Book Review: Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion and the Global Fight for Democracy (2025). Ronald J. Diebert.

I previously reviewed a book called Pegasus (2023), by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud. It recounted the investigation by a small group of journalists and internet researchers into the now-notorious Pegasus software, which allows the operator to covertly take control of smartphones, download all their private data, and turn them into remote microphones, GPS trackers and cameras in a target’s pocket. 

The Pegasus spyware app had been created by an Israeli cybersecurity firm called NSO as a tool to allow governments to spy on citizens, allegedly only to be sold to “good” governments trying to crack down on international terrorism and crime.

But in Pegasus, the authors exposed how NSO regularly violated their own stated policy of only selling to friendly democratic governments, and also sold the software tools to repressive regimes around the globe, who used it to terrorize political dissidents and opposition figures. The authors’ findings, and the dangerous process of uncovering the truth of NSO’s cyber-spying exploits, were the key ingredients of their story. 

Chasing Shadows is a related book, by the founder and director of an organization in Canada called the Citizen Lab, which played an important role in the Pegasus investigation. It is to a limited degree an autobiography of the author, Ronald Diebert, and his role in launching this non-profit organization dedicated to exposing the dark secrets of authoritarian governments, and their rulers, who use the internet and cyber tools to spy on and control their adversaries.

But it is also an up to the minute, true-life spy thriller, full of case studies, dangerous situations, and exploits of the small but committed circles of journalists and tech savants at the Citizen Lab and around the world. It is the story of these few brave investigators, who try to coordinate, share resources, and work together to expose and disrupt authoritarian governments and their operatives, along with the dark cybersecurity companies like NSO that enable their dirty deeds. And it is also the story of some of the victims, and what they experienced as a result of the spyware attacks on their phones.

It's discouraging to read this, and realize the power and technological capabilities of the cyber surveillance tools that are now available to dictators and criminals to control others, and attempt to destroy their opposition. 

But it’s encouraging and inspiring to realize that there are people who have accepted it as their life’s mission to investigate, expose and undermine these bad actors when they attempt to use these powerful spying tools against their adversaries. It’s also impressive how skillful these investigators, journalists and tech wizards have become in tracking and exposing the sales and use of these malicious tools, even with their limited resources, and the constant danger to themselves as well as the targets of surveillance.

You won’t sleep easier after reading Chasing Shadows, but it’s important to be aware of the current situation, and the nature of the high-tech surveillance threats we now face from the smartphones most of us carry with us all day. Recommended. 

Book Review: Heartbreaker: A Memoir (2025). Mike Campbell with Ari Surdoval.

Hello, friends! After a busy holiday season, I’m posting a review I’ve had sitting around, almost ready, for several weeks. It’s an entertainment-related review, as a relief from the endlessly distressing news cycle. Hope you enjoy it!

By the way, I’ve been thinking about my new year’s resolutions for The Memory Cache, and have decided to try to make it more readable and more engaging by aiming for more regular posts, but with fewer words. Somehow over the past few years, my posts have grown longer and longer, and even to me perhaps overly detailed. So look for shorter articles, more often, in the new year.

In my review of the documentary The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal a couple of months ago, I mentioned that I had read a couple of great rock biographies recently. I’m finally getting around to writing about one of them – Heartbreaker by Mike Campbell.

A few years ago, I read and reviewed Steve Van Zandt’s autobiography Unrequited Infatuations, which is probably the closest parallel story to Mike Campbell’s that you could imagine from the whole history of rock and roll. For both Van Zandt and Campbell, they were the primary sideman at the right hand of one of the great legends of American rock music. For Van Zandt, the legendary band leader, song writer, guitarist and singer was Bruce Springsteen; for Mike Campbell, it was Tom Petty.

Both of them were founding members of their respective bands, close friends with their superstar band leaders, and trusted advisers, co-producers, and song-writing collaborators. But their stories, their backgrounds, their personalities, and their own unique talents and contributions were also very different, which makes Mike Campbell’s book a new and rewarding addition to the slender shelf of “rock star sideman” autobiographies.

