Book Review: Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity and Democracy (2023). Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud.

This brand new non-fiction book combines the true story of a recent masterpiece of complex investigative journalism with revelations that are disturbing and important for all who value privacy, individual rights and democratic norms.

The authors are two noted French journalists, Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud.  They are both leaders in a French non-profit journalism organization called Forbidden Stories, which seeks to continue the investigative work of assassinated reporters from many dangerous authoritarian countries around the world. To accomplish this mission, they make use of the skills of a team of their own organization's staff, who work in collaboration with top reporters and technical experts from major news media companies and human rights groups from many nations.

The target of the special investigation described in this book was an Israeli company called NSO. NSO was a high-tech security company that developed and sold surveillance tools to governments. Among their most valuable tools was a secret product known as Pegasus, a combination of spy software and hosted I.T. services which allowed their customers to hack into smartphones, and to use the compromised phones and their data in a variety of nefarious ways.

Pegasus enabled not only access to all the existing content (email, text, video, audio) on any  phone it compromised, but also the ability to plant data on it (such as child porn, or other fake evidence used to besmirch the phone owner’s reputation, and justify arrest and prosecution). It also allowed the cracker to activate the microphone and cameras on the phone remotely, to serve as an unintended bugging device against the phone's owner, as well as being able to use the phone's GPS information to track the phone's owner's location. And it enabled the cracker to interact with the phone in other ways too, to control it, and download a vast array of personal private information from it on demand.

The product was quietly sold to select governmental agencies in allied countries with the permission of the Israeli government. In the beginning, it was marketed and defended by NSO as a tool for democratic governments, primarily in the west, to defend themselves and their populations from terrorists and criminals, in response to the many new apps and tools for data encryption on Apple and Android phones. The ability to hack into suspects' phones appealed to worried law enforcement agencies and officials in many countries, who feared that new phone encryption apps would prevent them from being able to monitor and investigate lawbreakers effectively.

However, this positive spin on the purpose and uses of NSO's tools took a dark turn when Forbidden Stories obtained a list of over 10,000 phone numbers from a secret source (probably within the NSO company), from nations around the world, which had been hacked using Pegasus. 

It quickly became obvious from the journalists' initial review of the phone numbers on the list that NSO must also be selling the product to repressive regimes and unsavory leaders in many places, to allow those dangerous customers to surveil, monitor and track individuals who were considered a threat to them or to their regime(s).  Pegasus suddenly looked to be a terrifyingly powerful new weapon for authoritarian dictatorships hunting dissidents, and seeking to silence or punish political opponents and inquisitive reporters.

Once Forbidden Stories realized the threat posed by the existence and sale of this tool, to them as journalists as well as to anyone who might fear the sort of all-knowing governmental surveillance and targeting made possible by Pegasus, they set to work on trying to find out more about it. To do that, they had to slowly and carefully build a wide network of respected journalists and media outlets in many countries, who would contribute to a large group investigative journalism project, but under very strict security restrictions.

One of the greatest risks to the project, and to the journalists working on it, was that each of their own smartphones might become a potential source of leaks that could blow the story wide open, before they were able to complete the deep and wide research needed to document it. Indeed, just by tracing the owners of many of the phone numbers on the list, the journalists working on the project quickly discovered that some of their own phones had already been hacked by Pegasus customers from repressive regimes.  

The reporters, computer experts and Forbidden Stories project organizers thus had to find ways to do their work, coordinate all their efforts and handle communications among participants on different continents, over a period of many months, without relying on the most common tools of their trade, the ones we all take for granted now – their phones and the internet.  This made their achievements all the more difficult, and their success that much more astonishing.

This is a truly disturbing, but impressive and thoroughly researched story on how a voluntary network of idealistic journalists around the globe pieced together the truth about a set of repressive surveillance tools, aimed directly at our smartphones, that could destroy the ability of anyone to trust in their own personal safety or security from malevolent governments and criminals anywhere in the world.  Having managed to uncover and document the story in astonishing detail, they then made it public, with a highly synchronized barrage of stories from many reporters in different places, with each report addressing the local instances and effects of the Pegasus spyware and operations in their many respective countries.  

The fact that Forbidden Stories' investigation, and its revelations, ultimately drove NSO out of its very lucrative phone spyware business is encouraging, but only somewhat. Unfortunately, as the authors point out, we still have to recognize how relatively easy it is to create spyware systems like Pegasus, tools that can use all the wonderful technological capabilities of our smartphones against us. The authors suggest we need to try to prepare for the next time in advance, by passing laws to try to limit or prevent development of these kinds of Orwellian surveillance technologies in the future.

This is an exciting real-world thriller of investigative journalism, combined with a vital cautionary tale about the threats to freedom and privacy posed by our ubiquitous smartphone technology. It includes a powerful and enlightening introduction by Rachel Maddow. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Fire in the Sky: Cosmic Collisions, Killer Asteroids, and the Race to Defend Earth (2019). Gordon L. Dillow.

I stumbled on this intriguing book over the holidays, in a pile of remaindered science books in one of our local bookstores. It turned out to be one of the better impulse book buys I’ve made lately.

The title itself is suggestive of the contents, but doesn’t nearly capture the richness of the author's presentation. The general topic is asteroids colliding with earth, and the threat they pose to life on earth and modern civilization, but Dillow approaches the subject with a measure of humor, a longtime journalist’s talent for research and storytelling, and a truly cosmic problem to consider.

