Book Review: Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath (2022). Bill Browder.

In 2015, Bill Browder, a young businessman and major Western investor in Russia during the early post-Soviet era, published a bestselling autobiography called Red Notice (previously reviewed here). It described how his harrowing experiences in Russia at the hands of the Putin authoritarian and kleptocratic government had led him to become the chief advocate for the passage of The Magnitsky Act by Congress.

The Magnitsky Act was named for one of Browder’s Russian lawyers and friends who had been murdered in jail by the Putin government after being falsely accused of various financial crimes committed by members of Putin’s own circle. The act gives the U.S. government the legal authority to freeze and confiscate the funds of human rights abusers, and has been used extensively against Russian oligarchs, members of the Putin government, and other autocrats of the post-Soviet world, most recently in connection with the illegal Russian war in Ukraine.

Browder’s new book Freezing Order is the excellent and heart-pounding true life sequel to the story he began in Red Notice seven years ago. Red Notice ended with him having successfully worked with Congressional leaders from both parties to enact the Magnitsky Act, which immediately put him at the top of Vladimir Putin’s enemies list. Freezing Order picks up the story with Browder’s next efforts to convince the leaders of other governments around the world to pass their own versions of the Magnitsky Act in their countries.

Since February, when Russian forces invaded Ukraine, we have had an ongoing public demonstration of the types of terrorism and cold-blooded brutality that Vladimir Putin is willing and able to unleash against his enemies. But Browder has experienced it repeatedly in his own personal life, as close friends and associates were poisoned, imprisoned and murdered, and as he increasingly has had to dodge and counter personal attacks on himself, including disinformation campaigns, lawsuits, death threats, in absentia convictions in Russia for crimes falsely attributed to him, and Russian attempts to use Interpol and other dark operations to capture him and extradite him back to Russia.

In one of the most chilling personal accounts of the dangers posed by the presidency of Donald Trump, he recounts his fears of being arrested and shipped off to Russia by Trump when Putin proposed that very idea at the notorious 2017 Helsinki conference, as a “fair” response to the American indictment of twelve Russian agents by Robert Mueller. Browder also provides detailed accounts of his own relationship to and knowledge of numerous of the Russian bad actors eventually identified in the context of the strange Trump/Putin relationship and the Mueller investigation.

One of the most important points Browder makes is that Vladimir Putin loves money. In furtherance of those desires, Putin and his cronies for years have run sophisticated worldwide criminal operations to steal from their own people, confiscate the assets and proceeds of Russian companies under fraudulent pretexts, and then export and hide the vast amounts – Browder suggests over $1 trillion – via complex, sophisticated money laundering operations.

But as victims, journalists and western government investigators have increasingly exposed, and by use of Magnitsky Acts in many countries confiscated the fruits of this theft, Putin has felt increasingly threatened and frustrated by the outside world. Browder suggests that the growing effect of these confiscatory efforts against oligarchs and human rights abusers has played a large part in driving Putin to his desperate war on Ukraine, and helps explain many of the other signs he has displayed of his hatred for and fear of the West.

It would be challenging to write a spy thriller with more devious plot twists and turns, unexpected dangers, and covert murder and mayhem. But this is an inspiring real-life story, with a crusading human rights advocate fighting for truth and justice against a criminal tyrant, while trying to survive a relentless covert campaign to stop him at every turn. It’s gripping, informative and very relevant to the current historical and geopolitical situation. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Shoot Like a Girl: One Woman’s Dramatic Fight in Afghanistan and on the Home Front (2017). Mary Jennings Hegar.

One of the historical anomalies of our country's recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been the increasing presence of women in our own armed forces, as well as in some of the other military forces and paramilitary groups involved in these conflicts. 

All wars are followed by the biographies and autobiographies of some of the participants; our own recent wars are no exception. But the fact that a number of these combatants are now women, with a whole new set of female perspectives, experiences, and challenges above and beyond those of their male counterparts, has led to some particularly absorbing new examples of the timeless soldier's memoir. Shoot Like A Girl is one of the best such accounts I've read to come out of the last two decades of American wars abroad.

