Croix de bois by Roland Dorgelès, Murphy proposes fascinating readings based on a large variety of historical and cultural documents. In the chapter entitled "Tactics of the Foot Soldier. The Arts and Antics of Système D," the author analyses la débrouille, namely the capability of "getting out of trouble, making do, cultivating the art of expedients, living by one's wits" (44-45). By shifting attention from the moment of extreme combat violence to episodes of rest and of everyday life of the soldiers, Murphy adopts Michel de Certeau's notion of tactic to read the Système D, a mindset [End Page 1118] and a slogan that became popular and widespread in France to the point of being "elevated to the status of national mantra" (11). Murphy's goal is to use the notion of the picaresque to reread in an original and coherent perspective a large body of diversified cultural productions. Even more interestingly, she also approaches the picaresque as a notion that can contribute to a major historiographical debate around people's participation in the Great War. Indeed, historians are still grappling with a challenging question: how and why did millions of people agree to fight for such a long period of time and in such terrible conditions? A first position, known as the paradigm of consent and shared by historians working at the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne, supports the vision according to which French soldiers had a deep commitment to the war and felt a strong identification with the Republic. A second vision, common among historians of the Collectif de Recherche International et de Débat sur la guerre de 1914–1918, argues that soldiers kept fighting because they were victims of coercion. According to Murphy, the picaresque mediates between these two positions making it possible to keep together aspects that seem in contradiction with each other, and thus to embrace the complexity of the situations French society was going through. Neither powerless victims nor martyrs, soldiers imagined and represented themselves as picaresque survivors whose...

ФЕНОМЕН "РОЗСТРІЛЯНОГО ВІДРОДЖЕННЯ" (ДО 80 РОКОВИН РОЗСТРІЛІВ В УРОЧИЩІ САНДАРМОХ)

In this paper we review the contribution of the writers, poets and painters of the so-called "Executed Renaissance" to Ukrainian culture. We showcase the peculiarities and dimensions of this phenomenon. The Ukrainian National Revival of the 1920s is shown as a spiritual process and movement, a model of perception of the world of the executed generation. We try to outline the most important features of the Ukrainian elite's worldview and to showcase their political, ideological and ethical principles which partly caused further repressions. The creative process of the Ukrainian intellectual elite had stunning results: thousands of papers and translations of the world best fiction and non-fiction books, numerous poetic anthologies, bibliographical reference books, readers, monographs. This fast cultural growth was aborted by the World War I. The National Revolution of 1917 droved for a very short time a new spire of the cultural prosperity, but the establishing of the Soviet State directed this cultural Renaissance to its very end, so to say to the execution of the Ukrainian cultural elite.

“The Great Terror” in the Contemporary British Novel

The mythological image of Russia in British fiction has been historically shaped and recurrently repeated for many centuries. Between the late 20 th and the early 21 st centuries the image of Russia and the Soviet Union was widely used by the authors of detective, adventure, etc. fiction, but it was also taken up by the leading British writers. The Great Terror of the Stalin epoch was described in a number of fiction and non-fiction books of the early 21 st century. The author analyses novels of three British authors devoted to the topic: House of Meetings (2006) by Martin Amis, The Siege (2001) and The Betrayal (2010) by Helen Dunmore, and The Noise of Time (2016) by Julian Barnes. The three authors clearly show their profound knowledge of Russian and Soviet history and culture, but their points of view on them, as well as their estimation of the country’s future, are different. Both M. Amis and his protagonist are sure that the whole country is a “big zona” without any historical future. Conversely, H. Dunmore is sure that the great terror did not annihilate the country’s potential, and the sources of inspiration for the Russian people lie in the country’s great culture, great city (Leningrad), and great country. J. Barnes’s novel is a brief biography of D. Shostakovich, but it is also a reflection on an artist’s existence under totalitarian pressure. Thus, the three British writers look at a concrete period of Soviet history from different, sometimes opposite, points of view, and come to different conclusions.

