The big films get all the Oscar buzz. People argue about whether The Irishman should have got something and whether Saiorse Ronan deserved it more than Renee Zellweger and whether the Oscars discriminate against female directors and women-oriented films (me:...
~ Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. By John Carreyrou. Elizabeth Holmes was just 19 when she started her company in 2003. She had a squad of major-league cheerleaders — senior professors at Stanford, angel investors,...
~ The Grammarians, by Cathleen Schine ~ This clever, original, entertaining novel follows a pair of very unusual people. Many of us, growing up, were fascinated by twins. Imagine another person with the same appearance and shared entirety of experience...
~ Mrs. Everything, by Jennifer Weiner ~ This novel has an ambitious goal: to tell the story of a woman from her birth in the 1940s to her death around 2016, and to reflect the events and changing mores of...
~ Sugar Run, by Mesha Maren ~ Jailed for life for murder, Jodi is startled to find herself released at the age of 35 after 18 years in prison. She heads straight to southern Georgia to find Ricky, the young...
~ The Irishman. A Scorsese film. ~ De Niro. Pacino. Pesci. in a Scorsese period-piece film about the Mafia. Sounds like an entertaining way to spend an evening, right? Lauded by critics, nominated for many awards, the film is a...
~ Catch and Kill, by Ronan Farrow ~ This remarkable book outlines and details the investigative journalism that led to the exposure of decades of sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein, and his eventual arrest. Ronan Farrow’s name and history are...
Jill Ciment’s The Body in Question is a difficult novel to categorize, especially at its start. A 52-year old woman in Florida becomes a member of a 6-person jury on a murder case. (Apparently, in Florida, the storied 12-person jury...
~ Tender at the Bone, by Ruth Reichl ~ I first came across Ruth Reichl in the early 1990s. We had a small baby and perforce spent much of our time at home, and the New York Times dining section...
~ The Book of Unknown Americans, by Cristina Henríquez ~ The title and the first few pages immediately tell you what the author is trying to accomplish here: tell the stories of Americans whose accomplishments rarely get attention, who both...
~ Traps, by Mackenzie Bezos ~ I must admit I picked up this novel because of the author’s last name. So let’s get that elephant out of the way first. The author married Jeff Bezos, who then went on to...
~ Jim Allison: Breakthrough ~ The backlash against scientific evidence and skepticism about data-driven consensus has reached alarming proportions, the most obvious instances being the anti-vaccination movement and the refusal to accept climate change. Into this atmosphere comes a wonderful...
~ The Gifted School, by Bruce Holsinger ~ Pointed and clever, The Gifted School has a delightfully snarky opening quote: There is something so tantalizing about having a gifted child that some parents will go to almost any lengths to...
If Intelligence and Advanced IQ are Taboo
L’enfant et l’affaire
The infinite diasporic variations within a community
Understated charm
Misfits
Life changes in Nairobi
Stranger than Fiction
Seville oranges and sugar make a pleasant, if imperfect, pot
A diasporic novel that doesn’t quite hang together
Icing on the cake
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