Hegar starts at the beginning, with her Texas childhood and family. Her young years were spent with a physically abusive father, and a mother who tried but struggled to protect her and her sister from their father's rages. Eventually they escaped, and their mother remarried, providing them this time with a kind and supportive step-father, who played a positive role in convincing Mary Jennings that she could be whatever she wanted. And what she wanted more than anything since she was a small child was to be a military pilot.

From there, she takes us through her college years as an ROTC cadet, her constant striving to be the best, the accidents and setbacks she encountered in cadet training, and direction changes she had to make along the way to realize her dreams. She describes how she took flying lessons on her own to become a pilot, and the near disaster of her first long-distance solo. She tells the story of her sad short-lived first marriage, her first assignment abroad as a young Air Force officer supervising aircraft maintenance, the gender-based discrimination she encountered from the male officers above her, and a horrifying sexual assault by an Air Force physician.

Eventually, though, through sheer force of will, persistence, excellence and a little luck, she was selected for Air Force flight training. She went through the basic flight school for fixed wing aircraft, and learned to fly the Air Force's T-37 trainer, before transitioning to flying helicopters. We experience through her the incredible challenges of surviving the rigorous flight training, and what it took to make it in the macho "man's world" of military aviation.

Once she had her wings, she began flying missions in support of the civilian world: search and rescue, fire fighting, and drug interdiction. But with the onset of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was inevitable she would end up there. And so she did. She volunteered, and sought it out, to serve her country, and to face the ultimate personal challenge of combat.

Her role in Afghanistan was to fly injured soldiers out of active combat areas. It was a dangerous job, with long days spent on duty, flying constantly, and frequently into "hot" landing zones. She describes it all, and how much she relished the mission, even with the pain and heartbreak of the constant injury and death around her. She also relates the range of experiences she had dealing with her fellows, including incredible solidarity and close friendships with many of her fellow servicemen and women, but also ongoing discrimination and harassment from some of the men in her units and chain of command.

She also describes the one mission where she was wounded in combat, lost her aircraft to enemy fire, and still managed to fly out on another helicopter's landing skid while firing her rifle at enemy fighters at the landing zone. That exploit earned her a Distinguished Flying Cross with Valor, as well as a Purple Heart, and made her a decorated war hero.

At the end of her story, we see how she ultimately ended her flying career with the National Guard, then became a political advocate, who helped lead the national fight to remove limitations on women serving in combat roles in the military. She also reveals that she did ultimately find happiness with another man from her Texas hometown, who became her husband and partner in her civilian life, which was a nice happy ending.

This is a very readable and inspiring adventure story of how one woman managed to live her dreams of flying and military service, even against the headwinds of institutional resistance to women serving in the Air Force, and how in the process, she became an American hero, and a force for positive change in the military. Recommended.

Book Review: Flight of Passage (1997). Rinker Buck.

Hello! As you may have noticed, I’ve been on a mini-sabbatical of sorts the past few weeks. My music and video production activities have been at an unusually high rate recently, which is part of it, but I’ve also been focused on some other personal matters that temporarily took priority. I suppose in the long run this happens to everyone, whether they’re working at a paid job, or just treating a hobby as though it were one!

But just to reassure you – I haven’t gone anywhere, and I haven’t lost interest in writing this blog and posting my reviews yet – quite the opposite. I’ll be back with more reviews in the next couple of weeks, plus let’s not forget that tomorrow is Rock and Roll Friday here at The Memory Cache. I’ll have something new for that.

Today though, I wanted to write a review about a book which has been in print for 25 years (so it’s a 25-year anniversary review, right?), but actually I’m reviewing it because it is one of my very favorite books and coming of age stories ever, and I wanted to share it with you.

Rinker Buck is a writer and former journalist who started his writing career as a recent college graduate in the early 1970s. He has gained considerable acclaim over the years for his newspaper and magazine writing, but in the mid-1990s he decided it was time to give his own account of a remarkable episode from his teenage years, back in the mid-1960s, which led him to write this book.