The book begins with the author describing a large meteorite exploding in the atmosphere over his home in Arizona a few years ago, a spectacular natural event which he and many others witnessed, and which started him down the road toward writing this book.

From that beginning, he moves to the story of the 50,000-year-old meteorite crater near Flagstaff, Arizona, which is a now a local tourist site. He explains how it was created, how it was “discovered” by white settlers in the nineteenth century, and how (as with other meteorite crash sites around the world) it was initially believed to be the residue of some sort of volcanic event. He then recounts the history of the clear-sighted individuals who eventually realized what it was, but then had to convince a skeptical worldwide scientific community over many decades that it really was the result of a massive meteorite impact.

Dillow then continues to weave together other aspects of the related scientific discoveries and events which inform our current understanding of the asteroid and comet threats to our planet. He explains how science had long had a consensus view that natural processes in the earth sciences were controlled by the uniformitarian doctrine, the idea that all changes were gradual, and caused by the same processes we now know about, a concept that was recently disrupted by the rise of the catastrophism doctrine. 

Catastrophism is the contrary view (to uniformitarianism) that contends that some major changes in earth’s history were the result of cataclysmic but rare events, such as asteroid strikes. Inevitably, this leads the author to a discussion of the changing scientific beliefs about what caused the end of the dinosaur era, a debate which has played out over the past half century or so in popular culture as well as the scientific community.

Some of the most fascinating parts of the book detail several major asteroid strikes in historical memory, and how scientists came to understand and prove what they really were, in contrast to earlier religious and pseudo-scientific explanations (spoiler alert: they weren't caused by UFOs). 

The 1908 Tunguska explosion in Russia, which I can recall was still considered a scientific mystery when I was young, is one of the best examples, as well as the 2013 Chelyabinsk asteroid event (also coincidentally in Russia). Dillow includes fascinating descriptions of both, and the means by which scientists eventually were able to confirm and explain what happened, including being able to calculate the approximate size and speed of the asteroids, and explaining why they created the particular explosive effects they did.

From there, the story moves on to the networks of governmental organizations and resourceful amateur citizen astronomers who have gradually built a database of Near Earth Objects (NEOs), and have begun to plan for the planetary defense. Needless to say, there are some wonderfully interesting and eccentric personalities involved. Dillow also looks at the growing public recognition and acceptance of the risks posed by asteroid strikes, the strategies proposed for defending against asteroids on a collision course with our planet, the politics of it all, and also includes evaluations of the Hollywood science fiction movies that have been made about it.

This book was written just a little too early to include a discussion of Don’t Look Up, the satirical 2021 disaster film about an impending asteroid strike starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence (previously reviewed here). It’s too bad, because at the time, most people (including me) thought the movie was really not about an asteroid strike, but about climate change, and our collective failure to do anything effective to stop it from destroying our planet and civilization. It was very much in keeping with a long history of popular culture and science belittling and laughing about the idea of giant asteroids striking earth, whether in the ancient past or in the future.

But in retrospect, Dillow’s presentation makes it clear that while a catastrophic asteroid strike may be a far less likely event in any of our lifetimes, it is one that is no less potentially devastating to us, our global human society and life on earth than the climate crisis. For that reason, he suggests, we should take it seriously too, and keep working on ways to try to protect our world from this low probability but very high-impact threat.

Fire in the Sky is an excellent piece of science reporting. It includes an enjoyable and educational mix of human stories of individual dedication and collective folly, along with plenty of science history. It also provides clear explanations of what we currently know and believe about asteroids, comets, and their frequent collisions with other celestial bodies, especially Earth and the moon. 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: Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America (2022). Mark Follman.

By now, after decades of horrifying mass shootings across the United States, in schools, malls, grocery stores, post offices, concerts, movie theaters and anywhere else that groups of people gather, most people have probably lost all hope that we will ever get this problem under control.

Particularly with the perpetual political deadlock and partisan divides on the issue of gun control, mass gun violence in our country seems to be an intractable problem from hell, with no realistic solutions available to stop the killing, and seemingly no one really trying to do anything useful.

Mark Follman’s new book, Trigger Points, provides a refreshing bit of relief from our weary and jaded view of this grim situation, along with many new insights into the nature of the problem. His topic is the field and study of threat assessment, a discipline that can be applied to many different behaviors and real-world situations, but in this case has to do with those experts in law enforcement, psychology, and education who have quietly and slowly begun to piece together a set of tools for identifying those at risk of committing attacks and finding constructive ways to head off or prevent those attacks before they happen.

In the process of telling the history of the small groups and individuals who have done the research and developed theories and practices for application in differing situations, we learn many interesting details of the research data and conclusions of the experts, which often contradict popular beliefs about mass gun violence and its perpetrators.

Some of the most important and surprising revelations in the book have to do with the popular but mistaken beliefs about the categories of people who commit these terrible violent acts. For example, it is widely believed that the perpetrators are almost all young white men, but in fact there have been many men across the entire spectrum of races and ethnic backgrounds, as well as a few women, who have carried out these kinds of mass attacks.

Another widespread but wrong belief is that all these murderous individuals are “mentally ill”. While many or most of them undoubtedly are coping with issues of depression, domestic neglect or abuse, self-loathing and suicidal ideation, only a fraction of these disturbed individuals who commit mass attacks have previous diagnoses of major mental illness. And many of them are leading lives that from the outside appear "normal", while holding down jobs, attending school or otherwise appearing to function in society.

