Book Reviews: Honorable Mentions List (Fiction and Science Fiction)

In my most recent personal note from last Sunday, July 23rd, I mentioned that I wanted to try occasionally posting an "Honorable Mentions" list, with only short descriptions of a number of items at once, rather than a longer review of a single book or show. Let's try it today! There's no time like the present for trying new things, is there?
 

American War (2017). Omar El Akkad.

This is a dark dystopian tale of a young woman growing up in a refugee camp in the 2070s in what remains of the American south, and becoming a fanatical warrior for another lost cause as a result of the traumas of her life, suffered in an America torn by a second civil war, the ongoing disasters of climate change, sea levels rising, and a pandemic caused by a bio-terrorism attack.

As in the nineteenth century Civil War era, the south is again the center of misery, ignorance and bigotry, but in a drastically reduced nation where no one has escaped the pain or moral conflicts growing out of multiplying political and ecological crises. 

It's thought-provoking, and definitely captures a lot of the fears and zeitgeist of our own times, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent Trump presidency and its turbulent aftermath. Recommended.

 

The Anomaly (2021). Herve Le Tellier.

This is a science fiction thriller and philosophical exploration of the contemporary theory popular in tech and gaming circles that life and "reality" may be a computer simulation.  The plot is set in motion when a commercial passenger jet passes through a violent storm, and then emerges safely to land – twice – but four months apart.

In the story, when this mysterious event happens, we then have two sets of the same people aboard, with a four-month difference in their experiences (the later arrivals would have missed what the other ones had been doing in the meantime). 

The rest of the story explores many aspects of the chaos such an event would create.  Among the passengers and flight crew, who is the "real" person? How would the discrepancies be resolved about who is really who, and who owns what? How would people in various types of human relationships and organizations with the two sets of survivors contend with the sudden appearance of apparent almost-duplicate people? And how would governments and the public deal with a logic-defying problem of this magnitude?

An interesting and well-told "thought experiment" story, with a philosophical and logical exploration of the "simulation" theory of reality. Recommended.  

 

The Circle (2015). Dave Eggers.

The Circle is a science fiction novel that focuses on the cultish behavior and seductive powers of social manipulation exercised by our major tech companies. In this telling, "The Circle" is a giant Facebook-like tech company that creates inexpensive networked micro-cameras that can easily be placed anywhere, to surveil anything, anyone and any place.

Along with its ubiquitous spying and secret-smashing technology, The Circle has a founder and leader with a charismatic hold on the tech company, a compelling utopian vision of a society seemingly based on a radical form of honesty and truth-telling, and personal growth objectives for employees (and ultimately for all of society) that are being sold as positive and beneficial, but which contain a dark potential for ultimate control by the few leaders at the top. 

This book, told through the experiences of a naive young woman recruit to The Circle, was the basis for the 2017 movie of the same name starring Emma Watson. It is a very nice literary companion piece to various "big data" and "four big tech companies" nonfiction books I have read about the risks posed by the dominance of Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google in our high tech modern world. Recommended.
 

Exhalation (2019). Ted Chiang.

I read this excellent collection of science fiction short stories on the recommendation of the New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein, who interviewed the author on one of his podcasts. Checking the book listing on Amazon, I discovered that it has an A-list of other celebrities, starting with President Obama, who have also read it and given it outstanding reviews.

The short stories were indeed remarkable, beautifully written and explored deep philosophical topics. I find that my retention of the details of the plots of a number of different short stories like this is shorter than with a novel, but it wouldn't add anything to this review to go into those details anyway. Better to just get the book and read it yourself! 

It was definitely an enjoyable read, and time well spent. Recommended.


Station Eleven (2015). Emily St. John Mandel.

Station Eleven is a powerful end-of-the-modern-world dystopian novel, seen through the eyes of a small cast of characters whose lives are connected through the events of a world-wide plague that ends civilization and kills off 99% of humanity.

In addition to imagining what that world would be like, where modern technology is gone but the memory of it remains, the story focuses on a set of curious personal connections and events that tie the characters and their lives together at different times and in different places.  

This book has now been made into an HBO Max mini-series, which was also good, and which I will review at some point. The book and its author have also become somewhat legendary, for the book's seemingly prophetic exploration of the kinds of personal isolation and changes to social relations that might result from a massive pandemic, written shortly before the less catastrophic yet still profoundly disruptive COVID-19 pandemic that struck the world in 2020. Highly recommended.

 

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014). Clare North.

This book contains a time-travel plot device that is quite like the one in my longtime favorite novel of this genre, Replay (1986) by Ken Grimwood. The story of Harry August again poses the question of what it would be like, and what you would do, if you got the chance to live life over and over again, starting in the same young body and identity, in the same family, and in the same time period and circumstances, but where each time you started over again, you carried with you the memories of your previous lives.

What things would you change about yourself? What would you do to try to achieve better personal outcomes than previous times? Would you actually be able to improve your outcomes, or would the endless possibilities of every lifetime simply lead you to a life that was different, but not necessarily better or worse than the others?

Could you actually alter the course of human events and history? Would you end up with God-like powers of prediction, and the ability to shape events, or simply be endlessly frustrated by your inability to change the course of what is to come? And are you alone in this strange cycle of lives lived repeatedly, or are there others to be found out in the world who are on the same treadmill? 

All these endlessly intriguing themes, and more, are explored and woven into the fascinating story of the many lives of Harry August, in a plot that moves quickly and maintains interest and suspense throughout. Highly recommended.

TV Review: Conversations with Friends (2022). Hulu.

This is the second mini-series on Hulu based on a novel by Sally Rooney. I previously did a brief review of the mini-series Normal People, based on Rooney's second novel, which follows a bright young woman and her sometimes boyfriend in Ireland as they find their way through an emotional and sexual journey of discovery at the end of high school, and then through their university years together and apart.

Conversations with Friends is based on Rooney’s first novel of the same name, and follows two young women at the university in Dublin (nicely played by Alison Oliver and Sasha Lane), who share interests and affection for each other, and who were previously lovers but are now just close friends. Like most young people, they are making mistakes, trying things out, and attempting to discover who they are and what they want to do, while dealing with the usual family, school and roommate challenges that are typical of this early adult stage of life.

Into the mix comes a sophisticated somewhat older married couple, a successful writer (Jemima Kirke) and her handsome but introverted actor husband (Joe Alwyn), who befriend the pair, hosting them at parties and taking them on an exotic vacation. What could possibly go wrong? Of course, there are new attractions in the quartet, and an affair, and a lot of complex emotions to be experienced and resolved.

I’m pretty sure this is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I found it an intriguing look into the challenges of being a young adult in this era. It sensitively explores issues of complicated sexual identity and attractions for young women, the appeal but also the problems with polyamory, the emotional risks inherent in ubiquitous electronic communications, and the challenges of maintaining friendships when sexual feelings and jealousies cloud the relationships.

