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The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Becoming Madame Secretary by Stephanie Dray is a piece of historical fiction about Frances Perkins, named by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be the Secretary of Labor, the first woman elevated to a cabinet position and the longest service Labor…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron own blog. Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks is a perfect book for any reader who has loved Brooks’s novel Horse, or Caleb’s Crossing, March, or The Secret Chord. Her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Tony Horowitz (Confederates in the Attic, Spying on the South, Baghdad without a Map)…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell is a wonderful biography about an extraordinary woman who played a key role in the defeat of the Nazis in the 1940’s, a woman of courage and powerful leadership skills, a woman…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes is an amazing and accessible book on the history of Russia, the central theme of which traces Russia’s mythologies as a key to the Russian character, leadership and major events. There are lots…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud is a fictional drama based on the author’s own multi-generational family, covering seven decades of family history and moving from Salonica in Greece, to French (colonial) Algeria to France, Switzerland, Brazil, Canada,…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Paris in Ruins: Love, War and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee is a well-researched account of France from the reign of Napoleon III through the end of his empire, the Franco-Prussian War he had provoked, the radical socialist…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Here are two novels in which key characters are named Gabe. The similarity ends there. The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides is a psychological thriller that plumbs the depth of the human psyche. The simplest narrative – a woman…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Locker Room Talk: One Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside by Melissa Ludtke is a sports writer’s impressive account of her 1978 lawsuit against Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who had banned female reporters from interviewing baseball players in the locker…
Read More »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…
Read More »Satori in Paris by Jack Kerouac. Grove Atlantic (2023), 120 pages, $16 (softcover) Reviewed by David Daniel Seventy years after it started, the Beat Movement continues to hold considerable cultural fascination. Nurtured by its origin-story of Columbia University friendships followed by the famed Six Gallery Reading and the San Francisco…
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