Book Review: Dark Matter (2016). Brian Crouch.

This science-fiction novel by a successful screenwriter seems almost to have been written with a movie in mind, given its combination of fast action, high tech inventions, complex plots, intrigue and suspense.  It has some love and relationship elements, some sex, some violence, and many mind-bending events. 

This is all in the service of exploring the unimaginable "multiverse" of quantum physics theory: a state where every act of choice by every person, and every instance of "chance", leads to a new universe and a different sequence of events and outcomes. The main plot driver is this question: what might happen if some brilliant person invented a machine that allows us to move between these universes? 

The point of this plot device is to show how each of us might end up becoming very different people, depending on which choice we make at each moment, and how that might interact with the choices of others. If you like this sort of speculation about life, and how our own choices and outside events constantly shape the course of our lives (and I do), it's a fun ride, and a thought-provoking one too.  Recommended.

TV Review: Heartland. Netflix Series (via CBC), Seasons 1-14.

Heartland is a Canadian modern Western family drama, about an extended family and their friends, foes and horses in a small town in Alberta.  It is the longest-running dramatic TV series in Canadian history, with a 15th season already playing in Canada (due for release next year in the USA), and a 16th season still to be made.  Despite all that, we’d never heard of the show until it went up on Netflix. We binged this one for months!  And we loved it. 

As the series opens, the central character, Amy Fleming (played by Amber Marshall) is a 15-year old girl living on a horse farm with her divorced mother, her older sister and their grandfather.   Unfortunately, Amy's mother dies in the first episode, with Amy in the car beside her, while trying to rescue an abused horse.  

From there, we see Amy grow and mature as a young woman coming into her own as a gifted "horse whisperer", trainer and rider, just like her mother, while we get to know all the extended family members, including several generations of foster kids and other young strays and friends that end up on the farm and in the local community.  

There's so much to love about this series:  the characters, their lives and loves, the gorgeous Alberta scenery, and the studies in complex family relationships and child development that run throughout.  There are also lots of Western-style adventures, including probably every use of a horse anyone has ever imagined, and plenty of humor.  

It was interesting to discover that Amber Marshall, and several of the other actors in the show, are accomplished equestrians in real life, who actually perform many of the stunts and riding scenes showing horses (and riders) doing amazing things. 

There is also an intrinsic Canadian "niceness" to the show -- the limited amount of violence rarely goes beyond fisticuffs, sex is usually no more than fully-clothed passionate kisses and hugs followed by scene changes, and conflict is usually resolved through slowly working things out.  A delightful long-running treat, which got us through many long evenings in 2021.  Highly recommended.

TV Mini-Series Review: Normal People (2020). BBC and Hulu.

A 12-part series based on the 2018 bestselling novel of the same name by Sally Rooney, this story follows a pair of young Irish lovers, their on again/off again romance and friendship, and their respective personality developments as individuals from their last year of high school into their years together and apart at Trinity College in Dublin. 

It's very touching, and definitely evocative of many of the common experiences and life lessons of sexual and romantic relationships during the late teens and early twenties.  It has a lot of fairly explicit sex in it, although most of it is handled very sweetly and tastefully.  Recommended.

Book Review: The Monk of Mokha (2018). Dave Eggers.

This is the incredible, inspiring true story of a young Yemeni-American who grew up as a poor immigrant child in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco.  In the process of trying to find a way to make a living as a young man, without much early success, he discovers that his home country of Yemen was the original source of coffee. 

From this minor piece of historical trivia, he has a vision of himself as the man who can restore Yemeni coffee to international prominence, and then sets out to do it, despite his lack of any knowledge about coffee, or any business experience, connections or funding sources.  

In the process of this unlikely quest, he encounters one major obstacle after another:  poor coffee growing practices across Yemen, local warlords, terrorism and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and the onset of the Yemeni war with Saudi Arabia, which unfolds and traps him in Yemen just as he's finally ready to ship his first load of elite coffee to America.  

An unusual rags to riches adventure story for our modern era.  Recommended.

Book Review: The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018). Timothy Snyder.

This book by a noted academic with deep personal connections in Eastern Europe exposes the political evolution of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, from a nation apparently on the brink of a promising transition to western-style democracy, to the totalitarian, corrupt autocracy of Vladimir Putin.  

