Having read and been horrified by Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novels, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, I was disappointed by The Heart Goes Last (2015, 380 pages in softcover format). Perhaps my review is biased by my own experience when I was a child. My family was poor, living paycheck to almost paycheck. By that I mean that the money often ran out before the next paycheck came in. So, we’d charge our food at the local grocery store for a day or two until Dad got hom

In response to Mr. Wieland’s Letter in the October 15 edition of The Madera Tribune: Going to school in the North, I had a history teacher that put a different light on the Civil War. It was mostly about the price of cotton. Cotton was produced in the South and the textile factories were in the North, mostly in New York. They were buying import cotton at a lower price than what the South needed. With no tariffs, the South was being squeezed into submission.

Ever wonder where the ghosts and goblins go after the evening of October 31? You know, the ones who knocked on your portal or rang the doorbell last night and scared you half to death. The ones who demanded treats or else. Are they swallowed up by fissures in the Earth’s crust? Are they lurking in shadows, waiting for just the right moment to reach out and grab you? The answer, I believe, can be ascertained by considering time zones. In 1884, a meeting of the International Me

Proposition 50, if approved, authorizes five new Democratic leaning districts for the election of Californians to the House of Representatives from 2026 through 2030 at the possible expense of GOP representation. It effectively expires, thereafter, allowing the existing Citizens Redistricting Committee to draw election maps following the 2030 census. All 50 states typically redraw their voting maps once every 10 years following the federal census. Not under Trump. Prop. 50 is

I’ve been asked why I generally review crime/mystery/ suspense/thriller-type novels. I suppose that my most direct answer is that I enjoy the genre. But these books are also a break from the books that I needed to read during my professional life. Most of those were in the fields of sociology and psychology, although I also taught a class titled “Sociology through Literature,” which was based on “modern classics.” This generation of YA (Young Adult) books also fascinates me b

California stands at a crossroads with Proposition 50, a measure that threatens to unravel the progress we’ve made toward unbiased, transparent redistricting. Californians strongly rejected partisan gerrymandering by establishing the Citizens Redistricting Commission, taking map-drawing power from self-serving Sacramento politicians, and putting it in the hands of an impartial group dedicated to fairness, not politics. The Commission has been far from perfect, but it beats th

Remember Elon Musk? No, not the disemploymentator. The high-tech industrial genius who was born in South Africa and immigrated to Canada in 1989. There, he attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, for two years before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, he received a Bachelor of Arts in physics and a Bachelor of Science in economics from the Wharton School. Since then, he has been busy amassing money. Even before he was granted his degrees, he co

Brad Meltzer is an interesting author who really knows his stuff. In September, 2006, he participated in a brainstorming session with the CIA, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and several psychologists to try to figure out new methods that might be used by terrorists to attack the United States. That was quite an honor for a guy who was once a writer of comic books. But comic books, like Justice League of America and Superman/Batman, were part of a much larger body of w