Facing the Mountain by Daniel James Brown is the story of Japanese American patriots fighting for the U.S. in World War II while their parents and siblings were incarcerated in concentration (euphemistically termed relocation) camps in the West and South. In this intensely moving and deeply researched narrative, Brown lays out in grueling detail the …
Continue reading More winter reading – pt. 2, non-fiction books
Former Ambassador Nikki Haley and Governor Ron DeSantis were like two playground kids pretending to be scorpions in a bottle in Wednesday night's debate, jabbing at each other, oblivious to the big foot about to crush them both. You lie. Nah, you lie. Back and forth they went, with slanted opposition research about each other's …
Continue reading Haley and DeSantis – a So’s ya mutha! debate
Few windows into today's higher education leadership were as shocking as the testimony of three distinguished university presidents (from Harvard, Penn and MIT) before the star chamber hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last month. In their obtuse, overly lawyered statements on anti-Semitism on their respective campuses, they wrapped themselves in a …
Continue reading Harvard president gone – for the right reasons
It's bedtime for 2023. It has been an ugly year. Ukraine. Hamas'October 7th attack. Bloodshed in Gaza. Wildfires and floods from global warming. House of Representatives chaos and gridlock. Biden's slump in polls. Social media's pollution of young minds. Misinformation. Disinformation. Need I go on? In this posting, I present my traditional list of headlines we could …
Continue reading Headlines you may – or may not – see in 2024
Small wonder that public approval of Congress ranges between 13 and a scant 15 percent. The year started with chaos and the gelding of Speaker Kevin McCarthy after 15 marathon rounds of voting. It ends with the House commencing an evidence-free impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden, after spending three weeks defenestrating McCarthy, who may be best remembered for reneging …
Continue reading Fed up with Congress? Here’s one of the good guys!
As the nights get shorter and colder, here are some novels to curl up with by the fire, even if you read them on Kindle. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride is a delightful novel set in Pottstown, Pennsylvania in the 1930’s, largely in a section of town called Chicken Hill. It’s …
As many of us sit down to bountiful Thanksgiving dinners, it’s all too easy to forget about the more than 17,000 homeless people in the midst of well-off Massachusetts. We have the seventh highest per capita rate of homelessness in the nation, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. This, in the state ranked …
Continue reading Homeless in Massachusetts left helpless by selfish solons
For decades, a generation of students, often protected by their parents from information and views that might disturb them, arrived on college campuses demanding that administrators continue to protect them from feeling hurt by uncomfortable ideas or stressed by robust discussions of the harsh realities of a complex world. They called out microaggressions and insisted on trigger …
Continue reading Student embrace of Hamas – willfully ignorant and antiSemitic
Remember Entebbe? Look it up. It was the site of a 1976 Israeli operation to rescue 248 hostages from an Air France flight captured by Palestinian terrorists and given sanctuary by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. The non-Israelis were quickly released, except for the Air France crew. The roughly100 hostages who were Israelis were hidden in …
Continue reading Wrestling with the complexities of the Israel-Hamas war
No matter how heavy the topic of the following books any one of them can be a temporary departure from the world around us, helping us better understand the seeds of today's chaos . Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust and the Music of Remembrance by Jeremy Eichler, longtime classical music critic of …
Continue reading Books for autumn reading, pt. 2 – non-fiction
Marjorie Arons-Barron 