The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill Reviewed by Mark D. Walker

  My middle daughter gifted me this book, which remained next to my bed for over five months due to its imposing size and more than 500 pages. But I decided to check it out as part of my “Black Lives Matter” awareness program. What was slavery about and how had it impacted the U. S. for so long? In this case, Aminata Diallo would be taken from her village in West Africa and placed on a slave ship in Sierra Leone – where I’d worked for three years. The ship was bound for South Carolina and from there she’d […]

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A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende, Reviewed by Mark D. Walker

  I hadn’t read any of Allende’s books since “House of Spirits,” and after seeing several revealing interviews of her over the last few months, I decided it was time to reacquaint myself with her latest novel. The setting of the Spanish Civil War and Chile drew me in even more, as many of my favorite authors, such as Federico Garcia Lorca, George Orwell, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Neruda lived through that war. Also intriguing was the landing of the protagonists in Chile after the military takeover of Pinochet. The President who was toppled was the author’s […]

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The Best of Million Mile Walker: Reflections on 2020! December

Dear Friends and Colleagues from Around the World, 2020 has been a challenging year in so many ways. For the first time in 47 years, our family did not celebrate Thanksgiving together, nor did our children and grandchildren celebrate Christmas Eve and Christmas at my oldest daughter’s place.  We had to settle on a series of Zoom calls emptying Christmas stockings on Christmas Eve and singing carols on another video call on Christmas. Here are some of the highlights of Million Mile Walker for the year. Culture Watch At over 335,000 deaths, the U.S. has the worst record, with 25% […]

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