The story is slow-moving, and all the characters seem on some level to be struggling with depression, and a perceived lack of fulfillment in their existing life situations, despite some measures of success and recognition in their personal and professional lives. But it’s all still interesting, and very easy to relate to experiences and feelings most of us had when we were young adults, or at least to stories of people we’ve known. Recommended.

TV Review: Tehran, Seasons 1-2. Apple TV+.

This was a recent find we tried on the recommendation of several different friends. And what a fortunate discovery! This is definitely one of the best shows we’ve seen in recent months.

Tehran is a very intelligent Israeli spy thriller, with sub-titles, although much of the show is in English. The main character is Tamar (played superbly by Niv Sultan), a young woman Mossad agent and childhood Jewish refugee from Iran, who is on her first mission. 

Tamar is working with a small team of fellow agents and Iranian resistance figures in Tehran to take out the radar system protecting a new nuclear fuel refining installation, so that Israeli fighter-bombers can reach their target and destroy it before the fuel is loaded into the centrifuges.  Given the recent history of real-world Israeli relations with Iran, and their attempts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, this is a very believable plot.

Initially, Tamar’s main role in this dangerous operation seems to be as a super-hacker, whose job it is to break into Iran’s defense computer systems as part of the complex plan to destroy the nuclear site. But despite her computer programming brilliance, and the help of a young Iranian dissident hacker, things end up going sideways, and Tamar has to quickly go out on her own, and use the full range of her secret agent skills to stay alive and operational.

Meanwhile, on the other side, a canny older Iranian counter-espionage officer and his tough young sidekick are hunting for the Israeli team, especially Tamar, and are frequently one step ahead, or else just behind but on the trail of Tamar and her team at every step. In these characters, we see the personal and professional stresses they face in trying to do their jobs, in the context of the constant risks, politics and treachery within the authoritarian religious government and ideology they serve.

A whole cast of other Israeli agents, Iranian police and civilians, politicians, dissident young people, and innocent bystanders support the greater story throughout, as Tamar finds her way through an unending minefield of surveillance, betrayal, plot and counter-plot. It will keep you on the edge of your seat throughout each show.

This show is strongly reminiscent of Homeland, in its portrayal of a strong, incredibly bright and unorthodox young woman agent using every trick, skill, connection and plausible lie at her disposal to continue the mission against impossible odds. Highly recommended.

Personal Notes: Progress and Changes at The Memory Cache blog.

Today’s post is a personal note about the state of the blog after nearly six months of daily reviews and articles.

I’m very pleased with the quantity of hopefully interesting information and opinion that I’ve shared with readers in this first half year, and am looking forward to continuing onward into the indefinite future! However, a half year into this project, it seemed like a good time to take stock of what I’ve done so far, and what I want to do with The Memory Cache blog going forward.

Several friends who read the blog have expressed surprise at the amount of writing I’ve done, and the sheer number of cultural items (books, movies, TV shows) I had to consume in order to have something to write about, day after day. And it’s true – I’ve just passed my 200th post, or more than one per day, for every day since I started the blog in February.  That's a lot of reading and TV watching, not to even mention the writing part!

However, as I think I mentioned at the beginning, I actually consumed much of this content, and compiled my notes and reviews over a seven year period, going back through the pandemic years, and all the way back to 2015. Over this first five+ months of the blog, I curated that back content, rewrote and added to many of those existing reviews, and also added plenty of new reviews of things I was enjoying this year. But it was a mix, with many of the written reviews almost ready to post, straight out of my back files, rather than needing to be written now.

Happily, most of that back information and content has now appeared, and is tagged and available by category for anyone to search and check out. The downside, though, is that I’m now (as I say whenever I catch up with a live broadcast while watching something on the DVR) “marooned in real time”.

In the blog context, that means for me to report on anything – book, movie or TV show – I now have to actually consume the content (read the book, or watch the show), then write a new review.  I can't just pull it out of the back files on a slow day.

This is exactly where I wanted to be, and planned to be when I started, after about this much time had passed. But what this means is that from this point on, almost all reviews and articles posted will be “just written”, or “hot off the press” so to speak, and they are much more likely to be about content that was recently released, and issues or topics which are currently being widely discussed and reviewed.

This doesn’t mean I won’t continue to discover new content from earlier years that I think is interesting, fun or important, and write about it. I certainly will. But it does mean that my posts are probably going to be at least somewhat more consistently relevant and timely than some of the ones thus far.

The other important consequence of finishing with the prior reviews, though, is that I can, and indeed must slow the pace down from this point on. I can’t dependably find and enjoy enough new content, and have the time to think and write about it on a daily basis (particularly while I'm also writing, recording and producing new music and video). Therefore, starting today, I’ll be aiming to post only 2 to 3 times per week, without a fixed schedule. This should allow me the time to find, enjoy and review items of wide interest, and of high quality and importance, to share with you.

I am also thinking of adding a couple of new features. One type of post I want to try occasionally will be called “Honorable Mentions”. These posts will include a short list of good books or shows of a particular type, where I will simply provide a brief description for each one, rather than a full review. This way I can note items I’ve read or seen that seemed worthwhile or interesting, but perhaps not exceptional (to me, anyway). Readers can then take note of the reference information, and check them out if they’re interested. Everyone has different tastes, so this seems a helpful way to offer suggestions without going into depth in reviewing every item.

Another area I want to explore is reviewing some other types of media. Like many of you, I read a number of major periodicals, and listen to some podcasts too. I could name the publications and podcast show names, but that wouldn’t be that useful – most busy people don’t have the time or the interest to keep up with the constant torrent of information out there. My thought instead was that occasionally, when I come upon a specific article or podcast episode that provides information that is new and startling, or perhaps puts an interesting or unusual spin on a current topic or event, I would love to share short reviews of these types of items too when I come upon them, and pass along the references.

One other option I am exploring is starting a mailing list for the blog. The idea would be to allow interested readers to subscribe, to receive periodic notices with news about recent posts, and a reminder and link to go check out the blog if you haven’t been there recently. If I do this, I promise you would never be receiving more than 1 or 2 emails per month. No one needs a ton more emails in their inbox, but it can be useful as an occasional reminder of something you want to follow regularly. I'll have more news on this idea soon.

So there we are. To sum up, the blog is in good shape, I’ve finished the “phase one” populating of the site’s reviews collection from my back files, and I'm moving to a 2-3 posts per week schedule, rather than posting 7 days per week. I’m also planning to add some new types of content, and perhaps an occasional informational mailing for subscribers.

If you can think of any other things you’d like to see, or have any other comments you’d like to share with me about the blog, please feel to write to me at info@wayneparkernotes.com.  I'd love to hear from you.  And if you have books or shows you think are fantastic, particularly ones that aren't on the bestseller or blockbuster lists, send me a note -- I'll take a look, and see if they might be a good subject for a review.

