notanotherbookreview

                                                                         SOMETIME THIS CENTURY (Harper Collins 6/9) by Samantha Silva is a delightful Regency comedy, as well as a modern puzzle. I may not be a typical reader of the Regency genre, having stumbled upon Bridgerton on Netflix and then read all volumes of Julia Quint's witty original. With a 21st century eye, I fixed on the very circumscribed lives of women, privileged or not, when the only acceptable career was "marrying well." Even being a novelist (Austen was known, if not as famous in her lifetime) was a family secret. Silva's novel has a lot of fun with Regency style, tradition and moneyed romance. There's also a sly comparison with our modern social behavior,...

Is honesty still a Virtue in 2026? Well yes, though it's under siege, writes Christian B. Miller in THE HONESTY CRISIS : Preserving our most treasured virtue in an increasingly dishonest worl d  (Oxford University Press. This book is a rare investigation of a value essential for humanity, despite our runaway "for profit everything" culture. Miller's position about honesty is also rare.  Though a Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest, who previously published Moral Psychology (2021, Oxford), his literary voice reminded me of Emerson's in  Nature and  Self Reliance.  Investigating what exists in human character and our world, Miller is no smug academic championing obsolete values. Honesty is still the virtue people most value in public and private character. The human spirit suffers from casually accepted deceit. Students' growing inability to resist having AI write their papers is a serious concern to Miller. What's the harm in using such "tools?...

 The Playground NY/LA , Barefoot Theatre Company & Pontifex Productions presents ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST by Dale Wasserman, based on the novel by KEN KESEY. Directed by Francisco Solorzano (April 30th-May17th, 2026)      During the Vietnam War era, the politics surrounding ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO's NEST , the novel, were volatile. "Counterculture" was not a "trend" in a time, when the nightly news showed the ritual of body bags being unloaded from planes for burial. Thousands of young men were dying in what was increasingly viewed as a brutal lost cause, a superpower game. Canada was the destination for an underground railroad of young men fleeing the war; whether students with high numbers in the lottery, or soldiers in the U.S. After the Kent State shooting of peaceful student protestors, a photo of a young woman placing a flower inside a gun barrel, was famous, as "They Shoot Students Don't They" marathon dances on campuses rais...

Connor Martin's debut novel , THE SILVER FISH, is an espionage fiction, where the personal and the political are intertwined in ways unanticipated. Unlike Le Carre's  Smiley's People (1979), where the British, U.S., and Russian networks and operatives seem clearly delineated,  THE SILVER FISH  layers the complexity of players and objectives into the implacable business of international corporations and governments. Human beings, local "foot soldiers" with ambiguous ambitions, are expendable and always in flux, amid competing and mutable goals  A prelude to this new world disorder might be the apocryphal story about Putin rumbling around the Kremlin "basement" during his Covid lock-down. Pondering the scattered legacy of Catharine the Great's Empire, he vowed to regain the lost territories of that empire. If true, did Putin's machinations intersect with Trump's debt to him?  (After multiple bankruptcies in the 1980s, Trump did visit Russia in ...

  SEVEN STORIES PRESS beautifully resurrects "Both an extraordinary 1930s text on anarchism in its original sense of liberatory principles of equality and mutual support, and short chapters with all age-appropriate illustrations and explanations of each principle. This book is certainly for progressive parents and their children."   “Help: To those who hesitate, give them encouragement: to those who despair of seeing victory far away, give them courage. Mutual help is a sacred and universal duty.” "Anarchy is a political and social state characterized by the absence of government, hierarchy, or enforced authority. It emphasizes voluntary cooperation, individual autonomy, and mutual aid rather than coercive rule. While often associated with chaos, proponents see it as a self-organized, free society."--wikipedia What is Anarchy? In my education,  Anarchy w as a political philosophy for crazy people, like the Russian who infamously rolled marbles across a stage during ...

The back cover of  The Beginning Comes After the End:  Notes on a world of change calls it   a sequel to  Hope In The Dark.  That book relates the historical moment in 1955, w hen Grace Lee Boggs ushered in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. That event, says Solnit, began the era of progressive social change. Now it may seem eclipsed in a distant past.. What we may not realize in our present world's incessant "newness" is the ageless persistence of social values--old ways and wisdoms. In our rising world view,  interconnection is a core value. Solnit shows how underlying transformations are often obscured by a longer arc of history. The scale of what's underlying is seldom recognized. Yet these currents shape destiny.  In Rebecca Solnit’s new book, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a world of change, there is plenty of evidence for a long view of political change. Though in our current period of backlash, after decades of progressive change, ...