That episode was a several-week-long trip he took across the continental United States with his older brother Kernahan in a tiny 2-seat Piper Cub from the 1940s, which the brothers first expertly rebuilt over the previous winter before setting out on their epic journey. By the end of it, due in no small part to the unsolicited promotional efforts of their father, the trip and the two boys were headline news across the country. It was a lot to handle for a 15-year adolescent, and his 17-year-old brother with a new pilot’s license, and less than 100 hours of “pilot in command” experience.

That’s the core of the story. But there is so much more to it. Not surprisingly, this book and the exploits of the two Buck boys are legend within the aviation community, where pilots of many generations have delighted in Rinker’s descriptions of the challenges of flying and navigating a small, fragile airplane with no radio through terrible weather, high mountains, and across wide plains, using old-fashioned piloting techniques like following roads and rivers, reading paper charts, and using only a simple compass to find their way, without any GPS or modern location-finding equipment aboard. And it is a terrific story for those elements alone, which appeal to the adventurous spirit of all pilots, as well as those of us who love stories of dangerous travel, exploration, individual bravery and overcoming the fear of the unknown.

But wait, there’s more! It turns out that Rinker and his brother were the two oldest brothers in a very large Irish Catholic family, at precisely that time in American history when these sorts of families were inherently interesting to the public, due to the recent prominence of the Kennedy family and the fascination with the JFK presidency. And at the head of their family was an eccentric, larger than life but overbearing father, a disabled survivor of plane crashes, with an epic younger life as a barnstorming pilot in the 1920s and 1930s, and a determination to see his two oldest sons follow in his daring early aviation footsteps.

So Rinker’s story is anything but just the narration of an exciting youthful experience. Instead, throughout, he writes hilarious and moving anecdotes, insightful observations and wonderful smart-alecky dialogue that capture perfectly all the dynamics of his complex relationships with his father and his older brother, as well as other members of his large and lively family.

As the story unfolds, he paints a vivid picture of how the two brothers learned to work together not only to rebuild and fly their plane, and dream up and complete their own defining personal adventure, but also to become the young men they soon would be, both because of and yet also in spite of their father’s hopes and dreams for them.

This is a coming of age story that is truly extraordinary, but also somehow so universal. It captures perfectly that moment where we set out to take on the world, while trying to figure out how to cut ourselves loose from the ties of love and parental expectations that bind us to our parents and families. Flight of Passage is definitely high on my lifetime “best books” list. Very highly recommended.

Book Review: Life and Death at Cape Disappointment: Becoming a Surfman on the Columbia River Bar (2021). Christopher J. D’Amelio with Reid Maruyama.

I discovered this unusual and worthwhile memoir last year in a charming little bookstore in Ilwaco, Washington, on a vacation to the southwest Washington coast. That was probably more than coincidence, since most of the action in this intriguing story of a Coast Guard surfman takes place in and around that same small town of Ilwaco, and at the Coast Guard lifeboat station nearby at Cape Disappointment.

Christopher J. D’Amelio was a 19-year old California surfer and swimmer when he enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1995. In the course of beginning to tell his story about his life in the Coast Guard, he talks briefly about why he enlisted, boot camp, the temporary disruptions to his personal life and his relationship to the sweetheart he eventually (and happily) married when he first joined, and his early tours and adventures aboard Coast Guard ships in Alaska and other dangerous areas.

But the heart of his story is about the decade and a half or so he spent at Cape Disappointment in the early 2000s, the last point of land on the southern Washington coast that ends at the mouth of the great Colombia River, where the river flows into the Pacific Ocean. This coastal area has often been called “the graveyard of the Pacific” for its uniquely destructive combination of high winds, waves, surf, tides, and shoals. Since the beginnings of recorded maritime history, hundreds of vessels have sunk just offshore, and the sea has claimed many lives in the process.

For precisely this reason, the U.S. Coast Guard chose this challenging location to create its training school for surfmen – the elite small boat operators whose job it is to brave the worst weather and conditions, and to captain tiny motor lifeboats (from 23 to about 5o feet long) through rain, wind, huge waves and various sorts of disasters, to save lives and where possible bring stranded ships in to safety and calm waters. This was the role for which the author volunteered and was chosen, and after detailing the rigorous selection and training challenges he faced, he takes us along for a ride on some of his most daring and almost unbelievable rescue "cases".

