Book Review: Under a White Sky (2021). Elizabeth Kolbert.

Elizabeth Kolbert, a writer for The New Yorker, is one of the very best contemporary authors on the environment, nature and climate change.   In her previous book, The Sixth Extinction, she explored the concept of the Anthropocene (the human-dominated geological age, in which we now live), and discussed the massive species die-offs that have been a consistent but now-escalating feature of the rise of human civilization on the planet.  

In this book, she looks at what climate change has already done to nature and the natural world, explores questions of what it means to have a human-managed “natural” environment, and offers thoughts on what we can and should do now to avert the worst impacts of global warming and our destructive effects on the planetary ecology.  

This is must reading for anyone concerned about climate change and our collective future as the apex species on Earth.  Recommended.

TV Mini-Series Review: The Little Drummer Girl (2018). AMC series, on Amazon Prime/Sundance Now.

This series is simply outstanding!  It’s a 6-part AMC mini-series from 2018, based on the John Le Carre' novel of the same name (my favorite of all his books) about an Israeli spy team's complicated plot to use a naïve but idealistic young English actress to infiltrate a secretive Palestinian terrorist group in the late 1970s.

The suspense builds quickly right from the start, and watching the improvised acting performance of Charlie (played convincingly by Florence Pugh) is both mesmerizing and terrifying, as she is slowly drawn deeper into acting in a deadly new “play within a play”, but in the real world, in a starring role where the cost of a single flubbed line or a moment of slipping out of character could be her life.

A strong surrounding cast, especially including Michael Shannon as the driven mastermind of the Israeli team and operation, and Alexander Skarsgard as the reluctant operative who must prepare Charlie in every factual and emotional detail for her most dangerous performance, makes for one of the most compelling, moving and believable spy thrillers I’ve ever seen on the screen.  

This AMC series is even better than the 1980s movie version with Diane Keaton, which was good in its time.  Very highly recommended.

Book Review: Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To (2019). David A. Sinclair, PhD, AO, with Matthew D. LaPlante.

The author of this book is one of the leading academic and medical experts on aging and life extension research in the world, with dual appointments as head of aging research labs at Harvard Medical School, and at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.  

The book makes a case for the fact of still-increasing lifespans around the world (at least for some of the population), and that our rapid acquisition of new science and information is opening the possibility of beginning to extend the possible outer limits of how long people can live a healthy and fulfilling life, way out beyond any previous possibilities.  

He discusses many facets of the topic of life extension, including concerns about overpopulation, the ethics of who can afford to get access to life-extension treatments, the roles of lifestyle, foods and diets, common supplements and treatments that can play a significant role in extending healthy life, but also the role that current scientific research is about to play in providing dramatic new biotech-based medical treatments to ward off “the disease of aging”.  

For Sinclair, aging should be viewed as a disease, indeed the primary human disease.  In his view, most of the other conditions and sicknesses of old age are simply symptoms of the breakdown in the body’s ability to repair cellular damage that accumulates over time.  

This book is very long, and has way too much advanced biology in it for me to thoroughly evaluate his every conclusion, but based on his international recognition as a scientist and his professional credentials, I take his writing on this topic seriously.  A very interesting treatise on the “state of the art” in an area of medical research that could cause revolutionary changes to our view of human lives and expectations in the near future.  Recommended.

Movie Review: Sylvie's Love (2020). Amazon Prime.

This is a touching love story about a young black couple in the 1950s and early 1960s.  The young woman Sylvie (played by Tessa Thompson) manages to get a menial job on a popular TV cooking show, and through her diligence and persistence, and despite constant obstacles of racism and sexism, works her way up to a successful career as a TV producer.  

As she's on the way up, she meets a handsome young jazz saxophone virtuoso (Nnamdi Asomugha), and they fall in love, and start planning a life together.  But things fall apart when his promising music career collapses as a result of the changing times, and the end of the jazz and big band eras in the early 1960s.  

As he loses confidence in himself, he withdraws, stops sharing confidences with her, and eventually settles into a working class job at a car plant far away from her.  But can love still conquer all, despite their different circumstances and positions?  

This is a moving universal kind of young love story, placed in the context of the black experience during the early American civil rights era.  Recommended.

