My Blog
The Last Garden in England
Gardeners, historians, Downton Abbey devotees, and Anglophiles will love The Last Garden in England for those reasons alone. But this novel by Julia Kelly is far more. It is the three different generations of main characters in 1907, 1944, and 2021 woven together by...
Dostoevsky. Navalny. Gordievsky. Solzhenitsyn.
The evils of the Russian Empire have long been challenged by dissidents of stunning courage, back to the 1849 staged execution of author Fyodor Dostoevsky. The very word ‘intelligentsia’ was created in the 19thCentury to describe Russia’s educated radicals. Now Putin...
Epiphany
While Christian manger scenes usually feature the three Wise Men at the stable where Jesus had just been born, the Christian church believes differently. The often present camel reminds viewers the Magi came from Persia, India, and Arabia—all far from Bethlehem. Thus...
A Surprising Page Turner
I’m not a devotee of essays and I’d never heard of Brian Doyle. But when my almost-cousin Genie said I must read Doyles’ new book of said essays, I knew she could be trusted. And, boy, could she! A distinguished novelist honored by the American Academy of Arts and a...
“She’s a size four and…” Barbara Bush in The Matriarch
I finished The Matriarch, a biography of the late First Lady Barbara Bush with a fresh respect for her. But, contrarily, I finished the book with a hugely diminished respect for her predecessor, First Lady Nancy Reagan. I half wish I hadn’t read the book by Susan Page...
Authors Without a “Name” Must Self-publish
If my name were Lady Gaga, LeBron James, Tom Brady, Oprah Winfrey, or Lady Gaga, my novel The Cameron Womenwould have been published with one phone call to a New York publisher. If I committed mass murder, same thing. Even if I just ran naked in front of the White...