Movie Review: Greyhound (2020). Apple TV+.

Tom Hanks stars as an inexperienced American destroyer captain early in World War II, trying to lead an American convoy of ships through a Nazi U-boat attack in the north Atlantic.  A good World War II naval story, based on C.S. Forester’s post-war novel The Good Shepherd, about an aspect of the war which perhaps has been less well covered in cinema than many other parts of the wartime experience.  

Still, not that much new ground is broken -- by now, there have been so many good movies about men at war, particularly in World War II.  This was a good but not exceptional performance by Hanks, who can always be depended on to play the decent, solid and reliable everyman at the center of a dramatic story.  Recommended.

Book Review: Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come (2019). Richard Preston.

This is the dangerous and heartbreaking story of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.  It is a medical thriller that focuses on the African native caregivers, along with foreign medical aid workers, NGOs and researchers who fought to bring the "deadliest yet" Ebola epidemic under control. 

It includes a disturbing and heartbreaking account of white European Medicin Sans Frontieres staff (also known as Doctors Without Borders) wrestling with the ethical and political question of whether to use a single available dose of an untested cure for Ebola on a key black African physician who had been leading the medical efforts in a local village, and deciding to withhold the experimental treatment, which ultimately was used to save another victim's life instead.

Timely medical reporting on one of the major epidemic stories immediately preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, with all the political, scientific, logistical and ethical problems involved, and the local and international responses that came into play.  It's an important backstory to the COVID pandemic and how the world has responded to it, and a taut medical drama too.  Recommended.

Book Review: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). Isabel Wilkerson.

This is a very compelling presentation on how the history and current state of racism against black people in the USA has all the elements of a well-developed caste system, very analogous to those of India and apartheid-era South Africa.   

One particularly horrifying set of historical facts she presents to bolster this case (of which I was unaware) is the extent to which the German Nazi leadership studied and copied the American racist caste system of the Jim Crow era against blacks, as they were making plans for their own racist campaigns against European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. 

In Wilkerson's view, Negroid features and dark skin color were deliberately used in colonial North America as arbitrary markers for the creation of a "sub-human" caste (similar to the Indian Dalits, or “untouchables”) as part of the development of the legal and moral basis for justifying slavery.   

Once firmly established, this caste system has proven remarkably tenacious over the centuries in its ability to keep re-forming and re-asserting itself, as various earlier elements of racism and race-based discrimination have been slowly outlawed or made socially unacceptable in American life.  

The author notes the manner in which this caste system was promoted to the lowest class whites, as an assurance that no matter how poor or downtrodden they were, they could always be confident that they were still of higher caste than anyone with black skin.  With this observation, she shows why lower-caste whites continue to be so resistant to any social changes (or individual achievements, such as Barack Obama's ascendancy to the presidency of the United States) that allow blacks to move to upper caste levels, and she gives examples in our contemporary social life and politics to illustrate and prove the point.  

This is a new and enlightening theory of how systemic racism against blacks has become so deeply pervasive and entrenched in American society, as a classic caste system, and shows starkly the toll that it has taken on black people, but also on the rest of our society, since the first black slaves arrived here in 1619.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Warehouse (2019). Rob Hart.

This dark near-future thriller does for Amazon what The Circle (2015) by Dave Eggers did for Google and Facebook, by painting a stark fictional picture of where unrestrained monopoly online retail capitalism could soon lead us.  

A failed small businessman who is also a former prison guard, and a beautiful female industrial spy, get jobs with "Cloud", a new mega-corporation and tech giant, in one of the company's ubiquitous live-in warehouse communities. 

As they're selected and trained for their dead-end jobs, meet each other and begin an affair, and as the spy plots to crack the all-seeing security of the company's network on behalf of an unknown client, we see a horrifying vision of all the ways our own familiar compromises with convenience in purchasing and product delivery, low costs based on cheap labor, and unlimited business access to our personal data could lead to a powerless and empty existence for all but a small ruling corporate elite.  

An excellent contemporary cautionary tale, strongly reminiscent of 1984 and Brave New World, but updated to address some of the unique challenges to freedom emerging in our own times and society.  Recommended.

Book Review: The Ministry of the Future (2020). Kim Stanley Robinson.

The New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein (in one of his  excellent podcasts on The Ezra Klein Show) called this "the most important book of 2020".  I can see why he reached this conclusion.

Kim Stanley Robinson is a famous contemporary science-fiction writer, who is best known for his novels about the colonization of Mars.  However, in this one, he takes on the climate crisis, with a small cast of characters, but as told through many different voices around the world. 

