TV Review: Atypical. Netflix Series, Seasons 1-4.

Atypical is a charming and heart-warming family dramedy series about living with a cognitive/behavioral disability.  

At the center of the story is a bright high school senior with high-functioning autism.  He has a younger sister who’s a track star, a neurotic and over-involved mother, and a devoted father who had abandoned the family for a time years ago, when he was first trying to come to terms with his son's diagnosis, thereby causing ongoing trust issues in the marriage.  

Our young protagonist also has a few eccentric friends, and a community of people from school and work with whom he interacts as he tries to figure out how to carve out a positive role in life for himself despite his condition, and all the normal social things he doesn't understand.  

In the process, we see the hardships and stresses his situation creates for the people around him, but also the unexpected rewards the various characters realize from his often too-honest and unfiltered view of the world and their own actions.  Funny yet with a serious message, this was definitely one of the more enjoyable and worthwhile shows we saw in 2021.  Recommended.

Book Review: Death Without Company (2006). Craig Johnson.

This is the second Walt Longmire mystery novel, in which an elderly local woman may have been murdered in the local old-folks home. 

 

With all the same excellent literary qualities, main characters along with some new ones, and a new mix of complicated family histories and relationships, long-hidden crimes and conspiracies, and plenty of the same kind of local color and great dialogue that were present in The Cold Dish (the first Walt Longmire novel), Johnson spins another entertaining and high-quality addition to his series of contemporary Western mystery novels.  

 

I really liked it!  But on the other hand, it's two down, 22 (and counting) to go, with the recent release of the latest installment (number 24) in this series.  I'm going to need to pace myself!  Recommended.

Book Review: Rules of Civility (2011). Amor Towles.

This is Amor Towles's first novel, written as a first-person account of the life of an aspiring young woman from the lower classes, who dives into the social life of the wealthy in late 1930s Manhattan.  

It contains wonderful, evocative descriptions of the people, places and social behavior of the American Yankee aristocratic class (and particularly of the young people) at that time, when the Depression was still recent history and the calamity of World War II was just ahead.  

It also nicely depicts the way in which for so many of us, our twenties are the time when who we ultimately will become in life as adults is shaped and molded by our experiences, the people we meet then, and the historical events around us.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019). David Wallace-Wells.

This book contains a series of essays detailing the extent of climate change damage to the earth and its environment and species that have already occurred, and where current trends are likely to take us.  

The author also makes clear how long we have already known about this problem, and failed to take meaningful steps to remediate it, and outlines much of what we know about what the fossil fuel industry has done to prevent progress on climate change, in order to protect its investments and profits. 

It’s all fairly grim and depressing, but important reading for informed citizens.  Recommended.

Book Review: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1983). Robert B. Cialdini.

In this important work from many decades ago, Dr. Cialdini laid out the six major psychological levers by which people get other people to do what they want.  This book is a classic from the 1980s, which has been heavily mined ever since by advertisers, marketers, social media developers and others who hope to get our attention and influence our behavior.

 

Some techniques based on his principals don't work as well as they once did in areas like mass-mailing campaigns, because they have been so heavily over-used, and in the course of this cynical exploitation, some of the underlying norms of society he describes have been worn away.  

 

But in general these principals still apply, they still work, and are still at the core of how advertising and social media operate, as well as being heavily used in many scams and other malevolent applications of social engineering.  

The six  weapons of influence include reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority and scarcity.  His explanations of how these methods work, and the related psychological research that demonstrates how and why each approach functions are clear, classic and timeless.

This book is still in print in a revised version.  Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Carrie Pilby (2022). Netflix.

An amusing tale of a 19-year old genius girl, already graduated from Yale, who is trying to find happiness in New York city. 

 

She's alienated from her father, working on her issues with an older male therapist, dealing with her feelings of loss from her mother's death, starting a job as a proofreader, dating a guy who's  engaged, sleeping with one of her professors, and slowly falling for a nice guy who lives next door. 

 

She's sorting it all out.  It's charming and funny.  Recommended.

Movie Review: The Tender Bar (2022). Netflix.

Ben Affleck plays a key supporting role in a sensitive coming of age tale about a young boy with an abusive and absent father, who is growing up with the support of his mother's large, chaotic family, and particularly the help and fatherly guidance of his bartender uncle (Affleck), and the rowdy group of local working class guys who hang out at his neighborhood bar.  

