TV Review: Mare of Eastwood (2021). HBO Max.

Kate Winslet gives an excellent performance as a weary  but driven detective in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, investigating murders of young women in her own extended family and community.  

This was not a particularly happy or uplifting series to watch -- it's dark, because of the filming style and location in run-down areas of Chester, PA, and because of the themes (murders of young girls, drug abuse, brutal crimes, destroyed families and desperate lives).  

Despite all these negative aspects, Winslet absolutely nails the local dialect and emotional affect of her character, and conveys the quiet depression and inner turmoil of a good but driven detective, who finds the investigative trail for horrendous crimes leading straight back into her own small urban community of struggling family and friends.  Recommended.   

Book Review: The Thousand Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians (1969). Brian Garfield.

After a trip to Alaska in the late summer of 2019, I checked out this book we'd seen in all the bookstores for tourists up there.  I thought I knew the landscape and major theaters of World War II pretty well by now, but I discovered a significant gap in my knowledge from reading this excellent history, written fifty years ago.

It turns out that the war against Japan in the Pacific had a brutal early phase in the far North Pacific, involving troops, airmen and sailors of both nations (and Canada) fighting for precarious footholds on the western islands of the Aleutians. 

In 1942, Japan successfully invaded and held two bases on Siska and Attu, remote Bering Sea islands where the abominable cold, fog and wet weather made operations almost unbearable for the armies, navies and air forces of both sides.  

Despite the difficulties, American forces re-took both islands in 1943, and through command inexperience and blunders learned important lessons which informed American strategy, tactics and equipment worldwide for the rest of the war, particularly with respect to cold weather operations, amphibious invasion strategy and tactics, and the use of forward air controllers as a key part of tactical air support for ground forces.  

A very interesting military history about a part of the war most of us know little or nothing about, in part because it was deliberately never publicized to the American public, due to the early mistakes, problems and losses involved.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Before: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives (formerly two books, Life Before Life and Return to Life) (2021). Dr. Jim Tucker.

I recently reviewed Soul Survivor, the astonishing story of a small Texas boy in the early 2000s who appeared to have detailed memories of a previous life as a World War II fighter pilot in the South Pacific. 

 

In that review, I mentioned two psychiatrists at the University of Virginia Medical School who are considered the leading experts on the scientific study of the phenomenon of very young children with apparent memories of past lives, and who (between the two of them) have been studying thousands of cases from around the world for over a half-century:  Dr. Ian Stevenson and Dr. Jim B. Tucker.

 

Dr. Tucker is the latter of these two researchers, who is still alive and actively writing about his research.  He has an endowed Professorship at UVA in Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, and is the director of the UVA Division of Perceptual Studies, an academic unit within the medical school that includes several other noted UVA researchers working in related areas, such as Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and other forms of paranormal mind/brain/body and perceptual phenomena.

 

In this newly combined version of his two earlier books, Dr. Tucker shares some of his most surprising and convincing cases of past lives memories in children, and describes the process by which he conducted and organized his research. 

 

Like his predecessor Dr. Stevenson, he is intent on demonstrating the scientific and repeatable nature of this research, and describing the methods used for objectively collecting and analyzing the data from their case studies. 

 

He also refrains from insisting that these cases are absolute proof of reincarnation, but makes the case for reincarnation as the simplest and most likely explanation for small children being in possession of verifiable facts, personality traits, behaviors and physical stigmata associated with a deceased person, by also considering and comparing the arguments for other possible interpretations of the strange facts of these cases.   

 

This two-volume book is probably the most accessible and engaging account of the state of the academic research into this phenomenon by these two doctors and their colleagues over a fifty year period, and contains remarkable descriptions of a number of the better-documented cases from their files.  Highly recommended.

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.