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The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Becoming Madame Secretary by Stephanie Dray is a piece of historical fiction about Frances Perkins, named by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be the Secretary of Labor, the first woman elevated to a cabinet position and the longest service Labor…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. I’ve never been a fan of Chuck Schumer. I find him frequently ineffectual and sometimes fatuous. But in the current intraparty squabble among Democrats about advancing this week’s Continuing Resolution, I regret to say he and nine other…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron own blog. Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks is a perfect book for any reader who has loved Brooks’s novel Horse, or Caleb’s Crossing, March, or The Secret Chord. Her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Tony Horowitz (Confederates in the Attic, Spying on the South, Baghdad without a Map)…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell is a wonderful biography about an extraordinary woman who played a key role in the defeat of the Nazis in the 1940’s, a woman of courage and powerful leadership skills, a woman…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. No Country for Love by Yaroslav Trofimov, the Ukrainian-born chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, covers Ukraine from 1930-1954 and is based on the real-life experiences of his own grandmother, whom he interviewed right up to the…
Read More »The entry below is being cross-posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. There’s a new crime boss in town, and he’s the old crime boss with the gloves off. There was plenty of crime in the first Trump administration, but much of it was behind a gauzy veil. It mostly had…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali is a timely read, a coming-of-age story by the author of The Stationery Store, which also draws on her Iranian background. Dedicated “to the brave women of Iran,” it is told in the…
Read More »The entry below is being cross-posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald has a little bit of Marcel Proust, something of James Joyce, a dose of Freud and a lot of post-WWII PTSD. The landscape is usually desolate, the lighting dark; the often-abandoned buildings are old, dank and soot-stained,…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes is an amazing and accessible book on the history of Russia, the central theme of which traces Russia’s mythologies as a key to the Russian character, leadership and major events. There are lots…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Trump world is giving us the “madman theory of foreign policy” and a reign of terror domestically. Around the world, he is fashioning himself as unpredictable and irrational, which comes naturally to him and doesn’t have to be “fashioned.” Just…
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