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I Came All This Way to Meet You by Jami Attenberg for $2.99

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The final weekend of the Premier League is here! Marcus, Jim and Andy are here with a tasty lowdown on today’s Preview Show, sponsored by Betway!

Frank Lampard cemented his status in English football folklore after Everton’s dramatic escape last night, while Leeds survival hopes hang by a thread. At the top end, one man stands between Man City and another glorious title: Steven George Gerrard.

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9 min read

A brief overview of the history of vaccination in Oxford

The remarkable success of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine’s rapid development, testing and rollout presents a moment in time to look briefly back at the history of vaccination in Oxford. Since the pioneering works of Edward Jenner in the 18th century with smallpox vaccination and the social and economic issues that ensued, clear correlations can be seen to those same issues being encountered today with the COVID 19 pandemic.

Many of the issues encountered in the 18th century are currently familiar. They included inoculation resistance, misinformation and conspiracy theories, quarantine and isolation, reporting and surveillance, vaccine passports (a requirement to work) and incentivisation programmes.

Early inoculation

Edward Jenner is well known around the world for his innovative contribution to inoculation and the ultimate eradication of smallpox. Smallpox, the deadliest of all eighteenth-century diseases, was a terrible disease that spread from person to person without discrimination. It was widely feared, killing approximately 30% of those infected. After the initial symptoms of headache, muscle aches, exhaustion and fever, the body would become entirely covered in a rash, including inside the eyes, earning smallpox the epithet ‘Speckled Monster’. Jenner’s work is widely regarded as the foundation of immunology although its origins were in non-white cultures including China, Africa and later Turkey. Many people’s lives were saved from death and horrendous disfigurement thanks to Jenner’s remarkable work and the later developments from his endeavours.

His work started with Sarah Nelmes, a dairy maid, who had become infected with cowpox. On 14 May 1796, Jenner removed matter from pustules on her hand which he then used to inoculate an eight-year-old boy (James Phipps) who then also developed pustules but quickly recovered. On 1 July, Jenner performed the second stage of the experiment by inoculating James with smallpox. His aim was to see if the cowpox vaccine worked. This was long before medical ethics; the risk Jenner took with the boy’s life today seems unacceptable.

Vaccinating Oxford

In 1796 Finmere villagers were among the first to benefit from Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccination and Robert Holt the local rector (among others) became an enthusiastic vaccinator. Holt’s achievements are noteworthy as he was untrained in medicine.  His work is an early example of overcoming inoculation resistance as his parishioners trusted him and there was success in the majority of cases. Holt supplied other clergymen and small village doctors with vaccine and was a leader in dissemination. However, not the most sanitary of procedures were always employed and secondary infections could occur which led, in time, to villagers’ refusals. Holt recognised the experimental nature of the procedure and robustly documented his results; this work earned him considerable praise within the medical profession.

As the U.S. Supreme Court threatens to overturn Roe v. Wade and dramatically decrease access to abortions across the country, the romance book world is fighting back. The Romance for Reproductive Justice auction is offering over 200 packages, including signed/annotated romance novels, author chats, manuscript queries, swag, and more in exchange for donations to National Network of Abortion Funds’ Collective Power Fund. The auction starts on May 21 and runs through May 23.

In early May, Politico leaked an initial draft of a U.S. Supreme Court majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito that would overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court Decision, which guarantees a constitutional right to abortion. Although the opinion isn’t final and abortion is still legal in the U.S., abortion rights activists are preparing for sweeping limits to reproductive freedom across the country. If Roe is overturned, 26 states are certain or likely to ban abortions according to the Guttmacher Institute. With little recourse for fighting the coming SCOTUS decision, pro-choice activists are looking for ways to increase access to abortion if Roe v. Wade is indeed overturned.

Meet Cute Romance Starts an Auction

That’s where the Romance for Reproductive Justice auction comes in. Meet Cute Romance Bookshop & Fizzery, a new romance-focused bookstore in La Mesa, California, jumped into action following the leaked SCOTUS documents.

“There was, very clearly visible on social media, a lot of anger in the romance community in the wake of the leaked Alito draft,” said Becca Title, founder of Meet Cute Romance Bookshop & Fizzery, in an interview with Book Riot. “Organizing this auction was a way for me to channel my own anger into something productive, and I have heard from a lot of our donors that the ability to donate gave them a similar outlet.”

In yet another ill-planned publicity stunt by a democratic elected official, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot — who did not step in to help Chicago Public Library workers during the pandemic — posted a photo of herself reading a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird in Houston’s Brazos Bookstore.

Behind her are several other books that have seen book challenges or outright bans in the last year, including Melissa (formerly George), Let’s Talk About Love, Go With the Flow, and more. Right-wing media seized this opportunity to call hypocrisy, much as they did when California’s Governor Newsom posed with a pile of banned books. Though he held Beloved, the media focused again on the carefully-placed copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, noting that Lee’s classic has been “banned” in several blue states.

Both publicity stunts did a good job once again confusing the public about the difference between a book ban and a curriculum update. While To Kill a Mockingbird has indeed been challenged and banned, the qualifier that it’s been banned in blue states is a conscious effort by right-wing banners to suggest that a book by a white woman about racism being replaced by books by Black authors who experience the true effects of racism is revoking free speech and freedom to read. As much as there is to dig into this willful misrepresentation, the real issue worth addressing here is how many public figures in speaking out against book bans refuse to engage with the issues of sex and gender (and indeed, race as well).

