Menu
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Newton Center Green in Massachusetts was packed on Saturday, despite temperature in the 30’s and a biting wind. A 10-piece local brass band energized the crowd with a rousing Saints Go Marching In. There were young and old, black and…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 1995 and was reissued with an afterword in 2023. This is a BIG book not necessarily in length…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Heart the Lover by Lily King shares some themes with What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, the book I reviewed two days ago. They’re both set against the backdrop of academia. King focuses on four young people in college, their spirit…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. A week into Operation Epic Fury, the administration’s stated objectives have shifted by the hour and by the speaker: eliminate the nuclear program, roll back ballistic missiles, defang the proxies, respond to Israeli pressure, achieve regime change.…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is a beautifully written novel in epistolary style, presented as a series of fictional letters, mostly penned by one Sybil Van Antwerp over eighty+ years. Even as a child, she wrote letters, finding it easier…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Call me a masochist. I watched all of Trump’s State-of-the-Union speech. The President painted a picture of the nation as he wanted to see it. It was a swirling mix of fantasy, twisted rhetoric and outright lies. We’ve…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild was first published in 1998, but its 2020 relaunch, with a forward by noted author Barbara Kingsolver and the author’s own afterword, attests to its relevance today. A dogged historical researcher, Hochschild…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Paper Girl: a Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by journalist Beth Macy is a perfect complement to my just-reviewed Buckeye by Patrick Ryan. Think of Paper Girl as small-town Ohio, part 2, the contemporary, non-fiction version. Macy grew up in Urbana,…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Buckeye by Patrick Ryan is a beautifully written novel about a fictional town in Ohio (Bonhomie), not far from Toledo. If you’ve ever lived in a small town, it may feel like home to you. The span is immediate pre-World…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Flesh by Hungarian-British author David Szalay was recently announced as the winner of the 2025 Booker Award. Although the Booker board called it “a propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unraveled by a series of events beyond his…
Read More »