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The enrty below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Time of the Child by Niall Williams returns us to the setting for his last novel, This is Happiness. We’re deposited back in the rural Irish village of Faha, where the men work hard and douse end-of-workday frustrations at the local…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of The Odyssey was a very different read for me. I had read a couple of versions of The Odyssey in my younger life. But her fresh translation of Homer came highly recommended, and I decided to give it…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The azaleas, daffodils and hyacinths are blooming; Passover and Easter celebrate rebirth. Spring blooms, however, are evanescent. We look for more lasting signs of hope, especially in the chaotic political world around us. Dare we see this as…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Safekeep, a debut novel by Yael van der Wouden, won the 2024 Booker Prize, and the award was well deserved. Set in the Netherlands in 1961, it focuses on Isabel, the only one of three siblings caring for the…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. On April 2, the Massachusetts legislature heard testimony on a bill giving suffering people in the last six months of their lives the legal option of self-administered, doctor-prescribed medicine for a more gentle passing. The fight for this…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. For Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, her high spirits and steely dedication are a year-round demeanor. The former co-captain of Harvard University’s women’s basketball team and a starter on a professional team in Austria applies the competitive drive and…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi is the remarkable memoir of an Albanian girl, told in the first person starting when she was just seven years old. Ypi sees the world and her homeland…
Read More »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)…
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