I hope you continue to enjoy the blog, and if you like it, please let your friends know about it too! And have a great week.

Book Review: Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives (1999). Tom Shroder.

In previous reviews I discussed the research and books by two successive University of Virginia psychiatrists over the past fifty years who have done extensive research around the world into the strange phenomenon of small children who appear to remember significant details about previous lives recently lived.   

These two doctors are the late Dr. Ian Stevenson, who started the ongoing study at the University of Virginia in the early 1970s, and Dr. Jim Tucker, who was a student and the eventual successor to Dr. Stevenson.  Both of these doctors have written books about their careers, their research, and the many "solved" and "unsolved" cases in their case files.  

Old Souls, written by a career journalist with long tenures at the Washington Post and the Miami Herald, is an "outsider's" account of his own investigation into Stevenson's work and research methods, which he pursued by accompanying the 79-year-old Stevenson on his last two major foreign research trips, first to Lebanon after the civil war there, and then to poverty-stricken rural parts of India.  

 

It's a  fascinating journalistic account by a skeptical observer, who by the end was forced to a very similar position regarding these cases of children's memories of past lives as that expressed by both Stevenson and Tucker: that is, that there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that this phenomenon is real and not fabricated, that Stevenson's and Tucker's research methods and protocols are scientifically sound, repeatable and appear most likely to be evidence of reincarnation, but that we may well never be able to understand or scientifically prove it, or understand it, unless we can somehow learn far more about the scientific nature of consciousness and of reality itself. Recommended.

Movies: Livin' Right Now (2005), and Love, Pain and the Whole Crazy World Tour (2008). Keith Urban.

Hello! It’s Rock and Roll Friday again here at The Memory Cache, the fourth Friday of each month, where for the past few months I’ve been posting reviews of books and shows about music, its history and some of my favorite artists and bands as a fan as well as a musician.

This month I don’t have any major new book or TV reviews, so instead today I’m going to talk about a couple of outstanding concert videos which are among the favorites on my bookshelf. These might be available from the library; otherwise they can probably still be found for sale on Amazon. I know that releasing full-length feature concerts on DVD is probably becoming a thing of the past for most music stars (along with DVDs!), but I want to share a couple of the best from my concert video library.

Today I want to talk about two concert DVDs from earlier in the career of my current favorite major rock star, Keith Urban. Keith Urban is technically considered to be a country music star, but his extensive catalog of music crosses over and includes influences from many strains of popular music, definitely including country and rock, but also folk and blues, pop, and in recent years, hip-hop, R&B and electronic dance music too.

I first discovered his music in 2016, already almost 20 years into his brilliant (and ongoing) career, when I took a listening foray into the world of modern country music after a family trip to Nashville. This was toward the end of Tom Petty’s career and life (my previous favorite), and I was feeling a need to explore some new music, and see if there were contemporary artists in country music that I might like, since there didn’t seem to be a lot new going on in rock music anymore. I actually listened to music from a half-dozen or so of the top country stars of the moment, including Blake Shelton, Thomas Rhett, Chris Stapleton and Brad Paisley, and liked several of them, but Keith Urban’s music stood out as utterly unique among them. It immediately caught my attention.

His songs had plenty of country elements, particularly during the early part of his career, like the sound of banjos and mandolins mixed in, but the songs were more complex in structure than most 3-chord country songs, the lyrics told emotionally appealing and relatable stories, Urban’s wonderful voice and delivery were captivating, and the lead guitar playing (also Urban) was absolutely thrilling to hear.

After I started collecting his albums, and becoming more familiar with my fast-expanding library of his amazing, memorable and addictive songs, I became aware of two full-length movies he had made of earlier concert tours, as his career was on the rise and gathering momentum. The first, Livin’ Right Now, was from 2005; and then he released another one, Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy World Tour, in 2008. I immediately ordered them both, and they were a revelation to see.

The thing I’ve come to believe about Keith Urban is that he is perhaps the most completely realized male rock star of my lifetime, in that he is the whole package of rock star skills and abilities in a single individual. If all we had were the large catalog of his songs and his studio recordings, we would already have more memorable and well-loved music than we have any right to expect from an artist or band. But to see him in a live concert performance setting is even better (even if on a DVD), because then you see the full range of the tools he has as a performing artist with which to work his magic on adoring crowds.

He is a charismatic showman. He is the riveting (and yes, very attractive) front man and leader of the band, generous and sharing with his audience, full of joy, funny, and energetic, running around the stage and out into the crowd, giving off so much warmth and fun, and singing those great songs, with his fans singing along to every word. That in itself should be enough to satisfy any rock fan or concert goer.

But then you see him playing his stunning guitar solos, like on the records but even better, often while he is also singing the lead vocals. I can’t remember ever seeing any other lead singer and front man for a great band who could also seemingly effortlessly play such dazzling guitar parts at the same time he was singing. It is awesome to behold, and I only realized that he could actually do that when I watched these two excellent concert videos.

A lot of folks by now are content to hear the classic songs from their youth (whenever that was), and maybe don’t believe there’s much new out there worth hearing or seeing. But I don’t agree. I believe that some of the greatest performing and recording musicians today, like Keith Urban and Taylor Swift, in fact put on much more amazing shows, and have much higher levels of individual artistic talent across a wider variety of media than the rock stars of decades ago, precisely because they are standing on the shoulders and the achievements of those great artists and music creators of earlier generations.  It also helps that they have far more and better technology at their fingertips, technology they've also had to learn to master.

Keith Urban regularly continues to deliver new bestselling albums, wonderful singles, and YouTube music videos, and continues to play sold out tours around the world. But for a time-capsule view of his live concert performances as a young breakout star, these two concert videos, Livin’ Right Now and Love, Pain and the Whole Crazy World Tour, are a treat. Highly recommended.

TV Review: The Crown. Seasons 1-4. (Netflix).

For those few who aren’t already aware of it, The Crown is Netflix’s recent somewhat fictionalized depiction of the reign of Great Britain's Queen Elizabeth II. 

Thus far, over the first four seasons, it has covered the period from her youth growing up during World War II during the reign of her father, the popular King George VI, through her ascension to the throne in 1952, her marriage to Prince Phillip, and many of her better-known personal and political experiences as the sovereign of Great Britain and head of the Royal Family from the early 1950s, through the 1960s and 1970s, and into the era of Margaret Thatcher and the young Princess Diana in the 1980s.

The actors in all the principal roles changed after season 2, in order to put older faces and personalities on screen that would better reflect the real-life characters as they aged and changed over time. However, what has been consistent is the quality of the actors in the leading roles, particularly Claire Foy and Matt Smith as the youthful Elizabeth and Phillip, and Olivia Colman and Tobias Menzies as the middle-aged Queen and Prince, all of whom turn in impressively authentic and convincing performances.