Those of us in the West who had been ignoring post-Soviet Russian developments in the belief that democracy had become inevitable there need to read this book closely.  Snyder pays particular attention to the 20th century fascist theoreticians who have been elevated back to prominence by Putin, and explores the tools, news media and institutions being used to destroy a fact-based political reality in Russia, in favor of an "eternal" regime with no succession plan, no accountability to the people, and no ability to look to history or objective facts to determine what is true and real.  

It’s not surprising that Snyder has been in demand as a commentator on cable news the past few years, both during the Trump presidency, and again now as we watch the horrifying war launched by Putin and Russia upon Ukraine unfolding in real time.  He has a deep understanding of the historical precedents for these events, as well as their theoretical underpinnings in the authoritarian traditions of Russia, the Soviet Union and elsewhere.

The playbook he describes is all depressingly familiar by now:  undoubtedly totalitarian in its methods and effects, and unrestrained by the democratic and rational traditions (along with fact-based journalism) which still exist in the western world and free societies, but which have been under similar forms of attack here too in the past several decades.  Recommended.

Book Review: Bad Blood (2018). John Carryrou.

An excellent investigative history of Theranos, the glittery $9 billion hi-tech health start-up led by Elizabeth Holmes, a beautiful and charismatic 19-year old Stanford drop-out who promised a revolution in blood testing, but instead led it to disaster and collapse through personal manipulation, brilliant but fraudulent marketing, secrecy and deceit over a 15-year period.  

 

The book and Carryou’s investigation, as well as some of the information contained in the book, appear in some of the current documentaries, podcasts and fictionalized versions of the Theranos story, including most recently the HBO documentary series The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and the Hulu TV mini-series The Dropout. 

 

A fascinating and disturbing story of the high-tech start-up world and its pathologies, well researched and presented.  Recommended.

TV Review: Parks and Recreation. Peacock Streaming (NBC), Seasons 1-7.

A really sweet and funny TV series about a bunch of mid-western Parks & Recreation employees in the little mid-western hamlet of Pawnee, Indiana, produced by and starring Amy Poehler.  I never bothered to see this one before, because I assumed it was just Saturday Night Live-style skits in an office setting (I've never been a big SNL fan).  

But when we finally watched it, it turned out to be endearing, hilarious and definitely binge-worthy.  The cast is excellent, starting with Amy Poehler in the lead role, but including also Nick Offerman, Rashida Jones, Rob Lowe, Chris Pratt and several others, playing a bunch of office and town misfits who are each ridiculous in their own unique ways, but all basically kind and adorable. 

This is definitely the sort of show where we laugh with them, rather than at them.  In this sense, it is very reminiscent of Tina Fey's wonderful 30 Rock comedy series.  No wonder the two of them (Poehler and Fey) have done so much great comedy together.  Highly recommended.    

Movie Review: The Snow Walker (2003). Amazon Prime.

Some good friends told us about this 2003 movie, based on a Farley Mowat novel, after we came back from a 2019 trip to Alaska.  We finally got around to seeing it, and it was well worth it.  

The story takes place in 1952, in the Canadian Northwest Territories, where an arrogant white bush pilot and war veteran on a side trip to a tiny remote native village is persuaded to take a very sick young native woman to the nearest city hospital.  

Unfortunately, the engine fails on the way, and the two of them end up crash-landing in a barren wilderness, where the pilot tries to take charge to figure out how to rescue them.  What he doesn't realize (until he does) is that his ailing passenger is far better equipped for survival, with just the few primitive tools she carries in her kit, than he could ever be in that hostile, cold natural environment. 

Watching the process of how she copes in the wild, and they gradually learn to work together, is fascinating, emotionally stirring and wonderfully told.  Highly recommended.

TV Mini-Series Review: Little Fires Everywhere (2020). Hulu.

A perfectly-timed new TV series when it was released (based on the 2017 bestseller of the same name by Celeste Ng), this series starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington explores many facets of race and class conflict in American society. 

Witherspoon portrays Elena, a wealthy White suburban Mom of four teenage children, seemingly well-intentioned and kind, but also narcissistic, uptight and clueless, whose life and family become increasingly intertwined with those of Washington's character Mia. 

