“Fly Away” By Kristin Hannah 416 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $18.77 “Fly Away” is the second book in the “Firefly Lane” series by Kristin Hannah, and picks up where its predecessor, the best-selling novel “Firefly Lane,” left off. In “Fly Away,” readers revisit Tully Hart as she tries to overcome the untimely death of her best friend, Kate Ryan. Tully, the former host of the talk show “The Girlfriend,” falls from her high, lavish life, as her best friend Kate’s death consumes her reality. Without Kate or her goddaughter, Marah, who has run away, Tully has no one to turn to and runs her car into a cement block in…
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Iraqi Jew reads from memoir about struggles in 1960s
Dr. Cynthia Kaplan Shamash, who was one of the last remaining Jews in Iraq, read a section of her memoir that explained how her people were brutally treated during the 1960s. She read from “The Strangers We Became: Lessons in Exile From One of Iraq’s Last Jews” on March 3 in the Benjamin Rosenthal Library, with support from the Center for Jewish Studies. Most of the Jews in Iraq left after World War II. Before that, Baghdad had a flourishing Jewish population. Back in the 1920s, 20 percent of the population was Jewish. In ancient times, Babylonia was home to many Jews, including Biblical prophets. But in modern times there…
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English Professor releases two books on the Beat Generation
Queens College Professor John Tytell taught English and literature for more than 50 years. He recently released two new books titled “Writing Beat and Other Occasions of Literary Mayhem” and “The Beat Interviews,” which both examine legendary writers of the Beat Generation. Tytell discovered the works by Beat Generation writers while in college and was interested in what the writers wrote about conditions in America. The Beat Generation refers to a period where writers such as created poetry critiquing American society in the 1950s. “I was reading these writers when I was an undergraduate at City College of New York. I wasn’t reading these works as part of any course…