“We Missed Caparica”: a Experiência Educativa do Estrangeiro em The Young Traveller in Portugal (1955)

In 1947, shortly after World War II, when major growth in tourism began, the London publisher Phoenix House launched an illustrated series titled «The Young Traveller Series». The first volume, set in South Africa, would be followed by another 40, targeting 12 to 16 year olds. The aim was to describe the way of life in several countries, exposing young readers to the diversity of the world and to linguistic and cultural differences. Avoiding the drier conventions of the travel book (in particular the profusion of objective, practical, utilitarian information), the series adopted an attractive and effective method of presenting the Other to an audience comprising children and young people, publishing narratives starring children and teenagers who go through the exciting experience of coming into contact with the most diverse regions of the globe. In 1955 a volume dedicated to Portugal was published: The Young Traveller in Portugal, by the journalist Honor Wyatt (1910-1998). A “book of fiction based on fact”, it is strongly autobiographical in tone, as it is the result of a journey to Estado Novo Portugal made by the author in 1953 together with her husband and two children, with the specific purpose of writing a book about this Iberian country. According to the principles of the series, the work relates a trip that from the beginning is intended as educational. Travelling along an alternative itinerary to those enshrined in travel guides, the English family escapes growing massification and instead seeks circuits that correspond to individual tastes and cultural interests. This article analyses how Portugal and the Portuguese are portrayed in this work for young British readers. Special attention is paid to the attitude of the protagonists towards the Portuguese Other and to the way the trip is presented as an experience that provides a comparison between the place of origin of the traveller and the country visited, with the consequent process of self-identification through differentiation. Getting away from the routine of everyday English life represents for the two younger characters a chance of adventure and personal challenge that has always been associated with travel. Furthermore, it is an opportunity to learn two important lessons: that Europe is not a homogeneous space, that it is, rather, made up of differences and specificities, and that the experience of the foreign can promote tolerance and understanding among peoples and cultures.

BeForever?: Disability in American Girl Historical Fiction

BeForever?: Disability in American Girl Historical Fiction Sami Schalk (bio) … with inspiring characters and timeless stories from America’s past … BeForever gives girls today the opportunity to explore the past, find their place in the present, and think about the possibilities the future can bring. —“American Girl Unveils Beforever Line” Launched in August 2014, the American Girl BeForever line is the brand’s attempt to make historical fiction more marketable to the contemporary “tween” girl market with “all-new, historically accurate outfits and accessories for dolls; new and refreshed fiction books; and an original line of historically inspired clothing for girls” (“American Girl Unveils” n. pag.). This repackaged line contains the same stories American Girl has been publishing for nearly thirty years in a revised format which tries to emphasize that girls and the qualities the company associates with them, such as can-do attitudes, creativity, and helpfulness, are “forever.” Not all girls throughout history, however, fit into the optimistic, bright, and marketable images of the BeForever line and this rebranding does little to address the qualms many critics of American Girl have already expressed about the brand’s watering down of history and its encouragement of rapid conspicuous consumption among its young audience. Who fits into the BeForever image of the continuity of girls throughout time and who must be kept off the glossy pages of the American Girl catalog in order to sell this particular understanding of history to children? In what follows, I analyze the role of disability in the historical fiction of the American Girl brand. I argue that the American Girl brand represents disability as mostly absent from history, while gender, race, and class are depicted as universal concerns which exist throughout a variety of historical periods. I further assert that the representation of disability in the American Girl BeForever line is emblematic of concerns with diversity in children’s historical fiction and reflects the particularly fraught nature of the incorporation of disability into neoliberal diversity models which prioritize specific notions of empowerment. American Girl (AG) is a multiproduct brand that is marketed through discourses of gendered empowerment and education which [End Page 164] appeal to both girls and their caretakers. The AG brand produces books (including a line of historical fiction, a line of contemporary fiction, and a line of self-help and craft books), dolls and accessories (including items which match the characters from the two fiction lines), girls’ clothing and accessories, a magazine, an interactive Web site, movies, and several flagship brand stores and smaller retail outlets. The brand has recently expanded to sell products in both Canada and Mexico. AG earns more than 400 million dollars per year and is recognizable to over ninety percent of girls in the United States (Borghini et al. 364, Schlosser 1). The origin narrative of American Girl begins in 1986, when a former teacher and textbook writer, Pleasant Rowland, was inspired to start the brand after two experiences: first, visiting Colonial Williamsburg and wishing there was a way to bring history to life for children and, second, being dissatisfied choosing a doll for her nieces when the options were either a sexualized Barbie doll or a Cabbage Patch baby doll (Chuppa-Cornell 107, Borghini et al. 364). Rowland sought to create high-quality dolls which girls could befriend (rather than emulate or mother in the cases of Barbie and Cabbage Patch dolls, respectively) and which, through stories, would connect girls with history in interesting ways (Chuppa-Cornell 107). Thus American Girl was created, starting with just three dolls/characters, each with their accompanying six-book series (written at a fourth to fifth grade reading level) and a collection of text-related accessories for girls and their dolls, all sold by mail order catalog. The brand rapidly expanded into the avenues noted above and in 1998, Rowland sold American Girl to Mattel (Rowland 41). Since then, the brand has remained consistently popular and revenue-generating with over 147 million books and 25 million dolls sold since 1986 (“American Girl | Fast Facts”). Mattel’s takeover of AG has resulted in an increased focus on and expansion of the contemporary line, while simultaneously resulting in the relative stasis...