In fact, Heartbreaker is notable not just as Campbell’s account of his life and career, and his role as lead guitarist and chief sideman for Tom Petty, but because it is the first “insider” autobiographical account of the band’s entire history from one of the members.

Tom Petty and various band members participated through interviews in the excellent Warren Zanes biography Petty, and Petty and the band members also cooperated with Peter Bogdanovich in the film  documentary Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Between those two works, and other published stories and anecdotes, many of the major events, trials, tribulations and successes in Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s long and storied history have been well documented. Yet we’ve never before read a full, reflective personal  account from one of the members of how the band began, how it all went down, and what came next after Tom Petty’s unexpected death in 2017.

I should say as fair warning that this book might not be for everyone. I’m a long-time enthusiastic fan of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and of Mike Campbell in his own right, so the level of detail he includes (for example) about the minutiae of equipment he owned, played and liked (or didn’t like) at different stages of his career, or how he learned to play different songs,  might not be for everybody.  But for me, as a fan and a lifetime guitar player too, I ate it all up.

In any case, that’s just a very small part of his story. He writes about his childhood, growing up an Air Force kid with a dad who was not always around, and his parents’ eventual  separation and divorce. He talks about their poverty, a childhood spent moving around and living in different cities. He describes being a poor kid in school, but one who was smart and did well despite the obstacles he faced in life and his family situation.

And he talks about how he took up the guitar, started playing in bands after seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan (like most rock musicians of the Boomer generation, including me), and ended up in college in Gainesville, Florida, where he met Tom Petty, and was invited to join Petty’s band after playing a flashy Chuck Berry lick on his cheap Japanese guitar.

From there, he moves on to a rich and satisfying history of the band. He talks about his fellow band members, how they met and got together, their talents, their ways of being, and how they got along. He brings the whole band rock and roll experience, and their personal relationships within the group very much alive.

I particularly liked reading about now he met his wife Marcy in the early days of the band in Los Angeles, and how they fell in love and built a life together. He does a wonderful job conveying the challenges and complexities of building a real, fully human life, a strong marriage and a close-knit family while immersed in the chaos of a life as an artist in a major rock and roll band, one that was frequently in the studio at all hours, or out on tour.

It seemed almost amazing to learn that there are some people in the rock community who apparently have long-term stable marriages and family lives – that’s not the typical public image of a rock star or famous entertainer. But it was a very heartwarming element of Campbell’s story.

There are so many other interesting aspects to this book. Campbell shares many of his thoughts about his own songwriting process, and his creative collaborations and deep friendship with Petty. He discusses nuances of his guitar playing style, and how he developed it, becoming one of the most iconic rock guitarists in the world in the process.

And then there were some powerful moments in the band’s history, like the time Tom Petty’s new agent talked to Campbell and the other members (without Petty), and presented them with a new "take it or leave it" financial arrangement that gave Petty a larger share of the proceeds. Campbell describes how he talked the other band members through this hard recognition that Petty was the main star, but that they were all going to end up doing well if they stuck with the band, even if Petty came out richer than they did. It was a pivotal moment, and one I'd never heard before.

Heartbreaker is an excellent rock autobiography, and an entertaining memoir from one of the great sidemen and lead guitarists in rock history. If you’re a fan of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, it’s a must read. For all others, it’s at least a very interesting life story of a talented and likeable person and artist, who chose the life of a famous musician, celebrity and entertainer. Recommended.

Book Review: Sociopath: A Memoir (2024). Patric Gagne, PhD.

Years ago, I read and reviewed The Sociopath Next Door (2005) by Martha Stout, an eye-opening survey of sociopathy by a clinical psychologist with a career specialty in treating subjects with this condition. From that book, I learned that sociopathy is generally characterized by the lack of normal human empathy towards others, along with a lack of moral inhibitions and remorse. It is usually accompanied by a range of anti-social behaviors, and is believed to exist in about 4% of the human population, a figure which appears to be relatively consistent across different ethnic groups.

