Profiles in courage by author Catherine Gildiner
Good Morning, Monster, offers the reader compelling profiles in courage by telling the stories of five patients who faced significant challenges to their mental health. In her author’s note, Catherine Gildiner, a clinical psychologist who was in private practice for 25 years says that she wanted the book to be both inspirational and a learning […]
Normal People, anything but simple
What is a normal person or relationship? These are the central questions of Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People that was nominated for the Booker award. Rooney tells the story of the complex relationship between two small town Irish teenagers Marianne and Connell, who we first meet in their final year of high school. They […]
Book review: Provisionally Yours by Antanas Sileika
For many in Europe, November 11, 1918 did not mark the end of a war but in fact the beginning of one. The collapse of the Russian, German and Austrian empires threw middle and eastern Europe into chaos and small, newly independent states emerged in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles. Fighting was often […]
Book review: An old detective finds new life
Philip Marlowe, the quintessential private detective, is the creation of the late Raymond Chandler, who died in 1959. Marlowe was tough-talking, street-smart and could handle himself in tight situations of which there were many. He became the model for the other fictional gumshoes that followed in his wake. Marlowe appeared in several novels and was […]
A sweeping tale for long winter nights
What do you get when you mix Charles Dickens with a helping of John Irving and a dash of Gabriel García Márquez? Well, you might get Songs for the Cold of Heart, an epic novel that tells the story of the Quebec-based Lamontagne family. Written by Eric Dupont and translated by Peter McCambridge this book […]
Kate Atkinson’s Transcription, an intriguing tale
Transcription, written by Kate Atkinson, offers a tale of spies, Nazi sympathizers and double agents. Set in London, the novel bounces back and forth between two time periods, 1940 and 1950 and keeps on surprising the reader with plot twists. In 1940, 18-year-old Juliet Armstrong is recruited to work for MI5. When France falls she […]
Support gas tax to fight climate change
Editor: By now, most of your readers will have read or heard about the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. It concludes that climate change is happening faster than was first predicted and severe consequences are now expected as early as 2040. The same day that this report came out, the Nobel Memorial […]
Foe is relentlessly nightmarish
If you read Foe by Iain Reid, fasten your seat belt because you are in for a roller coaster ride. The main characters are Hen and Junior. They are married with no children and live on a farm far from the big city. They seldom, if ever, receive visitors. It is sometime in the future […]
Book review: There There by Tommy Orange
“There’s no there there,” Gertrude Stein said about her hometown Oakland, California. Today that phrase is often applied to a person or place that has no distinctive identity. By borrowing the last two words of the quotation as the title of his new novel, native American writer Tommy Orange is out to show that on […]
Tish Cohenʼs Little Green puts a marriage under a microscope
How much pressure can a marriage take? That is one of the questions posed by Tish Cohen’s Little Green. Elise Sorenson is a dressage rider intent on making the U.S. Olympic team. Her husband Matt, a lawyer, has put Elise’s Olympic dreams ahead of his career by being the primary caregiver for their disabled daughter […]