Movie Review: Bombshell (2017). Kanopy.

This is an unusual and revelatory documentary about Hedy LaMarr, the beautiful movie star from Europe who became a Hollywood legend in the 1940s and 1950s.  Her story is remarkable, because she turned out to be so much deeper, smarter and more talented than her two-dimensional image as a female sex symbol and celebrity gossip topic would have suggested. 

As a young immigrant actress from Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, she was driven to help the American war effort, and did so, by leading war bond drives where she helped raise millions of dollars for the war.  

But her real interest was inventing.  In the early 1940s, working with an inventing partner, she came up with an innovation which was intended to help solve a technical problem relating to torpedo guidance systems, for which she was awarded a U.S. patent, although it was never used during the war. 

Later, though, researchers and engineers came upon her idea of "frequency skipping"-- rapidly changing the frequency of a radio signal to prevent jamming and monitoring -- and applied it to many of the electronic and communications technologies that are now foundational to our modern world.  The profits from her invention are now in the many billions of dollars, although she never saw any of it, because her patent had expired by the time others wanted to use it.  

A surprising and overdue appreciation of a brilliant and complicated woman, who struggled throughout her life to be recognized as something more than just another pretty face.  Highly recommended.   

TV Review: All Things Great and Small (2022). PBS, Seasons 1-2.

This series has been described as the "most soothing TV entertainment" out there.  It's not all that exciting, but it's a warmhearted series about decent, "salt of the earth" Yorkshire country people, living in a small rural English town in an earlier and simpler time.  

 

At the center of the story is a kindly young Scottish veterinarian learning his trade, while also learning about love, family and friendship.  

 

This is a remake of a popular English series from decades ago, which went to six or seven seasons.  Note:  the first two seasons of this series take place in 1937 and 1938.  The onset of World War II is coming next season (Season 3).  Recommended.

Movie Review: Finding You (2021). Amazon Prime.

A young woman goes to Ireland for a "study abroad" break before retrying her violin audition for a music conservatory in New York.  While there, despite her resistance and skepticism, she falls for a young action-film movie star trapped in his celebrity bubble. 

 

In the meantime, she is also mentored and taught about life and music by an old drunken Irish fiddle player, and becomes involved in straightening out a family tragedy for an angry elderly woman (Vanessa Redgrave).  

 

It's all fairly contrived, but still sweet and entertaining.  Recommended, if you like rom-coms and coming of age stories.  

Book Review: The Gathering Wind: Hurricane Sandy, the Sailing Ship Bounty, and a Courageous Rescue at Sea (2013). Gregory Freeman.

An in-depth account of how the famous tall ship "HMS Bounty", which was built in the 1960s for the "Mutiny on the Bounty" movie of that era (with Marlon Brando), found itself right in the middle of Hurricane Sandy in the Atlantic, and what happened to the ship and its crew.   

It includes a history of the ship itself, and its various travails and maintenance issues over the ship's life, along with a balanced portrayal of the captain and crew that inexplicably ended up right in the middle of Hurricane Sandy, where they had to face the terrible storm and the ship's last hours and sinking.  

It also covers the heroic Coast Guard air rescue operation that saved all but two of the crew members, and the legal trials and aftermath of the disaster.  A howling good sea story for the modern age, with old wooden sailing ships, helicopters and C-130s, brave sailors, determined Coast Guard rescuers and an epic storm. Recommended.

Book Review: Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot (2009). Bruce & Andrea Leininger.

Soul Survivor is the story of a modern boy from Texas who had detailed and accurate memories of life and death as a World War II fighter pilot, starting with terrifying dreams at night of burning up and falling that began before he even learned to talk. 

This was the first account I had read about the strange and widespread phenomenon of small children with apparent memories of past lives.  It is considered by experts in this field to be one of the most thoroughly researched and documented of thousands of these cases that have been collected and studied now for more than 70 years. 

It is also very powerfully told, through the experiences of the child’s parents, as they began to piece together the meaning of what their son was saying to them and doing in his early childhood, and then slowly validated dozens of specific factual statements made by their son about his memories of his previous life as a young fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, despite their own resistance to accepting as true what they were hearing from him, and their own religious discomfort at the outset with the whole idea of reincarnation.

Most of the books I have read by now on this topic concern the work of two eminent psychiatrists at the University of Virginia Medical School, Dr. Ian Stevenson (who began the study of this phenomenon in the 1970s, and worked on it throughout his long career there, traveling all over the world to gather case histories from different cultures), and Dr. Jim Tucker, who began as a student of Stevenson’s, then became an expert on the subject in his own right. 

Between the two of them, they continuously collected and studied thousands of case histories from around the world for more than fifty years.  Many of those cases, which they gathered with meticulous care under research protocols originally developed by Stevenson to screen out falsification and bias, are considered “solved”, which means they believe with a high degree of certainty that they have identified the past life (the person) to which the child subject refers, even though those people were not typically public figures or celebrities that would likely have been known to the child or the family involved.

The boy and family in Soul Survivor were not among their many astonishing cases, but as a starting point for reading about and understanding the phenomenon of children who remember past lives, it is excellent – moving, almost like a novel in style and persuasive enough to make you want to know more about it.  Very highly recommended.

Book Review: Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer (2021). Steven Johnson.

Steven Johnson is one of my favorite writers on the history of science, and this book is definitely up to his usual standards.   Although he does delve into some of the same topics of contemporary research and prospects for life extension addressed in Dr. David Sinclair's book Lifespan, which I previously reviewed, this book is primarily about the history of how whole populations have begun to live longer lives, and indeed, how we have doubled human lifespans in the past century. 