It makes for fun entertainment, especially for those who just can’t get enough of the lives of English royalty, but there has been a growing uproar around the show's historical accuracy and perspective in season 4, perhaps because the plot timeline is moving closer to our own times, where many of us already have well-formed memories of some of the actual events, and opinions about the personalities from mass media and news coverage.

The portrayal of Prince Charles' behavior toward Diana and of his character, which is fairly odious in the show in season 4, has particularly come in for sharp protests. Many reviewers have now added their caveats that this series should not be taken at face value in terms of the truth of its presentation of the times, the events, the various personalities and their relationships. 

Nevertheless, if seen as art, interpretation and entertainment rather than a slavish portrayal of historical lives and events, it’s a very interesting and enjoyable series. Recommended.

TV Review: The Good Fight, Seasons 1-5 (CBS TV series).

The story of high-powered lawyers in large firms in contemporary Chicago that began in The Good Wife continues, with the focus now on senior attorney Diane Lockhart (played by Christine Baranski), and two of her younger proteges. It begins right after the 2016 presidential election, with a Madoff-type Ponzi scheme scandal and the wreckage it leaves behind.

This series has been both attacked and praised for its overtly liberal sympathies and its portrayal of legal and social life in the Trump era. As with The Good Wife, many of the story lines, particularly with respect to the destabilizing effects of new technologies on personal and social lives, and on laws and the legal system, were up-to-the-minute with the show’s dramatic spin on breaking news stories in real life.

Both The Good Wife and The Good Fight are among the best legal drama series I've ever seen, with consistently interesting plots, engaging characters, fine writing and acting, plenty of outrageous dark humor, and "torn from the recent headlines" legal and ethical issues. Whether they will hold up over time as the social and political issues they explored fade from the news remains to be seen. Recommended.

Book Review: How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going (2022). Vaclav Smil.

This latest book by Vaclav Smil, a distinguished Canadian emeritus scientist at the University of Manitoba, and author of over forty books, is a stern warning and wake-up call to both extreme climate disaster predictors and optimistic climate change remediation advocates. Its main message is that we need to truly understand the extent to which modern life and all of its benefits are predicated on complex systems and materials that are currently impossible to have or maintain without the use and consumption of fossil fuels, in order to have a realistic view of what it will take to solve the problem of human-caused climate change.

It would be easy to misinterpret Smil’s objections to many of the common beliefs about climate change (both fearful and optimistic) held by most of us, based largely on the political statements and mass media reports we all read and hear constantly, as being signs that he is a fossil fuel apologist. That would be a big mistake, because a careful reading of this dense and data-filled book reveals no such thing.

It’s not that he doesn’t agree that we need to act, to try to save the world and its climate from the consequences of our dependence on fossil fuels. Instead, he is arguing strongly that we need to understand just how extraordinarily difficult that process will be in order to have reasonable expectations, and that no outcomes – either extremely positive or negative – can be assumed or confidently predicted based on our current state of knowledge and the existing global political and economic situations.

His chapters lay out his logical and fact-based arguments in a steady, relentless fashion. In chapter 1, he begins with a deep discussion of the history and nature of our energy systems, and how important energy conversion and supplies (from whatever sources) are to the existence of modern society. 

In chapter 2, he focuses on explaining food production: both the extent to which modern industrial farming and its output that feeds the world depend on mechanization that currently requires massive fossil fuel inputs, and the additional role of fossil fuel by-products in fertilizer production which makes current global crop yields possible.

In chapter 3, Understanding Our Material World, he suggests that there are four pillars of modern life, supporting the 7+ billion people alive today. In his view, unfortunately well-supported by the facts he presents and by our own knowledge of the world around us, they are: cement, steel, plastics and ammonia. He then explains in detail why these four materials are essential to sustaining life in our advanced economies, and why at this time it is impossible to jump quickly and fully to alternative materials and products derived from non-fossil fuels and carbon-free processes.  Moreover, he explores how even trying to move to sustainable energy sources like wind and solar, and producing electric cars, will require massive inputs of these fossil fuel derived materials to get there.

Again, he’s not saying we shouldn’t be trying to do so, and he even explores possible alternatives that have been proposed, or ones that could be envisioned. His point is that it is futile to hope that solutions to replacing all the key requirements for supporting modern life can be imagined, designed and implemented on the massive scale necessary to quickly replace today's sources of these materials – certainly not in the short time frame suggested by those who say “we need to get to net zero carbon by” some near future year ending in a 0 or a 5, as he puts it.

In the remaining four chapters, he tackles and explains other key elements of the climate crisis puzzle that we need to understand: globalization, actual versus perceived risks, what is and is not at risk in the planet's environment, and the difficult nature of attempts to predict and control the future. In each case, he carefully demolishes simplistic popular notions, establishes logical inter-dependencies between important factors and considerations, and provides needed rational perspectives on the complexity of the many challenges to be confronted.

At the end of the book there is a References and Notes section, which contains 70 pages of exhaustive footnotes and citations for each of the chapters and topics covered. These notes alone would be a gold mine for serious climate policy analysts, historians, social theorists and others who want to do a deeper dive into the question of how we got ourselves into this climate change situation as a species.

This book provides much needed history of the fossil fuel era, a sober, clear-eyed and data-based analysis of our modern economy and technology, and a rational discussion of what we can and can’t do to solve the climate crisis, within what likely time periods. It’s not surprising that Bill Gates, whose results-based approach to global health and philanthropy is well-known, cites Smil as his favorite author. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Skyfaring (2015). Mark Vanhoenacker.

As an amateur sport pilot and lifetime aviation enthusiast, I have read many stories about the exploits and adventures of pilots, going back to the very beginning of aviation in the early 20th century. 

I've read about the early pilot inventors, the military pilots in wars from World War I through the modern day, the amateur flyers and hobbyists, the early bush pilots in remote and desolate lands such as Alaska and Africa, the "Golden Age" long-distance pioneers like the Lindberghs and Amelia Earhart, the young women who ferried military planes in World War II, the test pilots and the astronauts, and many other variations of aviators and life experiences in the world of human flight. These have all been fascinating to me, although I admit I'm probably more enamored of these flying stories than many people would be.

One type of pilot memoir I'd never previously encountered, though, was an account of the life of the pilots most familiar to most of us, from our experience as airline passengers: the ones who spend much of their professional careers at the controls of modern commercial jet airliners, assuming the risk and responsibility for flying hundreds of members of the public at a time to their distant destinations around the globe in these incredibly complex and marvelous aircraft.

Skyfaring has happily filled in that missing part of the aviation story for me. It is a non-linear, lyrical account of the life and observations of a commercial 747 pilot. It told me a lot of things I didn't know about the lived experiences and work conditions of commercial airline pilots, while also exploring the beauty and transcendence of a life lived constantly in different time zones, and at altitudes measured in miles rather than feet.

