By Miriam R. Kramer Children’s literature is the early foundation for our imagination, understanding of others, and the way we approach the world. I can still remember my mother reading to me and thinking how badly I wanted to learn how to read myself. My father would say it was imperative to have an excellent vocabulary, and we would discuss interesting words. My grandmother, a teacher, taught me to read, and my grandfather, a historian, took me to the public library on a weekly basis every summer when I came to visit. I would enter endless wondrous worlds: ones that strongly echoed my own and others that were set in alternate universes but still rang true. So here are some recommendations to make children’s lives infinitely richer. I cannot list all my favorites in this amount of space, so I will suggest a few beloved old titles and some new ones that have crossed my path of late. For very young readers, Dr. Seuss is always a great place to start. Dr. Seuss’s ABC: An Amazing Alphabet Book is a delight, like most of his colorful, whimsical works. I cannot think of a better way to learn the alphabet. The Cat in the Hat starts children learning the joys, rhymes, and rhythms of poetry on a basic level. Dr. Seuss makes serious points in a charming, seemingly nonsensical way, whether he is talking about the spirit of Christmas in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, or the importance of conserving the environment in The Lorax. He embodies Oscar Wilde’s quip: “Life is too important to be taken seriously.” An adorable, classic work for children from four to six is Arnold Lobel’s Caldecott Honor book, Frog and Toad Are Friends. The book presents an excellent friendship between very different personalities. Frog and…
By Miriam R. Kramer “If the Lasso way is wrong, it’s hard to imagine being right.” Trent Crimm, a British journalist from the Independent writes these words in his column about soccer, or football, as most of the world calls it, becoming one of many aloof or hostile characters won over by an American football coach named Ted Lasso. The Emmy-winning Apple+ TV series emerged just when it was needed at the height of the pandemic on August 14, 2020. The story of Lasso, who moves to the London Borough of Richmond to coach a Premier League soccer team, Ted Lasso lives up to its hype. Currently in its third and last season, it continues to reveal the kind of heart, beauty, and humor that most TV stumbles past even with clever plotlines and spot-on writing. Ted Lasso is its own animal, a show that may make you tear up but never makes you feel despair. It is anti-despair, and despair is very fashionable in peak TV, the golden age of television characterized by cable series and shows released by streaming series. I am tired of hunting for TV that makes me happier, while also spoiled by excellent series. From shows like The Sopranos to Mad Men, Homeland, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Game of Thrones, or a lesser-known British gem such as The Fall, I consume series and then let them go, while remembering great acting, storytelling, and the moods they evoke. While many of them are wonderfully written, memorable, humorous, or provocative, they often reflect and support deep cynicism and feelings of desolation. I recently finished the first season of The Last of Us, a post-apocalyptic series that jangles the nerves, picking up the ever-popular theme of zombies while highlighting deeper human stories in some episodes. I have…
By Miriam R. Kramer South African comedian and commentator Trevor Noah captured the national spotlight when he was appointed as the host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central in 2015, replacing the iconic Jon Stewart. When he started, Noah aptly said “I can only assume this is as strange for you as it is for me.” The studio executives who picked an astute, biracial unknown over a bog-standard witty white guy were considered daring at the time. Noah’s outsider’s take on American and international culture and events worked in his favor, gaining him a devout following until he gave up the show in 2022. While on the air, he also wrote Born A Crime, a number-one New York Times bestselling memoir about growing up in the South African-defined category of “coloured” (South African spelling) during apartheid, and how that shaped him as a man and as a comedian. In his memoir, Noah talks about identity in South Africa, how his parents’ different identities shaped his own through their presence and absence, and what it meant to belong to a rigidly defined caste. His mother proved the defining influence on his young life. Trevor describes her as someone extraordinary, fearless, unaccepting of the limits placed on her life as a black woman through the apartheid. One of those strictures was the South African law preventing black and white people from having a child, or indeed the member of any prescribed race from having a child with someone from another race. As a young woman, his mother, having mostly brought herself up, was an independent thinker as well. Forbidden from living in designated white areas by the government, she slept in restrooms at night to avoid going back to Soweto, the black township where she was prescribed to live with her…