 

Based on the J.R. Moehringer autobiography, and produced by George Clooney.  Recommended.

Book Review: Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service (2021). Carol Leonnig.

Zero Fail is one of two Secret Service books I have read recently.  It is a history of the agency by a talented investigative journalist, which traces the Secret Service and its leadership from its origins in the Treasury Department, through its changing roles and capabilities as the protectors of Presidents, and its transition in the early 2000s to being one federal police agency among many in the post-9/11 Homeland Security Department.  

Leonnig is particularly interested in the major failures that shaped the agency from its inception, particularly presidential assassinations and attempts, and how the need to protect the agency in the wake of those failures helped create a closed, defensive organizational culture, which has continued to tolerate and cover up mistakes, as well as the bad behavior, institutional sexism, drunken excesses and sexual antics of agents and supervisors.  

A penetrating analysis and treasure trove of “inside secrets” from the agency which continues to have “zero fail” (in protecting the president) as the standard to which it should and must be held.   

This account concludes in near-present time, and does include coverage of Donald Trump's attempts to bend the agency to his own personal service and political purposes, in ways unlike those of any previous presidents.  This is especially relevant now, as news this week has revealed that members of the Secret Service close to Trump may have actively participated in attempts to derail the certification of the 2020 election by Congress.  Recommended.

Book Review: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015). Yuval Noah Harari.

This widely heralded book by an Israeli professor is nothing less than a history of the human race.   It combines anthropology, archeology, history, sociology, and philosophy not only to tell how we came to be (and when), but to explore why we became the dominant species on earth.  

There is much here that is fascinating.   For example, we typically think of humans as having been around for a long time, but Harari explains what the most recent archeological research has shown, which is that Homo Sapiens only appeared and replaced all the other earlier human species within the relatively short time period of the past 70,000 years.  

During that time, we invented government, agriculture, writing, science and other “force multipliers” that extended the reach of humanity’s power over the natural world and other species, by harnessing the collective resources of large numbers of us in pursuit of goals set by the much smaller number of people who emerged as leaders down through the ages.  

A delightful read that provides much food for thought, by looking behind the curtain of our evolution and history as a species, in order to explain how things came to be the way they are.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019). Darrell Bricker and John Ibbotson.

Empty Planet is a startling book in the "everything you know is wrong" genre, having to do with population growth.  

The main thesis is that all our current fears about a population crisis for the planet may be way overblown, because the major demographic effects of global urbanization, increasing wealth and education in developed societies, the rise of women as social equals and professionals in the workplace, and the loss of religious belief are to push birth rates well below replacement levels (which is about 2.1 children/woman).  

That has already happened in much of the world, and is happening rapidly now even in the less developed areas.  The authors argue that the real crisis may be in the effects of shrinking and aging populations on societies and economies.  

Lots of details and demographic analysis are included.  This is a very important book for understanding the current immigration debates and crises as well, given the potential value of increased immigration as used in some countries to compensate for population decline.  Highly recommended.

Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America (2022). Ryan Busse.

This new non-fiction release brings an unexpected insider perspective and history to the evolution of the National Rifle Association (NRA) over the past 30 years from its longstanding traditional role as a sportsman-oriented outdoor recreational and educational organization, to its current position as one of the most influential and dangerous organizations promoting militarism, authoritarianism and extreme right wing politics in the United States.

 

Ryan Busse was raised on a Kansas farm, and grew up with traditional rural American values of patriotism, love of the outdoors, and familiarity with guns, especially hunting rifles and shotguns, which were tied in his mind and emotions to much-loved memories of youth and family.  When it came time to choose a profession, he became an early employee of Kimber of America, at that time a boutique gun maker that specialized in making fine hunting rifles, where he rose during a successful career of more than twenty years to a position as an industry award-winning vice president.  

 

Along the way, though, he witnessed and initially was part of the dramatic transformation of both the gun industry and the NRA that occurred from the 1990s to the present, into something very different and much darker than what he thought he had joined. 

 

The transformation he describes included the early use of organized internet “trolling” as a way to create fear in opponents within the NRA and the gun industry; the glamorization of recent combat veterans and their lethal equipment to build a market for selling more guns, especially high-capacity pistols and variants of the AR-15 assault rifle; skillful use of cynical marketing techniques, to legitimize sale of military-grade weapons to civilians, notably a rebranding of AR-15 variants as the MSR, or “modern sporting rifle”; and the encouragement of gun sales to what industry insiders contemptuously called “couch commandos”, that is, young civilian men with fantasies of war and a desire for a kind of “cosplay” with real weapons as an outlet for their imaginations and frustrations.    

