How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion by David McRaney offers what could be an eye-opening look at how to talk to “the other.” It’s about much more than when every day becomes Thanksgiving Day and seemingly reasonable people turn out to be crazy Uncle Harry. McRaney shares what he has …
Category: reading list
Books: a fictional interlude in our non-fictional life
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 …
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Frigid weather, fiction to warm your spirits
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
During frigid temps, some non-fiction books to warm you
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
More winter reading – pt. 2, non-fiction books
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 …
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Fiction for frosty nights
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 …
Reading for summer’s waning days
Yes, it's past Labor Day, but it's still summer weather. And, while the calendar is getting more cluttered, it's still easy to cling to the image of long walks in the sunshine, leisurely reading and cold soups for dinner. Here are five works of fiction that will give also you pleasure. Tom Lake by Ann …
Some light reading before Labor Day
Going Back to T-Town: The Ernie Fields Territory Big Band by Boston journalist Carmen Fields is a memoir of her father, trombonist, pianist, music arranger and band leader of the Ernie Fields Big Band. The saga covers many of the swing bands and jazz groups that enlivened the American music scene in the middle of …
Autobiography and memoir for intimate summer reading
The Nazi’s Granddaughter: How I Discovered My Grandfather was a War Criminal by Sylvia Foti was the fulfillment of a pledge Foti made to her dying mother to write a memoir of the author’s highly esteemed grandfather, Lithuanian general and national hero Jonas Noreika. Foti grew up in the Lithuanian community of Chicago, sustained by …
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Summer reading a delicious pleasure
Reading books year-round is life-enhancing, but reading in summertime seems especially to be savored. Here are some non-fiction selections. The First Kennedys: The Humble Roots of an American Dynasty by Neal Thompson will fascinate anyone intrigued by the immigrant experience, Irish roots, old-time urban ward bosses and Boston politics in the late 19th-early 20th centuries. …
Marjorie Arons-Barron 