Movie Review: The Dig (2021). Netflix.

With the well-told flavor of a made-for-English TV drama, this interesting story, loosely based on a real set of events, chronicles an ailing older woman in pre-World War II England (played by Carey Mulligan) who hires a local non-academic excavator (Ralph Fiennes) to explore ancient mounds on her property.  

Looking like an aging Indiana Jones, the somewhat curmudgeonly but talented excavator finds a Dark Age ship buried in one of the mounds.  The dig, and the eventual discovery and excavation of the ship and its ancient contents, bring out competing local archeological academics and museum authorities, who fight with each other for control of the dig, the academic narrative and the loot from the burial site. 

A very enjoyable story and evening's entertainment.  Recommended.

Book Review: Cloudmaker (2021). Malcolm Brooks.

The setting for this unusual adventure novel is rural Montana in 1937.  Young Huck, a high school kid with a talent for building and fixing mechanical things and an obsession with aviation, is building a Pietenpol biplane (one of the earliest “homebuilt” airplane designs) from plans, in a barn, without even telling his mother.  

It's a story of families, youthful sexual exploration, growing up, and small-town adventures in the Depression era.  Other great characters include Annelise, Huck’s rebellious "bad girl" cousin from the city, who is also a young pilot and Amelia Earhart fan, and McKee, a disaffected young Mormon, blacksmith, mechanical whiz and gun expert. 

This is a well-paced twentieth century western adventure novel with an appealing set of characters.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: A Game of Birds and Wolves (2021). Simon Parkin.

A couple of years ago, I recognized a new trend and category of recent “books about how women helped win World War II, and didn’t get any credit for it.”  This book is definitely another excellent contribution to that category of history books.  

The primary figure in the story was a forcibly retired but talented Royal Navy officer, who was brought out of retirement when the war began to devise strategies using war gaming for fighting the German U-Boat “Wolf Pack” attacks on Allied convoys in the North Atlantic. 

However, much of the key talent that helped him succeed consisted of a group of young Wrens (women’s naval auxiliary members), most of them barely into adulthood, who helped design, test and play the naval war games that played a vital role in helping the British learn to defeat the Nazi U-boat campaign.  

I particularly enjoyed the part where the young girls played overly-confident senior Royal Navy officers in the U-boat/convoy battle simulations, and consistently defeated these “experts” with their superior understanding of the tactics they’d learned from developing and playing these war games.  The real payoff came when those officers began to accept the validity of the tactics they’d learned in the simulations, and started winning the battles at sea with the German U-boats.  

But of course, as in so many other areas, it was only with the recent release of old archives that it became clear the vital role that these bright young women had played. For most of their lives, their contribution was shrouded in the same kinds of classified documents that hid the contributions of women in so many other areas of the war effort, and gave the famous men at the top all the credit.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: This is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race (2021). Nicole Perlroth.

This book is a deeply researched and well-informed history of the development of cyberweapons, and the growth of the worldwide market for "Zero Day" exploits (undiscovered software bugs that can be used to take control of a computer).  The author has been covering this beat as a reporter since the early 2000s, and tracks how hacking moved from pranks done by teenage boys to tools of organized crime, and then on to the intelligence organizations of nation-states. 

She describes how tools that were first developed for spying and theft of secrets were repurposed into "kinetic" weapons, that could be used to inflict damage to physical infrastructure, starting with U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear centrifuges via the "Stuxnet" virus, but then on into the vicious and massively harmful economic, power grid and communications shutdowns in Estonia and Ukraine carried out by the Russians.   

She also provides deeply disturbing accounts of the Russian attacks on democratic countries, using social media to undermine candidates and sow disinformation, while also attempting to access and disrupt actual voting systems in the U.S. and elsewhere. 

This is a "must read" book for anyone who wants to understand the full extent of the cyberwar threat to modern society caused by our utter dependence on computers to control every aspect of our daily lives and communities.  Highly recommended.

Movie Review: News of the World (2020). Xfinity On Demand, others.

Tom Hanks stars as an old Confederate Civil War veteran in Texas, who ekes out a living traveling from small town to town, putting on shows where he reads articles from various distant newspapers, to bring people the "news of the world".  

In one town, the local authorities prevail upon him to take a young white girl who had been captured by Native Americans as a small child back to her family in his horse-drawn wagon. The young girl speaks only the Native American language, and identifies as an Indian, compounding the difficulties of their uneasy relationship and dangerous journey across the hostile, anarchic Texas territories of the post-Civil War era.  

An excellent, compassionate and unusual Western, well executed in movie form, although the book was even more powerful and moving, particularly in portraying the struggles of the young girl to cope with her latest traumas, and the insecurities of separation from the only family and way of life she still remembers.  Recommended.

Movie Review: Under the Tuscan Sun (2003). Amazon Prime.

I decided to take a little break today from the grim news outside, by posting reviews of a couple of movies that are just on my lists as enjoyable entertainment.  One is an oldie, the other a more recent release.

We saw Under the Tuscan Sun, a truly charming and heartwarming film, at a theater when it first came out in 2003.  It's a romantic and lovely film about a divorced American writer, who takes a trip as a tourist to Italy, and then buys a dilapidated Tuscan villa on impulse.  

 

In the course of the movie, she manages to rebuild her shattered life and her crumbling old house with the help of a new community of friends and family, while cooking some great meals, traveling through beautiful scenery, and having a brief love affair with a handsome Italian. 

 

It's based on a true story and book, but it was fictionalized somewhat for the film.  Recommended.

Book Review: The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth about Men and Women in the 21st Century (2017). Stephen Marche (with commentary by his wife, Editor Sarah Fulford).

The author of this entertaining and compelling account of contemporary marriage and relationships between the sexes was a tenured professor and author at a New York university a few years ago, when his wife was offered a prestigious position as the editor of a major periodical back in their home country of Canada. 

 

From this initially difficult situation for him, where he agreed to put her career first, leave his desirable  academic position and move with her and their family back to Toronto, where he would take on primary responsibility for caring for their small children, Marche explores the reality of our current lives, loves and families, and how men and women (at least in Western society) balance the competing demands of professional lives, raising children, maintaining households and divvying up all the necessary chores and responsibilities.

 

Moving effortlessly between social science research on changing male and female roles, and his own family’s experiences and emotional responses to them, he challenges the post-feminist concept of a “war between the sexes”, a zero-sum approach that assumes that any improvements to women’s condition has to come at the expense of men’s happiness, satisfaction or status.  Instead, he argues that we are moving toward a time where the improving status and condition of women, and their increasing ability to live fuller lives that can include work, home and family, actually improves the emotional fulfillment of men’s lives and of the whole family too.

 

But of course, it’s always complicated.  It’s a dance, and both participants have to commit to it.  So he explores the dynamics of this dance within his own family, and tells a story of life in a modern family that is both endearing and familiar.  And his story is further improved by the fact that his wife, the editor,  periodically injects her own often amusing observations as footnotes to the same topics and events he’s recounting, to provide a woman’s perspective on their shared experiences and sometimes differing reactions.

 

A very enjoyable account and analysis of modern marriage, families and love, that will ring true to many readers who have their own experiences of the same range of common challenges, issues, joys and satisfactions.  Highly recommended.