Among the most banned books in the past year are those which highlight sex, sexuality, and gender. PEN America’s report on book bans in US schools shows that queer characters and topics of sexuality are two of the biggest reasons a book is banned, falling right after books with protagonists of color. These categories, of course, overlap significantly, as seen through the books the American Library Association identified as the most challenged in 2021.

While there’s a range of ereaders on the market, there’s no arguing that the Kindle has taken the top spot in terms of popularity. But narrowing down your ereader purchasing to a Kindle is only the first step. After that, there’s the crucial question of which Kindle model to get. Two of the most well-loved Kindle models are the Paperwhite and the Oasis. They both have similar sized screens and share a lot of features. So, the Kindle Oasis vs. Paperwhite: which one should you get?

First, a little bit of history. The Kindle Paperwhite came out in 2012, and its latest generation/update was in 2021. The Kindle Oasis came out in 2016, and its latest generation/update was in 2019. I will be comparing the most recent generations of both, though because the Oasis has not been updated in three years, it will likely either see a new generation in the next year or so or be officially discontinued.

The Republic of Kenya is the 29th most populous country in the world, home to more than 47,600,000 people, and the third largest economy in Sub-Saharan Africa. It has an incredibly rich history, tracing primate habitation for more than 20 million years. Its borders encompass major cities of Nairobi, the current capital, founded by colonialists in 1899; Mombasa, the original capital, founded by Kenyans in 900 CE; and Kisumu, one of the oldest settlements in Kenya and located on Lake Victoria.

The country was invaded by Omani Arabs in the 17th century, who then established a slave trade with Portuguese colonialists. In the 1880s, Germany established Kenya as a protectorate (a deeply colonialist word), calling the whole country the “East Africa Protectorate,” which was transferred to the British in 1890. It was renamed Kenya in 1920; from 1952 to 1959, the Mau Mau people in Kenya fought a rebellion to release the country from British rule. On December 12, 1964, the Republic of Kenya was officially established and functions today as an independent democratic republic, although it is still considered part of the British Commonwealth.

With such a deep history and so many diverse voices — both African and not — in its history, it is no surprise that Kenya’s literature is equally multifaceted and beautiful. I’ve gathered ten books about Kenya here from Kenyan authors, based on recommendations from Kenyan readers and bloggers.

The Best Books About Kenya

If you grew up within the bounds of Western civilization, chances are you’ve heard of Mother Goose in one form or another. Maybe she was the charming and comforting old woman on the cover of the book your parents read to you at bedtime, or maybe she was an actual goose. Whatever the case, the nickname Mother Goose has been synonymous with childlike nursery rhymes and fairytales for centuries, but her true origin is up for debate.

Although she only came into prominence in Europe and North America between the 17th and 19th centuries, Mother Goose’s origins date back to as early as the 8th century CE. Betrada II of Laon, mother of Charlemagne (AKA Charles the Great, the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire), spent frequent time in children’s company telling them folk and fairytales.

Her most common nicknames were “Queen Goosefoot” or “Goose-foot Bertha,” as she suffered from a malformation of one of her feet. Some accounts suggest that it was Robert II of France’s wife who was Queen Goosefoot, as her name was also Bertha and her common nickname was “Bertha the Spinner” — referring to someone known for “spinning” fantastic tales that enthralled children. Another theory is that the original Mother Goose was the Queen of Sheba, who was known for having a “strange foot” that resembled that of a goose or swan.

Meanwhile, in France by the time of the mid-17th century, nicknames such as “Mère L’Oye” or “Mère Oye” — roughly translated to Mother Goose — were used as descriptors of women of a certain age who enjoyed delighting children with fairy and folktales. It was Charles Perrault who, in 1697, published his revered and largely influential collection of stories Histoires ou contes du temps passé often supplemented with the subtitle Contes de ma mère l’Oye.

English European readers, however, were already familiar with their own iteration of Mother Goose by the 17th century in the form of Old Mother Hubbard, a nursery rhyme by English poet, Edmund Spenser, first published around 1590. In the 1690s, as Perrault was gearing up to release his own goose into the wild, Madame d’Aulnoy — a French author of literary fairytales — began publishing collections under the pseudonym Mother Bunch, a figure similar to that of Mother Goose.

If you’re looking to read more books from around the world, beginning with novellas in translation makes a lot of sense. For reasons I don’t fully understand, a lot of the fiction that gets translated into English is novella length. It may be that the novella is a more dominant form in other countries than it is in the U.S., or it may be that shorter books are easier to translate and therefore easier to publish. Either way, there are many wonderful novellas in translation to choose from.

Personally, I love reading novellas: they are long enough to create the feeling of immersion in a story, but not so long that I, as a slow reader, feel bogged down. They are also a great way to try out new authors and styles without a major investment of time. If you like what you find, you can search out other books by that author or in that style.

Also, if you fall in love with a particular novella in translation, you can seek out other work from that country or region. The books in the list below come from Mexico, Palestine, Japan, Argentina, Switzerland, France, Colombia, and South Korea. Reading one of these might inspire you to learn more about the literary culture and traditions of that place.

You might also find a new favorite author. I have read and loved the books in this list and have gone on to seek out other work by these writers. You might have the same experience!