Of all the military services of the United States, I’ve long felt that the Coast Guard is both the most under-appreciated, and the most inspirational. Their mission above all others is to save lives rather than to take them, and many of their members do this crucial function for the rest of us, day and day out, for years and decades, often under the most horrifyingly dangerous conditions.

As a result, a number of their technical specialties are particularly and almost unimaginably daring to most of us, including their storm-trained helicopter and C-13o pilots, and especially their famous rescue swimmers, who routinely jump out of helicopters into freezing oceans into terrible storm conditions, without much more than a dry suit, a mask, a knife and a pair of flippers to keep them alive while they pull people out of the water and off sinking ships and oil platforms.

The surfmen are in a similar category of bravery and skill. D’Amelio describes the physical danger aboard these tough little covered lifeboats, the huge towering waves, ferocious winds, and the pounding that shakes the crews' bodies to their cores, while they still need to constantly and carefully control engine power and steering to prevent being capsized or swamped by every passing monster wave set. But he doesn’t brag – it’s just what he did, and it is clear it was a passion and a mission for him, one that he felt called to do, and generally enjoyed.

Very much to his credit, he also talks wisely in retrospect about the toll that this “always on call” dangerous work takes on a marriage and family life. He also talks about the difficult form of guilt that he and his colleagues always carry about every life they tried but failed to save. You would think that these men and women might be well content with the number of hair-raising rescues they've performed that did succeed, and the many lives they’ve saved, but oddly it seems that it is the few failures that seem to weigh on them the most, long after the glory of each amazing rescue exploit is behind them.

The author talks honestly and openly about all that, in a way that made the connection for me to all our first responders who take on the role of protecting others, and who often suffer from lingering psychological burdens as a consequence of adversity and losses they experience that are beyond their control. It should make us all value what these first responders do that much more, and be grateful for their willingness to serve, but particularly for those who routinely put their own lives at risk to do it.

This is an excellent first-hand account of what Coast Guard surfmen and their fellows do for the public all over the country, how they do it, and what it costs them. They train in Washington state, but of course they are deployed around the whole country and its coasts, wherever rough ocean conditions or storms occur. I would imagine they’re on duty in Florida today, in the wake of Ian, the latest massive hurricane to hit that region. I hope they’re all staying safe, but of course that’s not in their job description. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Wild Tales: A Rock and Roll Life (2013). Graham Nash.

I saw an article this morning in The Seattle Times about an upcoming small venue local solo concert by Graham Nash, now 80 years old, who (for those who haven’t heard of him) is a famous surviving member of two of the great bands of the 1960s and 1970s, and a two-time inductee in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Since it’s once again Rock and Roll Friday here at The Memory Cache, I thought I’d take the opportunity to review his 2013 autobiography, which I read recently.

I’ll jump ahead in the story, to provide some context for those readers who don’t know: Nash first gained fame in the mid-1960s as a singer, guitarist, songwriter and founder of the Hollies, one of the more popular “British Invasion” bands, whose songs regularly soared to the top of the international charts, along with those of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.  A sample of their greatest hits would include songs like "Bus Stop", "Carrie-Anne", "Look Through Any Window", and "On a Carousel".

Nash was particularly well known for his signature high harmonies and vocal leads in many of the Hollies’ hits. But after years of rock stardom, he tired of the band’s formulaic sound and songwriting, so he moved to southern California, where in the late 1960s, he became a founding member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY).

In Wild Tales, Nash takes us all the way back to his childhood, growing up in a slum neighborhood in Manchester, England. He talks about how he found his way to music, and the influences from late 1950s American rock, and the popular artists in England at the time that led to his love of harmony singing. He describes the formation of the Hollies, and sets it in the context of the other bands in England at the time that were vying for popularity and opportunities to perform. He also relates his family life and formative experiences, and how he came to his lifelong passion for photography, which has led him to acclaim for his visual art in addition to his storied musical career.

