Book Review: Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly War: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat (2017). Giles Milton.

A very well-written history of the small group of British genius inventors and scientists who developed a vast toolkit of sabotage devices for use by the SOE, OSS, and ultimately the allied military forces. 

It also reveals some of the most successful special operations using these weapons, including the Norsk heavy water Hydro plant raid, the "harass and delay" campaign that kept the Das Reich SS divisions from reaching Normandy in time during the Allied invasion, and the use of a new weapon late in the war for hunting submarines that far exceeded the effectiveness of conventional depth charges.  One of several very good histories by Giles Milton.  Recommended.

Book Review: The Echo Maker (2003). Richard Powers.

After reading The Overstory, Richard Powers’ remarkable novel about trees, forests, and how the fate of humans, the environment and the planet is bound to them, I decided to explore some of his other work.  

 

This much older novel weaves a gripping mystery out of the results of a young man’s late-night car crash, and the rare mental condition he suffers from the accident, where he can’t recognize the people and things closest to him.  

 

In the course of this unusual but masterful story, a number of different characters and elements are drawn into the mystery, including the beloved sister he can’t recognize, an alienated older popular neuroscience writer and academic, an old girlfriend of the crash victim, the fate of a local migratory crane population and the river site they visit each year, and other pieces.  

 

The book didn’t look that large or long, but it did seem to last and last, with a slowly unfolding story that held my rapt attention throughout, even though I frequently had no idea where it was leading.  A neurological, philosophical and ecological mystery of the first order.  Recommended.

Movie Review: Dune (Part 1) (2021). HBO Max and in theaters.

The SyFy Channel produced two good TV mini-series in the early 2000s, Dune and Children of Dune, which covered the first three books of Frank Herbert’s legendary six-book Dune science fiction series (Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune). 

Although the special effects were not up to contemporary Hollywood standards, these two mini-series (which are difficult to find now, except as used DVD sets for sale online) were the best attempt until now to bring Frank Herbert’s trailblazing epic book series and universe to the screen.  There was also an unfortunate movie version produced in 1984, but it is barely worth mentioning, and several other proposed versions never made it to completion.

This new large-screen 2+ hour version, released to widespread acclaim late in 2021, covers only 1/12^th of Herbert’s full six-book Dune epic (i.e., only the first half of the first and most famous book, Dune), but it does so with visual beauty, fantastic special effects, a talented and exotic-looking cast, and a faithfulness to the book version that has eluded earlier cinematic treatments. 

The hardest thing about making any film version of Dune has always been the number of technological, social, political and historical facts and settings in the Dune universe that need to be conveyed to viewers, in order to have the plot and action make any sense.  The director handled that very well, through an early narrator’s summary, and by accepting that only a part of even one of these complex and rich books could be done justice in the course of one feature-length movie.  

The producers placed a bet that it would be well enough received to justify spending the money to tell part 2 in a later sequel.  That bet apparently paid off on opening day, with the wide enthusiasm and critical success of this first really excellent film version of the Dune story.  Very highly recommended.

TV Mini-Series Review: Spies of Warsaw (2013). BBC, on Amazon Prime.

As a long-time fan of Alan Furst's many outstanding novels of spies, saboteurs, dangerous liaisons and doomed lovers in pre-war and World War II Europe, I often asked myself the question, "why has none of these excellent historical novels ever been made into a movie or TV series?". 

Spies of Warsaw, which came out in 2013 on BBC, based on the 2008 Alan Furst novel of the same name, appears to be the first (and only) such effort.  It features David Tennant (the fine Scottish actor we’ve seen in several other British TV shows recently) playing the leading man role of a French military attaché and intelligence officer in Warsaw in 1937 and 1938. 

Our hero is trying to uncover the Nazis' plans and tactics for invasion, and convince his dull-witted superiors in Paris of the threat of a German tank end-run around the Maginot line and through the Ardennes. 