A third misleading and useless popular belief, according to the author and the research, is that there is a useful “profile” of the mass killer that can be used to easily identify who is a likely potential mass murderer. Instead, what the threat assessment researchers have found is that there is a process, a life path followed by the individual, which has common features across many cases, and which can be recognized and interrupted with suitable interventions.

It would be easy to belittle this research, and the experts who have been developing this field of threat assessment, by pointing to the many cases of mass gun violence that continue to occur. The counter argument to that skepticism is the number of cases that have already been prevented by threat assessment experts and teams, and the lives that have already been saved, which the author spotlights from little-known case histories. As bad as it is, it could be worse.

What becomes clear from Follman’s account is the fact that these techniques and insights, developed from extensive research over the past fifty years (including extensive interviews of surviving mass killers), are not yet widely known outside the small expert community. The point is that they should be known, and the techniques and science behind it more widely shared.

Where there are existing threat assessment programs in place, combining the expertise of law enforcement, school officials, HR representatives, and others to help intervene and assist people headed down the road toward mass violence, there have been many successes. It was interesting to learn that the state of Oregon, and now Washington, are among the leading areas in the country for threat assessment programs. We need more of these programs, and many more people trained to recognize and report the common symptoms of troubled people preparing for violent acts in time for interventions to take place.

There will never be a way of anticipating every mass casualty attack, and as the author acknowledges, the number of deaths in mass gun violence events pales beside the ordinary daily toll of gun-related murder and suicide. There is no perfect solution. But in this book, we see sensible, research-based methods of heading off many of the worst gun massacres in our society, and saving the lives of victims and even sometimes the perpetrators.

It is also encouraging to hear the message that even with the huge numbers of guns in our population, the ease of acquiring them and our inability to put effective limits on access to guns due to political hyper-partisanship on this issue, there are still things we can do to improve our situation and lower the risk.

This is an important myth-busting expose’ on a confounding problem which is practically never out of our headlines anymore. It offers hope, insight, an inspiring tale of a few dedicated researchers and activists on a long mission to find effective solutions, and a plan for how we might begin to stem the tide of mass gun violence in our country. 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 Reviews: Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History (2008), Thomas Norman DeWolf, and The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning (2022), Ben Raines.

Earlier today, I posted a review of The Sweetness of Water, an outstanding novel of life in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Civil War and slavery in the South.

For readers interested in reading more on the history of slavery, the slave trade, the impacts of the Civil War and the collective responsibility of white society for the ongoing consequences of racism against slaves and their modern African-American descendants, there are two other non-fiction books I’ve read recently which bear mentioning here. Both should be available from local libraries and online booksellers.

In Inheriting the Trade, the author, Thomas Norman DeWolf, told the story of the production of a documentary film made in the early 2000s about the efforts of a dozen descendants of a wealthy Rhode Island family to collectively discover and come to terms with the role played by their influential rich white ancestors in contributing to and profiting from the slave trade throughout much of its ugly history.

A relative of mine told me that the documentary film that was the product of this family's project, as recounted in this book, has continued up to the present day to be an influential media resource within the Episcopal Church community nationwide, in the church’s efforts to come to terms with white complicity in the slave trade and its legacy, in trying to support anti-racist and social justice movements, and in discussing controversial ideas such as the quest for reparations for the descendants of slaves.

Inheriting the Trade asks many of us who are white, particularly those whose families have been in North America since the early days of European colonization, and especially those in the North, where many wrongly believe “the North wasn’t involved in slavery”, to think more deeply about how the evils of slavery and the slave trade advantaged our own ancestors, and about what individual responsibilities we might have to try to make amends for that, even at this late date. Recommended. 

 

I also recently read a new non-fiction history book, The Last Slave Ship, by Ben Raines. Mr. Raines is a historian who was tracking down the little-known story of the Clotilda, a sailing ship that was used by several conspirators from Alabama to bring a load of African slaves to the United States shortly before the Civil War.

This slave voyage was noteworthy, because it occurred decades after slave importation had become illegal in the United States. The apparent purpose of the voyage was to win a bet, by proving that it was still possible to bring new slaves to the South from Africa, despite aggressive maritime enforcement against it by the United States, England and other European countries. And indeed the plotters were successful in buying more than a hundred slaves on the African coast, and managing to transport most of them alive, and into slavery in Alabama.

Among my many other reading interests, I’ve always enjoyed stories of deep-sea exploration for famous old sunken wrecks, which is what I expected to be the focus of this book. In fact, though, the recent discovery and partial recovery of the Clotilda, which was burned and scuttled by the owners shortly after the slaves were brought ashore, in order to destroy the evidence of the plotters' crimes, forms only a minor part of the narrative. 

The author was more interested in telling the story of the more than 100 “late-arriving” slaves from the Clotilda, who were freed at the end of the Civil War, only a few years after they were brought here against their will, but who then maintained a relatively isolated community in Alabama called Africatown, where many of their African traditions from before slavery were preserved well into the twentieth century.

This book is not the most lively account I’ve read on various aspects of the several hundred year history of slavery – in parts, the writing seemed a little plodding -- but it is a unique story from that history which apparently has not been told before, and it needed to be. Recommended.

Book Review: Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (2022). Douglas Rushkoff.

I just finished reading this interesting new book by Douglas Rushkoff, a professor of media theory and digital economics at Queens/CUNY, who is also an award-winning author of numerous books, a podcaster, and a long-time technology observer and critic. 