Nash doesn’t hold back in describing the people, places and events he experienced as a member of the Hollies, and then later in CSNY. His memories of the CSNY era are particularly salacious and gossipy. This legendary “super-group” of four established rock stars from other famous bands, with their unique complex vocal harmonies, massively popular rock hits and anthems of the Boomer generation, along with their drug use, sexual exploits, and larger than life friendships with other rockers and celebrities, has always been renowned for the instability of its internal relationships within the band, driven by gigantic egos, sudden wealth and their increasingly erratic personal behaviors as their celebrity and musical fame skyrocketed.

Nash takes us along for the full ride, not only at the moments of their greatest success, but also through their later years of repeated band reunions, break-ups, tragedies, new projects and awards. He shares details and stories about his various personal relationships with women, including groupies, his wives, and his famous but brief romance with Joni Mitchell in the late 1960s in Laurel Canyon, which he immortalized both in songs and in his photography. He also opens up about the ups and downs of his friendships, including with several of his Hollies band-mates, and with David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, and others from the pantheon of classic rock superstars.

This is definitely a “tell all” book, which should appeal to fans and historians of the age of rock and roll, as told by one of the most successful and long-lasting musical and artistic voices of the era. It’s not the most beautifully written autobiography I’ve read, but it is honest, authentic and enlightening. Recommended.

Book Reviews: Honorable Mentions List (Non-Fiction, Biography and History)

Today I'm posting another set of "Honorable Mentions" from my files, with short reviews or summaries, and another five books included together in the list.  Here we go! 
 

Book Review: Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016).  J. D. Vance.

This notable book from the year Donald Trump won the presidency (which book was also made into a movie in 2020 by Ron Howard) is an autobiographical look at the injuries of culture and upbringing in the "hillbilly" part of American society, that is, white, Scots-Irish, and Appalachian, by someone who survived it and moved beyond it.

It described the travails of white working class culture and family life from the inside, in a piece of remarkably moving and eloquent writing, which was received with rave reviews at a time when America was struggling to understand the rage and irrational behavior of Trump’s animated base of white rural supporters.

The author and hero of the story seemed a decent and likable sort, who prevailed against the odds, and who obviously valued family, served his country honorably as a Marine in Iraq, then went to college at Ohio State University, succeeded there, was accepted into and made his way through Yale Law School, and ended up with a loving wife and a highly-paid job in venture capital finance.

The real tragedy of the story comes in the aftermath to the book, when after a brief flirtation with the Never Trumpers in the Republican Party, Vance threw in his lot with Donald Trump, racist politics, and dark money billionaires, in his current quest for a U.S. Senate seat from Ohio.

If his answer to “what does the white underclass need to succeed?” is to oppress minorities, encourage racism, suppress voting, support authoritarianism and rob the poor for the benefit of the ultra-rich, he obviously didn’t learn anything noble or helpful from his own journey. The book is still recommended; the author, at least in his quest for a future in our national politics, not so much.


Book Review: The Black Hand: The Epic War Between a Brilliant Detective and the Deadliest Secret Society in American History (2017). Steven Talty.

The Black Hand is a history and biography of Joseph Petrosino, a famous early 20th century Italian-American New York City detective, and his war against the Sicilian "Black Hand Society" of extortionists, bombers and kidnappers, in the broader context of American antipathy to new Italian immigrants.

This inspiring true tale of crime-fighting and political battles within the Italian-American immigrant community was a previously unknown chapter of American history for me, and it explores the roots of the Italian Mafia story in the United States. Apparently Al Capone was a graduate of the Black Hand organization, among other well-known Mafia mobsters of a slightly later and more famous era. Recommended.


Book Review: Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood that Helped Turn the Tide of War (2018). Lynne Olson.

This is a World War II history of how England became the "last hope" for all the European countries conquered and occupied by Germany during the war, whose governments and fighters contributed to keeping the dream of freedom, and victory over the Axis alive while in exile in Britain.

It contains many interesting tidbits of the national stories of the Nazi-occupied countries and their people, and how their relationships to Britain developed and changed during the war years.

Lynne Olson is a very readable popular historian and writer. She has written several other worthwhile histories of other aspects of World War II as well. Recommended.
   

