By Madeleine Johnson | August 12th, 2021 | “Notebook” Doris Lessing stirred a literary tempest in the 1980s with an experiment intended to illustrate just how hard it was for an unknown author to publish a book. Although the future Nobel Prize winner had already acquired both commercial and critical success with global best-seller “The Golden Notebook,” she decided to submit a manuscript to her … Continue reading Noblesse oblige

By Madeleine Johnson | July 13th, 2021 | “Notebook” I have a friend who can watch any movie, no matter how suspenseful or violent, with complete detachment. She scoffs when I have to cover my eyes in the cinema when tension or fear become unbearable, which is often for me. She marvels that I can’t see past the artifice and remain unmoved. “But it’s just … Continue reading When the Gestapo starts streaming

By Madeleine Johnson | June 10th, 2021 | “Notebook” There are some words whose definitions you just never forget. One of these is “vapid”, which my mother used to describe my friend Penny in fourth grade. Thanks to her trenchant criticism (which I felt extended to me), it’s a word I notice even to this day. So this recent headline in the “Washington Post” caught … Continue reading Vapid and vaunted

By Madeleine Johnson | May 15th, 2021 | “Notebook” I started out with World War I. The YouTube lectures and books I consumed while working on a family genealogical project soon led me to YouTube lectures and books on World War II. After reading Spanish author Almudena Grandes’s family saga “The Frozen Heart,” my interest spread to the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. The … Continue reading Back to the Cold War

By Madeleine Johnson | April 11th, 2021 | “Notebook” I have found myself up against a reality I thought had set aside when I returned to the United States from Italy four years ago, settling in a small town in New Hampshire. The problem has come up again with TV program “Stanley Tucci Searching for Italy”, airing on CNN, and the repeated invitation to join … Continue reading The Italian dream conversation

By Madeleine Johnson | March 7th, 2021 | “Notebook” An algorithm recently suggested that I learn about the Vikings. I took its advice and have just finished listening to the audio version of English archeologist Neil Price’s recent history of the Viking Age “Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings.” The algorithmic suggestion probably originated from my recent purchase of a history … Continue reading Rethinking the Vikings

By Madeleine Johnson | January 31st, 2021 | “Notebook”, Memory Lane I usually avoid mirrors. But one caught me unawares the other day. To my surprise, the person in I saw in it was not me but my mother. Who else’s knees sag that way or has hands spotted just so? No, this couldn’t be me. Yet it was. After a lifetime of rolling my … Continue reading When you become her

By Madeleine Johnson | December 29th, 2020 | “Notebook” The last 12 months have been no time for travel, with 2021 looking not much better. To avoid quarantine regulations, I have decided to opt for day-long trips I can take in a way that bypasses all regulations. Here’s how I imagine one such trip. 2 a.m. I arrive in an airport in some hot, populous … Continue reading The mind traveler

By Madeleine Johnson | December 3rd, 2020 | “Notebook” During his successful 2016 run for the White House, and well into the early part of his presidency, Donald Trump was compared to Italy’s former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi so often the comparisons became a sort of journalistic genre. Commentators saw parallels between their media careers, their images as self-made men, and their womanizing. In truth, … Continue reading Don’t call me Trump

By Madeleine Johnson | November 7th, 2020 | “Notebook” Some years ago, President Barack Obama ruffled feathers when he used art history as an example of an unproductive — or at least unremunerative — academic credential. My B.A. and M.A. degrees in art history never did much for me financially, so I know what Obama was trying to say. It’s no secret an art historian’s … Continue reading On art and Elders