In 1933 Germany, headmistress Anna Essinger was ordered by the newly-elected Nazi party to fly a Nazi flag above her school.

The Covid pandemic has produced many new books with many of them addressing the current situation in which we humans find ourselves and the pressing issues that we need to address.

Ron Rash’s new novel “The Caretaker” (Doubleday, 2023, 252 pgs.) is much different than his previous novels.

I have always been a fan of old books. There’s a comfort I find in between the pages of a story written long ago, a sort of escape from my modern-day life.

Every once in a while, a novel hits me with a punch I never saw coming, perhaps even one unintended by its author. 

Sometimes a great book just falls into my lap, which is what happened recently with Sherri Mitchell’s “Sacred Instructions” (North Atlantic Books, 2018, 227 pages).

Suppose you believe that climate change is a threat to humanity, but you oppose abortion or that you consider owning a firearm a natural right, but support open borders?

Sometimes we read certain histories — Scott’s expedition to Antarctica, for example, or Washington’s troops at Valley Forge, or the prisoners in the Soviet gulag — and are stunned by the endurance and courage of the human spirit.

The day before my June getaway to the beach ended, I developed a bad case of bookshop lust.

April is the season when Chaucer’s pilgrims gathered before setting off to Canterbury and the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket. “Oh, to be in England,” wrote poet Robert Browning, “Now that April’s there.” Later, T.S. Eliot added a different perspective: “April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of a dead land.” In her poem “Spring,” Edna St. Vincent Millay also looks askance at the fourth month: “To what purpose, April, do you return again?” and then ends with “It is not enough that yearly, down this hill/April/Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.”