Совместное изучение художественных книг и кино как метод коррекционной работы с эмоциональной сферой при расстройствах аутистического спектра

Technique of joint reading and discussion of fiction books and movies as a method of psycho-correctional therapy with autistic children of school age and young people is presented. Cognitive, emotional-volitional sphere deficits strongly impede the reading by autistic people on their own and productive mastering by them of the literature course at school age. In order to the work leave a mark in the soul of an autistic person, enrich his ideas about the world of people and about himself , it is necessary to learn a book slowly and to return to it on different occasions and in different contexts. The ways of aid an autistic person in connecting the work content and his own life experience and emotional impressions, in developing possibilities of an empathy, in remembering the content and using it later are described. Then, a matter of choosing appropriate books and films for such a job is discussed. The article describes techniques that help an autistic person to connect the content of a work with his own emotional experience and life experiences. Also it describes abilities which develop the empathy to the characters of a work, the memorization of the work's plot and the actualization of information about a work in the future.

MODERN FICTION AS FACTOR OF STUDENTS’ READING CULTURE DEVELOPMENT

Nowadays there is an urgent need for the formation of students’ reading culture in a modern university. It is necessary to enhance the educational value of a book in students, who are losing their interest in reading. Fiction is gradually becoming less popular among youth (as compared to cinema and music, it ranks third). This was confirmed by the results of the research conducted in 2012 and in 2016 at the Pedagogical Institute of Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University (PNU) and Pedagogical Faculty of Mukachevo State University (MSU). 78 students (majoring in Primary Education) and 30 students (majoring in Social Pedagogy) at PNU and 96 students at MSU were involved in the research. Most of the students were females. Applying such methods as questionnaires, conversations, interviewing and observations, we studied the place of fiction in the system of students’ inquiries, its role in education, as well as students’ knowledge of educational fiction. The whole complex of the methods used ensured the reliability of the research results and confirmed that students’ reading culture is an integral part of the job profile diagram of a qualified teacher/educator. The level of students’ reading culture may be enhanced in the case of implementing a specially organised system of teacher education. This system should enable students to acquire an awareness of the works by modern writers; introduce popular fiction books into students’ extracurricular activity. In our opinion, student involvement in literary societies and research centres of modern literature may facilitate the formation of literary interests among future teachers.

Birth of the cool: a two-centuries decline in emotional expression in Anglophone fiction

ABSTRACTThe presence of emotional words and content in stories has been shown to enhance a story’s memorability, and its cultural success. Yet, recent cultural trends run in the opposite direction. Using the Google Books corpus, coupled with two metadata-rich corpora of Anglophone fiction books, we show a decrease in emotionality in English-speaking literature starting plausibly in the nineteenth century. We show that this decrease cannot be explained by changes unrelated to emotionality (such as demographic dynamics concerning age or gender balance, changes in vocabulary richness, or changes in the prevalence of literary genres), and that, in our three corpora, the decrease is driven almost entirely by a decline in the proportion of positive emotion-related words, while the frequency of negative emotion-related words shows little if any decline. Consistently with previous studies, we also find a link between ageing and negative emotionality at the individual level.

Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson: A Biography by Elizabeth Maslen

Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson: Biography, by Elizabeth Maslen. Northwestern University Press, 2014. 556 pages. After decades of neglect, at best making cameo appearances in lists of little-read writers of the or as a star in recovery scholarship, Storm Jameson might well be on the cusp of a true revival. As part of Northwestern University Press's series Cultural Expressions of II, the second major biography of this always engaging, never flawless, luminary of twentieth-century British letters and political activism may hopefully accelerate a growing wave of critical evaluation to match the historical interest. Jameson was a vital part of world historical events of the 1930s and 1940s, working diligently through the interwar years in the peace movement and serving as a Sponsor in the Peace Pledge Union. In the years leading up to the Second War, she began assisting political refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe, the most famous of these being Czeslaw Milosz, who would be a friend to the end of her life. During the war, Jameson was elected president of PEN, the international organization of writers that, under her leadership, changed from being avowedly apolitical to becoming directly engaged with advocating for social justice against fascist regimes. It was at her behest that PEN would publish An Appeal to the Conscience of the World (1940), urging allied countries and all PEN centers to fight for universal free speech. And it was as PEN's president, though not officially speaking on its behalf, that she would publish her pamphlet End of This War (1941), the document that announced her formal break with the absolute pacifism that was crucial to her activist politics after the Great War. This impressive resume of political activity during a much studied time in European history might have been enough to merit biographical scrutiny, but Jameson was first and foremost a writer, the staggeringly prolific author or editor of seventy books of fiction, criticism, drama, politics, and memoir. Her productivity was spurred along partly by financial need, but unlike other highly productive writers--Georgette Heyer, say, or Jameson's much admired Georges Simenon--she never quite managed to make formulaic genre fiction a forte. Her letters often show a desire to have either more time to spend on a big serious novel or the capacity to crank out hack work that could readily sell. She would have neither. Reading Maslen's biography, one finds a lifelong saga of mixed reviews that fail to fully comprehend the complex, formally experimental, politically engaged fiction that it seems Jameson could not help but write. She also never seemed to be a truly rapid writer, revising heavily and spending fourteen-hour days with her fiction as well as her political activities, along with, as Maslen notes, keeping house for her husband and son. All of Jameson's Yorkshire-bred hardiness and work ethic combines with a distinct challenge for any biographer--the thicket of harsh self-criticism that pervades her letters and her monumental autobiography Journey from the North (published in Britain in two volumes, 1969-1970). Maslen is an adept reader of Jameson's writings, both the published works and the archival materials, and throughout her biography there are signs of the combative approach Maslen takes to her subject, a necessary measure it one does not wish to accept Jameson's nearly constant self-deprecation as fact. For instance, her novel That Was Yesterday (1932), which she sometimes regarded as her first mature work, begins with this disclaimer on the copyright page: A few sentences in this book, chiefly conversational, have been lifted with slight alterations from an earlier novel of the writer's. This earlier book was fortunately not much read: even more fortunately it was printed on quickly perishable paper. The pity is that it was printed at all. This, one thinks, would not inspire confidence in the prospective reader. …

Planning the future of plant systematics: Report on a special colloquium at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Planning the future of plant systematics: Report on a special colloquium at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Uneven Earth: a slow website for environmental justice

In 2003 Jacqueline Winspear’s first novel was published in the usa, starting a succesfull series of historical fiction books featuring Maisie Dobbs, a young woman starting a career as a private investigator. Set in early Thirties London, Winspear’s books are not only an example of historical mistery, but can also be considered a result of a long research process made by the author; through all the novels a strong sense of memory and loss connected to the aftermath of Great War can be found. The main character was a nurse during the war, and the awful experiences she dealt with in that period are still present on her mind, as are on all English people’s minds. In every book Maisie has to solve an investigation case that always bring her to face the physical and psychological consequences of war. The aim of the article is to analyze some of the various topics that run under the novels’ main plots, such as the sense of disenchantment felt by the majority of English society or the change in women’s condition.

