A Certain Slant
Book 2 of the Maggie Barnes Trilogy
Broken Glass
Book 1 of the Maggie Barnes Trilogy
Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
A Review of Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar. Little, Brown and Company, 2020. Regardless of where we think we fall on the continuum of civility, one thing is certain, we can’t assume that we understand others automatically or that they understand us. In the places where we cross paths with strangers, faulty perceptions and...
Looking for Dawn by James C. Schaap
Book Review: Looking for Dawn by James C. Schaap. Floyd River Press, 2017. Most stories are woven around characters. It takes a different sensibility and a determined imagination also to weave a story around a place. That is especially true of the region in which James Schaap has chosen to place Looking for Dawn....
The Murmur of Bees by Sofia Segovia
Book Review: The Murmur of Bees by Sofia Segovia, translated by Simon Bruni, Amazon Crossing, 2019. Previously published as El murmullo de las abejas by Penguin Random House, 2015. Although I read all sorts of novels, I am careful when recommending them to my friends. This beautiful novel by Sofia Segovia is one that...
The Misappropriation of Age: When Books About Old People Aren’t Funny
Older characters add color and texture to stories, but age-shaming isn't funny. ...
A Review: The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish, Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt, 2017.
Sometimes quarantines are necessary. But what about the permanent restrictions we place on human flourishing for no other reason than small mindedness?...
The Secret Wisdom of Nature: Trees, Animals, and the Extraordinary Balance of All Living Things by Peter Wohlleben. Greystone Books, 2019
For a third time in less than five years Peter Wohlleben, a forester turned author, has given us a volume of stories about salmon and trees, deer and ants, bark beetles and wild boar, and much more. The reverence that Wohlleben has for the natural world and living things is expressed well in the...
A Hidden Life (2019) A film by Terrence Malick
What’s the Value of an Oath? Terence Malick’s new film, A Hidden Life, takes three hours to view and far longer to process. The first impression of the film is its aesthetic craft. The settings in South Tyrol are dreamlike: mountains, waterfalls, fields of waving grain, and rushing rivers. The camera angles and lighting...
Onboard with Mr. Rogers
It seems we can’t get over our fascination with Mr. Rogers. What keeps drawing us back for another look at him?...
The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall, Simon & Schuster, 2019
Cara Wall has written a true boomer drama. She has avoided all the flash and dazzle that boomers sometimes flaunt in claiming how progressive their generation was. Wall dares to dig deeper and expose the uncertainty that is the legacy of the boomers after all the long hair and psychedelic colors have faded....
Celebrating Emily Dickinson
Time has had the last word. Emily Dickinson has become one of America’s best known poets, but she never knew that herself. ...
