The role of community in two novels by Barbara Kingsolver

Throughout her career, contemporary writer Barbara Kingsolver has written novels that appeal to both readers and critics. Beginning with The Bean Trees in 1988, through Poisonwood Bible in 1998, Kingsolver established herself as a rising star among contemporary writers. In a review of one of the Kingsolver’s books, one critic said, “It seems there is nothing she can’t do” (Smith 3). Kingsolver sets herself apart from many of her peers in both her style and her themes. Raised in Kentucky, but now living in Arizona, she has a gift for storytelling. Her dialogue is strong, especially in its ability to capture the sound and voice of the working class. Her characters, for the most part, are well developed. Very often, they are people we would want as friends and neighbors, especially in the toughest of times. Her fiction is full of humor even when the subject is dark. All of these elements—dialogue, characterization and humor—add up to a style that is both literary and accessible. She told one interviewer: “I really believe that complex ideas can be put across in simple language. And a good plot never hurt anybody. It doesn’t cost you in literary terms to give your readers a reason to turn a page” (Kerr 55). Kingsolver also sets herself apart by incorporating her political views into her writing. She laments what she perceives to be a modern-day separation of art and politics, and she feels an obligation to write about the issues that she feels are important. In an interview with Lisa See of Publishers Weekly, Kingsolver says she wants to leave the world a little more reasonable and just” (46). She says the way to do this is through her writing: “The only authentic and moving fiction you can write is about things that are most urgent to you and worth disturbing the universe over” (47

Making it Work: Factors that Influence the Success of Programs at Rural Community Colleges

Community colleges are expected to contribute to economic development efforts by implementing new programs that respond to the needs of business and industry. Program development is complex, especially for community colleges in rural areas where business and industry are scarce. This qualitative study explores the factors that influence successful occupational programs at rural community colleges. Participants included administrators, faculty members, and students associated with three rural community colleges in West Virginia, as well as one state-level administrator and a former community college president. This study indicates the importance of five factors that influence the success of occupational programs: demand for the skills taught by the program, the leadership of the program director, the effectiveness of instruction, the support provided to students, and the relationship to business and industry

Crossing the phantom divide in brane cosmology with curvature corrections and brane-bulk energy transfer

We consider the Randall-Sundrum brane-world model with bulk-brane energy transfer where the Einstein-Hilbert action is modified by curvature correction terms: a four-dimensional scalar curvature from induced gravity on the brane, and a five-dimensional Gauss-Bonnet curvature term. It is remarkable that these curvature terms will not change the dynamics of the brane universe at low energy. Parameterizing the energy transfer and taking the dark radiation term into account, we find that the phantom divide of the equation of state of effective dark energy could be crossed, without the need of any new dark energy components. Fitting the two most reliable and robust SNIa datasets, the 182 Gold dataset and the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS), our model indeed has a small tendency of phantom divide crossing for the Gold dataset, but not for the SNLS dataset. Furthermore, combining the recent detection of the SDSS baryon acoustic oscillations peak (BAO) with lower matter density parameter prior, we find that the SNLS dataset also mildly favors phantom divide crossing.Comment: 11 pages,3 figures, revtex4, revised version, accepted for publication in Phys. Lett.