Knife by Salman Rushdie is an account of the near-fatal attack on the well-known writer in 2022 by a lone knife-wielding terrorist who hated Rushdie for his writings, having read just two pages, and could only aver that Rushdie was “disingenuous.” The assailant, whom Rushdie calls “A” (for ass) but refuses to name, somehow eluded …
Continue reading Non-fiction books taking us to places both familiar and strange
Let's all be grateful that Boston's bids for the Olympics have all failed. In the 1990's, a self-appointed group, originally called The Boston Olympic Organizing Committee, conducted feasibility studies and mounted bids to host the 2000 Olympics, then the 2004 games and finally the 2008 spectacular. At the time my husband was leading an International …
Continue reading Summer Olympics 2024 – be glad we didn’t win
Want to get away from current news stories, weather warnings, and Donald Trump's hush money election fraud trial? Want to stretch out with a book amidst the fragrance of lilacs, the perfume of flowering crab trees and sweet rhododendrons, and the riotous colors of geraniums and bleeding hearts? Here are some novels to consider this …
You all know the cliche - "if it bleeds, it leads." Local news, and increasingly national networks, promote stories off the police scanner. As a result, for decades, the perception of crime has exceeded the reality of crime across society. Naturally, if you've been mugged or a neighbor's house broken into, crime is indeed a …
An Unfinished Love Affair: a Personal History of the 1960’s by historian and biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin is the book I have been waiting for, and it doesn’t disappoint. It is an intimately told, stunningly impactful history of the 1960’s told through the eyes of her husband, presidential speech writer and himself a shaper of …
Continue reading Book Retells our Lives with Love, Loss and Hope
The Lioness of Boston by Emily Franklin is a lush historical novel about Isabella Stewart Gardner, Belle of Boston, an upper class young woman who refused to limit herself to the cultural norms prescribed by the wealthy social elite of her time and who, in her struggle to assert herself, made an impact on the …
Continue reading More books to delight and challenge,pt. 1-fiction
If you think today’s headlines are bad, you’re right. We’re dogged by the apparent philosophy of those in my lifelong profession: bad news is good news, and good news is no news at all. Just consider a few of the all-too-real headlines in my morning email on April Fool’s Day: World Central Kitchen suspends aid …
Continue reading Turning down the news and looking elsewhere
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein is a short, dense and intense meditation on what it means to be an outsider and a survivor. The first-person narrator speaks directly to the reader spinning the tale of how, as a child, her family had taught her to subdue her own wants and silence her own voice …
Continue reading Books: a fictional interlude in our non-fictional life
Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane is as effective a thriller as his previous books, once again taking a deep dive into the social and political environment in South Boston, this time in the lead-up to the 1974 school busing crisis. That event was raw, for both Blacks and Whites, but it's just the backdrop for …
Continue reading Frigid weather, fiction to warm your spirits
Master, Slave, Husband, Wife: an epic journey from slavery to freedom by Ilyon Woo is the story of Ellen Craft, a light-skinned enslaved woman and skilled seamstress, and her husband William, also enslaved and a skilled cabinet maker, and their 1848 flight from their masters in Macon, Georgia to Philadelphia, Boston, Canada and England. Ellen …
Continue reading During frigid temps, some non-fiction books to warm you
Marjorie Arons-Barron 