Book Review: Red Sea Spies: The True Story of Mossad's Fake Diving Resort (2020). Raffi Berg.

This book was the basis for the exciting spy movie Red Sea Diving Resort (2019), which I saw and liked, but haven’t reviewed.  The book is also really good, and it supplies even more excitement, sense of constant danger and risk than the movie.  

The underlying true story is about a secret Israeli campaign over several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s to help black members of an ancient Jewish community escape from oppression in Ethiopia, and move to Israel as Jews under the Right of Return.  

The book focuses more of a spotlight than the movie on the origins of the campaign, the dedicated and daring but often disobedient Mossad team leader on the ground, the means by which the Ethiopians escaped their homes and camps despite the government’s oppressive monitoring of their communities, and many of the close calls and specific incidents that took place during the course of the rescue operations. 

Of course, the main focus of the story is still the establishment of a fake diving resort, from which the Ethiopian Jews could be secretly evacuated to boats offshore by Israeli commandos.  It’s a thrilling and inspirational true story of dedication, great personal risk, intrigue, daring rescues, and human compassion towards strangers under threat by a brutal regime.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (2020). James Nestor.

This is an entire book on something we all usually take for granted: breathing. 

The author has previously reported on deep-sea “free” divers, who can descend to great depths and stay submerged while holding their breath for long periods of time.  As a result of what he learned in researching the divers, and because of his own health issues, particularly around respiration and nasal congestion, he went on a personal search for more knowledge about this essential and largely automatic human function.  

In the course of the book, he describes many historical and contemporary religious and exercise disciplines that focus on control of breathing as the key to other health, mental and spiritual attainments, and his own experiments in using these techniques to improve his breathing.  

He reveals other intriguing facts too.  One was that the structure of human skulls, and the size and shape of our breathing passages in the nose and mouth, as well as the health of our teeth and jaws, have changed for the worse at two points in human evolution:  first, about 10,000 years ago, when the agricultural revolution began, and humans stopped having to chew their food as hard, and even more dramatically about 300 years ago, with the introduction of soft breads and manufactured food that further softened most of the food in our diets.  Who knew?

In any event, it’s a fascinating tour of the complex role that breathing plays in our health and happiness, and how we can alter and improve our breathing by revisiting techniques that have been known across many human cultures since ancient times. Recommended.

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).