I have remained interested in the topic ever since, the more so throughout the first and now second Trump administrations, during which sociopathic behavior and its extreme adverse effects on other people have been on daily public display in the Oval Office, and from other major figures within the administration and the MAGA Republican Party. 

For that reason, when I saw reviews of Dr. Patric Gagne’s book Sociopath: A Memoir last year, I knew I would have to read it. It seemed almost unbelievable that an actual sociopath would not only publicly confess to having this condition, but would be willing to write a book-length autobiography about herself, describing what all she had done, and what she had felt or not felt about it.

Dr. Gagne tells a remarkable and even sympathetic story about her life and condition. She doesn’t hide who she is, and many of the shocking things she’s done in the course of growing up and slowly gaining insight into herself. She describes stabbing a classmate as a second grader with a pencil (one of the few transgressions for which she got in trouble), and a habit she developed early on of breaking into neighbors’ houses, scouting them and hanging out in them while the owners were away. She admits to stealing, lying and enjoying getting away with things she knew were not socially or legally acceptable. And she does confess to a lack of remorse or empathy for others.

She was also very smart. Her intelligence helped her do well in school, as well as helping her learn to conceal her lack of empathy and her deceitful behaviors from most other people. Of course, her parents and family eventually figured out that something wasn’t right with her, but she was bright and high-functioning, as many sociopaths are.

At the time she was growing up, there wasn’t yet a huge awareness or large body of psychological research on sociopathy. What little information there was tended to be focused on criminal psychopaths and older people who were institutionalized, which didn’t help her understand why and how she was different from her family members, and others she encountered at school and in the neighborhood.

This is an important and fascinating story of how a gifted sociopathic woman tried to cope with her lack of empathy and inability to connect with people around her emotionally, and to understand the traits that are hallmarks of her condition. She takes us through her childhood of maladaptive behaviors, her encounters with therapists as an adolescent, and ultimately the fortuitous connections she made at university that allowed her to begin to study and research sociopathy as a  college student and then an academic.

One particularly interesting part of her story was her description of a sort of “pressure” in her head that from an early age drove her to commit anti-social and forbidden acts, which were the only way she knew as a child to relieve this pressure that would build up inside her head. As she grew older, she slowly began to find alternative techniques she could use to relieve this pressure, and teach herself not to act out as a remedy to her inner drive to misbehave.

Eventually, in her own determination to figure out how to fit into normal society, and how to avoid doing “wrong” even though she didn’t feel any empathy or remorse herself, she gained the credentials as a psychologist (including her PhD) that allowed her to counsel and treat other sociopaths, and do social and psychological research on the condition.

Amazingly, Dr. Gagne also found love with a partner, built a community of friends, and had children she cares for and loves. She tells the story of those relationships, how they began, the troubles she encountered in maintaining them, and lessons she learned along the way that helped her fit in and be successful, despite the void in her where caring and empathy should have been.

She also has found meaning in a professional life devoted to helping other people like herself adapt to what she believes is another form of neurodiversity, and find ways to fit into the larger human community that fears and despises them.

I was truly impressed by her account, her intellect and her insights. And I believe she is sincere, honest and well-meaning, although none of those attributes are ordinarily characteristics of sociopathic personalities.

On the other hand, I couldn’t avoid the feeling that she and her story are a sort of black swan event. I hope she is successful in treating others with this same condition, and admire all she has done and accomplished, while also maintaining deep reservations that the vast majority of sociopaths among us will ever travel the relatively hopeful and constructive path she found for herself.

It would take many more success stories like hers to convince me that we would ever be wise to let down our individual and collective defenses against these wolves among us. And now watching the rise of a whole political party and movement in America, led by obvious sociopaths who obey no rules or laws, clearly enjoy inflicting fear and violence on others, and show absolutely no remorse for their crimes is not helping to assuage my fears about the threats that sociopaths continue to pose to the rest of us.

