CLEVELAND -- Red Sox general manager Dan Duquette didn't give manager Butch Hobson a vote of confidence yesterday, but did say, "Butch is doing the best he can. There's always going to be speculation about the manager when the team is playing poorly." ...

A hustling Red Sox third baseman and later, in the early 1990s, the team's manager, Butch Hobson had to regroup after a '96 cocaine- possession charge. Now 48, he's managing the Atlantic League's Nashua Pride in New Hampshire. Hobson lives in Vermont. HOW...

It is strange, but desperately appropriate in these bitter days, to open a novel upon no heroine, no hero, and no peculiar personal problem. To find rather upon the beginning pages the sweep of continental movement, peoples—not people—on the march—a march not made voluntarily towards some desired goal but forced on before brutality, disaster, and extinction. ["The Trespassers"] starts clearly with the broader theme. The story, intense, embattled, and sharply individualized...

Not all the mistakes of America can be blamed on the State Department. Some are collective immoralities, such as the discrepancy between our pretensions as a land of refuge and our actual, eyedropper admission of refugees. Our quotas have been steadily reduced ever since Hitler came to power, in exact proportion as the need grew…. This, oddly enough, is the main theme of a first novel ["The Trespassers"] which includes a love story, a description of Freud's farewell meeting with ...

[First Papers is a] leisurely, warm-hearted novel…. [Laura Hobson] writes with sympathy and affection of Stefan Ivarin, an intelligent, idealistic Russian immigrant who became an American not only "by choice, by law, by document," but more profoundly by the conviction that came to him with his first naturalization papers that "a lifetime might go toward validating those papers and being worthy of them."…