Death of an elephant

Old and new books of fiction are abundantly visible on checkout counters, public libraries, and bookstores in shopping malls and on the Internet. They usually deal with mystery, romance, and sellable thrills of life. That explains the conspicuous invisibility of Death of an Elephant. It’s a novella, self-published by a serious academic. Brij Mohan's debut in the reality-based realm of fiction mocks at the ‘absurdities’ of life in an otherwise progressive, happy, and affluent world.

Enhancing the Clinical Reasoning Skills of Postgraduate Students in Internal Medicine Through Medical Nonfiction and Nonmedical Fiction Extracurricular Books

ObjectiveTo improve the clinical reasoning skills of postgraduate students in internal medicine through 2 kinds of extracurricular books: medical nonfiction and nonmedical fiction. MethodsClinical reasoning is difficult to define, understand, observe, teach, and measure. This is an educational innovation under an experimental framework based on a cognitive intervention grounded in constructivist and cognitivist theories. This study was conducted from June 1, 2014, through May 31, 2015. It was a pre-post, randomized, controlled, prospective, mixed-methods, small-group study. The intervention was through medical nonfiction and nonmedical fiction books. The process was structured to ensure that the students would read the material in phases and reflect on them. Clinical reasoning (pretests and posttests) was quantitatively assessed using the Diagnostic Thinking Inventory (DTI) and clinical reasoning exercises (CREs) and their assessment using a rubric. A qualitative design was used, and face-to-face semistructured interviews were conducted. ResultsPosttest total scores (DTI=188.92; CREs=53.92) were higher for the study group after the intervention compared with its own pretest scores (DTI=165.25; CREs=41.17) and with the pretest (DTI=159.27; CRE=40.73) and posttest (DTI=166.91; CREs=41.18) scores of the control group. Interviews with the study group confirmed that the intervention was acceptable and useful in daily practice. ConclusionWe introduced, evaluated, and proved an approach to teaching-learning clinical reasoning based on the assumption that the clinical reasoning skills of postgraduate students in internal medicine can be enhanced through 2 kinds of extracurricular books and that fun as well as interest will enhance learning. This study is not only about teaching-learning clinical reasoning but also about the humanities in medical education.

Bringing a Taste of Abroad to Australian Readers: <em>Australian Wines & Food Quarterly</em> 1956–1960

Bringing a Taste of Abroad to Australian Readers: <em>Australian Wines & Food Quarterly</em> 1956–1960

Diary of a Wimpy Kid by J. Kinney - 3rd review

Kinney, Jeff. Diary of a Wimpy Kid. New York: Amulet Books, 2007. Print.In the book their grandpa moved in with them. And his mom has been talking about the old days and their grandpa made them wash him. I like the book cause it’s funny and cool and and it has pictures and sometimes I don’t really like reading cause sometimes it gets boring. I rate this book 10 stars cause I like it.Highly recommended: 5 out of 5 stars Reviewer: LenayaMy name is Lenaya and I like nuggets. My favorite ice cream is cookies and cream. I like reading fiction and I like reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid. I also like real life books and fiction books. I like to read Diary of a Wimpy Kid because I like it it’s funny. What I would change about the book is to make it more fiction because then it cannot be true.

The Treasure of Easter Island by G. Stilton

Stilton, Geronimo. The Treasure of Easter Island. New York: Scholastic, 2013. Print.What happens in the book is Geronimo's sister Thea went to Easter Island to look for treasure on it. She got captured by pirates. Thea, one of the characters, met Professor Von Dusty Fur, he is an archaeologist who specializes in ancient treasure. Then Geronimo and his friends, Wild Willy and Susie Shutter mouse, trap his cousin. They all fell down a hole and landed right under the Rano Kau Volcano. After a pirate took them out of their cage then tied them up behind crates full of gold coins. I like to read this book because it has a sense of adventure and fun. Treasure Island would be a fun place to go to some day and explore. I rate this book as a 5 out of 5. Highly recommended: 5 out of 5 stars Reviewer: JoshuaMy name is Joshua and what I like to read is fictional books. Some books I like to read are by Geronimo Stilton or the book Spirit Animals. I enjoy reading because I can keep my mind busy and it is fun reading about stories that could be true but aren't.