Subtitled “Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization”By some quirk, many Westerners habitually think of the Nile Valley in Egypt as the birthplace of civilization. I may be projecting a little, but until not too long ago, I operated from that point of view. With only slightly more exposure to archeology, we learn that that honor belongs to Mesopotamia. In a highly readable, persuasive text, Paul Kriwaczek recounts the beginning of what’s called the Urban Revolution, through the multiple cultures...
February 18, 2021
"The Swimmer" by Laury A. Egan
In The Swimmer we encounter Bess Lynch, a sixty-something psychotherapist, as she retreats to a cabin on Cape Cod, trying to disengage from the presences crowding her life. Her practice already handed off, she needs to make some important decisions about family, her will, and particularly her marriage. She’s on borrowed time. She has already survived much longer than a patient with Stage IV pancreatic cancer can normally expect.As determined as Bess is to follow her plan, she’s caught up when a...
February 07, 2021
"Some Tame Gazelle" by Barbara Pym
Jane Austen said of her novels concerned themselves with “two inches of ivory,” in which everything is so small that everything matters almost too much. Much the same can be said, and I’m sure has been said, about Barbara Pym’s novels. Setting them in rural England, Pym concerns herself with the lives of proper English women, who have lived to a riper age then Austen’s heroines, and who live lives closely circumscribed by faith and close-knit village society. “Some Tame Gazelle,” which, when I started...
February 02, 2021
"Adventure by Chicken Bus" by Janet LoSole
Traveling the dicey, dangerous countries of Central America, Janet LoSole and her family undergo one harrowing adventure after another. Sometimes they literally defy death, and sometimes their efforts to stay healthy and in one piece fail, because of the ubiquity of toxins and other hazards. And one asks Why? Why would a Canadian couple - rational, by all outward signs - subject themselves and their two sweet daughters, still shy of their middle school years, to such misadventures?LoSole provides...
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