Call me a masochist. I watched all of Trump’s State-of-the-Union speech. The President painted a picture of the nation as he wanted to see it. It was a swirling mix of fantasy, twisted rhetoric and outright lies. We’ve heard his shameless exaggerations about how many wars he has ended, how he has lowered drug prices …
Continue reading SOTUS: More Spin from the Bloviator-in-Chief
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 to write than to speak. Readers learn on the very first page that the correspondence …
King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild was first published in 1998, but its 2020 relaunch, with a forward by noted author Barbara Kingsolver and the author’s own afterword, attests to its relevance today. A dogged historical researcher, Hochschild documents the shameful capture of Africa’s Congo river and territory by the rapacious megalomaniac King Leopold II …
Paper Girl: a Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by journalist Beth Macy is a perfect complement to my just-reviewed Buckeye by Patrick Ryan. Think of Paper Girl as small-town Ohio, part 2, the contemporary, non-fiction version. Macy grew up in Urbana, Ohio, graduating from high school in 1982. Though four generations …
Buckeye by Patrick Ryan is a beautifully written novel about a fictional town in Ohio (Bonhomie), not far from Toledo. If you’ve ever lived in a small town, it may feel like home to you. The span is immediate pre-World War II through the 1970’s, and the focus is on three generations of each of …
Continue reading Small town America: Is it what we think it is?
Flesh by Hungarian-British author David Szalay was recently announced as the winner of the 2025 Booker Award. Although the Booker board called it “a propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unraveled by a series of events beyond his grasp,” I found it hard to get into. At best, I saw its protagonist, then-15-year-old …
The New England Patriots defeat of the Denver Broncos in the mile-high stadium for the first time in an AFC championship game was an enormously pleasurable distraction from other news that sometimes seems to grow worse by the hour. Before, during and after the game, news outlets continued to cover the gestapo-like tactics of ICE …
Continue reading All gestures small are great (with apologies to James Herriot)
Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin was published in 1982 and was recently discovered by a friend, who recommended it to me. It is a well-drawn portrait of the Solo-Miller family, an affluent New York family steeped in tradition and guided by a willful mother, Wendy, who demanded decorum and imposed rules for every aspect of …
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America by Barbara Demick is a stellar piece of journalistic reporting in book form, laying bare in well-researched details the far-reaching impacts of China’s One Child Policy. For more than 30 years, Chinese women who became pregnant were subjected to forced abortions, mandated sterilization, and fierce beatings. …
Continue reading China’s One Child Policy reverberates today
Massachusetts, for long the nation’s undisputed leader in education, is slipping. It has been slower than other states to rebound from the pandemic. Too many third grade children can't read. Only 1/3 of MA 4th graders & MA 8th graders read at grade level on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. Yet researchers …
Continue reading Unfinished legislative business, pt. 2: teaching our kids to read again
Marjorie Arons-Barron 