Book Review: Everybody Lies (2017). Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.

The essence of this book, by a former Google data scientist, is an exploration of how Google searches reveal more about what we're really like than we ever previously knew or wanted to admit. 

This book is similar in its analysis and impact to OK Cupid founder Christian Rudder’s 2015 book Dataclysm, which made use of huge volumes of personal information collected from online dating sites to dissect the realities of sex, dating, race and other aspects of society, and our true beliefs and feelings about them. 

Both books are entertaining, thought-provoking and of great value for understanding why "big data" about everything we want to know and do, and what we thereby unintentionally reveal about ourselves, is such an important new tool for the social sciences, and for gaining a better understanding of our world and society. 

The author calls Google search and other search engines "digital truth serum" (that is, what we ask search sites, from the hoped-for privacy and relative anonymity of our web browsers, where we’re not trying to create a brand or image of ourselves for public consumption, as we do on Facebook and other social media platforms).  It’s a very good analogy.  Recommended.

Movie Review: Don't Look Up (2021). Netflix.

This is last year's star-studded "end of the world" movie satire about a planet-killing comet headed for earth.  At the beginning, a talented young PhD student (played by Jennifer Lawrence) discovers a new comet, but her excitement quickly turns to terror when she and her professor (Leonardo DiCaprio) calculate that the comet will crash into earth in six months. 

This seemingly far-fetched yet unfortunately all too believable farce satirizes every absurd thing that's happened in our culture through the past five years:  Trumpian autocratic politics, climate change denialism, celebrity culture obsessions, social media disinformation, space-seeking billionaires and COVID-19 vaccines and mask resisters.  

In doing so, it makes a powerful statement about our collective failure to take seriously the threats looming before us, or to focus on finding viable solutions to problems (especially climate change, for which the comet is an obvious stand-in) that present a clear and present danger to our survival as individuals and as a species.  

Lawrence and DiCaprio star, but there are also great assists from Cate Blanchett (as a vacuous morning show TV co-host) and Meryl Streep (as a female Trump-like president).   

It's grimly amusing, but also a passionate scream for sanity and planetary preservation in our own beleaguered times.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Spy and the Traitor (2019). Ben MacIntyre.

John Le Carre' called this "the best true spy story ever told".  It describes the career of Oleg Gordievski, a Russian KGB agent who rose over many years in the 1970s and 1980s to an appointment as the station chief of the London station (Rezidentura), during which he acted as a high-level double agent on behalf of MI-6, after recognizing the corruption and moral bankruptcy of Soviet Communism.  

 

His long run as Britain's top Soviet agent came to an abrupt end when he was exposed by the notorious CIA turncoat spy Aldrich Ames.  Called back to Moscow for interrogation, he avoided death and exposure only with an almost unbelievable escape from Russia, aided by his British allies.  

 

A terrifying but fascinating story of real-life spying, intrigue, betrayal, danger and escape.  Recommended.

Book Review: Eyes in the Sky (2019). Arthur Holland Michel.

This is a detailed account of the development of wide area surveillance tools and technology, at first in the context of IED campaigns against US troops in the Middle East, but now increasingly as a tool of domestic surveillance as well.  

The "eye in the sky" devices that have been developed use incredibly high-resolution wide area cameras mounted on planes or drones, with the ability to take multiple images per second of entire cities, and then can use the images and high-powered computers to be able to track people and activities forward and backward in time.  

The book does a good job of laying out the development history, and then evaluating both the pros and cons of having a "God's Eye" view available to the government agencies that now possess this technology. 

Its uses in war and law enforcement were the first and most obvious (and controversial) applications, with attendant civil liberty fears, but Michel also discusses positive potential uses for disaster management, environmental protection and various kinds of scientific research.  Recommended.

Book Review: The Passengers (2019). John Marrs.

The Passengers is another dystopian thriller of the near future, this one focused on self-driving cars. 

The essential plot:  a hacker takes over a set of self-driving cars, threatens to kill all the riders, and live streams their terror with audio and video feeds from inside each car, to make important points about financial liability and legal responsibility for accidents when self-driving cars are involved, as well as to highlight the potential vulnerability of each of us to personal data theft and misuse. 

The story raises some interesting and very contemporary philosophical and legal points about automation and self-driving vehicle technologies, but the plot becomes a little strained at the point that the hacker seems to know everything about the individual secrets and personal moral failures of each doomed passenger. 

Still, it's taut and unnerving.  It's a little too close to the media spectacles, privacy invasions and destructive online mob behaviors we've already experienced in real life on our TV news, smartphones and the internet.  Recommended.

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.