…..a good poem shucks the oyster shell of one’s mind to reveal the pearl within.
Contrary to my original belief, The Offing is not a thriller assassin novel. No one gets “offed!” The offing means “the distant stretch of sea where sky and water merge.” The novel is set in the summer of 1946 in...
A Short Report on a Long and Fabulous Book
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver is the winner of the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (shared with Trust by Hernan Diaz).
The book is structured like Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield and Kingsolver uses that...
Ban this Book, by Alan Gratz, is a story about empowerment and coming of age through education. When protagonist Amy Anne finds out that her favorite book (as well as several others) has been banned from her elementary school library, she starts finding her voice. Devastated that it has been taken off the shelf, Amy...
How Beautiful We Were, by Imbolo Mbue, is a story mainly about environmental degradation, but education plays an important role. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells us of the catastrophic effects of oil spills and river pollution on the land and on the people of Kosawa. Children die from poisoned...
Marie Benedict’s The Other Einstein offers the chance to follow the life of a brilliant woman, Mitza Maric, whose own scientific merits were lost in husband Albert Einstein’s enormous shadow. In the early 20th century, Mitza was a brilliant physicist in her own right and her contribution to the theory of relativity is strongly...
The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad (published in English in 2003) is a non-fiction description of the life and family of Shah Muhammad Rais. At Shah M Book Co, Rais braved persecution to bring books to the people of Kabul over the course of three decades and successive repressive regimes. As well as...
