The Cool Teacher Book Review by Jude Joseph Lovell It feels apt to title this review with that debatable oxymoron. Especially because Peter Kravitz, a retired educator from the New York Public Schools system and a contributor to this magazine, has produced a new memoir that vacillates freely between opposing poles: funny to serious; emotional Read more
Hilary Mantel’s Triple Play Book commentary by Jude Joseph Lovell I decided early while reading The Mirror & The Light, the third volume of Hilary Mantel’s challenging but remarkable trilogy of historical novels about Thomas Cromwell, a statesman and minister to the English king Henry VIII, that I could not write a conventional review. I Read more
My Two Favorite Books of 2021 by Jude Joseph Lovell It is hard to believe yet another year has come and gone. Seems like only just last week I was sitting in a similar place scribbling about my favorite books of 2020. One of those was called Love in the Time of Cholera, and I Read more
The Whip and the Carrot By Angie Littlefield Many of us, when we reach “a certain age,” want to write about our family. We do it for several related reasons: we want to set things down before memories are lost, we want to hand down our family history to the next generation, or we want Read more
Crisis Management Book Review by Jude Joseph Lovell Rumaan Alam, a Brooklyn-based writer of Bangladeshi-American descent, has written a third novel called Leave The World Behind that has generated a buzz for raising timely, provocative questions and for its page-turning fluidity. I’m leading with the good news. The bad news is the book is heavily Read more
Chapter 3: Brooklyn August 1988 by Peter Kravitz I picked up a map of New York City High Schools at the Board of Education on Court Street, near my wife’s and my first Carroll Gardens apartment, a third-floor walkup on Second Place. I planned to pedal my Raleigh three-speed—my childhood bicycle—to various Brooklyn High Schools Read more
The Memory of Pain Book Review by Jude Joseph Lovell If there is anything that unites us all, no matter who we are or where we come from, it is that we cannot pass through this life without pain, sacrifice, even suffering. This is one of our few guarantees. The question becomes: What do you do Read more
A House with Many Rooms Book review by Jude Joseph Lovell Throughout his distinguished career, much has been made of the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s “mixed” heritage—the fact that he was raised in England by his Japanese parents. Since his novels tend to raise questions that strike to the core of humanity—who we really are, and Read more
Once Upon A Time in the West Book review by Jude Joseph Lovell Here we are in the U.S.A. in “the evil of its winter,” to lift a phrase from the celebrated Irish fiction writer Kevin Barry’s brand-new book of stories, That Old Country Music (Doubleday). “But then,” he notes, “I suppose January is a tough Read more
My Two Favorite Books of 2020 by Jude Joseph Lovell Proving the old adage about time, flight, and having fun, I return again for the third year in a row to share my two favorite books of the year. While neither of these titles were published recently, both are well worth the investment of time Read more
