Author Archive

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…

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…

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,…

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…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. So, now he’s said it. President Biden told Howard Stern recently that he’d be willing to debate Donald Trump. With all due respect, I disagree. I just don’t think there’s anything to be gained.   I have…

The entry below is bewing cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Judy Kugel’s beloved husband, Peter, suffered from advanced Parkinson’s and the residual effects of a stroke,which led him to the point where he could no longer bear to continue. If he had lived in Vermont or Oregon…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. An Unfinished Love Affair: a Personal History of the 1960’s by historian and biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin is the book I have been waiting for, and it doesn’t disappoint. It is an intimately told, stunningly impactful history of the…

The entry below is being cross-posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. The Lioness of Boston by Emily Franklin is a lush historical novel about Isabella Stewart Gardner, Belle of Boston, an upper class young woman who refused to limit herself to the cultural norms prescribed by the wealthy social elite of…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. If you think today’s headlines are bad, you’re right.  We’re dogged by the apparent philosophy of those in my lifelong profession: bad news is good news, and good news is no news at all. Just consider a…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Consider the plight of my friend, let’s call her Barbara. A widow, a vivacious, smart and active woman “of a certain age,” she found love again more than a decade ago with a widower. After a long…