At the same time, he is also falling in love, and in and out of several beds, while setting up a dangerous spy operation in the heart of the German government.  A very enjoyable 4-part series, and an admirable job of translating Alan Furst to television by BBC.  Recommended.

Book Review: Hidden Figures (2016). Margot Lee Shatterly.

This is the eye-opening book on which the outstanding movie Hidden Figures (2016) was based.  It’s the inspirational story of the young black women mathematicians, mostly math teachers from the south, who played a key role in aeronautical R&D for the U.S. in World War II, and then went on to play similarly vital (and previously unknown) roles in the early space program with NASA.  

The story illuminates the stark contrast between their abilities, dedication, patriotism and successes in a professional and technical world once assumed to be the exclusive domain of white men from elite universities, and the lives they lived as second class citizens due to the way blacks and women were treated in American society.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women (2017). Kate Moore.

This is an excellent history of the "radium girls" who painted dials and watches with radium paint in the 1910s and 1920s, at the dawn of the atomic age.  It’s a story that resonates today, featuring a group of uninformed young female workers being subjected to horrific radiation poisoning by several companies, which then did everything possible to deny and suppress knowledge of the nature of the poisoning (to the women and the public), and to prevent having to pay for the damage caused to the lives of their  workers.  Highly recommended.

There is now a cinematic version of this story on Netflix, in the 2018 movie Radium Girls (not released until 2020 due to the pandemic). 

Book Review: Dark Matter (2016). Brian Crouch.

This science-fiction novel by a successful screenwriter seems almost to have been written with a movie in mind, given its combination of fast action, high tech inventions, complex plots, intrigue and suspense.  It has some love and relationship elements, some sex, some violence, and many mind-bending events. 

This is all in the service of exploring the unimaginable "multiverse" of quantum physics theory: a state where every act of choice by every person, and every instance of "chance", leads to a new universe and a different sequence of events and outcomes. The main plot driver is this question: what might happen if some brilliant person invented a machine that allows us to move between these universes? 

The point of this plot device is to show how each of us might end up becoming very different people, depending on which choice we make at each moment, and how that might interact with the choices of others. If you like this sort of speculation about life, and how our own choices and outside events constantly shape the course of our lives (and I do), it's a fun ride, and a thought-provoking one too.  Recommended.

TV Review: Heartland. Netflix Series (via CBC), Seasons 1-14.

Heartland is a Canadian modern Western family drama, about an extended family and their friends, foes and horses in a small town in Alberta.  It is the longest-running dramatic TV series in Canadian history, with a 15th season already playing in Canada (due for release next year in the USA), and a 16th season still to be made.  Despite all that, we’d never heard of the show until it went up on Netflix. We binged this one for months!  And we loved it. 

As the series opens, the central character, Amy Fleming (played by Amber Marshall) is a 15-year old girl living on a horse farm with her divorced mother, her older sister and their grandfather.   Unfortunately, Amy's mother dies in the first episode, with Amy in the car beside her, while trying to rescue an abused horse.  

From there, we see Amy grow and mature as a young woman coming into her own as a gifted "horse whisperer", trainer and rider, just like her mother, while we get to know all the extended family members, including several generations of foster kids and other young strays and friends that end up on the farm and in the local community.  

There's so much to love about this series:  the characters, their lives and loves, the gorgeous Alberta scenery, and the studies in complex family relationships and child development that run throughout.  There are also lots of Western-style adventures, including probably every use of a horse anyone has ever imagined, and plenty of humor.  

It was interesting to discover that Amber Marshall, and several of the other actors in the show, are accomplished equestrians in real life, who actually perform many of the stunts and riding scenes showing horses (and riders) doing amazing things. 

There is also an intrinsic Canadian "niceness" to the show -- the limited amount of violence rarely goes beyond fisticuffs, sex is usually no more than fully-clothed passionate kisses and hugs followed by scene changes, and conflict is usually resolved through slowly working things out.  A delightful long-running treat, which got us through many long evenings in 2021.  Highly recommended.