February 15th, 2018 | Architecture and Design, Family, General, Politics, visual arts, Women
On February 12, 2018, the portraits of the 44th President and First Lady of the United States were unveiled. How do I like them? Let me, as it were, count the ways. The paintings are modern. The artists who made them (Kehinde Wiley, b. 1977, and Amy Sherald, b. 1973)...
February 9th, 2018 | Family, General, literature and poetry, Popular Culture
No genetically engineered monsters, no exotic locations, no time-travel: #17 of the Pendergast series, The City of Endless Night by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Grand Central Publishing, 2018), is a good, old-fashioned thriller. Truth be told, Doug Preston is...
February 4th, 2018 | Education, Family, Genealogy, General, Health, literature and poetry, Math and Science
My sister used to drive me crazy—well she still does in many ways—for her interactions with her daughters. One of the worst things was her flat assertion about her younger daughter’s problems with math. “She can’t do math,” Sister said. “She get’s it from me.” Then a...
January 4th, 2018 | Family, Genealogy, General, Indigenous Peoples, literature and poetry, Politics, Society at Large
I had read David Grann’s article in The New Yorker, “The Marked Woman,” last March so the outlines of this appalling story were familiar to me. The completed book, however, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (Doubleday, 2017),...
January 1st, 2018 | Family, Genealogy, General, literature and poetry, Society at Large
I decided a few days ago that I would record every book I finished reading in 2018 and say something about each. As it turns out, this book, It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree by A.J. Jacobs (Simon & Schuster, 2017), a Christmas gift...
May 10th, 2017 | Architecture and Design, Europe, Family, Friends, General, Memory, Travel, visual arts
Gounod’s Faust was the first opera I ever saw, and I saw it at Palais Charles Garnier in Paris in March 1970. As we ascended the massive stair forty-eight years later, studied Marc Chagall’s rainbow of a ceiling and gazed out over the loggia outside the ornate Grand...