Book Review: Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire. A 500 year history (2017). Brad Anderson.

Fantasyland is a funny, well-researched history of how America, from the days of its earliest settlers, has been a unique experiment in wishful thinking, fantasy, individual nuttiness, crackpot religious ideas combined with wild entertainment, mass susceptibility to bunkum and conspiracy theories, and the generalized conflation of individual personal belief and emotional feelings with objective fact that led us to the age of Trump.

In short, in the author’s view, what we're seeing now isn't new in American history -- it's a logical outcome of the entire American experience since the earliest days of white settler colonies in North America. That’s perhaps a contrarian view, given the past six years of listening to news commentators saying “We’re in uncharted territory now”, but Anderson makes an amusing and entertaining case for his proposition. Recommended.   

 

Book Review: Angels in the Sky: How a Band of Volunteer Airmen Saved the New State of Israel (2017). Robert Gandt.

This is a very enlightening history of the beginnings of the Israeli Air Force (IAF) in the 1948 War of Independence, and the World War II veteran pilots from all over the world who volunteered to smuggle planes and weapons, and fly them into combat for the newly-formed nation.

The author details a number of clandestine operations that had to succeed against impossible odds for Israel to evade international restrictions on military sales to the region, and the many pilots from previously (and recently) warring nations who volunteered to smuggle planes and fly them in combat for Israel, whether out of idealism, boredom, or the simple need to find meaning and a purpose again in continuing to be fighter pilots at war.

Robert Gandt has written several other good histories as well.  He’s definitely an author whose other books are worth checking out. 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: 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.

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.

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: 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 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: The Storyteller (2021). Dave Grohl.

For those who don’t know who Dave Grohl is, he might say facetiously that he “was that other guy in Nirvana”, that is, the power drummer behind the drum set, who provided the pounding beat while Kurt Cobain was out front, playing guitar and singing the generation-defining Nirvana songs he had written, for those few short years until Cobain took his own life at the peak of the 1990s Seattle-based Grunge rock era.

As the band-mate and close friend to a tragically and prematurely deceased rock superstar, Grohl could easily have self-destructed, retired and vanished from the music scene, or chosen to switch to a different career. But he did none of those things. Instead, after a brief hiatus, he re-created himself as a guitar player, lead singer, songwriter, front man and bandleader for another top rock act of the 2000s era which he founded, The Foo Fighters.

Along the way, he did quite a few other interesting things too. He has produced several music-related documentary movies and TV shows, including a fascinating movie he made for Netflix, Sound City (2013), about a legendary old Los Angeles music studio, the stars who had recorded there, and the marvelous obsolete analog mixing board he ultimately rescued for his own home studio; a TV mini-series, Sonic Highways (2014) documenting a 20th anniversary recording tour for the Foo Fighters, during which they recorded at eight famous studios across the country; and a mock horror movie with the band, Studio 666 (2022).

He has also had various collaborations with other famous musicians, including a memorable performance on Saturday Night Live playing drums with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, which led to an offer from Petty to join the band, but which he ultimately declined in order to pursue his plans for the Foo Fighters band he had just started.

In The Storyteller, Grohl doesn’t write a straight narration of every twist and turn along his path, or provide a precise chronological account of his career and life. Instead, he tells stories: anecdotes of different things he experienced, and things that happened to him that impacted him personally, emotionally and professionally. It’s occasionally a little confusing, because he sometimes jumps back and forth in time, but ultimately it allows him to connect the dots, and paint a convincing picture of himself as a man and an artist.

This is a worthwhile and self-reflective autobiographical sketch by one of the leading and most popular men of the contemporary rock music world, who survived a devastating personal and professional loss early in his career, along with outsized fame and celebrity at an early age, only to start over and succeed again on his own terms. Recommended.

Book Review: Becoming Bulletproof (2020). Evy Poumpouras.

A former female Secret Service agent combines stories from her career, protecting the lives of several presidents and their families, with insights on how many aspects of her training as an elite security agent can help individuals to be safer and more secure in their daily lives.

