I thought the Boston Red Sox were well past their sordid corporate history of bigotry and ugly fans' and players' misbehavior. New ownership since 2002 has largely been a breath of fresh air. Gone are the overt racist ways of owner Tom Yawkey, who notably turned down opportunities to hire Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays and …
Kamala Harris scores with VP pick
I was happier than I thought I'd be yesterday morning when Kamala Harris announced her selection of Tim Walz as her running mate. That quiet sense of elation rose to celebration last evening with their first joint appearance at an exuberant rally in Philadelphia. Several weeks of compare and contrast, sorting out the pros and …
Still more summer fiction
The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl is a confection, set in the 1980’s in Paris. Stella, a 20-something copy editor in New York, leads a highly routinized life, the regularity of which is comforting to her. She is estranged from her mother, Celia, who has never expressed love of her. Nor has Celia ever told …
Fanatics and vigilantes: two books with red flags
American Mother by Collum McCann is an as-told-to account by Diane Foley of the 2014 death of her son, freelance American journalist James W. Foley. McCann, the author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin, is a master storyteller, tells the first and last chapters of this riveting book in the third person, but …
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Biden stands tall in standing down
Our phone has been ringing off the hook; our electronic mailboxes flooded. Friends, even staunch supporters of Joe Biden, have come to accept the idea that he is not well enough to serve another term. Worse, that he didn't have the stamina even to win a second term. The stakes could not be higher. Now, …
Should the Democrats give up? Absolutely not!
Four days in the halcyon setting of the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox were not enough to insulate us from the political sturm und drang that erupted this past weekend. I joined others in shock and horror at the shooting of Donald Trump, saddened that the violence following upon incendiary political rhetoric may have contributed …
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Two Creative Approaches to Fiction Writing
James by Percival Everett tells the story of Huckleberry Finn’s escape from his drunken abusive father with slave Jim in pre-Civil War Missouri. As a child, I read Huckleberry Finn as a simple adventure tale; as a college student, I came to understand it as telling account of mid- 19th century American life and culture. …
Remind me, why did we fight our Revolution?
Remember when we scoffed at Richard Nixon telling David Frost that the President couldn’t be prosecuted for Watergate because “when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal.” We thought that our Constitution established “a government of laws, and not of men” and that no person, even the President of United States, was above …
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Presidential debate: Oh no, Joe!
It wasn't long ago that I wrote that I thought there was nothing to be gained by a Trump-Biden debate. Knowing that presidential debates are usually more about style than substance, I said that, if there were to be a debate, there should be real-time fact checking. Without it, I feared that Trump's repeated falsehoods …
Four Novels by Three Authors, All About Family Life
Long Island by Colm Toibin is a May, 2024 sequel to his notable 2009 novel Brooklyn and follows its principal characters, Eilis Lacey, an Irish immigrant to Brooklyn in the 1950’s, and her husband Tony Fiorella, a plumber from a robust Italian family. When Toibin picks up their story again, it’s the 1970’s, and they …
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Marjorie Arons-Barron 