 

Busse provides examples and insights from his own experiences about the extent to which NRA officials used and benefited from corrupt practices, to build personal fortunes, and manipulate individuals and gun companies to conform to the NRA's increasingly hard line on contentious political and social issues.   He also describes his own conflicted position and feelings, as his company, the gun industry and the NRA changed around him, and eventually became threatening to him and his family.

This is an important slice of our recent political history by an inside observer to the rise of a leading force in the American radical right of the early 21st century.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Boys and Sex (2020). Peggy Orenstein.

After the success of Girls and Sex (2016), which I previously reviewed, and her experience researching and writing it, Orenstein decided it wasn’t either fair, or complete, to leave out the boys’ side of the story.   So she initiated a similar set of candid conversations with young high school and college boys, to find out how it felt to be a boy trying to navigate early sexuality in our society.  

Not surprisingly, she found out plenty about boys’ use of and experience with consuming large amounts of pornography online, but discovered that for many boys (as with the girls), watching porn was more an attempt to know what to expect and to do in sexual encounters than a real pleasure in itself.  

Orenstein also finds out more about the social pressure that boys feel in a wide variety of settings (especially college fraternities) to have a large number of sexual “conquests”, and to avoid sharing their emotions with partners, or getting involved in ongoing love relationships.   

In one particularly powerful section, she talks about the impact of colleges’ and the courts’ changing responses in the #METOO era in how they handle young men who have been abusive to women.  She talks about the often-difficult nature of defining and recognizing consent, particularly in alcohol-infused situations, and describes some of the ways now being developed to promote accountability and greater awareness in victimizers, in the hope of preventing a lifetime of these sorts of exploitative and destructive behaviors toward women by these men.

More so than in Girls and Sex, she also explores some of the experiences and attitudes of gay and trans boys and young men, as they try to establish their own sexual identities and comfort zones in the midst of the pressured, predominantly heterosexual young male environments and social scenes of school and college.

This companion book, like Girls and Sex, is a fascinating, thoughtful and well-researched look at what ails our current approach to raising our children to have healthy sexual attitudes and behaviors, and what we could do to make it better.  Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Letter to You (2021). Apple TV+.

Letter to You, the most recent Bruce Springsteen documentary, is about the four-day recording session with his beloved E-Street band which produced this same-named new album, his first rock album in seven years.  

Clips of recording studio performances are mixed with interviews, and reminisces by Bruce, the band members and other friends and family who were present.  Recommended.

Book Review: Life (2010). Keith Richards and James Fox.

Last month, I started a new tradition here at my blog: Rock and Roll Fridays!  Every fourth Friday of the month, I intend to share a review of at least one good artifact of rock music, including biographies, concert videos, and television specials.  It's Rock and Roll Friday again, so today I'm sharing my short review of Keith Richard's autobiography Life. 

I bought this 2010 rock star memoir by Richards (guitarist, singer, co-songwriter (with Mick Jagger), co-leader and founding member of the Rolling Stones) years ago, then never actually read it until much more recently (in 2020).  

 

I think I was reluctant to get into it, because Richards is pretty much the personification of the depraved, bad boy rock star in the popular imagination.  His drug use and addictions, frequent arrests, and outlaw persona are legendary; in fact, he writes that during the 1970s he consistently topped lists of "ten rock stars most likely to die this year".  But he didn't. 

 

And after reading his story, he turns out to be a much more complex, intelligent, thoughtful and even perhaps kind person than I had expected.  Of course, he's still outrageous, but he’s also a genuinely authentic and sympathetic character, who has a lot to say about the Rolling Stones, his relationships with Mick Jagger and the other band members, and their iconic music. 

 

He also delves deeply into his guitar playing techniques and songwriting, along with many of his legendary life experiences and relationships.  He recounts the many celebrities he's known, and partied and played music with, and shares other unexpected anecdotes from his long life and enduring career as one of the most notorious stars of the rock and roll era. 

 

I thought I wouldn't like this book, but I did.  "It's Only Rock and Roll, But I Like It!"  Recommended for rock music fans, and the celebrity-curious.