Author Archive

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson is a relatively short, exquisitely written novel (published five years ago) about two Black families, divided by economic status, whose lives become joined when their children conceive a baby. Iris, 16, insists…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak is a large book delicately woven by a metaphor: drop of water falls into the river, whose particles are borne to the sky and fall again to the earth as…