By Miriam R. Kramer As a teenager in 1985 I first ran across Margaret Atwood’s newly published work, The Handmaid’s Tale, at Old Town’s wonderful Olsson’s Books & Records, which formerly stood on S. Union Street in Alexandria. I was taken aback by the power and simplicity of her writing. This classic work of radical dystopian fiction describes the fate and musings of one woman, Offred, a Handmaid in a monotheocracy called Gilead, formed after the imagined destruction of the United States of America. Recently Atwood’s powerful book has been adapted into an equally riveting series on the streaming network Hulu. In this patriarchal post-American society, martial law and a totalitarian regime controls the movement of all citizens and women in particular, all of whom must cleave to traditionally interpreted monotheistic, puritanical values, or suffer terrible punishments. Those in charge twist the Bible’s words into propaganda, dividing women into high-status Wives, nun-like propagandists and teachers known as Aunts, servant slaves such as Handmaids and Marthas (housekeepers/cooks), low-status Econowives, and finally the Unwomen, those too unruly to do anything but shovel toxic waste in the Colonies until they die, or others who serve as speakeasy-style prostitutes. No women work outside the home, and none, even those with higher status, are allowed to read and write. Fertile women are particularly prized for their ability to continue the human race, since disease and chemical waste in the former United States have caused sterility among the population at large. Therefore, those few women proven to be fertile who are not already married to high-ranking Commanders in the rigidly conservative new hierarchy are requisitioned as Handmaids. They exist as puritanically dressed sexual slaves subject to impregnation on religious monthly Ceremony Days. Handmaids bear the burden of continuing to populate the country in pleasure-free, wife-supervised rituals…
By Miriam R. Kramer “He’s a real nowhere man Sitting in his nowhere land Making all his nowhere plans for nobody Doesn’t have a point of view Knows not where he’s going to Isn’t he a bit like you and me?” Lennon/ McCartney Harry the Spare. William the Heir. The former a young man floating angry, purposeless, and bemused in his gilded cage; the latter distant, walking a straight line, fulfilling endless rote duties to the public while carrying the weight of an ancient monarchy on his shoulders. In writing the book Spare, Harry, Duke of Sussex, has given people all over the world a look at his inner workings of the monarchy, a world shrouded in secrecy despite a rabid, lying paparazzi creating controversy with splashy headlines and stolen pictures. Harry delves into his worship of his mother Diana, his undiagnosed and life-changing trauma at her death, and his complex, troubled relationship with his family. He also reveals the path he trod and the therapy he experienced to find his raison d’être. Harry sketches himself as a lad traumatized repeatedly by a ravenous paparazzi paid hundreds of thousands of pounds for pictures of royalty. As a young man he re-lives the memory of his mother’s fate at the hands of tabloid journalists over and over, searching for his purpose and goals despite the emptiness he feels from her loss and his highly unusual role within British culture. He reveals his difficulty in losing his early memories of his mother after she died, and his bout with magical thinking. Until he was 23 he believed on some level that his mother was alive and had disappeared to escape the press, with the intention to come back some day. Down for Eton from his birth, Harry detested its emphasis on…
By Miriam R. Kramer As Americans, many of us have Irish heritage that we celebrate with trips overseas to ancestral villages, atmospheric Guinness-soaked pubs, lonely cliffside views of crashing seas, and all the misty green landscape we can soak in. If Ireland is indeed a land of stories, I almost always want to hear them. This goes doubly true in the case of storytellers such as Dervla McTiernan, an author of police procedurals who goes beyond that cliched tale-telling structure to achieve something more. Trained as a lawyer, McTiernan has written a detailed series starring Detective Cormac Reilly, who solves crimes in such books as The Ruin, the Scholar, The Good Turn, and the recent prequel novella, The Roommate. In The Ruin, Detective Inspector (DI) Cormac Reilly is a garda, a detective of twenty years who has transferred from Dublin to Galway, where he originally started his career as a young policeman. He has taken a step back in his career to accommodate his live-in girlfriend, Emma, a brilliant and accomplished scientist who found a job in a renowned Galway laboratory. Mistrusted by his station and assigned to cold cases, he oddly finds a current case connected to one he encountered in Galway as a brand-new garda. Twenty years ago Reilly found Hilaria Blake, a heroin addict, dead in a house with her ignored and abused children, fifteen-year-old Maude and five-year-old Jack. After making sure Jack goes to the hospital, Maude disappears, and Jack goes into foster care. Reilly has no way to investigate it further. Twenty years later, DI Reilly finds out that Jack, now a young man, has committed suicide for no apparent reason. Reilly meets his fiancé, Aisling Ryan, a doctor-in-training, to find out why. Under pressure, Aisling eventually investigates circumstances surrounding Jack’s suicide that invite suspicion….