The author is particularly revelatory in her discussions of interrogation techniques, and how to tell if someone is lying. She is a believer in "soft" methods that try to build an empathetic connection between interviewer and subject, and describes the sometimes counter-intuitive approaches she would take in order to elicit confessions, and to know when the subject was lying or telling the truth.  She also suggests these techniques and insights can be used by others, to be able to avoid being deceived and victimized by others in the course of their everyday lives.

I've read several of these kinds of "how to be more secure" books. It is intriguing to learn the ways of thinking and the psychological techniques used by law enforcement and intelligence experts, which certainly could translate into normal work and life situations. But I also think that most of us don't have all that many opportunities to practice and learn these sorts of skills, and to develop the level of awareness of others and of our physical environment that a top professional like Poumpouras does in the course of a law enforcement career.

Still, it was an enlightening read, and I also enjoyed her perspective on various presidents and some of their family members from her close interactions with them on their protective details. Recommended.

Book Review: The FBI Way (2020). Frank Figliuzzi.

The author, who is now a cable TV analyst, was a career FBI agent who eventually rose to high-level leadership within the organization. His book is a combination of insights into the "FBI Way", that is, describing the norms of the organization and the processes they use to foster excellence, responsibility and integrity in their staff, with illustrative examples of how these norms and processes have succeeded and failed, taken from his own career and experience.

Figliuzzi is not a fan of Donald Trump, so he does cover topics in the latter part of the book relating to how the FBI was challenged by Trump's attitude toward the Bureau, and by his attempts to destroy its independence, and turn it and the Justice Department into tools of his own authoritarian and gangsterish aspirations. Recommended.

Book Review: Educated (2018). Tara Westover.

This autobiography is a gut-wrenching personal account by a young woman of growing up in a rural, extremist Mormon family in Idaho, dominated by a patriarchal father who believes in anti-government conspiracies, the end of the world, and his own personal brand of religious fanaticism.

Despite endless years of serious accidents and injuries from dangerous work and family car trips, physical and psychological abuse from a crazy brother and her father, a total lack of modern healthcare, social isolation and no schooling as a child, she ultimately got out, slowly separated herself from her family, and learned about the outside world and objective modern reality by becoming an educated person.

This autobiography is beautifully written and inspirational, and provides a stark picture of the extremes of opinion and behavior on the outer margins of American society. There may be a movie adaptation of this book coming out, but I haven't been able to find details of it online.  Highly recommended. 

Book Review: Unrequited Infatuations (2021). Stevie Van Zandt.

This rock and roll autobiography is an unusual one, in part because it is told by someone who is not the “front man” for a band, or a major solo act himself.  This is a “sideman’s” story.  

For those who don’t know, Van Zandt, also known as “Little Stevie”, is a close friend and confidante of Bruce Springsteen.  He became a founding member, guitarist and backup singer of Springsteen’s E Street Band, and Springsteen’s right-hand man in the early years, only to quit in the 1980s, just as the band was reaching its peak years of popularity. 

As he recounts, he returned to the band many years later, but only after building his own separate life and identity as a musician, political activist, actor, script-writer and producer, as well as a celebrity gadfly, solo artist, band-leader, project organizer and friend to many other stars.  

His style of story-telling seemed to verge at times on the bombastic, self-admiring and grandiose, and might have been intolerable except for the fact that all the outrageous claims he makes and the crazy stories he tells are apparently true, and are often very funny.  It also helps make it more bearable that he openly shares his failures and insecurities too.  

But yes, he did play a huge part in organizing financial, political and celebrity support in the U.S. against South African apartheid, and in support of Nelson Mandela.  He did become an actor, and a major star in The Sopranos, one of the top TV series of all time.  He did star in and help produce another improbable but popular gangster-related Netflix show set in Norway, Lilyhammer.  And he does seem to know just about everyone in the celebrity world, and has wild stories and gossip to share about his interactions with many of them.  

If you’re looking for a fun read, and lots of tall tales from the life of a high-powered Forrest Gump of the entertainment world, this book might fill the bill.  Recommended.

Book Review: Born to Run (2016). Bruce Springsteen.

