Reviews

The entry below is being cross-posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Mountains Sing , a first novel by Vietnamese poet and author Nguyen Phan Que Mai, is a saga about the Tran family, against the backdrop of 20th century Vietnamese history, is told from two perspectives. First is that of grandmother Dieu Lan,…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah by Charles King is a delicious mix of history and music, against the backdrop of 18th century England.  George Frideric Handel had grown up in Halle, Germany, worked…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall is one of the most captivating works of fiction I’ve read in a long time. (I thank my reliable source Beth G. for the recommendation.)  Set in rural England, this is a story of…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Lost and Found: Coming of Age in the Washington Press Corps by Ellen Hume captures the idealism of a young reporter, from her early days as a cub in California, moving to the L.A. Times and its Washington Bureau, and…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Known World by Edward P. Jones , published in 2003, is a richly woven saga set in antebellum South between 1840 and 1860. The central focus is the Townsend family headed by Augustus and Mildred, who are freed former…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Kingmaker by Sonia Purnell, author of A Woman of No Importance, is another display of the author’s mastery of biography. In this scrupulously researched and documented chronicle, her subject is Pamela Churchill Harriman, a too-often-dismissed woman of consequence. A woman of power…

The entry below ia being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The War Diaries of Simon Robert Gordon by Constance Gordon Kean is a daughter’s loving tribute to her father’s and mother’s 1940’s romance against the backdrop of a world war. Her father, a sergeant stationed for three years in the…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi is the remarkable memoir of an Albanian girl, told in the first person starting when she was just seven years old. Ypi sees the world and her homeland…