It’s not quite what I thought I was going to be reading, which was just a travelogue through all the ways in which the stupendously wealthy are planning to escape their most feared social and human catastrophes, although it does have plenty of elements of that.

Instead, the author had a broader criticism of the ultra-rich tech magnates in mind, which has to do with what he labels “The Mindset”. The Mindset as he describes it is an intellectual framework coming out of Silicon Valley and other tech centers that combines boyish fantasies and science fiction, “techno-solutionism” (the desire to find tech solutions to every human existential and social question), Ayn Rand-style selfish individualism and libertarianism, misogyny, and a desire to dominate the world while accruing vast wealth and power.

One ironic outcome of The Mindset for the tech billionaires, Rushkoff suggests, is a need to imagine and devise complex personal survival and escape plans, funded by their vast wealth, to survive the very crises their businesses and technologies are helping to cause. These crises include all the familiar ones we’re concerned about these days: political polarization, the climate emergency caused by our fossil-fuel based economy, civil unrest, the threat of war and nuclear disaster, and the rise of authoritarianism around the world.

In the course of the book, the author recounts many of the most egregious and often ridiculous ideas, pursuits and beliefs that have become part of what he calls The Mindset. For example, he talks about the obsessions of men like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson to somehow get themselves and their wealthiest peers into space, in the belief that if they can just make space travel and life possible, they can survive the global collapse on Earth they all fear is coming.

Early in the book, Rushkoff takes us behind the scenes, to visit some of the survival estates and hideouts the super-rich have created, to try to stay alive when everything on Earth goes to pieces. He provides insights into tech-driven phenomena like the rise of blockchain and crypto currencies, which I have long thought (as does he) are massively complex and costly solutions to non-existent problems. He also talks about the plans of some tech leaders to find a way to upload their minds to computers, and to thereby achieve immortality, removed from the needs or reality of our ties to our human bodies, or alternatively to discover and invent medical technologies that will eliminate aging for themselves and their families.

Rushkoff clearly has a political opinion about all this, and constantly contrasts what he characterizes as the cold and narcissistic nature of The Mindset, and its most powerful believers, with a more humane, cooperative and altruistic world view and way of being. And I’m very sympathetic to his general outlook and moral orientation, although in some cases his analysis seems a little too simplistic and rigid.

Nevertheless, Survival of the Richest is a very thought-provoking and detailed look at some of the peculiar fantasies, excesses, projects and ambitions of the super-wealthy tech leaders of our era. 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 Review: Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy (2021). Tom Nichols.

As you’ll recall, just last week, I did an “Honorable Mentions” post on five books about authoritarianism, democracy and recent politics. Coincidentally, though, this week I read another such book, but one with a very different outlook than most of the other ones.

Our Own Worst Enemy, written by a professor at the Naval War College, who is also a regular contributor to The Atlantic and other periodicals, turns the focus mostly away from the bad actors and would-be authoritarians whose attempts to undermine democracy here and abroad have held so much of our attention over the past several years. Instead, he argues that “we the people” need to take a hard look at ourselves and our discontents to understand why our politics have reached such a sorry state.

Nichols makes a number of interesting points that have the ring of truth about them. He begins with a well-supported assertion that we are living in a time of material abundance and technological accomplishment beyond anything humans have ever known before, where even the poor take for granted wealth and technology undreamed of by humans in the past. Despite that reality, many of us are obsessively unhappy, and focus mainly on what we perceive as constant losses and social decline (much of which is non-existent) rather than the relatively bountiful conditions all around us. This reflexive dissatisfaction, and the fear of loss, are powerful emotions, and ones easily manipulated by cynical political actors.

The author talks about the growing epidemic of narcissism, now amplified by social media, where more and more of us are focused mainly on ourselves, our own desires, and our appearance to the rest of the world. He contrasts the selfishness of the narcissistic personality with the kind of outward-looking, modest, generous and compassionate personality which is at the core of democratic behavior, and a democratic society. A successful democracy requires that we regularly show compassion and tolerance for others, including strangers, but he suggests that more of us now have little use for or concern for anyone outside of ourselves and our immediate family.

Another observation he makes has to do with boredom. He suggests that our democracy may be a victim of its own success, in creating such freedom and abundant wealth, combined with the endless passive entertainment we consume, that many of us don’t know what to do to find meaning and fulfillment. This is another void in ourselves which is ripe for manipulation by con men and hucksters (on both ends of the political spectrum), who know how to whip up enthusiasm and excitement in a bored population by appealing to imaginary threats and fears.

Several writers have recently noted the apparent vibrancy of Ukrainian democracy under threat from the Russian invasion, as compared with our angry and polarized society. The difference seems to lie in the fact that for Ukraine, the whole society is now united by the excitement, the shared threats and privations, and the clear and present danger posed to their freedom and lives by Putin’s invasion. We don’t share any such feelings of common destiny or meaning in the face of an unambiguous threat (a feeling probably last experienced here in World War II), particularly since we rely on a paid volunteer military populated by only a few of us for our common defense.  Instead we divide into factions and tribes, and allow our discontents to be nurtured by those groups and individuals, from politics to finance to media, who can profit from our antipathies toward each other.

