Book Review: Recursion (2020). Brian Crouch.

This is the second novel by Crouch that approaches the question of multiple universes and timelines, but this time from the standpoint of neuroscience and memory. 

In this story, the mechanism for traversing multiple lives lived (or periods of lives) has to do with an invention that allows a person to jump back to a point in their memory where something emotional happened, and then restart their lifetime story from that point, but with their old memories intact (thus allowing them to consciously make different decisions, and become different people). 

The "life loop" is a plot that has been similarly explored in other stories.  Groundhog Day is probably the most famous example in film (with its very short "one-day" timeline loop), but it is also the basis for two earlier sci-fi novels which I highly recommend, Replay (1986), by Ken Grimwood, and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014), by Claire North. 

This book is another worthy contribution to the time loop literary tradition, but one in which there is more effort made to come up with a technological explanation for what is happening to the characters.  That focuses more attention on the wider problem of the unintended consequences of the new technologies we humans keep inventing, and the massively destructive effects they can have on our happiness and social stability.  Recommended.

Book Review: Orfeo (2014). Richard Powers.

This is the most difficult and complex Richard Powers novel I've read so far.   It tells the story of Peter Els, a now 70-year-old loner and musical composer (of classical music) who has spent his adult life trying to create a piece of music of surpassing and universal truth. 

 

Through scenes looking back to different stages of Peter's adult life, we see a number of separate threads of his personal story, including his first great love in college, a failed marriage to another woman, an often-destructive collaboration and friendship with a strange dancer and dramatist, and his troubled experience as a mostly absent parent to a daughter. 

 

Along the way, we also are exposed to deep discussions of music and music theory, the history of 20th century classical music and various trends in academic criticism of it, and an interwoven set of political themes about repressive technologies, authoritarianism and the social damage of the war on terror.  

 

Looming dangerously in the background of this complicated stew of ideas and events is yet another plot-line about the accidental discovery of his amateur experiments with home-brew DNA manipulation (in his quest for a new musical form), and his eventual pursuit by a bioterrorism-obsessed police force and a hysterical internet-fueled post-9/11 public.  It definitely held my attention, but at times it seemed like there was just too much going on to follow it all.  

 

At the end, the main question I had from reading this book, which was deeply relevant to me, was: what is the point of composing and creating new music, when there is already so much of it freely available to anyone, and where for most musicians, there is so little chance that many people will ever hear or appreciate the product of all their hard work and creative obsessions?  For that matter, why is anyone driven to make art if there’s no likely probability of recognition or reward for it?

 

It’s an enduring mystery of the musical mind and the creative soul, and of our own times, as explored by one of our greatest contemporary novelists.  Recommended.

TV Review: Longmire. Netflix (originally A&E), Seasons 1-6.

This six-season TV show on Netflix was definitely one of our favorite pandemic "year 2" binges.   Set in a small town in modern Wyoming (in the first decade or so of the 2000s), it features Walt Longmire (Robert Taylor), a grizzled and recently widowed old-school Western Sheriff, solving crimes with the help of his small department of younger deputies and various local characters and friends.    

His deputies include Vic Moretti (Katee Sackhoff, who starred as Lt. Starbuck in the more recent Battlestar Galactica series from the SyFy Channel), and several young men with interesting personality traits, histories and quirks.   

Walt Longmire also has a best friend (played by the outstanding Lou Diamond Phillips), a Native American who owns the local watering hole, and acts as a social bridge to the local Indian reservations and their people.  Then there’s Walt’s young adult daughter Katie, recently graduated from law school, who is a bit at loose ends as to her career and future.    

Most episodes tell the story of a particular murder or other crime, but there are also long-running mysteries and unsolved crimes simmering in the background.  Full of wonderful who-dun-it stories, a lot of realistic plots about the fraught relations between rural white communities and their Indian neighbors, occasional gunfire and violent action, mild love interests and sex, and a very relatable cast of characters, with strong writing and scripts.   

This series is based on the (by now) 24-book set of Longmire mystery novels by Craig Johnson.  Highly recommended.

TV Review: Atlantic Crossing (2021). PBS mini-series.

Kyle McLachlan stars as FDR in a fact-based story of the Danish princess (the wife of the crown prince) who escaped with her children from the Nazis, and then carried on a charged friendship with romantic overtones with the President, while trying to influence the Americans to aid the Danish war effort and resistance during World War II.    

It appears that there was some dramatic license in the series, but in general it sticks to facts that have been reported elsewhere about the unusual relationship of the Danish princess to President Roosevelt, and the influence she wielded with him for the benefit of the Danish government in exile.  Recommended.

TV Review: The Gilmore Girls. Netflix Series, Seasons 1-7.

A very smart and funny dramedy about a rebellious former teenage unwed mother (now adult, independent and successful) from a wealthy upper crust family, and her high-achieving teenage daughter, who live together in Starr’s Hollow, a small town near Hartford, Connecticut.  

The duo at the center of the story are separated by only 17 years of age and the actual fact of their relationship and roles as mother and daughter, but otherwise behave like two teenage best friends, as they try to find their way together through their respective growing up processes,  love affairs, relationship problems and broken hearts, oddball friends, difficult parents and grandparents, and charming but unhinged neighbors and assorted characters around town. 

We binged this endearing series for several months.  We also saw Netflix's four-part "9 years later" sequel, The Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, where we caught up almost a decade after the end of the original series (circa 2016) with Lorelei, Rory and most of the other familiar denizens of Starrs' Hollow.  

This series was written and produced by Amy Sherman-Palladino (who also wrote and produced The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel).  Both series feature harried single mothers in unusual predicaments, each surviving and sometimes thriving while producing a nonstop flow of hyperactive dialogue and wisecracks.

The fact that Lorelei Gilmore (the mother, brilliantly played by Lauren Graham) has a more than able verbal sparring partner in her best friend/daughter Rory (equally brilliantly played by Alexis Bledel), along with numerous other verbally-quick-witted friends and relatives, makes the whole show a delightful and very worthwhile entertainment.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Soldier Girls (2014). Helen Thorpe.

This excellent social and military history is essentially a triple biography of three women soldiers of different ages, races and backgrounds who served together in Afghanistan and Iraq in the first few years after 9/11.  

All three were members of the Indiana National Guard, who had joined for very different reasons, but none with an expectation that they would ever end up in a combat zone.  Then 9/11 happened, and they were each pulled into the vortex of multiple deployments punctuated by strange intervening returns to normal life. 

The author interviewed all three soldiers extensively, as well as many of their fellow soldiers, family and friends.  Their personal lives and experiences, most intimate thoughts and relationships were revealed and interwoven, in order to show how they were changed in ways both positive and negative by their time spent together, as part of a mixed-sex unit at war during several deployments in both the Afghanistan and Iraqi war zones.  

An absorbing, moving and complex tale of loves and friendships gained and lost, unexpected skills and abilities developed, maturity and wisdom acquired through trauma and suffering, and the powerful bonds forged among people sharing common dangers and adversity.  Recommended.

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.