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…
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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,…
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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…
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The entry below is being cross posted from Majorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Long Island by Colm Toibin is a May, 2024 sequel to his notable 2009 novel Brooklyn and follows its principal characters, Eilis Lacey, an Irish immigrant to Brooklyn in the 1950’s, and her husband Tony Fiorella, a plumber from a robust…
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The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. It wasn’t long ago that I wrote that I thought there was nothing to be gained by a Trump-Biden debate. Knowing that presidential debates are usually more about style than substance, I said that, if there were to be…
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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…
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The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Should we be able to decide the nature of our passing when we are close to the end of our lives? Many people who are terminally ill and suffering want the legal option of self-administered doctor-prescribed medicine…
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The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Knife by Salman Rushdie is an account of the near-fatal attack on the well-known writer in 2022 by a lone knife-wielding terrorist who hated Rushdie for his writings, having read just two pages, and could only aver that Rushdie…
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The entry below ias being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Let’s all be grateful that Boston’s bids for the Olympics have all failed. In the 1990’s, a self-appointed group, originally called The Boston Olympic Organizing Committee, conducted feasibility studies and mounted bids to host the 2000 Olympics,…
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The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Want to get away from current news stories, weather warnings, and Donald Trump’s hush money election fraud trial? Want to stretch out with a book amidst the fragrance of lilacs, the perfume of flowering crab trees and…
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