The Boss's long-awaited autobiography finally appeared in 2016.  It explores in the first person the same kind of personal and emotional territory as was covered in the Tom Petty biography Petty, which I previously reviewed.

In fact, Springsteen and Petty, the two most beloved and iconic American rock stars of our age,  have similar stories in so many respects:  growing up poor, surviving abusive and neglectful fathers, youths spent in 1960s garage rock bands, struggling with depression throughout their careers, and tending to the difficult process of building and managing extraordinarily tight-knit bands of gifted musical subordinates and collaborators over long periods of time. 

They both experienced the incredible highs of performing live in front of huge adoring audiences, writing hundreds of popular songs, creating great records in the studio, and working with many of the other luminaries of the rock music world over their respective 40+ year careers.

Yet at the same time, in both these books, we see them going through many of the same kinds of personal and family ups and downs that we all have in our own lives. 

Fortunately for the millions of fans worldwide of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, he's still here, and still making great music, as he demonstrated last year with the release of his first rock album and accompanying movie in seven years, Letter to You, also previously reviewed here.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (2021). Bruce Greyson, MD.

This recent book by one of the world’s leading scientific experts on Near Death Experiences (NDEs) is an account of what is now known about NDEs, based on his career of collecting data about them, analyzing the data, researching historical NDE anecdotes and beliefs, and working with other researchers. It is also an account of his personal journey in deciding to study them, and then dedicating a major portion of his career as a physician to designing and carrying out this unusual research on what he knew from the outset was a controversial topic.

Dr. Greyson faced many of the same sorts of institutional skepticism and resistance to his pursuit of understanding of this phenomenon that other researchers have confronted in what I call “mysteries of life” topics (i.e., frequently-reported phenomena that are “paranormal” or unexplained by conventional materialist science). Nevertheless, as a practicing psychiatrist, he kept hearing descriptions of these strange and psychologically impactful experiences, many of them sharing common features, and ultimately couldn’t avoid trying to understand this puzzling reported experience which kept turning up in patients he treated who had been through serious medical emergencies.

It was intriguing to me that although he has taught at several different prestigious university medical schools during his career, he ended up at the University of Virginia, working closely with both Dr. Ian Stevenson and Dr. Jim Tucker, two of the leading psychiatrist researchers into the phenomenon of young children who appear to remember details of past lives.

All three of these doctors, and others among their colleagues, seem to share a deep curiosity about what is behind the shades of what we normally accept as material reality, and particularly the nature of the relationship between mind and brain, which has been a central philosophical and religious issue since antiquity.

As with recent attempts to study other “paranormal” phenomena using scientific methods of interviewing via a structured approach, and applying quantification and analysis of frequently recurring aspects to patients’ stories (techniques that Greyson pioneered with respect to NDE research), at the end we’re still left with unresolved questions. Do minds exist independent of physical bodies and brains? We still don’t know, but Greyson’s account adds more evidence to the possibility that they do.

But beyond those cosmic questions, Dr. Greyson’s research also yields many fascinating insights into the psychological impacts of NDEs on experiencers, and the people around them. There is an insightful exploration of how NDEs can change the personalities of those who have them, not always for the better in terms of their own happiness, although gaining a heightened appreciation for preserving life and being more kind and loving to others seems to be a common tendency among many survivors. 

He reveals other surprising commonalities across reported NDEs. One category of cases involves people in the near-death state who seem to know about the deaths of other people in remote locations, before it is known to them in their waking state, or to the people around them.

He describes other cases where patients in this NDE unconscious state seemed to have viewed details of what was going on around them and nearby (outside the room where their body was lying) when they were definitely unconscious, including one eerie episode which happened to him when he was first practicing medicine, and played an important part in convincing him to undertake this line of research.

Another fascinating finding he revealed was that while most NDE experiences seem to involve meeting or becoming aware of an all-powerful deity of some sort, there was no consistent correlation between that and the experiencers’ prior or subsequent religious beliefs, or lack thereof.

For anyone interested in NDEs, and how they fit into the other mysteries of our existence, this is an intriguing, compassionate and ultimately comforting introduction. Highly recommended.