King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild was first published in 1998, but its 2020 relaunch, with a forward by noted author Barbara Kingsolver and the author’s own afterword, attests to its relevance today. A dogged historical researcher, Hochschild documents the shameful capture of Africa’s Congo river and territory by the rapacious megalomaniac King Leopold II …
Tag: Politics
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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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 …
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 …
More than Romeo and Juliet: Israel meets Palestine
The Anatomy of Exile by Zeeva Bukai is a riveting novel about an Israeli-born woman, a Sabra named Tamar, married to a Syrian Jew, Salim, who has migrated to Israel. She has been raised with the noble founding values of Israel as an egalitarian society. His experience, however, is that of a Mizrahi, darker-skinned Jews …
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Myth building around slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk
Help me out here. I’m struggling with conflicting messages about Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA and inspirational leader especially to young, college-age conservatives. In our ever-escalating culture of violence, his horrific assassination has become the latest prominent expression of solving political disagreements with the trigger or the blade. What perplexes me is the …
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Markey fights Trump assault on Massachusetts – and beyond
"All politics is loco," Senator Ed Markey told a gathering of the New England Council on Monday, paraphrasing a favorite saying of House Speaker Tip O'Neill of Cambridge. Just part of the craziness this week is the President's unilateral decision to activate the California national guard and use active duty Marines to control crowd protests …
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Authoritarianism versus liberalism: a political memoir
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi is the remarkable memoir of an Albanian girl, told in the first person starting when she was just seven years old. Ypi sees the world and her homeland through the perspective of her very complicated family. Her grandmother, Nini, who lives with them, …
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Margin of error won. We lost. A first look.
This time the pollsters were right. They had held all along that the election outcome was within the margin of error. It could go either way. And so it did. But in the wrong direction. Donald J. Trump won on a campaign of lies and grievances, fear and loathing. We’re a deeply divided nation, preferring …
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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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Marjorie Arons-Barron 