The Memory Cache is the personal blog site of Wayne Parker, a Seattle-based writer and musician. It features short reviews of books, movies and TV shows, and posts on other topics of current interest.
A very nice first book and memoir by (full disclosure here) my long-time primary care physician, Dr. John Crocker, who as a young man was one of the student researchers working with Jane Goodall in Gombe, Tanzania, studying chimpanzees.
It’s a very personal and thoughtful reflection on how what he experienced and learned there shaped his life, and made him a better doctor and father. Highly recommended.
An energetic young London girl marries a Canadian soldier in 1941 in the midst of the Nazi bombing campaign, and quickly gets pregnant. As the wife of a Canadian combatant, she is shipped off to his home in poor, rural Alberta in 1943 with their young daughter, but without her husband, who is off fighting the war.
When she arrives at the primitive family home on the plains, she has to learn how to get along with a dour mother-in-law, a crippled sister-in-law, and other unwelcoming and unsophisticated locals she doesn't know.
This is a well-executed "fish out of water" tale, that highlights the plight of World War II British war brides sent off during the war to the "safety" of their new husbands' distant homes and families. Recommended.
Atypical is a charming and heart-warming family dramedy series about living with a cognitive/behavioral disability.
At the center of the story is a bright high school senior with high-functioning autism. He has a younger sister who’s a track star, a neurotic and over-involved mother, and a devoted father who had abandoned the family for a time years ago, when he was first trying to come to terms with his son's diagnosis, thereby causing ongoing trust issues in the marriage.
Our young protagonist also has a few eccentric friends, and a community of people from school and work with whom he interacts as he tries to figure out how to carve out a positive role in life for himself despite his condition, and all the normal social things he doesn't understand.
In the process, we see the hardships and stresses his situation creates for the people around him, but also the unexpected rewards the various characters realize from his often too-honest and unfiltered view of the world and their own actions. Funny yet with a serious message, this was definitely one of the more enjoyable and worthwhile shows we saw in 2021. Recommended.
This is the second Walt Longmire mystery novel, in which an elderly local woman may have been murdered in the local old-folks home.
With all the same excellent literary qualities, main characters along with some new ones, and a new mix of complicated family histories and relationships, long-hidden crimes and conspiracies, and plenty of the same kind of local color and great dialogue that were present in The Cold Dish (the first Walt Longmire novel), Johnson spins another entertaining and high-quality addition to his series of contemporary Western mystery novels.
I really liked it! But on the other hand, it's two down, 22 (and counting) to go, with the recent release of the latest installment (number 24) in this series. I'm going to need to pace myself! Recommended.
This is Amor Towles's first novel, written as a first-person account of the life of an aspiring young woman from the lower classes, who dives into the social life of the wealthy in late 1930s Manhattan.
It contains wonderful, evocative descriptions of the people, places and social behavior of the American Yankee aristocratic class (and particularly of the young people) at that time, when the Depression was still recent history and the calamity of World War II was just ahead.
It
also nicely depicts the way in which for so many of us, our twenties are the
time when who we ultimately will become in life as adults is shaped and molded
by our experiences, the people we meet then, and the historical events around
us. Highly recommended.
This book contains a series of essays detailing the extent of climate change damage to the earth and its environment and species that have already occurred, and where current trends are likely to take us.
The author also makes clear how long we have already known about this problem, and failed to take meaningful steps to remediate it, and outlines much of what we know about what the fossil fuel industry has done to prevent progress on climate change, in order to protect its investments and profits.
It’s all fairly grim and depressing, but important reading for informed citizens. Recommended.
In this important work from many decades ago, Dr. Cialdini laid out the six major psychological levers by which people get other people to do what they want. This book is a classic from the 1980s, which has been heavily mined ever since by advertisers, marketers, social media developers and others who hope to get our attention and influence our behavior.
Some techniques based on his principals don't work as well as they once did in areas like mass-mailing campaigns, because they have been so heavily over-used, and in the course of this cynical exploitation, some of the underlying norms of society he describes have been worn away.
But in general these principals still apply, they still work, and are still at the core of how advertising and social media operate, as well as being heavily used in many scams and other malevolent applications of social engineering.
The six weapons of influence include reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority and scarcity. His explanations of how these methods work, and the related psychological research that demonstrates how and why each approach functions are clear, classic and timeless.
An amusing tale of a 19-year old genius girl, already graduated from Yale, who is trying to find happiness in New York city.
She's alienated from her father, working on her issues with an older male therapist, dealing with her feelings of loss from her mother's death, starting a job as a proofreader, dating a guy who's engaged, sleeping with one of her professors, and slowly falling for a nice guy who lives next door.
She's sorting it all out. It's charming and funny. Recommended.
Several years ago, I read and reviewed an excellent book from 2016 about Silicon Valley and particularly Facebook called Chaos Monkeys: Insi...