Nichols also spends some time on the extent to which many citizens of the United States are too uninformed about policy and political issues to be able to make reasoned, rationally consistent judgments when it comes time to vote. As a case study, he looks at the significant group of voters who voted for Barack Obama twice, then voted for Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton. A comparison of the programs of the two candidates, and their respective parties, reveals little overlap in the ideologies and programs advanced by the two parties or the candidates. Yet this group of voters willingly moved their support from one side to the other apparently based on celebrity, “excitement” factors and emotional “feelings”, and the public images of the two candidates, rather than the sorts of policies they embraced, and would attempt to enact if elected.

One other item considered by the author is the growth and active promotion of “resentment” in politics, where increasingly people will act against their own interests in order to make sure that someone else doesn’t get something, and who perceive loss and humiliation in every event that benefits anyone else. Much of this he lays at the feet of social media and our entertainment industry, which stokes our own envy continuously by feeding us idealized images of other people apparently having things we might not have. 

The author himself worries through all this that he is engaged in “moral hectoring”, and perhaps he is, but nevertheless, in his call for us to look deeply at ourselves as well as others in trying to understand and hopefully ease the woes of our contemporary polarized democracy, he is making a vital appeal. It's one we should listen to and reflect upon. Recommended.

Honorable Mentions: Democracy, Authoritarianism, and American Politics.

Today I'm doing another of my "honorable mentions" posts, featuring another five good books I've read that focus on similar or related topics. Today's list includes a sampling of the best of the political science and history books related to the threats to democracy posed by autocratic authoritarian movements, including that of the Republican Party under Donald Trump.

 

Book Review: How Democracy Dies (2018). Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt.

An excellent political science book analyzing how democracy is being and has been eroded toward autocracy, comparing various scenarios and steps in other countries to what was going on during the Trump era.

This was an early warning that democracy has guardrails, in the form of legal and institutional checks and balances, and norms, and that these were heavily under assault in Trump era America. This theme is certainly far less surprising now than it was when written, but nevertheless it’s an excellent political science exploration of the ways in which democracy can be undermined and ultimately destroyed. Recommended. 

 

Book Review: The Retreat of Western Liberalism (2017). Edward Luce.

Luce provides an eloquent description of the macro-level global economic trends now shaping the world, to the advantage of rising Eastern countries and economies (especially China) and the increasing disadvantage of the West.

He provides a high-level view of why populism, nationalism, protectionism and autocracy are on the rise here and in Europe, as the middle class thins out, fast-growing economies abroad and automation at home threaten jobs and living standards, the gap between rich and poor expands, and a frightened working population in the West is turning to authoritarian solutions over traditional liberal democracy. Recommended.



Book Review: Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020). Anne Applebaum.   

Applebaum is an excellent writer for The Atlantic, who is also an historian and subject matter expert on Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet world and authoritarianism. In this account, she draws in part on her own experiences living and traveling in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe over the past two decades to provide illustrative cases of democracies sliding into illiberal democracy and then authoritarianism.

She uses the case of Poland’s transformation under the Law and Justice Party as her point of departure, then also discusses other recent illiberal democracies and anti-democratic movements, in Poland, Spain and Turkey, as well as Brexit in the UK and the rise of Donald Trump, with his authoritarian Republican brand of politics in the USA.

Applebaum has an interesting background from which to make this critique. Her ideological preferences and associations as a writer and person (as she shares in the book) are definitely on the right end of the political spectrum, but these tendencies don’t appear to act as ideological blinders. As a historian, she is clear-eyed and even-handed in seeing the tendency toward authoritarianism within individuals and societies as being equal opportunity: it can and does arise regardless of the ideological background of the leader and his followers.

A very good account of the recent rise in authoritarian movements, and the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of democracy around the world. Recommended.  

 

Book Review:  A Warning (2019). Anonymous: A Senior Trump White House Official.

The same unknown person (now identified as Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor) who wrote an editorial in The New York Times in 2018 claiming a bunch of good people inside the administration were protecting us from Donald Trump has now written a book in which he tells us what it's like to live inside the insane Trump bubble.

And oh, by the way -- those reassurances in the editorial? It turns out they were wrong (big surprise). The author now believes that no one can keep Trump from trying to do what he wants to do, which is to destroy American democracy and become an autocrat. It is an interesting and by now completely normalized view, but nothing we don't already know.

There are many other insider accounts of the Trump administration and his pathological behavior by now, most of which I’m probably not going to read. There will be even more written. I’m afraid they’ll be writing books, plays and movies about Trump and his bizarre administration far into the future. But this book is a reasonably good representative of the contemporary genre, if you’ve never read one before. Recommended. 

 

Book Review:  The Road to Unfreedom: Russia * Europe * America (2018). Timothy Snyder.

Timothy Snyder, the noted Yale University history professor and a leading expert on modern European history, wrote one of the earliest and most excellent guidebooks to surviving the Trump presidency and preserving democracy. Little more than a pamphlet in size, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons for the Twentieth Century (2017) broke down the experiences of Hitler’s fascism and Stalin’s communism into twenty easily digestible rules and principles of how autocracy develops, and what the signs of its onset are.

In The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder provides a detailed history of recent developments in autocracy, and threats it poses to democracy around the world, focused primarily on the disappointing collapse of democratic efforts in Russia after the demise of the Soviet Union, and the ominous career of Vladimir Putin as Russia's leader.

