On July 19, some Parkside residents voiced their concerns to the Pleasanton City Council about a proposed recycled water fill station in their neighborhood that the council will reconsider later this month for a fifth time.
Churchill & Son
By Josh Ireland. 2021. 464 pages
When you read of domestic conflicts on a large and violent scale, you go back to the Greeks: Agamemnon’s unhappy family and the fated House of Atreus. The Churchills inhabited a similar world, full of sound, sadness and fury, shown here in all its dramatic stages.
Josh Ireland does not provide new material in this study of Winston Churchill and his relationship with his only son, Randolph, but he relates it with even-handed sympathy for both chief actors. The reader is drawn in, spell-bound at the spectacle and its tragic trajectory.
The front cover photo, taken in 1930, shows Churchill with his familiar expression of bullish determination and defiance, grasping a stick as he walks ahead of his son, then aged 19, closely following in his father’s footsteps. This was Randolph’s insoluble, lifelong problem: how to function successfully, independent of the overwhelming aura cast by his father.