Summer reading and escape from Donald Trump

The lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer demand relief from the news, and summer reading could be just the antidote.  The following are some suggestions: Non-Fiction: Tara Westover’s memoir Educated is one of the most gripping books I have read in a long time, possibly ever. Against all odds, Westover grew up in a Mormon …

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Summer reading part two: non-fiction

The following are suggestions from when I wasn’t fleeing the daily news into real fiction, as noted in my previous blog. I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey behind the Lines of Jihad,  a memoir by Washington Post national security reporter Souad Mekhennet, takes us into dangerous territory to places she was uniquely qualified to …

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Summer reading part one: escape into fiction

Every year at this time I share books that that may interest my readers.  What I have discovered in year two of the Trump administration is how I often have I sought escape into fiction, though it is fiction with a political edge. Waking Lions by Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen is a thriller about a …

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Books to escape from Benghazi, Boko Haram, Boehner, biz cycle etc, pt. 2

For real escape through summer reading,  there's no substitute for fiction.  Here are a few books worth sharing. My top read this past year was The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.  A 13-year-old boy in Manhattan survives a terrorist bomb in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  His mother is killed.  They had been visiting her favorite painting, a goldfinch …

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Book ideas for summer nights

My family's return from a glorious week in London shows how salutary it is for a political junkie to purge herself- albeit temporarily - of politics. So before I get sucked back into  the  nearly unspeakable frustration of focusing on the ongoing national political dysfunction, I want to reflect on the pleasures that lie between the covers of a …

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