He uses Putin’s rise as the most important contemporary instance of modern autocracy, especially in Putin’s creation of what Snyder calls “the eternal present” – an information environment where the past is rewritten to support the leader’s preferred beliefs and interests, the present is made unknowable by the careful propagation of conflicting and contradictory narratives and conspiracy theories, and belief in a different future is impossible because of the lack of any mechanism for succession of political control beyond the life of the current leader.

A portion of this book, which was written before the beginning of the Ukraine war in February, also covers elements of Putin’s ongoing plans and attempts to gain and consolidate control over Ukraine during the past decade. It provides valuable insights into why Russia invaded Ukraine, and also some history to explain why Ukraine’s resistance has been so spirited. Recommended.

Book Review: How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World (2014). Steven Johnson.

For those who haven't heard of him, Steven Johnson is probably one of the top science historians writing for popular audiences today. Awhile ago, I reviewed his most recent book Extra Life (2021), his thorough inquiry into causes of the rapid increases in human longevity over the past couple of centuries. It’s the latest in his still-growing list of fascinating works of history about science, technology and innovation, and their roles in the development of modern social life and its conditions.

He has several other good books which I hope to review in the future, but for today I wanted to go back to the first of his books that I read, which is still probably my favorite of his. It’s called How We Got to Now, which might seem to be an absurdly broad and overwhelming topic, if he hadn’t limited it to looking at the outsized impact of a few discoveries and technologies which have had truly profound effects on the way we live, and what we as individuals and societies now have and can do.

As his fans know, Johnson’s strength as a historian of science, particularly evident in this wonderful book, is to notice obvious things hiding in plain sight, the things we are all aware of but rarely stop to consider how important they are, and to then explore them..

He begins with a chapter on glass, for example, that ubiquitous material that humans have made for millennia by melting sand, and even used to create art, windows and useful household objects. In Johnson’s telling, though, glass only began to have a truly revolutionary effect on the human condition when a few amateur experimenters learned how to create lenses with it.

As their experiments led to greater understanding of light and the visible spectrum’s physics, other researchers and hobbyists discovered that a lens could cure many eyesight problems (through the creation of glasses), while allowing scientists to far more effectively see and study both the grand and distant (the planet and the universe, via telescopes), and the very small and near (such as microscopic-sized life forms in the body and the environment). These new tools caused an explosion in our scientific and practical knowledge of the material universe around us, and the bodies we inhabit, over a relatively very short period of historical time.

From there, he explores yet more new inventions which have been made possible through our steady progress in learning how to mold and form glass, including the development of fiberglass and glass-based composite materials; the development of the fiber optics at the center of our global communications networks; the television screen that has so profoundly changed our societies; and the glass vacuum tubes that were prerequisites to the beginnings of radio, television, and computing. And that’s all just in one chapter!

For each such area of vital innovation he describes, he tells the fascinating stories of the people who in many cases stumbled unexpectedly into their discoveries, then shows the ways key information was shared and passed along, and how the initial discoveries had their impacts amplified through social networks of other curious and inventive people. He does a great job of tracing other serial developments that flowed from early breakthroughs, and illustrating the mechanisms by which invention and innovations spread and change through society.

It’s a surprising , eye-opening and highly entertaining tour through the science history of a half-dozen of the most important human discoveries that have shaped the world in which we live, told by an expert and insightful narrator. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (2016). Sebastian Junger.

This 2016 book by Sebastian Junger, the noted action journalist and chronicler of people under extreme duress, whether at sea, as in The Perfect Storm (1997), in forest fires, as in Fire (2001), or at war in War (2010), is a short, intriguing discussion of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in veterans, which he explains as an understandable reaction of fighters to the experience of returning from war, and leaving the close-knit fellowship and shared purpose of small combat units, in exchange for the atomized, anonymous and mundane state of individual life in modern society.

Drawing in part from his own experiences and observations, which included months as a journalist embedded with American soldiers in Afghanistan, as well as the literature and recorded history of war and warriors going all the way back to the Greeks, Junger explores the "natural" state of humans living in small groups, with their strong values of mutual aid and communal life, which are now mostly found only in armies, war zones, natural disasters, and in some of the few remaining primitive societies on Earth. 

He contrasts that with the widespread personal alienation and loneliness of life in a mass consumer society, which many returning veterans find so alienating, and which creates so much anxiety for them when they return to civilian life.

In developing support for his viewpoint, he also reviews the well-known and widespread phenomenon of “civilized” people kidnapped into primitive societies where similar bonds of mutual closeness and dependence existed, particularly cases of white settlers on the American western frontier who were taken forcibly into Native American tribes, but once there, did not want to leave, even when freed and given the opportunity to return to the white settler society from which they originally had come.

All of this leads the author to his main thesis (and this certainly has been controversial) that the problem of PTSD may be not so much with the soldiers and their traumatic, violent war experiences, as with the nature of the alienating and isolating modern societies to which they return. 

Without necessarily accepting Junger’s theory as a complete explanation of the problem of PTSD, and the difficulty that warriors have in returning to civilian life, this is a thought-provoking and insightful study of the lingering damages of war to the psyches of combat veterans. But it is also an exploration of the deficiencies of modern advanced societies, and the ways they may fail to meet basic human psychological and emotional needs, although we may not be aware of these deficiencies if we’ve never experienced the sort of intense, inter-dependent connections to the people around us that Junger describes. Recommended. 

Book Review: The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age (2020). Steve Olson.