Nevertheless, this well-written and highly readable memoir is an important contribution to our understanding of the sociopathic condition and the people who have it. It is a useful counterpoint and alternative perspective to books like The Sociopath Next Door, one informed by living with the condition and describing it from the inside. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism. Sarah Wynn-Williams (2025).

Several years ago, I read and reviewed an excellent book from 2016 about Silicon Valley and particularly Facebook called Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine  by Antonio Garcia Martinez. It was a memoir by a former Wall Street trader who moved to California around 2010, and jumped into the high tech investment world. In addition to many interesting and appalling stories of the people and bad behavior he encountered along the way, Martinez’s story stood out for its clear presentation of how the electronic markets in personal data for advertising work at places like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Instagram, and what it’s like to work in those high-tech corporate environments. 

With Sarah Wynn-Williams' splendid new tell-all memoir about life in the upper ranks of Facebook’s leadership, Careless People, we now have an even more gripping, often shocking but highly readable insider’s account of the people who have built and now control the world’s most powerful social media company, and the lawless and corrupt practices that have made Facebook and Meta the destructive forces they have become in modern society. Some of these outrages have already been investigated and publicized in the news media, but Wynn-Williams’ story takes it to a whole new level of factual detail and disillusioning personal experience.

 

The author’s origin story is an unusual one. The childhood survivor of a near-fatal shark attack in her native New Zealand, she grew up to become an idealistic young lawyer and diplomat who discovered Facebook around 2009. She was immediately enthralled by the possibilities the social media app presented for promoting open communications between people and communities, resisting authoritarian regimes (as seemed to be happening during the “Arab Spring” at that time), and generally being a new and important force for social good in the world.

 

With that hopeful and idealistic perspective, she spent more than a year trying to find an “in” at the relatively new Facebook company, so she could pitch her idea for a job she wanted to do there: director of global public policy. At first, she made little progress, because the top management hadn’t even considered the idea that Facebook had the potential to run into many kinds of legal conflict, complex policy issues and resistance from political leaders in countries around the world. But eventually, through sheer persistence, she was able to talk herself into the job she had invented, and began to work regularly with Facebook’s top leadership, including Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and others. 

 

As she describes it, Wynn-Williams began filled with hopes for herself and her new career, imagining a useful role at Facebook where she could use her training and experience in international law and diplomacy to help make the company and its products a force for positive change around the world. With these goals in mind, she began encouraging Mark Zuckerberg to start trying to make personal connections with important global leaders, in order to create favorable conditions for promoting Facebook’s apps and the company in countries around the world.

 

She brought her diplomatic skills and experience to bear, trying to set up meetings, handle protocol, and prep the boss for what should be discussed in those meetings with world leaders and other CEOs. It turned out that wasn’t so easy, since Zuckerberg at this early stage was uncomfortable meeting new people, hated politics, didn’t think he needed to know anything or be prepared for these meetings in advance, and basically wanted someone else to deal with it all. Nevertheless, Wynn-Williams kept trying.

 

She also became part of the circle of young women staffers around Sheryl Sandberg. She soon found herself  recruited along with other female staff to do non-company work promoting Sandberg’s book Lean In, helping to manage all the attendant glory and publicity Sandberg received as a supposed feminist success story, the powerful professional woman and visionary corporate leader who could balance work and family, and “have it all”. But the author soon realized that Sheryl could “have it all” mainly because of her stupendous wealth, her paid full-time childcare staff, and her ability at work to compel others to do things for her, without regard for the toll that might take on her assistants, or the appropriateness of having Facebook pay for these personal services for her.

