On 'Stalingrad' and Stalin, The Boston Sunday Globe
May 29, 2022 Repressive states tend to like their authors best when they are safely dead. Joseph Stalin admired Nikolai Gogol but...
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Related Reading: On the increasing danger of cyberattacks, The Boston Sunday Globe
April 24, 2022 One day in 2007, Russian hackers took down key online services in Estonia. This action, now generally recognized as the...
On Women’s History Month, books about Shirley Chisholm and by Stacey Abrams, The Boston Sunday Globe
March 27, 2022 Fifty years ago, Shirley Chisholm announced her candidacy for president of the United States. The response was widely,...
Related Reading: On rural America, The Boston Sunday Globe
February 27, 2022 Who should speak for or about rural Americans is perennially up for grabs. For a while, it was J.D. Vance, whose...
Four Takes: On water, too little or too much, The Boston Sunday Globe
January 30, 2022 Lucas Bessire suffers from what Elizabeth Hardwick has called the stain of place. He tried running away from home to...
Four Takes: On good food and sweet homes
December 26, 2021 Show of hands: who’s up for another sheet-pan recipe? Just as I thought. In the roughly two years since the pandemic...
On spycraft: New books take on the CIA, The Boston Sunday Globe
November 21, 2021 Since its creation in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency has proven an elusive symbol of the nation’s identity: by...
Four Takes: On college, opportunity, and merit, The Boston Sunday Globe
October 24, 2021 After days of immersing myself in the state of US college admissions, the story I could not shake was this: In 2015,...
Four Takes: to save the oceans, fall in love with them, The Boston Globe
September 27, 2021 Sometimes the impulse to seek our own image in nature runs aground. Consider the anglerfish. The female — beady-eyed,...
Four Takes: On Maine, The Boston Sunday Globe
July 25, 2021 In July, the summer people fan out to homes in Maine. For those who can only fantasize, books set in the state offer a fine...
Four Takes: 50 years after the Pentagon Papers, does a free press still function?
June 27, 2021 Fifty years ago, on June 27, Daniel Ellsberg distributed his last remaining copies of what are now known as the Pentagon...
Four Takes: Four books that find us heading West, The Boston Sunday Globe
May 23, 2021 In the 1830s, curious Americans paid 25 cents apiece to see Joice Heth, an elderly Black woman reputed to have been George...
Four Takes: Books about gardens can help satisfy cravings for plant life
April 25, 2021 Even among apartment dwellers, spring can prompt longings to connect with the soil. Perhaps for that reason, the Boston...
Four Takes: New books about life in our galaxy, and beyond it.
March 28, 2021 Some years ago, when I lived in Providence, I learned to avoid a busy intersection where five streets converged. A...
Four Takes: On Hollywood, The Boston Sunday Globe
February 21, 2021 In this winter of discontent, the pandemic has claimed even the things we love to hate. The Oscars, traditionally aired...
Four Takes: Every book is arguably a journey; those explicitly about journeys hold special appeal
January 30, 2021 The other day, a bank officer told me she is dying to travel. Imagine: She has always hated travel. I resisted saying...
Four Takes: On artists and art, New biographies take us behind the pictures, The Boston Sunday Globe
December 20, 2020 Books about artists place their authors, at best, in a draw with their subjects. After all, the art is what drives our...
Four Takes: The art of the short story, The Boston Sunday Globe
November 15, 2020 On the train that is literature, the short story is often relegated to second-class, while the novel travels in luxury....
Four Takes: If few of us know about China, it is not for lack of books, The Boston Sunday Globe
October 25, 2020 A few months into his presidency, Donald Trump wooed Chinese president Xi Jinping with cake. “We had the most beautiful...
Four Takes: On the rights of women 25 years after the Beijing Declaration on Women
September 20, 2020 Earlier this month, the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration on Women passed with little notice. Produced by...