In my senior year at university as a political science major, I wrote two long papers on different aspects of the Manhattan Project and the development of nuclear weapons, one of which focused particularly on why the U.S. government made the decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II, and whether that was the right decision, based on all the complex geo-political and military calculations that American leaders had to take into account in making that world-changing and city-destroying decision at the end of the war.

In the intervening half century, the history of the development of nuclear weapons and how we began the perilous nuclear age has continued to draw the interest of historians, philosophers and scientists. We might have expected that almost everything about the Manhattan Project and the race to beat Hitler’s Germany in developing atomic weapons has been researched and published by now, but that turns out not to be true.

In The Apocalypse Factory, we learn about another key chapter in the story, which has received relatively less historical coverage: the story of how plutonium, a radioactive element which occurs rarely in nature, became the essential ingredient in atomic weapons, and how it was first manufactured for the American nuclear weapons industry.

Olson relates the history of the academic chemists in the late 1930s who first created plutonium from uranium through complex chemistry experiments, how plutonium and the ability to manufacture it as a byproduct of uranium-based fission solved key problems of bomb-making, and how Manhattan Project scientists and leaders, in combination with the DuPont company, quickly created a factory at Hanford, Washington, to turn plutonium creation into an industrial process.

From the history of the invention of nuclear weapons science and technology, and how the industrial processes were developed, the author goes on to provide a brief social history of the Tri-Cities area in eastern Washington, which grew rapidly from rural desert scrub land under the wartime urgency of the project, as thousands of workers poured into the area under conditions of strict secrecy. 

It’s a particularly interesting look back for those of us in Washington state who know about Hanford and it’s terrible waste disposal problems, but not as much about the more human story of how the three cities grew together, and developed their own distinct local culture.

The latter part of the book tells the story of the Nagasaki bombing, which is uniquely tied to the Hanford plutonium story in that the Hiroshima bomb (the first bomb dropped on Japan) was a one-time design, using uranium as the bomb fuel, where the two masses of uranium to be combined to start the runaway fission process were fired at each other down a gun-like barrel. The Nagasaki bombing used the plutonium implosion design, which has become the model for all subsequent atomic bombs. In that sense, the Nagasaki bombing is more closely tied to the work done at Hanford than at the other Manhattan Project sites.

After exploring the human and infrastructure impacts of the bombing, the author talks a little about the legacies of plutonium production: the permanent threat of nuclear weapons to human civilization which has thus far eluded real solutions, and the environmental problems of waste cleanup at the Hanford site. None of it is news, especially to those of us in the Northwest, but Olson does a good job covering the backstory, and the lasting problems left over from the war-driven invention of this monstrous technology of destruction. Recommended.

Book Review: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (2020). Mary Trump, PhD.

I decided after a year or two of the Trump presidency that I wasn’t going to read most of the tell-all books about Donald Trump, his life, his corrupt administration, and all the bizarreness that constantly surrounds him. I read several of them early on, but quickly concluded that reading these books was a joyless and monumentally depressing exercise.

Having recognized before he was even elected that Donald Trump was clearly a sociopath and a narcissist, I soon discovered that reading more details of his pathetic existence and chaotic administration brought me few additional insights into his condition and behavior, and no enjoyment whatsoever. Another disincentive to reading Trump-related books was the fact that every shocking new detail of his story contained in the latest sensational book release immediately appeared on every cable news show and in the constant news coverage of Trump, so there was never anything new or surprising to be learned by the time any of these books reached the bookshelves.

Despite all that, I recently read Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough, the only book to appear so far written by an actual Trump family member. The author is someone who knew the long history of the family members and their relationships from close-up personal experience. Her insider’s account is enhanced and made even more credible by the fact that she is also a PhD clinical psychologist, who specializes (not surprisingly) in the sorts of dysfunctional psychological conditions which appear to abound in the lives of many of the Trump family members.

Of course, much of the most interesting content from the book was also immediately revealed through the mass media as soon as it was published, partly through broadcast interviews with the author herself, so again, the amount of new information in the book that wasn’t already a part of the gigantic trove of public knowledge of Donald Trump by the time I read it was fairly limited. Nevertheless, there was value in hearing the whole story and her clinical analysis directly from her, in book form – it made it more believable, more complete, and more emotionally comprehensible and resonant than most of the Trump literature.   

Mary Trump was the daughter of Donald Trump’s older brother Fredy. The story she tells about the family is almost Shakespearean in its dramatic excesses and its notorious, conniving characters. At the head of the family was Fred Trump, a driven entrepreneur and family patriarch who built a real estate empire in Brooklyn, and became fabulously wealthy, but had little time or love for anyone else. Like most patriarchs, he looked originally to his oldest son, Mary’s father Fredy, to become his principal successor and heir in his real estate business.

The problem with this plan was that Fredy had little interest in or aptitude for his father’s real estate business. He went off to serve in the army, which he liked and where he did well, but this disgusted his father, who had no use for the military or the concept of service. Fredy loved boats and airplanes too, and had the money to buy them and learn to operate them, but his father also had nothing but contempt for these activities. At one point, Fredy even snuck off to become an airline pilot, a goal which he actually achieved on his own, and was able to pursue successfully for a brief period of time, thereby further enraging his father.

But that didn’t last, because Fredy also had alcohol and drug problems, caused no doubt by the constant stress of trying and failing to satisfy his father's plans for him. So Fredy kept coming back to his father and the family business each time he failed at his own projects, trying hopelessly to find a role in the business he could play well, to win his cold-hearted father’s approval, and eventually be able to support his growing family.

