Reviews

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Elements by prolific Irish writer John Boyne is an intense novel that takes you into the darkest places of human behavior and miraculously brings you into the light with a slender promise of hope. Broadly speaking, it is about…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’ own blog. The Order of the Day by award-winning French novelist and film maker Eric Vuillard is a well-researched and creatively presented story of the Anschluss, Hitler’s move to take over Austria and incorporate it into Germany. It is a brief cautionary…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Names by Florence Knapp offers a rich exploration of identity beginning with our names – how much of our name defines how we see ourselves, how our name influences others’ perceptions of who we are – and expanding her…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Art Thief: a True Story of Love, Crime and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel, published in 2023, is a well researched and documented account of one of the most unusual art thieves of all time. For…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Jonathan Weiner is a comprehensive and enormously powerful study of the cycle of poverty in American cities brought about by the eviction of poor people from their homes. Eviction is not…

The entry below is being cross posted by Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Art of a Lie by Laura Shepherd-Robinson is a mystery set in London in 1749. It is a romp, filled with colorful characters, set against the well-detailed urban landscape of the Georgian era. The plot is full of surprises,…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 1995 and was reissued with an afterword in 2023.  This is a BIG book not necessarily in length…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Heart the Lover by Lily King shares some themes with What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, the book I reviewed two days ago. They’re both set against the backdrop of academia. King focuses on four young people in college, their spirit…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is a beautifully written novel in epistolary style, presented as a series of fictional letters, mostly penned by one Sybil Van Antwerp over eighty+ years. Even as a child, she wrote letters,  finding it easier…