Mia is a mysterious free-spirited Black artist with a 15-year old daughter, who moves from place to place every few months in a beat-up old hatchback, for reasons that she doesn’t reveal but which increasingly add to the tension surrounding her, her daughter and their odd rootless lifestyle.

This situation quickly becomes a powder keg for all the racial and class tensions, as well as the family dramas and personalities, within and between the two families and the Shaker Heights community in Ohio.  A really excellent piece of TV drama for our era.  Highly recommended. 

Book Review: Petty: the Biography (2015). Warren Zanes.

This book claims to be the 'unvarnished truth' about the life of Tom Petty, resulting from Petty and his whole circle of friends, Heartbreakers band members, fellow stars and family members opening up to the author about all the private emotional turmoil and personal ups and downs of one of America's greatest ever rock and roll legends and his band.  That seems to be a well-founded claim, as much as any biography can claim to be the ‘truth’ about anyone’s life.

A nicely-written and intensely revealing look behind the scenes of one of rock's most epic, beloved and habitually private figures, published shortly before his tragic death.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound & Revolution of the Electric Guitar (2016). Brad Tolinski & Alan Di Perna.

This book is a surprisingly engaging cultural, musical and technical history of the electric guitar.  It includes stories of the individuals who designed and built the iconic guitar models, the companies they created, the trend-setting musicians who used and altered the guitars, and what it all meant. 

It is interesting that there is or was an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and then at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the similar name “Play It Loud: The Instruments of Rock and Roll” which by sheer cosmic luck I was able to attend on the opening day (at the Met) in 2019.  It is full of the actual instruments played by many great rock stars, many of them much the worse for wear. 

I don’t know if the exhibition still exists, or whether this book was in any way connected to it (other than by the fact that it covers much of the same history), but you can still find references and some videos online related to this marvelous museum collection of instruments.

A fun read for any electric guitar player or recent American music and social history fan. Recommended.

Book Review: Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021). Anthony Doerr.

Anthony Doerr’s previous novel, All the Light We Cannot See (2014), won numerous well-deserved literary awards and accolades.  His new novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, continues to demonstrate his mastery of story-telling in the modern novel, but with an ambition and reach that is astonishing and miraculous.    

 

How to even describe a plot like this, or to say what it is about?   At its core, it is about books, libraries, and the preservation of stories and the earth through the generations, and the efforts that people take to try protect books and our history against the ravages of time, wars, floods, disasters and human follies.  But it is so much more profound than that.

 

The novel’s plot skips back and forth between individuals and small communities across history, from antiquity and the Greek age, to the siege of Constantinople in 1453, to America in the 1900s and 2000s, to the Korean War, and to a human space ark in the near future, heading for a new habitable planet light years away.  And in each time and place, there is one common element: an obscure, ancient book containing the tale of a fool who travels far, and becomes a donkey, a fish and a bird, before returning home in the end.  

 

I had to admit to being a little skeptical when I read the plot summary on the book jacket.   How could such a convoluted set of people and places have a readable plot or allow us to build any emotional connection to the characters?   But this is where Doerr’s story-telling wizardry comes in.  The characters with all their human failures and weaknesses, their difficult circumstances, and their seemingly doomed attempts to learn, to become wiser, to survive, and to somehow preserve the continuity of the human story, were both believable and lovable in the very best sense.

 

This is the kind of rare story where you’re desperate to know what happens next, and how it will end as you’re reading it, but you also don’t want it to end, because you’ve become so attached to the characters and their lives. 

 

It reminded me of Richard Powers’ master work of 2018, The Overstory, in several important respects:  its somber but deeply caring inclusion of humanity’s headlong run toward ruining our home planet’s environment as a major theme, its portrayal of the power of the human spirit to try to keep fighting against the eternal challenges and setbacks of the human condition, and its use of the narrative trick of separately telling multiple stories of different lives in different times and places, only to somehow bring all the threads of these stories together into a coherent whole by the end.

 

A marvelous book, which left me somehow happier and more hopeful after I’d read it, even with all the sad events and powerful truths that are part of the story.  One of the best novels I’ve read in memory.  Very highly recommended.