I would recommend this book to any member of the flying public, whether you're an aviation fan or not. Because the pilots now fly behind closed security doors, we rarely see or perhaps even notice these consummate professionals, who hold our lives in their hands for hours at a time every time we fly on an airliner.  

This account pulls back the curtain on this small elite group of highly-trained experts who routinely take on such a heavy responsibility for so many of us, without our even really being aware of what they're doing or what it takes for them to be there. They perform this service for us with a coolness and consistency that makes what they do seem unremarkable, as though they're office workers, and it's just another day at the office for them. But what they do is remarkable.

As the author points out, as passengers we now usually take for granted the technological miracle of fast, high-altitude flight above the earth, often closing the windows to take a nap rather than staring out in rapt appreciation at the astonishing view of the world which these airplanes and their pilots afford us, for however brief a period.  It's amazing how fast we have learned to take things for granted that not long ago would have been the most miraculous experience of a lifetime.

Vanhoenacker does a wonderful job of conveying the full range of the commercial pilot experience: the effects of constant rapid travel across time zones, the nature of the work relationships with constantly changing flight crews, the beauty of the earth as seen at all hours of the day and night from 36,000 feet, the teamwork on the flight deck, and with the cabin crew, and many other interesting and revealing insights into the lives and minds of airline pilots. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and Unexpected Solutions (2018). Johann Hari.

This is an excellent and unusual exploration of the psychology of depression, which posits a 9-point spectrum of situations and causes in peoples' life situations that create most depression, rather than the more conventional medical view that depression is primarily a biologically based condition, and therefore something that can be easily treated with medication and other psychiatric therapies.

The author reviews the scientific literature in each of the different life experience areas, then moves on to the second section, which talks about the sorts of changes in lives and society which can help control, reduce and eliminate depression.

This book is ultimately political and economic in its view of depression and its sources in modern society. The main thrust of its arguments is that we live in human societies where too many people are economically disadvantaged, politically powerless, and have too few meaningful and supportive relationships with other people in our families, friendship circles, work organizations and communities.

A well-presented case for the need for major changes in our political, social and economic conditions, in order to live happier and less depressed lives, and avoid many of the negative personal and societal effects of depression. Recommended.

Book Review: Autumn of the Black Snake: George Washington, Mad Anthony Wayne, and the Invasion that Opened the West (2018). William Hogeland.

This is a dense, very well-written history of the early days of American western expansion, and the immediate post-revolutionary war era, particularly its Indian politics and the hostilities between the natives and the white settlers who were moving into the western territories.  

The book reveals and documents the fact that many of our Founding Fathers (especially George Washington) were major land speculators, who also did want a national army, as opposed to many of the "no standing army!" militia supporters who were so vocal during the aftermath of the revolutionary war, in the period when the nature of the United States and its form of government were being negotiated.  

Hogeland uses this background information to provide insight on some of the personal motivations that may have influenced Washington's political decisions and actions with respect to settlement of the western frontier lands, and the new government's relations with the native people and tribes.

As Hogeland describes, Washington used his political skills and influence to have his newly approved national army deal with an immediate Indian war crisis on the western frontier. To accomplish this, he appointed the revolutionary war hero “Mad Anthony” Wayne as the army's founding general, with his prime directive being to take care of the problem with the tribes who were blocking westward expansion.

General Wayne, coming off a disastrous and humiliating period in his post-revolutionary war personal life, proved to be brilliant in his assigned role, and with his leadership and organizing skills, a standing U.S. Army was created, the war was won, and the western land-grab began. Much of the book describes the people, places and events involved as this process played out in the late eighteenth century, during the early years of the new nation.

This is a fascinating and complex story of a short period in American history most of us have never heard or thought much about, but which was a pivotal time in shaping the future of the United States, its territorial expansion across the North American continent, and the beginnings of the U.S. Army, which has continued to play such an important role here and in other parts of the world ever since. Recommended.

Book Review: Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (2017). Nancy MacLean.

I previously reviewed Dark Money, Jane Mayer’s essential study on the long-term plans, motivations and activities of the Koch brothers and their circle of other right wing billionaire families (especially the Mercer and deVos families), and their efforts to use their vast wealth to undermine the foundations of American democracy, in the interests of ridding themselves of governmental regulations and any obligation to help provide for the less wealthy and fortunate.

I consider Dark Money to be one of the most revealing books on contemporary American politics ever written. I would encourage everyone to read it, in order to understand much of why our country’s politics and our common commitment to democracy seem to have unwound before our eyes in recent years.

Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains is a vital case study of the broader phenomenon which Mayer documented so thoroughly. It is a chilling book that documents the life of an influential right-wing academic, whose entire career provides a clear example of the radical right billionaires' use of self-financed academic influence operations over many decades to try to develop, justify and popularize otherwise deeply unpopular ideas, and promote political and economic opinion that supports their business and financial interests rather than those of the general public.

It provides abundant documentation from the archives of this major economic theorist of the libertarian right in the late 20th century, James Buchanan, of a multi-generational effort and plan to destroy American democracy, in favor of "liberty" for the super-wealthy at the expense of everyone else, or in other words, plutocracy.

It was possible to tell this story, because the author gained access to Buchanan’s files and notes spanning a half-century of his career, including correspondence, academic papers and other types of private documents, showing how these extreme right-wing political influence operations were planned and carried out, particularly within and supported by conservative and libertarian academics, and certain sympathetic universities and economics departments that were well supported and rewarded financially for their efforts.

This is a notable and important book about the roots of American radical right movements, their academic thought and political organizing over the past fifty years, and the money and individuals who brought it all to us and to our political system. Recommended.

TV Review: Anatomy of a Scandal (2022). Netflix.

This is a riveting political and sexual drama about a “perfect” upper class British marriage of two Oxford graduates (played by Sienna Miller and Rupert Friend) that slowly comes apart under the pressure of a cheating scandal involving the husband, a popular and rising Tory minister in the British government.

As the minister’s affair first hits the tabloids, it looks like the usual guilty politician's playbook unfolding, with sad and "honest" confessions to the wife, public apologies, and professional PR assistance in trying to ride out the rough parts and get back to business as usual. That strategy all starts to come unglued, though, when the young paramour and minister's aide brings rape charges against the minister, revolving around whether she had given consent to a post-affair sexual encounter.

Michelle Dockery stars as the prosecutor who brings the rape case against the minister, with a hidden agenda and secrets of her own. Throughout the unfolding story, new issues and mysteries keep appearing about other dark personal secrets in the lives of the minister and his wife, dating back to their shared Oxford days, and the social activities of the husband and his close friend, who is now the Prime Minister, when they were both members of a campus club of rich bad boys called “the Libertines”. 

This excellent mini-series combines several hidden crimes and mystery plots, a fine legal courtroom drama, a story of a seemingly happy marriage under the pressure of cheating and betrayals, a familiar portrayal of the extent to which political power, privilege and wealth can protect people from the consequences of their crimes and bad acts, and a thought-provoking exploration of the difficulties of identifying and proving consent to sex on the part of the woman, in the context of ongoing sexual relationships and unplanned moments of passion. Highly recommended.

