Book Review: Bewilderment (2021). Richard Powers.

Richard Powers is one of the very best and most original novelists I've discovered over the past several  years.  Fortunately, he has also had a prolific career, so having started with his most recent works, I can now look forward to having the pleasure of finding my way through his backlist. 

 

Bewilderment, his most recent story (told in the first person) is the poignant account of an astrobiologist father and widower trying desperately to save his brilliant but disturbed 9-year old son from the triple threats of mental impairments, grief for his dead mother and distress over our world's ecological catastrophes.  It is an astonishing tale in its impact and human insights.

 

It is particularly moving in its portrayal of the emotional state of despair that our world's condition can evoke in most of us, yet also in how it portrays the positive power and healing effects of love, and of an acceptance of the limits to our individual abilities to change or prevent the destructive outcomes to nature that are already underway from climate change and environmental destruction.  

 

Maybe even more than his outstanding novel The Overstory, this Richard Powers book is an amazingly powerful and compelling story for our times and current situation.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made (2021). Ben Rhodes.

This truly excellent book by one of President Obama's former advisers is one of the many recent political history and theory books of the past several years addressing our collective concerns about the global rise of authoritarianism, and as such seems to be a fitting candidate for my first post to The Memory Cache.  It's one of the best such books I've read.  

 

 The "fall" to which Rhodes refers is the period since the apex of American hegemony and global influence as the beacon of hope and spreading democracy, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  The discussion is focused on the rise of nationalism in reaction to the American-led post-Cold War globalization, beginning with the career of Victor Orban in Hungary, then moving on to Vladimir Putin and Russia, and Xi Jinping in China.  

 

In each case study, he shows how the very hubris of American-driven globalization of business, culture and values gave rise to a virulent reaction against globalization and American democratic values in many cultures.  He illustrates particularly well the way in which nationalist authoritarians, especially Putin, have been able to use the U.S. military adventures and disasters of the 9/11 "forever" wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to create a populist narrative in their own countries about the greed, corruption and hypocrisy of our culture and values.   

 

These narratives, often cynical and supported by lies and disinformation, but salted with a solid grain of truth, have bolstered these autocratic leaders' popularity at home, and their calls for nationalist and authoritarian opposition to the  American-led, democratically organized world. 

 

Rhodes' book is particularly successful and effective, because it shows us how we often appear to others around the world, outside our own self-admiring cultural bubble of democratic Western values.  A disturbing and important contribution to the urgent discussion of the rise of authoritarianism and nationalism around the world.        

We're Live! Welcome to The Memory Cache.

Hi, this is Wayne. This is my first post on my new personal blog site, The Memory Cache. I'm calling it that, because for the past seven years, I've written and kept summaries and mini-reviews of most of the good books I've read, the movies I've watched, and the TV shows I've seen, partly for the fun of writing them, but mostly as a way to remember more about all the interesting content flowing by me, so I don't forget it all the day after I see it.  

    

Two years ago (when the pandemic was new), I decided to share annual lists of my short reviews with a few friends and family members. They were well-received, so recently I thought perhaps I could make a blog out of these notes to myself, and in the process make my reviews available much faster (than once a year), and to a wider audience. So here we go!

 

I spent the past three days working my way through all the tech challenges of creating a blog site. It really took me back to my IT database administrator days, when I worked closely with systems administrators: figuring out about Domain Name Servers, making and changing DNS records and propagating them, installing SSL site security certificates, and a lot of other web-hosting esoterica which probably won't mean anything to you if you're not already deep in the IT systems weeds.

 

But it was a fun challenge for me, and a new opportunity to learn some tech processes I didn't already know: namely, how to set up my own web site, and put it on the public internet. Very exciting!  And now it's here.  Who knows where this could lead?

 

Next up: a steady flow of new book, movie and TV reviews from 2022, plus I'll gradually be adding reviews from my previous annual lists (back to 2015).  You'll notice I have a variety of interests, so hopefully you'll find some content that looks interesting to you too along the way. 

 

For now, comments are allowed if you want to respond to posts. That will continue as long as comments are friendly, positive and constructive. I'd be happy to hear ideas and suggestions for how to make this blog a more helpful and entertaining site. Enjoy, and come back often!