‘There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century’  
• November 10, 2021

The foreign-policy expert sees parallels between her lower-class roots and the hurdles facing today’s workers.   England is strangled by its pernicious class system. Even in 2021, the country’s rigid social […]

Kitty Kelley Book Club: ‘Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence’   
• October 14, 2021

Reviewed by Kitty Kelley  An instructive but dry treatise on a grim subject.  Despite their mutual animosity, Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill will be forever linked as a result of […]

‘First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents’: Presidential BFFs Receive Recognition in a Romp of a Read 
• September 16, 2021

Imagine you are a contestant on “Jeopardy!” and you select “Presidents and Their Female Friends” for $200. The host says: “This 20th-century president was known for his close relationships with […]

Kitty Kelley Book Club: ‘Blind Man’s Bluff: A Memoir’ 
• August 18, 2021

Some memoirs flicker like fireflies on a summer night. Others pierce your psyche with their subjects’ tortured experiences, consequent miseries and — finally — their oh-so-glorious survival. “The Story of […]

Kitty Kelley Book Club: ‘Henry Adams in Washington’
• January 14, 2021

Though fact-filled, this biography by George Washington University professor of English Ormond Seavey does strangely little to reveal the private man behind the public persona.

‘The Lost Diary of M: A Novel’
• September 18, 2020

THIS FICTIONALIZED ACCOUNT OF ONE OF JFK’S REAL-LIFE LOVERS WILL DELIGHT CAMELOT BUFFS AND GOSSIP HOUNDS ALIKE Many intriguing stories spring from the “what if ” crevices of a writer’s […]

‘Swing Kings: The Inside Story of Baseball’s Home Run Revolution’
• August 13, 2020

THE OLD-SCHOOL STYLE OF BATTING HAS BEEN TURNED ON ITS HEAD From the title, “Swing Kings,” readers might think Jared Diamond is writing about Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. But […]

‘Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography’
• July 15, 2020

UNSUNG OR UNWELL? REEVALUATING THE FIRST LADY THROUGH A FEMINIST LENS “Mary Todd Lincoln remains America’s most provocative First Lady,” writes Jean H. Baker in the first sentence of her […]

‘The Moment of Tenderness’
• June 17, 2020

THIS COLLECTION OF MADELEINE L’ENGLE’S EARLY STORIES SEEMS HEARTFELT, IF ILL-CONSIDERED Review by Kitty Kelley Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007) was a storyteller known for her childhood fables, religious tracts and fanciful […]

Kitty Kelley Book Club: ‘The Story I Am’
• June 11, 2020

In “The Story I Am: Mad About the Writing Life,” acclaimed author and essayist Roger Rosenblatt mines his personal oeuvre.