TV Review: Virgin River, Seasons 1-3. Netflix.

This popular series was initially a promising discovery on Netflix. We saw Season 1, which was released on Netflix in 2019, early in 2020, and then saw Season 2 when it was released late in the same year. This series is based on a book series of the same name by Robyn Carr.

The premise for the show is that Mel Monroe, an attractive youngish nurse practitioner and midwife from Los Angeles with a tragic personal backstory (played appealingly by Alexandra Breckenridge), takes a one-year job in a remote northern California town, working with a curmudgeonly 72-year old doctor who has the only medical practice in town.

This doesn't turn out to be an easy adjustment for anyone, but in the course of her trying to fit into the rural community, we slowly find out a lot about her sad recent history, and why she came to Virgin River, as well as more about the assortment of various rural characters she encounters, works with, cares for and falls in love with. It was a very watchable and likeable “fish out of water” show for the first couple of seasons.

I found by the third season, though, that I had become deeply tired of it. The plot seemed increasingly outlandish, many of the characters’ behaviors and choices were overly-dramatic, and the plot situations thought up by the show’s writers seemed to be geared toward trying ever more desperately to drum up some excitement and emotional impact for viewers by creating a story where there really wasn’t any left.

In other words, it had turned into a true prime-time soap opera. At that point, I stopped watching it, although I understand that Netflix has agreed to future seasons 4 (dropping later this month) and 5 (sometime next year?), so I assume plenty of fans must still be enjoying it.

Based on that, I would cautiously recommend it, but only until you reach the point in the series where it starts to exceed your personal “jumping the shark” tolerance, and you've lost the ability to suspend disbelief about the increasingly ridiculous plot developments, and visceral dislike for at least some of the major characters you're presumably supposed to like and care about.

To me, it’s a particularly good example of the frequent situation where show producers should recognize after a few seasons (but often don’t) that they’ve mined a vein until it ran out, and it’s time to close the mine, before the whole thing collapses under its own weight.

Book Review: Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime (2017). Ben Blum.

Ranger Games is another take on the by-now familiar elite special operations training story, but this one turns strange in a big hurry, as it morphs from an account of the determination of a dedicated young soldier to succeed and achieve in one of the Army’s most challenging combat organizations, into a true crime story about “all-American” young men whose lives go off the rails under the pressure of a grueling training program and their imminent deployment to a deadly war zone. 

In the process of telling this baffling story of a young soldier and his world, it explores many of the difficult and dark psychological and social forces at play in the U.S. military during the height of the long-lasting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The subject of this book is the author's cousin, a seemingly normal American boy, a nice kid from a middle-class home with a lifelong dream of becoming a soldier, who completes his training, and becomes a newly minted Army Ranger, but then incomprehensibly ends up as the getaway driver in a bank robbery in Tacoma shortly before his scheduled first deployment to Iraq.

The author is trying to piece together an explanation for what really happened, from the many details provided by the participants in the robbery, their families, Army soldiers and all the friends and associates around his cousin.

It’s gripping, and Rashomon-like as he peels back layers of truth, family mythology, lies, mental illness, manipulation, subjective interpretations and general bizarreness in the course of the unfolding story. Recommended.

Book Review: Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (2014). Peter Pomerantsev.

A perfect companion piece to Red Notice by Bill Browder and The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder (both previously reviewed here), this book was written by a western filmmaker and journalist, based on his ten years in Russia during the early post-Soviet era.

Pomerantsev set out as a young film maker and journalist in the exciting years of Russia in transition in the early post-Soviet 2000s, but learned (as did Bill Browder) that he was trying to operate based on assumptions about the existence of western-style rules and open values in a society where the lessons of a century of totalitarian rule, and hundreds of years of Russian autocracy, could not be so easily overlooked or overcome.

He describes the ways in which Putin and the oligarchs came to power, by using state power and the courts to steal and centralize assets, after the Soviet collapse caused the sell-off of state businesses. He vividly depicts the way the early "gangster" behaviors and style of tough young men in Moscow in the 1990s gave way to the power of the oligarchs; the toll taken on the beautiful young women trying to survive in a predatory macho environment utterly controlled by a new class of strong men; and other social aberrations, such as the widespread rise of cults and conspiracy theories, all supported by and promoted through Putin’s state control of the news media.

A chilling social history of contemporary Russia, and a shocking wake-up call to those of us who were not paying attention to the dissolution of the dream of a more open and democratic Russia in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, and the danger posed by the rise of Vladimir Putin as a new autocrat of the Russian nation. Recommended.

Book Review: Varina (2018). Charles Frazier.

This is a beautifully written, haunting novel about Varina Davis, the much-younger wife of Jefferson Davis, and First Lady of the Confederacy, by the noted author of another Civil War epic and award-winning novel, Cold Mountain (1997) (which was also made into an outstanding movie of the same name in 2003 starring Nicole Kidman, Jude Law and Renee Zellweger).

Varina is written in a non-sequential fashion, jumping from her youth and adolescent years, to the story of how she ended up married to Davis, with important moments, insights and experiences she had from before, during and after the Civil War, and then from episodes and periods later in her life.

In the story, we gain a sense of a young woman who made understandable choices out of necessity early in life that unexpectedly took her to a position of power and influence in a revolutionary moment, yet who was sensitive enough to realize along the way, and in the aftermath, the profound injuries and injustices of the course and the cause she’d chosen, and to regret her complicity in them.

I don’t know if this fictional portrayal of her character is fully accurate to the life and person of the real Varina Davis, but in Frazier’s telling, we get a very three dimensional portrayal of an intelligent woman trying to find her way through a life that was (for a time) exceptionally privileged, yet achieved at the expense of the suffering of so many others. 

She becomes increasingly aware of that suffering through the events and hardships she experiences as the southern rebellion collapses, and she has to find ways to go on with her life as a wife, mother and then widow, as well as a venerated celebrity in the South for her role in a failed cause that was considered traitorous and despicable by most of the rest of American society, and perhaps as well by her own conscience.   

Another interesting aspect of the story is Frazier's exploration of the extent to which Varina was automatically held responsible by many for the decisions and actions of her husband and the other powerful Confederate men around him, but on some levels had little agency in those decisions and their consequences, as a woman in 1860s American society.

I found it a gripping human story, powerfully told, despite the fact of her inherently unsympathetic supporting role in history as wife and First Lady at the center of the moral calamity that was the Confederacy. Recommended.

TV Review: The Good Lord Bird. (2020). Showtime.

Based on the recent novel by James McBride, previously reviewed here, Ethan Hawke stars in this Showtime mini-series as the abolitionist John Brown, as seen through the eyes of a young freed slave boy in a dress (played by Hubert Point-Du Jour), who's been mistaken by Brown for a girl.