 

What makes Wynn-Williams’ story so compelling are the harrowing daily personal experiences and interactions she describes, and the insights she has on what she had to do to try to survive and succeed in this toxic work environment. She describes a work culture where having children and families is something to be essentially hidden from supervisors, where insane work hours and demands on personal time are normal expectations of employees by upper management. She recounts going through several pregnancies during her time at Facebook, one with calamitous damage to her health, and reveals how her bosses still expected her to be working from home or going on foreign trips, even during her maternity leave and an extended period of physical recovery.

 

The author also gives chilling descriptions of ongoing sexual harassment, both from her male boss Joel Kaplan and from Sheryl Sandberg, who Wynn-Williams claims tried to force her to go to bed with Sandberg during a long international flight on a private jet. Wynn-Williams describes many of the things she did at work for years to try to stay out of trouble and under the radar of top leadership, while also trying to report and resist wrongdoing, whether it was about sexual harassment, or her repeated objections to the business’s policies and practices when they appeared to be immoral, corrupt, illegal or just plain stupid.

 

The author confirms Mark Zuckerberg’s widely reported rage at having Facebook blamed by the press for Donald Trump’s stunning 2016 upset victory. Zuckerberg apparently felt Facebook was being unjustly accused and defamed, at least until his own managers explained to him all the powerful software and data tools for voter manipulation they had used on Trump’s behalf. He then ended up testifying in Congress, and with the support of his staff, lied about and obfuscated the company’s extensive consulting work for the Trump campaign, and its powerful effects, according to Wynn-Williams.

 

Later in the book, Wynn-Williams also delves into details of Facebook’s attempts to win its way into the Chinese market, which became one of Zuckerberg’s top priorities in his relentless quest for more customers. According to her account, the Facebook leadership appeared untroubled by what it concluded was the need to collaborate with China’s authoritarian government in providing spying capabilities against its own population, if that would advance the company’s interests. The author claims they were also perfectly willing to lie to the U.S. government about the extent of their cooperation with the Xi regime, and lie to the Xi regime about their covert attempts to penetrate the market without meeting the Chinese government’s legal requirements. She provides numerous examples to back up these claims.

 

Another shocking reveal was the fact that marketing teams at Facebook had developed advertising decks to promote their abilities to target 13-17 year old girls with signs of emotional distress (as contained in their posts) for advertising that would take advantage of the psychologically vulnerable state of those girls. Of course, when Facebook was caught out on this, and hauled before Congress to explain, the company’s leadership lied, and denied they had those capabilities. But they did, and they were promoting and selling those capabilities to customers, who wanted to advertise products like weight loss aids and beauty products to under-age girls in crisis.

 

Ultimately, after most of a decade in the upper echelons of the Facebook hierarchy, the author’s attempts to encourage Facebook to do the right things in different situations, whether in the realm of international law and policy, or in dealing with employee harassment by top leaders, ended with her being fired. None of the leaders responsible for all these problems apologized to her, or acknowledged any wrongdoing. They just got rid of her, which is of course what they are still hoping to do now, by suggesting the author is just a disgruntled fired employee with emotional problems and a “sour grapes” grudge against the company. 

 

I saw a news report that Facebook’s and Meta’s leadership really did not want this book to be published, and it’s obvious why not after reading it. It’s potentially a devastating blow to the Facebook and Meta brands, not to mention the reputations of people like Zuckerberg and Sandberg. But I’m convinced that Wynn-Williams is telling the truth about this crew of “careless people”. She paints a very believable and by-now familiar picture of the toxic high-tech corporate culture they’ve created, and shows how their vast wealth, unchecked ambition and lack of any moral compass or empathy for others on a routine basis has led them to launch these destructive social media applications out into the world, with little concern for their adverse effects on individuals or society.

 

I know there has been enough negative press and analysis about Facebook and Meta in the past few years that many people might not want to hear any more about it. But this book is essential for really understanding the extent of the cynicism, greed and corruption at the heart of Meta and its leadership, and the negative effects that has had on the politics of our time, our attention and our social lives.

 

It’s also a riveting read, and a compelling personal story of survival and endurance in the face of adversity, disillusionment and loss. Very highly recommended.   

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.