Safekeep, a debut novel by Yael van der Wouden, won the 2024 Booker Prize, and the award was well deserved. Set in the Netherlands in 1961, it focuses on Isabel, the only one of three siblings caring for the big old house in which she grew up. Brother Hendrick has moved on to a gay …
Category: Culture
Social Security and Frances Perkins: Trump doesn’t get it
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 Secretary ever (for all 16 years of the FDR presidency.) There have been biographies written …
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A message to Pete Hegseth about women in combat
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 of whom most people have never heard, a woman whose life should be instructive to …
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Ukrainian novel reveals history of suffering
No Country for Love by Yaroslav Trofimov, the Ukrainian-born chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, covers Ukraine from 1930-1954 and is based on the real-life experiences of his own grandmother, whom he interviewed right up to the time of her death at 96. What was happening at the time is historically accurate, …
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An Iranian novel that resonates politically
The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali is a timely read, a coming-of-age story by the author of The Stationery Store, which also draws on her Iranian background. Dedicated “to the brave women of Iran,” it is told in the first person, primarily by its chief protagonist, an Iranian girl named Elaheh or Ellie, …
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This Novel is a Challenge
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald has a little bit of Marcel Proust, something of James Joyce, a dose of Freud and a lot of post-WWII PTSD. The landscape is usually desolate, the lighting dark; the often-abandoned buildings are old, dank and soot-stained, all reeking of imagined history. Even when there are crowds, there is loneliness, setting …
Splendid history answers Russian riddles
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 of maps (ever-changing due to Russia’s thirst for acquiring lands and people near its always-expanding …
Trump II: two weeks down; 206 to go
Trump world is giving us the "madman theory of foreign policy" and a reign of terror domestically. Around the world, he is fashioning himself as unpredictable and irrational, which comes naturally to him and doesn't have to be "fashioned." Just ask Greenlanders and Panamanians, fearful that he said he'd use force if necessary to take …
In Trump Week Two, this piece of fiction is a gift
Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson is a relatively short, exquisitely written novel (published five years ago) about two Black families, divided by economic status, whose lives become joined when their children conceive a baby. Iris, 16, insists on giving birth to Melody, without any understanding of or commitment to being a mom. Her …
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A novel embedded in history, enriched by poetry
There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak is a large book delicately woven by a metaphor: drop of water falls into the river, whose particles are borne to the sky and fall again to the earth as rain, only to repeat itself. The image speaks to continuing cycles of human experience, starting at …
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Marjorie Arons-Barron 