It's a compelling performance in many ways -- Hawke vividly portrays a complex, driven man, who on the one hand is buffoonish and often ridiculous in his religious fanaticism and his conviction in the odds of success for his divine mission, but who also is shown to care deeply and passionately for his family, his religion and the enslaved people he hopes to save.

As with the book, having the story told through the voice of the young boy, as he tries to make sense of John Brown's astonishing actions and his own precarious, evolving situation, adds both humor and a much-needed black slave’s perspective to the unfolding drama, and to Brown's crazed yet morally righteous viewpoint and utterances. Recommended.

Book Review: A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution (2017). Jennifer A. Doudna & Samuel Sternberg.

This is a personal account by one of the principal inventors of the CRISPR gene editing technology of how she created these astonishing tools for manipulating the underlying chemical structures and design of life forms, with reflections on the ethical and political issues, and technological potential of these new tools for humans to engineer and alter not only nature, but our own inheritable traits as human beings.

It covers some of the same territory with respect to genetic engineering and humanity's future as Bill McKibben does in Falter (previously reviewed here), but from a perhaps more optimistic perspective.

Since this book first appeared, there is now a new version or off-shoot of CRISPR technology which provides far more advanced and specifically targeted gene editing (think character-level search and replace) than the first generation CRISPR tools did, a development which will only increase and accelerate the risks and possibilities explored in this book.

The author, Jennifer Doudna, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for her work. She is now also the subject of a lengthy biography by the noted biographer Walter Isaacson, called The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing and The Future of the Human Race (2021).

A Crack in Creation, though, allows this brilliant chemist and researcher to explain her life and her groundbreaking work in her own way, and to share her own thoughts on the ethics of the technology she has helped to invent, and what it all means for the future of humanity. Recommended.

TV Review: The Queen's Gambit (2020). Netflix.

This series we enjoyed might not need much introduction, since the few people in the U.S.A. who haven't seen it have at least heard plenty about it by now -- it was one of the most acclaimed TV shows of 2020.

The main character, Beth Harmon, is a sad, pathetic orphan child from a bad home (played by Annabeth Kelly as a 5-year old, and then Isla Johnston as a pre-teen), who ends up learning to play chess from the maintenance man in the orphanage. While there, she also picks up a wicked drug and alcohol problem.

The series then shows her meteoric rise to the top of the pro chess world, due to her mental brilliance and amazing recall abilities, along with her struggles to succeed under the burden of her psychological and dependency issues. As the character moves into her teenage years and young adulthood, the role is taken over and played brilliantly by Anya Taylor-Joy. 

Along the way, there are a number of important themes being explored through Beth's unusual experiences, including the loneliness of the top-level competitive chess player (or perhaps any type of high-achieving superstar), the struggle of a young woman to succeed and win in a completely male-dominated activity, and the toll and interrelationships between traumatic life experience, mental illness and substance abuse.

This series has first-rate acting, scripting and plot, with what were apparently accurately staged versions of high-level competitive chess matches. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump (2019). Andrew McCabe.

The author, a former acting director of the FBI and deputy director, who worked with and then succeeded James Comey, combines a biography of his life and career with the FBI from the 1990s to the present, where he worked as an agent on Russian crime groups, the 9/11 aftermath, Al Qaeda and ISIS terrorism, the Boston Marathon Bombing and other top threats to the USA, with an in-depth account of his hair-raising and discouraging encounters with Donald Trump and his top administration officials.

McCabe, who was unceremoniously fired by Trump the day before completing the twenty years of service that would have entitled him to a federal pension, in an act of vindictiveness and spite that was almost unbelievable, comes off as a dedicated and idealistic public servant with deep insight into many of the major issues in federal law enforcement and national security we have faced for the past three decades.

He later settled a wrongful termination suit against the federal government, in which he was exonerated of wrongdoing, restored to good standing and granted retirement with his full 20-year pension benefits, but only after a new president and new Justice Department leadership were in place.

This week, McCabe is back in the news, on the basis of a New York Times report confirming that both he and James Comey were the targets of an extreme form of IRS tax audit in the years immediately following their dismissals by Trump. An internal IRS audit by the inspector general has been announced, to discover whether they may have been targeted as another form of revenge for their refusal to cooperate with Trump's attempts to suppress investigations of his 2016 campaign and its relationship with the Russians.  

McCabe's descriptions of several conversations he had with the Bully in Chief are particularly revealing and disturbing, although not that unusual or surprising given the volumes of information now available about the mob-boss culture and pervasive corruption endemic to the Trump White House. Recommended.

Book Review: American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (2019). Diana Walsh Pasulka.

I heard about this book a couple of years ago, when Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist and podcaster, interviewed the author on his podcast, The Ezra Klein Show.

Dr. Pasulka is a PhD Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of North Carolina, who stumbled into the world of UFO believers and researchers when she realized that there were extensive Biblical and historical references in her own Vatican archives research to stories of miracles going back to the early Middle Ages, which, if stripped of the belief system of whatever religious perspective was at play in these accounts, seemed remarkably similar to modern-day UFO sightings.

This led her to begin to explore modern UFO believers and their claims, and to take their stories more seriously as real physical or psychological phenomena which should be studied scientifically as well as philosophically. She was also fascinated with new forms of religious belief and experience in the age of “miraculous” technologies, such as we’ve seen since the mid-20th century.

In the process of researching and investigating the history of the modern UFO era, she discovered for herself (before the New York Times revealed it to the world in 2017) that there were many very serious scientists, government officials and wealthy tech individuals pursuing UFO research, but that until recently they almost uniformly refused to admit it publicly, for fear of being ridiculed or undermining the more conventional parts of their careers.

American Cosmic is somewhat unique among UFO books, in that it is a scholarly and philosophical exploration of UFOs and UFO literature in the context of religious experiences going back to ancient times, and forward into our modern technological era. It makes for an interesting and thought-provoking read on this puzzling phenomenon. Recommended.

Book Review: Sea Stories: My Life in Special Operations (2019). Admiral William McRaven.

This is the autobiographical account of a distinguished career as a Navy SEAL and U.S. special operations warrior by probably the longest-serving and most famous recent SEAL of them all.

McRaven rose to the top of the U.S. special operations world in the post-9/11 era, in the course of which he was there and in charge of some of the U.S. military's most famous operations, including the capture of Saddam Hussein, the rescue of Captain Phillips (of the Maersk Alabama cargo ship) from Somali pirates, and the killing of Osama Bin Laden. He also participated in and led literally thousands of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Admiral McRaven is a good story-teller with a career full of participation in and command of complex, difficult special operations events. As an increasingly high-ranking officer, focused on issues of team formation and organizational leadership rather than individual martial prowess and exploits, he brings a very different and welcome perspective to the story of the SEALs and the larger special operations community of the U.S. military.