By Miriam Kramer “Could you be any more brutally honest?” Matthew Perry got his big break in 1994 when he and his four costars became television superstars with the advent of Friends, one of the most beloved sitcoms in TV history. With the publication of his recent memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing; Perry bares his soul and life-long trauma. This extraordinarily raw memoir recounts not only the story of his life as a Generation X emblem and beloved actor, but also his terrible battle with addiction and the ways in which he has come to terms with it. Matthew Perry grew up in Canada with his mother until age fifteen, a nationally ranked tennis player who felt a huge hole inside that was partially a result of his parents’ early divorce. His father, John, an American musician, separated from his mother, Suzanne, a beauty queen. His father became an actor who lived in California. His mother, a respected journalist, served as press secretary for Pierre Trudeau, former prime minister of Canada. Perry marked his childhood and adolescence with a longing for the stability and security that he had never experienced. Known for his tennis prowess, he never found it a means to establishing a sense of identity and self-worth. With his mother’s high profile job traveling with the Canadian prime minister, he often felt abandoned and always on edge. He moved to live with his father in Los Angeles when he was fifteen. In hindsight, as an adult, he views his parents with love and respect for doing the best they could as very young people raising him, and for sticking by him during his stints in rehab and in the hospital. To get attention and please his mother on the occasions she was at home, Perry…
By Miriam R. Kramer “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” In her eight Regency historical romances, focusing on the family Bridgerton from 1813-1827, Julia Quinn might take this introductory sentence to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and slightly re-write it: “It is a truth acknowledged in the Bridgerton family, that any Bridgerton heir has enough money to marry well and for love, and should do so post-haste.” If you have binged the two costume-drama seasons on Netflix, with Shonda Rhimes as the showrunner, you will mostly know what to expect. The highly popular novels do take a slightly more serious tone at times. Their titles are as follows: The Duke and I (Daphne), The Viscount Who Loved Me (Anthony), An Offer From a Gentleman (Benedict), Romancing Mr. Bridgerton (Colin), To Sir Phillip, With Love (Eloise), When He Was Wicked (Francesca), It’s in His Kiss (Hyacinth), and On the Way to the Wedding (Gregory). The Bridgerton family, heir to the deceased Viscount Edmund and vibrant Viscountess Violet, comprises eight stair-step children named in alphabetical order according to age. Anthony, the Viscount-to-be, is pressured by the responsibility that will fall on his shoulders of looking out for his siblings. Next come Benedict, Colin, Daphne, Eloise, Francesca, Gregory, and Hyacinth. With a loving, wise mother ready to push her children into society to find spouses, Quinn puts a happier, lighter spin on the Austen society satire and adds in the boisterous nature of an exceptionally large family whose members all adore and support one another. The first novels start with comments from a light-hearted, acerbic, and anonymous society maven named Lady Whistledown, who knows everything about the glittering society in which the Bridgertons move. In a…
By Miriam R. Kramer Published November 2020 With an Addendum about J.K. Rowling’s New Novel, The Ink Black Heart J.K. Rowling, ranked in the top ten bestselling authors of all time, has moved far away from her Harry Potter days. Her renown from penning her beloved children’s fantasy series of seven books, plus other books related to the series, have made Harry Potter and his world of witches, wizards, and fantastic beasts a global pop culture touchstone. The Casual Vacancy, her first murder mystery, was a stand-alone novel with a nasty tone about nasty people. After this freshman effort, which had a mixed reception, Rowling decided to create the Cormoran Strike series, a succession of blunt, psychological murder mysteries based around two private detectives, Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott. Deciding to write under the pen name Robert Galbraith, Rowling wanted the series to sink or swim on its own merits, while signaling that these thrillers were set in a different universe than her blockbuster children’s novels. She was outed as the author, however, and the first novel subsequently shot up the bestseller list after its middling initial sales. The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm, Career of Evil, Lethal White, and very recently, Troubled Blood, have profiled a provocative, evolving partnership between Cormoran and Robin, along with their private lives and hunts for the criminals who lurk among their diverse victims. Cormoran Strike, a former military policeman who wears a prosthesis after his leg was blown off in Afghanistan, starts a struggling detective agency. A secretarial temp assigned randomly to the office, Robin Ellacott, shows up there for a week’s work, only to be confronted with Strike’s ex-fiancée running out the door and Strike himself, who nearly knocks her down the stairs by accident. A sympathetic, personable, and organized colleague, she complements…
By Miriam R. Kramer From the Vault: I have read a number of Stephen King’s compulsively readable books since this column: Firestarter, The Dead Zone, The Shining, Rose Madder, The Eyes of the Dragon, Joyland, and The Outsider. They all touch on the wide-ranging variety of interests and subject matter I detailed below in my original column. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is the most recent. The tale of Trisha, a young girl who gets lost in the woods off the Appalachian Trail, is an older publication but a compelling page turner. She keeps herself going by listening to Red Sox baseball games starring her favorite player, Tom Gordon, on her Walkman. In the process she forages for food and seeks shelter while sensing a lurking presence watching and following her. I look forward to King’s next publication, Fairy Tale, which comes out in early September. Since officially beginning his career with a short story sold in 1967, the extraordinarily prolific author Stephen King has written more than 60 novels, not to mention multiple screenplays, five non-fiction books, and approximately 200 short stories. His first published book, Carrie, was released in 1973 when he was in his twenties, giving him enough money to write full-time. Since then, he’s left a legacy inextricably intertwined with pop culture in books and movies. His writing comprises horror, science fiction, fantasy, and straight fiction genres, with those genres often overlapping. He has referred to himself as the writer’s equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries, which does not tell even part of the story of his enduring popularity, despite showing that he understands his common-man touch. Even as an omnivorous reader, I put King aside for a long time. What I did read I found to be propulsive and very engaging, but I…
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