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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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)…
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…
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…