(un)published

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, Hogarth, an imprint of Random House, New York, © 2025. I have just finished reading.  Knowing I wanted to write this review, this morning, while waiting my turn in the ophthalmologist's exam room, I read the NYT's glowing review  from September 14, 2025 on my phone.  Then I read some of the 81 commenters mixed reviews.  Some abandoned the book almost from the start, others read through but did not like it and, finally, there were those who loved it.  Regardless of the category commenters fell into, many made interesting and insightful observations.  The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is that kind of book. Full disclosure, I have no particular literary expertise that credentials me to write this review.  I'm much more comfortable reviewing field guides and the like—although some might argue that I have no particular expertise there either.  What I do have is that I am a reader who loved this book. ...

Nightingales:  The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale : by Gillian Gill, Ballantine Books, published by The Random House Publishing Group, 2004.  535 pages: text, illustrations, footnotes and index. I love the little serendipitous events that occasionally happen in life.   Nightingales is such an event for me.  My local public library does fundraising with used books that have been donated to the library for this purpose.  A couple of months ago I made one of my routine visits and happened to see this hardcover book on their shelf for $3.00.  I don't believe the original owner of the book had ever read it.  Possibly had never opened it.  As a nurse, I could not leave it on the shelf and it's now been opened, and read. I recently saw the movie Downton Abbey, The Grand Finale .  I watched every PBS episode of each season and loved it. After reading Nightingales, the lives of the Downton Abbey characters came...

A guest editorial in the NYT yesterday, May 8th,   How Will We Know when We Have Lost Our Democracy ? by Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt is enough to rattle anyone's cage. On Wednesday, May 6th I woke up to make coffee, get breakfast and while that was brewing I took my blood pressure.  I have hypertension, take a daily medication that has not been that great at controlling it. My internist requested that I take my BP a couple of times a week for a more thorough check.  On Wednesday morning it was so high, I panicked.  I started out looking for a same day appointment - none available, then I made an appointment for June 18th.  That wasn't going to do much when my blood pressure was shockingly high this minute.  Finally, I had an extended telephone conversation with a triage nurse who was able to both calm me down and get a note to my doctor for the additional medication we had discussed.  I picked up this medication on Wednesday evening a...

This week I was introduced to Ed Zitron.  Read below.  This is the comment, with minor edits to make sense in this space, that I posted after reading Ed's essay, The Slop Society , for his January 17th newsletter. I've never had a Facebook account.  I've had an unused Instagram account and, as I was reading Ed's newsletter, I deleted Instagram from my phone.  For some reason, perhaps my natural distrust of some things (I'm not necessarily proud of this), I have had a chip on my shoulder against Silicon Valley and their products and, just generally. their way of being.  The tech industry has destroyed San Francisco (at one time an astonishingly beautiful city - feel free to disagree - unfortunately, I also remember the hippy era).  I also believe that Silicon Valley and the tech industry is the foundation of the grotesque inequality we have in our country.  I believe Donald Trump and his tech oligarchs like Zuckerberg, Altman, Bezos, Musk, et.al. use il...

The title comes from the New York Times Athletic headline this morning; that is, Sunday, January 19th.      Last night, as I could not sleep and my head was swimming with thoughts and sentences, I knew I had to write something. Our football team, the Detroit Lions, lost to the Washington Commanders 45-31 while playing at home, in Detroit, and after winning 15 games during their regular NFL football season.  I turned the game off in the early minutes of the 4th quarter just after the Lions threw their third interception in the game while trying to run one of the trick plays for which they have become famous.  They didn't need to run that trick play.  Rather, in my view, they should have got down to their workman-style signature play.  Ten yard pick-up pass here, twelve yard pick-up there, an eight yard run ... and so on.  They were behind in the score, but they still had time.  Washington was playing other worldly football but there was still ...

Today is October 19, 2024.  Today also marks eighteen days to the date of the US presidential election on Tuesday, November 5, 2024.  More or less, I have stopped watching the news.  For 300 million people, again more or less, this is a severe anxiety producing time and watching the news worsens anxiety tenfold.  As I write this, there is no way to know who will win the election.  The polls, which I don't read or watch, have the election split 50-50.  Despite the even odds split, many are going into the election with great confidence; that is, their candidate will win this election.  I'm not one of those people.  So I have stopped watching or reading much of the news.  Not everything, of course.  It's impossible to avoid everything. Yesterday, October 18, 2024, I read Adam Gopnik's essay in the most recent print-edition of The New Yorker , October 21, 2024, titled Reflections:  As Bad As All That, Donald Trump and the unmaking of Am...