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.

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.