Meanwhile, Donald (Fred's second son) was observing Fredy’s failures to meet their father’s harsh and unforgiving expectations, and decided to modify his own behaviors in ways that would gain him “favorite” status with his father Fred. The behaviors he chose were exactly those that we recognize in the troubled and extreme personality we know today. 

He would become a “killer”. He would be the person who disparaged and mocked “losers”, ironically eventually even including his father, after Fred was afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease. He would learn to treat everyone – even his closest family members – as worthless objects, to be despised, used and manipulated for his own purposes, without any sympathy or empathy for any difficulties they might be experiencing. And he would learn to excel in creating a fictitious public image of himself as a powerful, wealthy, and indomitable businessman, regardless of his lack of any demonstrated abilities or personal achievements independent of those enabled by his wealthy father.

According to Mary Trump, every one of the destructive and dysfunctional behaviors Donald tried out on those around him just gained him more approval from Fred Senior, and more leniency from this cold-blooded father for his obnoxiousness, cruelty and misbehavior. It was ironic, as Ms. Trump points out, that none of Fred's indulgence could ever actually reassure the chronically insecure Donald deep down that his father really loved him. And he probably didn't. Fred didn't appear to have the capacity to love or empathize with others either, just as Donald doesn't.

This is an extremely disturbing but highly credible insider’s look into the dark heart of a family with serious behavioral and psychological disorders, who somehow produced the strange and historically anomalous figure of Donald Trump, whose ambitions, unchecked rage, sociopathy and incompetence have so clouded the recent past, present and perhaps near future of our country. Recommended.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

Book Review: The Premonition: A Pandemic Story (2021). Michael Lewis.

On the back cover of Michael Lewis’s latest non-fiction book, The Premonition, there is a single quote of praise for the author from reviewer John Williams of the New York Times Book Review. The quote says, “I would read an 800-page history of the stapler if he wrote it.”

That is high praise, but an apt description of the quality of Lewis’s story-telling and his books, which among others include The Fifth Risk, which I previously reviewed; The Big Short, his insightful and scathing story of Wall Street and the financial and political shenanigans that caused the 2008 financial crisis; and also Moneyball, his fascinating account of how a gifted young statistician and Billy Beane, the unconventional general manager of the 2002 Oakland Athletics, upended Major League Baseball's traditional player evaluation process and built a winning baseball team of young “dark horse” players on a limited budget. Moneyball was also later made into a popular sports drama movie starring Brad Pitt.

The Premonition takes a look at a topic you’d think none of us would ever want to read another word about, the 2020 onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It brings to light a gripping story behind the stories we’ve all heard, and it's a story most of us knew nothing about, despite the endless media coverage of the pandemic and how it's been handled here in the U.S.

At the center of his narrative is a small group of unheralded experts in the field of public health, including a 13-year old girl whose school science project turned into a key tool for modeling disease spread within social networks; a California doctor and public health officer whose relentless drive to save lives by taking action based on scientific knowledge constantly ran afoul of political actors and their self-serving agendas; and a small group of epidemiology policy outsiders across the U.S., heavily steeped in the research and history of the 1918 Flu epidemic, who recognized the pandemic’s potential danger almost the moment it first appeared in Wuhan, but had to fight against medical and political establishments in Washington D.C., in the states and at the CDC to make their voices heard, and to come up with effective means for combating the pandemic’s spread.

In the course of telling this inspirational yet depressing story of how the U.S. bungled its early response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Lewis demolishes the image of the CDC as an effective instrument of pandemic response and management. He paints it as it ultimately was seen by this small group of outside experts, as a stuffy and self-serving academic bureaucracy, reluctant to make recommendations or take action that might not succeed, and reflexively protective of its data and knowledge in service to its production of academic research papers rather than the sort of rapid “break the glass” action required in the face of a public health emergency.

Lewis also goes into some fascinating detail about the impact of rapid genomic testing for the first time in this pandemic, and how our ability to quickly read the genetic code of the disease as it mutated from person to person created at least a theoretical means to map the spread of the disease, and better understand what people and events were the “super-spreaders” that needed to be isolated to slow the disease’s spread. This little understood capability was not used very effectively, due to the lack of interest in resourcing widespread testing early on.

The book is a riveting story of private insights and urgency, contrasted with public delay, inertia, inaction and incompetence. In addition to these little known public health and epidemiological heroes behind the scenes, who ultimately ended up providing much of the most effective public health advice for fighting the pandemic, we see a few political figures who did listen, and acted relatively promptly upon the science-based advice coming from these experts, including Governor Gavin Newsom in California, as well as a few senior figures in the Trump administration and at the CDC, who had to operate anonymously and stay “below the radar” to try to steer the federal government toward an effective response.

For all of us who followed the news throughout the pandemic, and were trying to make sense of how the government and the CDC could seem to be so slow, so disorganized, and so lacking in preparedness for a pandemic like COVID-19, The Premonition provides much needed clarity.  It highlights many of the reasons for our national failures in responding to the pandemic quickly and effectively, and puts a spotlight on the small group of people who ultimately had the right answers, but were often thwarted in being able to get federal, state and local governments to follow their advice, and swiftly take the necessary steps to stop the spread of the disease.

It's a powerful, intriguing and illuminating account of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and some of the previously unknown human dramas and events behind the scenes that played out as our health system and society struggled to find answers to the emerging public health crisis. Very 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.