TV Review: Royal Flying Doctor Service. PBS Series, Season 1.

A new Australian dramatic series on PBS, released at the end of 2021, this show is based on real-life stories of the doctors, nurses and pilots who fly the Outback with the RFDS to save lives and provide crucial medical services to the rural population across the remote areas of the Australian continent.  

It reminded me (oddly enough) of Sky King (a 1950s adventure series about a small-plane pilot who flies around the American west, engaging in cowboy-like heroics and rescues), but with Aussie medical folks instead, and the usual TV medical show stories of the lives and loves of the team, as they live and work in a small rural community.  There's also a nice "fish out of water" plot included, in the person of the newly hired head doctor from London, as she tries to prove herself in the less sophisticated environment and more primitive working conditions of the Outback.  

There were a lot of lovely shots of twin-engine King Air planes flying over scrub and desert too, which appealed to my aviation-enthusiast side.  But the realistic stories of health care workers, pilots, family members, lovers and patients under stress were the most compelling parts of the series.  Additional seasons have not been announced, but we can hope.  Highly recommended.   

Book Review: Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Corrupting the World (2020). Tim Burgiss.

This is an exhaustively researched story of how dirty money from corrupt regimes in Eastern Europe and elsewhere was first stolen by small circles of autocrats and their favored cronies, then traveled out through the international financial system to corrupt and distort the financial watchdogs and overseers in the Western world, particularly in the UK and the United States.  

 

Focused especially on a group of billionaire oligarchs and autocrats in Kazakhstan who were able to buy up state-owned natural resources and processing plants for a small fraction of their value in the twilight days of the Soviet system, it shows clearly the complementary roles of extreme wealth and autocratic power in facilitating and controlling the narrative about these crimes.

 

One noteworthy aspect of this dynamic is the important role of private security and espionage agencies employed by the oligarchs, to create an information environment where any story can be created and believed, based on the ability of the powerful and their agents to selectively present a mix of fact and fiction (about themselves and their critics) to the public, to support their own self-serving narratives. 

 

It is the same demoralizing function that autocrats use within their totalitarian states to limit and control their populations’ understanding of “truth”, but here it is employed effectively in western media markets by private interests, in service of their own personal wealth and corrupt purposes.

 

Not surprisingly, Donald Trump’s story makes a late appearance in the book, for his own real estate and money laundering activities, which often intersected with the interests and activities of the corrupt oligarchs from Eastern Europe and Russia.  It also makes clear the extent to which he too has succeeded in shaping a narrative about himself and his business activities that does not rely on the truth of who he really is, or what he has actually done or failed to do.   

 

A useful history of recent “dirty money” developments and operations, especially those coming out of the collapse of the Soviet Union.  It's all the more relevant to understanding the world of the post-Soviet oligarchs, whose yachts and airplanes are now being seized around the world as a result of Russia's war in Ukraine and the international sanctions campaign against it.  Recommended.

Book Review: The Daughters of Kobani (2021). Gayle Zemach Lemmon.

This was an eye-opening story about one of the many lesser-known facts of the horrific war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, which was that a group of young Iraqi Kurdish women decided to go to war as fighters against ISIS during the Syrian war, despite the strong opposition in their own communities to women serving as soldiers.  

In doing so, they proved in combat what everyone in their Kurdish Islamic families and societies had doubted, which was that women could not only be fearless, tough and effective combatants, but that they could also be strong military leaders, who men would follow into battle and obey.  

One interesting side-note in this history, which was important, was the fact that an earlier charismatic Kurdish military and political leader was a follower of Murray Bookchin, an American anarchist writer from the 1960s and 1970s, who had stressed the need for women to gain equality in all aspects of life in order to create a just and egalitarian society.  The influence of this Kurdish “Bookchinist” ideology apparently played a significant role in giving these brave young women the opportunity to join Kurdish fighting units, and play the important role they did in vanquishing ISIS. 

An inspiring story of young women at war, which also provides an in-depth look at the horrors of the ISIS regime, the coalition war against it, and the larger Syrian war in which the Kurdish and Iraqi campaign against ISIS played out.  Highly recommended.