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The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. “All politics is loco,” Senator Ed Markey told a gathering of the New England Council on Monday, paraphrasing a favorite saying of House Speaker Tip O’Neill of Cambridge. Just part of the craziness this week is the President’s…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Kingmaker by Sonia Purnell, author of A Woman of No Importance, is another display of the author’s mastery of biography. In this scrupulously researched and documented chronicle, her subject is Pamela Churchill Harriman, a too-often-dismissed woman of consequence. A woman of power…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Sitting at Fenway Park last week got me to thinking about the mystique of what used to be American’s #1 pastime. The beloved image is of a warm summer night, a gentle breeze blowing the American flag in…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, was much anticipated, heavily promoted and widely reviewed. It ended up as a three-day story. More than one person has…
Read More »The entry below ia being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The War Diaries of Simon Robert Gordon by Constance Gordon Kean is a daughter’s loving tribute to her father’s and mother’s 1940’s romance against the backdrop of a world war. Her father, a sergeant stationed for three years in the…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. To the Midnight Sun: A Story of Exile and Return by Stephen Saletan is another search for one’s own identity by researching a close relative, in this case, Saletan’s Russian-born grandmother, Eda Grigorievna Bamuner. As a child in suburban New…
Read More »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…
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