I recently reviewed Code Over Country by Matthew Cole, which delved into the significant problems that developed within SEAL Team Six and its veterans over the past three decades, particularly its tendency to value loyalty to the unit commander and the team above its members' larger duty to the country, and the extent to which some of the veterans of this unit both covered up mistakes, and also began to use their wartime experiences for self-promotion and self-aggrandizement after their retirements.

Admiral McRaven was specifically identified in that book as someone who had stood in opposition to these negative tendencies as they were developing within SEAL Team Six, so it is interesting and enlightening to hear his own account and perspective on his entire career, and the challenges and issues he identified and faced in the SEALs and the special operations community during his many years of service. Recommended.

Book Series Review: The Crazy Rich Asians Trilogy: Crazy Rich Asians (2014), China Rich Girlfriend (2015), and Rich People Problems (2017). Kevin Kwan.

The first and best known of this three novel series, Crazy Rich Asians, was the basis for the blockbuster romantic comedy film of the same name (2018). 

It tells the story of a young Chinese-American woman and college professor, the daughter of a single mother who immigrated from mainland China, who falls in love with a handsome young Chinese man in New York, not realizing that he is the only son and primary heir of one of the oldest, most powerful and wealthiest families in Singapore. 

The problems begin when he invites her to a friend’s wedding back home in Singapore, without warning her about his family or his position in society there, and she begins to experience and realize the full power of the social forces arrayed against her, and her otherwise happy romance with her charming and attractive boyfriend.  

China Rich Girlfriend and Rich People Problems continue the stories of the same cast of absurdly wealthy contemporary characters and their families from Singapore, mainland China and Hong Kong, presented as modern-day novels of manners, but with a large amount of tongue in cheek. 

This is all fun, light entertainment mixed with plenty of amusing social commentary. Kwan clearly enjoys detailing, relishing and skewering the excesses, cluelessness and foolishness of the over-privileged and over-indulged super-rich from Chinese society and elsewhere. Recommended.

TV Review: The Mandalorian. Seasons 1 & 2 (Disney+).

I watched the whole first season of Disney’s first venture in monetizing the Star Wars galaxy for streaming TV with only modest enthusiasm, but it improved steadily over the course of the second season.

The story takes place in a remote corner of the galaxy, after the destruction of the second Death Star, and the apparent death of the Sith Lord and Emperor Palpatine at the end of Return of the Jedi. It’s a lawless time – the New Republic is struggling to extend its well-intentioned reach, while the fractured forces of the evil Empire are still out there, and they’re up to no good.

Into this Wild West universe comes a lone ranger in shining metal armor, with a jet pack and a lot of other hi-tech weaponry. He is known only as “The Mandalorian” (a reference to his warrior  people and their beleaguered home planet), and he makes allies of convenience and a number of new enemies as he takes on a dangerous mission to save a small child of the Yoda species from mysterious forces.

There is plenty of Star Wars type action and scenery, and a whole new set of gritty characters, strange planets, and plot twists, with a surprise appearance by one of the major Star Wars characters at the end of season 2. Recommended.

TV Review: The Brokenwood Mysteries. All seasons (1-6). Amazon (Acorn).

This was a quirky but quite endearing mystery series, featuring a rumpled older detective inspector with a beater car and a love for American country music, along with his two young wise-cracking detective sidekicks (a woman and a man), and a delightfully oddball female Russian pathologist, who solve local murders in small town New Zealand.

I found by the final season that I was wearying of the story and the characters, which I find is not unusual with many TV series. Producers and writers don’t always know when it’s time to pull the plug on what was a very good idea when it started. With those reservations, recommended.

Book Review: December 6 (2003). Martin Cruz Smith.

In my ongoing search for reading and entertainment available from the library by e-book during the pandemic, I started looking for novels from the past in the thriller/mystery vein by well-known authors in that genre, and fortunately stumbled on this one.

I knew I'd read several of the very good Martin Cruz Smith mystery novels about his Russian detective character Arkady Renko a long time ago, but this book is about another sort of anti-hero protagonist, Harry Niles, a cynical, rebellious son of American missionaries who grows up in 1930s Japan.

Niles is a gaijin (a white foreigner) who is nevertheless steeped in Japanese culture, art and criminality from having grown up in it, yet with a part of his identify and loyalty still tied to his American family and roots.

The novel is a well-written, gripping story of life on the edge of danger in Japan during the China war of the 1930s, with a little bit of a spy thriller plot about the impending Pearl Harbor attack included, along with an interesting portrayal of the China war and the lead-up to World War II as seen from the Japanese side.

This was definitely a worthwhile, interesting and exciting read in an unusual and little-visited historical setting. Recommended.

Book Review: The Splendid and the Vile (2020). Erik Larson.

I had to take two runs at this one to finish it, primarily because I've already read a very large number of books about Winston Churchill, the Battle of Britain, and World War II, so I have a low boredom threshold for new books covering this by-now familiar territory. But in the end it was worth the effort, due in large part to Erik Larson's proven ability to bring history alive through his research, and through his descriptions of the lives of notable individuals living through interesting times and experiences.  

This latest Churchill biography focuses on the legendary British Prime Minister during the war years, and particularly on what people in his inner circle of family, friends and close associates were doing during this period. 

Some of it was new; other parts were by now familiar from earlier sources, and not all that fascinating. That made it a readable but not exceptional addition to the vast trove of Churchill books, distinguished from the others chiefly by the author’s access to interviews with and the papers of several of Churchill’s closest political supporters and family members. Recommended.

Book Review: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2018). Patrick Radden Keefe.

This popular book from 2018 is about the Provisional IRA (commonly known as "the Provos") and the murder of a mother of 10 children during "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. 

Very well-written and suspenseful, this history of the Troubles, and the political violence and terrorist groups of the period (as experienced by a number of the Provisional IRA leaders, members, defectors and family members), was made possible in part due to confessions made by several of the Provos as part of a long-term history project at a major Boston university.

The participants in the study who provided testimony to the project were promised their words would be held in secret until the participants were all dead. That promise failed, however, when U.S. courts intervened on behalf of IRA victims and Irish police investigators, and opened some of the history project files, adding to the climate of mistrust, fear and retribution among the people, organizations and events of the period.

The author interviewed many of the key players, as well as the family members of victims of IRA terrorism, and particularly spotlighted the role and activities of Jerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein (the Provos' political front group), which was a recurring topic throughout the narration.   

This is probably one of the best and most moving histories of that bloody period, one that describes clearly the terrible personal costs of living and trying to survive in a civil war zone. 

Given the increasingly open advocacy by some in our own society for the idea that insurrection, religious and ethnic intolerance, paramilitary violence and civil war are what we need here in the United States, it can be read as a stark cautionary tale of what that experience actually feels like, and of the harm it inflicts on all those forced to live through it, regardless of which side they're on. Recommended.