During most of human existence, including prehistoric times, ancient civilizations, the Dark Ages, and all the way up through the Renaissance, it doesn’t appear that human lifespans grew very much.  Indeed, by using and explaining some of the research and statistical methods that have been used to guess at population longevity from before the time of censuses and population health record-keeping, Johnson shows that even when average lifespans grew slightly longer in the past, they were also likely to grow shorter again with regularity as a result of plagues, famines and other natural causes. 

In the past two centuries, though, a series of innovations that you might not have assumed would help many people live longer have indeed begun to do so.  Johnson describes how these innovations (such as public plumbing systems, clean water systems, vaccines, seat belts, refrigeration and better food distribution) have each played a role in adding years to our life expectancy.  

This is a timely reminder in the years of the pandemic how much benefit science (and the scientific method), enlightened public policy and rising prosperity have played in giving us all the  expectation of an “extra life” worth of time to live.  It’s very enjoyable and informative; this is science history at its best and most accessible. 

Extra Life has also been accompanied by a four-part PBS Mini-series of the same name, which I haven’t yet seen.  Highly recommended.     

Personal Notes: About Mysteries of Life

In this blog's Topics list, you will now see a new item called "Mysteries of Life". 

 

The sorts of topics to be included and discussed in my Mysteries of Life section are those that deal with aspects of the "paranormal".   Some will disparage and dismiss these topics as new age, mystical, pseudo-scientific, hocus-pocus, fantasy, or otherwise just absurd within the modern scientific and rationalist worldview.  I understand that reaction and that skepticism, and am quite sympathetic to it.  Skepticism is a necessary part of any rational thought.

 

I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories, organized religions, cults, magical thinking, or other non-rational and unscientific belief systems.  I am a strong believer in reason, logic, and the scientific method, which over the past five hundred years have given us a powerful set of tools for evaluating, testing, proving and disproving ideas about the reality we inhabit, through a process of repeatable and peer-reviewed experimentation. 

 

With that said, though, I have occasionally stumbled onto well-documented facts and events, and even had a few personal experiences, that challenged aspects of the scientific and materialist consensus as well as my own beliefs, and raised disturbing questions that are not easily explained by our current understanding of "objective" reality.

 

Two such evolving stories that have particularly caught my attention in recent years are the strange reports of many young children around the world who appear to have detailed and often-verifiable memories of recent past lives; and the newly-rehabilitated status of the UFO phenomenon, which had been denied and ridiculed by the U.S. government for three generations, only to be suddenly acknowledged and confirmed a few years ago by that same government, after the New York Times reported on a series of encounters between UFOs and a U.S. Navy carrier task force that were witnessed and recorded by many of the pilots, officers and sailors who were there when it happened.

 

After starting down this road, I also noticed that once I had begun to delve into the history and scientific study of these two particular areas of investigation, I soon discovered other types of curious phenomena and widely reported psychological and paranormal experiences that seemed to be similar, or at least somehow related. 

 

One possibility to explain this proliferation of weirdness is that once you head down the rabbit hole of giving any credence to the paranormal, you'll inevitably be drawn deeper into it, much like other forms of irrational belief and madness.  But it is also conceivable that there are real common threads or unknown forces involved in many of these unexplained mysteries.  These perceived similarities between different paranormal phenomena often seem to suggest the same need to probe our limited understanding of the true nature of our human minds (as distinct from our brains), and our consciousness and perceptions.

 

For example, I recently discovered that the phenomenon of the Near Death Experience (NDEs), when studied in a scientific manner across a large data set of patient reports, raises many of the same sorts of age-old questions of mind, body and soul, and of space and time, as are found in attempts to understand the meaning of accounts of apparent reincarnation, or of UFOs and reported alien encounters. 

 

Meanwhile, some of our contemporary physicists, still looking for a grand unified theory of existence, suggest with increasing frequency that quantum physics, and its postulation of an endless multiverse determined by consciousness, choice and observation, may offer explanations for some of the paranormal phenomena that have been reported recently, and throughout most of recorded history for that matter.  What are we to make of that?

 

It may be that none of these questions can ever be convincingly answered, explained or proven.  I'm very open to that possibility.  But the process of documenting and cataloguing strange facts and events, the study of puzzling and often traumatic or transformative experiences many people have reported that don't seem to be "normal", and the search for greater knowledge and understanding of these odd phenomena, is still intriguing to me. 

 

Therefore, I will occasionally report on good books, movies and TV shows by and about people who are exploring "mysteries of life" from a scientific and academic perspective.  The more we can know about what's really going on in these lives, minds and world of ours, the better, don't you think?  And besides, it's fun!  Who doesn't love a good eerie mystery?

Movie Review: Enola Holmes (2020). Netflix.

This lightly amusing historical period piece and mystery stars young Millie Bobby Brown (of Stranger Things fame) in the leading role.  

As Sherlock Holmes' little sister Enola, a feisty and non-compliant teenage girl, she goes into the family business, as a means of escaping the oppressive plans and domesticated female role their older brother (as her guardian) has made for her.  

Nicely outfitted with the latest in Edwardian fashion and surrounded by English period sets and scenery, young Enola helps win the battle for women's suffrage in Britain, while freeing herself from repressive social expectations, and tracking down the beloved but unconventional mother who had abandoned her. 

Of course, there are plenty of other mysteries to solve, plots to uncover and prevent, and brilliant Holmes-ish detective work throughout.  Recommended.