The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Jonathan Weiner is a comprehensive and enormously powerful study of the cycle of poverty in American cities brought about by the eviction of poor people from their homes. Eviction is not…
The entry below is being cross posted by Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Art of a Lie by Laura Shepherd-Robinson is a mystery set in London in 1749. It is a romp, filled with colorful characters, set against the well-detailed urban landscape of the Georgian era. The plot is full of surprises,…
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Newton Center Green in Massachusetts was packed on Saturday, despite temperature in the 30’s and a biting wind. A 10-piece local brass band energized the crowd with a rousing Saints Go Marching In. There were young and old, black and…
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 1995 and was reissued with an afterword in 2023. This is a BIG book not necessarily in length…
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Heart the Lover by Lily King shares some themes with What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, the book I reviewed two days ago. They’re both set against the backdrop of academia. King focuses on four young people in college, their spirit…
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. A week into Operation Epic Fury, the administration’s stated objectives have shifted by the hour and by the speaker: eliminate the nuclear program, roll back ballistic missiles, defang the proxies, respond to Israeli pressure, achieve regime change.…
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is a beautifully written novel in epistolary style, presented as a series of fictional letters, mostly penned by one Sybil Van Antwerp over eighty+ years. Even as a child, she wrote letters, finding it easier…
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Call me a masochist. I watched all of Trump’s State-of-the-Union speech. The President painted a picture of the nation as he wanted to see it. It was a swirling mix of fantasy, twisted rhetoric and outright lies. We’ve…
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild was first published in 1998, but its 2020 relaunch, with a forward by noted author Barbara Kingsolver and the author’s own afterword, attests to its relevance today. A dogged historical researcher, Hochschild…
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Paper Girl: a Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by journalist Beth Macy is a perfect complement to my just-reviewed Buckeye by Patrick Ryan. Think of Paper Girl as small-town Ohio, part 2, the contemporary, non-fiction version. Macy grew up in Urbana,…