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 …
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China’s One Child Policy reverberates today
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. …
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Unfinished legislative business, pt. 2: teaching our kids to read again
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 …
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Unfinished legislative business, pt. 1: End-of-Life Options bill
Should people suffering with excruciating pain in the last six months of their lives have the legal option to self-administer doctor-prescribed medicine for a more gentle passing? The fight for this right has been going on for more than a decade on Beacon Hill. There is some encouraging news. Before the end of 2025, the …
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Trump says the U.S. will run Venezuela. What’s next?
For a populist President who campaigned against the foreign entanglements of his predecessors and raged against nation building, it’s stunning that he would launch a military action against Venezuela that the vast majority of Americans oppose, at least without authorization by his reflexively compliant Congress. Trump traditionally says his critics suffer from Trump derangement syndrome. …
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Race for Middlesex District Attorney : more than just another generational contest?
Incumbency combined with voter inertia are a mighty force in keeping officials in office, be they high-performing or flawed. Nowhere is this truer than in down-ballot races, when all the excitement is at the top (e.g., the 2026 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, the race for Massachusetts governor and controversial referenda (e.g., statewide rent control …
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Swedish writer delivers an epic autobiographical novel
Two weeks ago, I had knee replacement surgery, so my posting will be limited through the rest of the month. Here's a great big book to hold you over in the interim. Meanwhile, happy holidays - yes, all of them.....Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, New Year's, etc. See you in 2026! The Sisters, by Swedish writer Jonas …
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The risks of denying history
The Granddaughter is a pretty straightforward novel by German writer Bernhard Schlink, translated by Charlotte Collins. The time is contemporary Germany, and Berlin book store owner Kaspar comes home to find wife Birgit dead in the bathtub, apparently by drowning. They had met in the early 60’s, in a divided country. They had fallen in …
Saying thanks on Thanksgiving
During my tenure at WCVB-TV, Channel 5, I would write an annual Thanksgiving week editorial railing at all the turkeys in our lives. Favorite targets were members of the legislature who......., drivers who........, people in lines at the store who........., teenagers who............, television advertisers who............ The presentation was dramatically enhanced by the station's super-talented Creative …
Boom and bust. Rinse and repeat?
1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History – and How it Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin is a spellbinding deep dive into the irrational exuberance of the Roaring Twenties, the amassing of wealth and wild stock market speculations that eventually blew out the fortunes of Wall St. insiders as well as …
Marjorie Arons-Barron 