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.

Book Review: Eat Like a Fish: My Adventures as a Fisherman Turned Restorative Ocean Farmer (2019). Bren Smith.

This fascinating autobiography recounts the unusual path by which the son of American ex-pat refugees from the Vietnam war draft, growing up rough on the coast of Newfoundland, became a wild and rebellious commercial fisherman at an early age, but then slowly matured into a thoughtful, educated pioneer in the new world of modern ocean farming.  

Along the way, he coined the phrase "Kelp is the new Kale", formed alliances with high-end gourmet chefs, rediscovered the history and methods of aquaculture in human societies, and became a leading advocate for using ocean farming in distributed small farms to meet resource needs, while helping to keep the oceans healthy in the face of climate change and other forms of pollution.     

An inspiring personal story, with important information and background on the recent rise of aquaculture and kelp farming here in the United States and elsewhere, as a new set of solutions to help feed us, improve the quality and health of the oceans, and create other positive effects in support of our efforts to slow the pace of climate change.  Recommended.

Book Review: Uncanny Valley: A Memoir (2020). Anne Wiener.

The author, a millennial who became a writer for The New Yorker on technology topics, has written a sort of tell-all memoir about her experiences in her late twenties, when she left the New York publishing scene to try to get ahead in her career and her life by working in customer support for high-tech start-ups in Silicon Valley.  

 

Although she doesn't name the several companies where she worked (choosing instead to use descriptive words such as "the social media company" rather than explicitly naming them, although it's not hard to guess), we get a full tour of her experiences as a young woman from the East Coast in the Bay Area start-up and venture capital tech scene.  

 

She describes how excited she was to be part of small teams doing big important new things, but how she also felt discriminated against, both because she was female, and because her educational background and interests were not in technology, but in literature. 

 

I found it an insightful and touching personal account of a young millennial woman's coming-of-age experience, with a nice amount of snark thrown in about the precious world of the high-tech entrepreneurs and workers of her generation. 

 

It takes us back to that time (not long ago) when the Great Recession had just happened, and young tech entrepreneurs were busy selling venture capitalists and the public on their dreams of vast wealth creation (mostly for themselves), and the transformative social power of apps.  Recommended.

Book Review: Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice (2015). Bill Browder.

Red Notice is an autobiographical account by Browder, the grandson of a famous U.S. Communist and the son of a Harvard legal scholar, of his efforts to make his own mark in the world by becoming a hedge fund manager in the newly "free" economies of Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1990s and early 2000s.  

He succeeded in that, and quickly became very wealthy in the new "Wild West" of the post-Soviet economy.  But in the process, by expecting Russian business to be governed by the rules of fairness and transparency that are generally honored in the West, he ran afoul of Putin and the new generation of Russian oligarchs, and discovered the reality of "Russian rules", including all the sorts of dirty operations, corruption, murder and mayhem with which we have lately become so familiar.  

When one of his lawyers was imprisoned for defending him and his hedge fund, and ultimately was killed by the Russian state, it led him to fight back, leading to U.S. Congressional passage of the Magnitzky Rule, which placed personal sanctions on key Russian business and government figures, and triggered our ongoing national crisis over Putin, Trump and the Russian attacks on our political processes.  The Magnitzky Rule is prelude to the sanctions now being imposed on Russian oligarchs around the world in response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Red Notice is a gripping personal story, and a foundational background piece in the complicated history of our current political moment, and our complicated relationship to the post-Soviet world of Russian politics and finance in the Putin era.  Recommended.

Book Review: Following Fifi (2017). John Crocker, MD.

A very nice first book and memoir by (full disclosure here) my long-time primary care physician, Dr. John Crocker, who as a young man was one of the student researchers working with Jane Goodall in Gombe, Tanzania, studying chimpanzees.

It’s a very personal and thoughtful reflection on how what he experienced and learned there shaped his life, and made him a better doctor and father.  Highly recommended.

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Book Review: Madame Fourcade's Secret War (2019). Lynne Olson.

This biography by Lynne Olson, who in recent years has become a prolific and very readable World War II historian, tells another story of a woman whose role in the war was little known until recently, but who played an important role in fighting the Germans, and contributing to the ultimate Allied victory.  

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was an upper-class young Frenchwoman who worked closely with a French intelligence leader just before the war, and with him set up one of the largest and most effective French spy networks early in the war, before the German invasion of France.  The two of them also made contact with British intelligence, and became one of the British government's  earliest and most important sources for information from within occupied France. 

However, in the period after the German invasion, her boss was lost, leaving Madame Fourcade in charge of the network, despite the fact that she was only 31 years old, and a woman, on the run with two small children from whom she ultimately had to be separated for much of the war. 

The rest of the book details how she managed to keep the network alive, rebuild it as members were captured or killed, repeatedly dodge capture herself despite a steep price on her head, win the trust of the men serving under her as well as leaders of other networks and the British, and navigate the dangerous politics of occupation-era France, as she steered her organization between the Vichy collaborationist authorities, the Gaullists and the Communist resistance groups.  

A very well-written and interesting account of one of the greatest resistance leaders and spies in wartime France.  Recommended.

Book Review: Soldier Girls (2014). Helen Thorpe.

This excellent social and military history is essentially a triple biography of three women soldiers of different ages, races and backgrounds who served together in Afghanistan and Iraq in the first few years after 9/11.  

All three were members of the Indiana National Guard, who had joined for very different reasons, but none with an expectation that they would ever end up in a combat zone.  Then 9/11 happened, and they were each pulled into the vortex of multiple deployments punctuated by strange intervening returns to normal life. 

The author interviewed all three soldiers extensively, as well as many of their fellow soldiers, family and friends.  Their personal lives and experiences, most intimate thoughts and relationships were revealed and interwoven, in order to show how they were changed in ways both positive and negative by their time spent together, as part of a mixed-sex unit at war during several deployments in both the Afghanistan and Iraqi war zones.  

An absorbing, moving and complex tale of loves and friendships gained and lost, unexpected skills and abilities developed, maturity and wisdom acquired through trauma and suffering, and the powerful bonds forged among people sharing common dangers and adversity.  Recommended.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Review: The Woman Who Smashed Codes (2017). Jason Fagone.

This is one of several recent books about Elizebeth Smith Friedman and her husband William, the "parents" of the NSA and modern American cryptology.   

William Friedman, as the male in the couple, tended to get more contemporary fame and historical recognition, but this book, based on extensive notes and documentation from Elizebeth that have only recently been declassified, shows that she was at least as brilliant and prolific in her code-breaking career as he, and made her own unique and until now largely-unrecognized contributions.  

Of particular note were the chapters on her early work during the 1920s and 1930s with the U.S. Coast Guard cryptology unit, which was formed during the Prohibition era, and led to her being able to identify smugglers, map their networks, and break up many of their rum-running operations.  

From there, she and her Coast Guard colleagues transitioned to breaking Nazi codes during the World War II U-boat war in the Atlantic, and also disrupting extensive Nazi spy operations throughout South America, for which J. Edgar Hoover largely stole the credit (the F.B.I. had to use her and her team for most of their code-breaking, since they had no such resources or abilities of their own).  

This biography is another inspiring addition to recent books about the previously unknown contributions and heroism of women in World War II, and a detailed account of the famous spy couple, and their careers, love and family as well.  Highly recommended.