Author Archive

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl is a confection, set in the 1980’s in Paris.  Stella, a 20-something copy editor in New York, leads a highly routinized life, the regularity of which is comforting to her.  She is estranged…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. American Mother by Collum McCann is an as-told-to account by Diane Foley of the 2014 death of her son, freelance American journalist James W. Foley. McCann, the author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin, is a master storyteller, tells the…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Our phone has been ringing off the hook; our electronic mailboxes flooded. Friends, even staunch supporters of Joe Biden, have come to accept the idea that he is not well enough to serve another term. Worse, that…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Four days in the halcyon setting of the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox were not enough to insulate us from the political sturm und drang that erupted this past weekend. I joined others in shock and horror at the…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. James by Percival Everett tells the story of Huckleberry Finn’s escape from his drunken abusive father with slave Jim in pre-Civil War Missouri. As a child, I read Huckleberry Finn as a simple adventure tale; as a college student,…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Remember when we scoffed at  Richard Nixon telling David Frost that the President couldn’t be prosecuted for Watergate because “when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal.”  We thought that our Constitution established “a government…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s owm blog. The Claims of Life by Diana Chapman Walsh is a deep and delightful memoir by the former president of Wellesley College, whom I met and with whom I briefly worked in conjunction with the 125th anniversary of the college. A…