Set in the 2030s and 2040s, it tries to imagine what a quasi-worldwide "Ministry of the Future" would have to do in order to save the world, and in telling that story, looks at a variety of climate-related crises and challenges that seem all too plausible in our current political and economic situation.  

I'm not sure the author’s "many voices" story approach makes for the best novel, literarily speaking.  But he does discuss and illuminate many of the ethical, financial, political and practical hurdles we will face in the coming years, if we are to find global solutions to the crisis of human-caused climate change.  Highly recommended.

TV Review: The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window (2022), Netflix, and The Flight Attendant, Seasons 1-2, HBO Max.

The TV mini-series The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, starring Kristen Bell, is remarkably similar in genre and concept to HBO’s TV series The Flight Attendant starring Kaley Cuoco, which just arrived on HBO Max for a second season.  

 

In both series, the plot centers on an attractive young woman protagonist, each with her own serious emotional problems and excessive drinking habits, stumbling into a murder mystery which in The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window may or may not have even happened, and in both cases may or may not have been done by the intoxicated leading lady herself, who then has to try desperately to clear herself and solve the mystery by playing amateur detective. 

 

Both Bell and Cuoco are gifted comedic actors, and both pull off their respective roles convincingly and amusingly.  This is no mean feat in either case, since they need somehow to convey their characters’ tortured souls, their drunken irreverence and silly but self-destructive misbehavior in absurd situations, and yet also cleverly manage to figure out “who dun it” from a baffling list of likely suspects and clues that would challenge a sober person, all at the same time.   

 

The amateur detective work and smart-alecky response to mysteries, violence and dire personal straits is familiar territory for Bell, whose acting stint as the girl sleuth Veronica Mars earlier in her career contained much of the same appeal as this new show.  I saw all the Veronica Mars TV seasons and the follow-on movie a few years ago, and thought it was an outstanding and entertaining series, with a very gutsy and appealing young heroine. 

 

For Cuoco, her long acting run as Penny, the sweet but clueless party girl next door in The Big Bang Theory, who had to constantly improvise, make up stories, tell little lies and use her sexy good looks and flirtation to get herself out of embarrassing situations with the socially inept but brilliant tech nerds across the hall, was similarly good preparation for her role here, as a different sweet but clueless party girl (and flight attendant) who finds herself in far more dangerous situations than Penny ever faced.

 

For some viewers, trying to combine comedy, murder, intrigue, psychological thriller and satire into one show might be all too much.  However, I think both these series are worth seeing just for the enjoyment of watching these two remarkably talented actors working their onscreen magic to get their characters out of impossible situations.  Recommended.

Book Review: Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice (2015). Bill Browder.

Red Notice is an autobiographical account by Browder, the grandson of a famous U.S. Communist and the son of a Harvard legal scholar, of his efforts to make his own mark in the world by becoming a hedge fund manager in the newly "free" economies of Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1990s and early 2000s.  

He succeeded in that, and quickly became very wealthy in the new "Wild West" of the post-Soviet economy.  But in the process, by expecting Russian business to be governed by the rules of fairness and transparency that are generally honored in the West, he ran afoul of Putin and the new generation of Russian oligarchs, and discovered the reality of "Russian rules", including all the sorts of dirty operations, corruption, murder and mayhem with which we have lately become so familiar.  

When one of his lawyers was imprisoned for defending him and his hedge fund, and ultimately was killed by the Russian state, it led him to fight back, leading to U.S. Congressional passage of the Magnitzky Rule, which placed personal sanctions on key Russian business and government figures, and triggered our ongoing national crisis over Putin, Trump and the Russian attacks on our political processes.  The Magnitzky Rule is prelude to the sanctions now being imposed on Russian oligarchs around the world in response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Red Notice is a gripping personal story, and a foundational background piece in the complicated history of our current political moment, and our complicated relationship to the post-Soviet world of Russian politics and finance in the Putin era.  Recommended.

Movie Review: On the Rocks (2020). Apple TV+.

This entertaining film stars Rashida Jones and Bill Murray, and was directed by Sofia Coppola.  It’s an amusing comedy about a young New York mother (Jones) who develops suspicions that her otherwise seemingly wonderful husband might be cheating on her.  

Into this bout of post-natal insecurity comes her serial philandering playboy father (Murray), who is immediately sure she is right, and sets out to drag her into his wild ideas and outrageous plots for investigating the husband.  Recommended.