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The entry below is bering cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Promise by Damon Galgut won the 2021 Booker Prize.  A family saga set in South Africa, it focuses on the Swart family from 1986 to 2018, mirroring the country’s emergence from apartheid to the uncertain promise of the present. …

Four stories about Cambodian Americans of Lowell have been prominently featured in the Boston Globe in recent weeks: A changing of the guard in Lowell as a diverse leadership takes office (Dec 26, 2021) Lowell city councilor is nation’s first Cambodian American mayor (Jan 4, 2022) I said to myself,…

Peuo Tuy is a spoken word poet, creative workshop instructor, and community organizer. Her poetry collection, Khmer Girl (2014), is inspired by the traumas of her life, including her family escaping the killing fields of Cambodia and enduring the inequities of life as immigrants in the U.S. Peuo is a founding member…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Nearly eight years ago, I sat at a small table at a Peet’s Coffee shop across from a pretty, pert, smart and saucy woman, the former head of the state Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division and chief…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. This was the speech many have been waiting for for months: the President standing in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol and speaking the truth about the democracy-defying January 2021 insurrection. Conciliatory softness would just not do…

Learn About Kerouac on Zoom from Anchorage, Alaska Jack Kerouac, U.S. Navy, 1943 (colorized by metacolor on reddit)   Alaskans and people around the country who are over the age of fifty will have an opportunity to learn about author Jack Kerouac in four seventy-five-minute Zoom sessions beginning February 10.…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Remember Dr. Li Wenliang, the Wuhan whistleblowing eye doctor whose warnings to medical colleagues about the not-yet-identified Covid virus were dismissed by Chinese authorities as “false comments” and rumors?  In January 2020 my info-holic husband told me about Dr.…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. For lovers of non-fiction, two deep dives into the fragility of democracy, here and in the land in the land of its birth. These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore is a mammoth tome, published…

It’s a new year. There’s a new Lowell City Council. And I’m trying a new thing, a weekly newsletter on Lowell politics. Some background: The richardhowe.com blog was born 15 years ago. Its mission was to cover “Lowell politics and history” which we did with thoroughness and regularity. But by…