Book Review: Uncanny Valley: A Memoir (2020). Anne Wiener.

The author, a millennial who became a writer for The New Yorker on technology topics, has written a sort of tell-all memoir about her experiences in her late twenties, when she left the New York publishing scene to try to get ahead in her career and her life by working in customer support for high-tech start-ups in Silicon Valley.  

 

Although she doesn't name the several companies where she worked (choosing instead to use descriptive words such as "the social media company" rather than explicitly naming them, although it's not hard to guess), we get a full tour of her experiences as a young woman from the East Coast in the Bay Area start-up and venture capital tech scene.  

 

She describes how excited she was to be part of small teams doing big important new things, but how she also felt discriminated against, both because she was female, and because her educational background and interests were not in technology, but in literature. 

 

I found it an insightful and touching personal account of a young millennial woman's coming-of-age experience, with a nice amount of snark thrown in about the precious world of the high-tech entrepreneurs and workers of her generation. 

 

It takes us back to that time (not long ago) when the Great Recession had just happened, and young tech entrepreneurs were busy selling venture capitalists and the public on their dreams of vast wealth creation (mostly for themselves), and the transformative social power of apps.  Recommended.

Movie Review: The Courier (2020). Amazon Prime.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Rachel Brosnahan star in a cold war spy thriller and docudrama about the Soviet spy Oleg Penkovsky, and the British businessman who was recruited to carry his secrets from Russia to MI6 and the CIA.  Cumberbatch plays the businessman courier, and Brosnahan plays the role of his wife. 

Taut, suspenseful and based on the real life story, with an excellent and believable performance by Cumberbatch.  Recommended.

Book Review: Under Occupation (2019). Alan Furst.

For those not familiar with Alan Furst, a quick summary:  Furst is an American novelist who has written more than a dozen novels about the period in Europe leading up to and during the early years of World War II, which are in the “spy thriller” genre, but are so much more. 

As he has commented, his stories, which take place in various capitals and countries all over eastern and western Europe, try to capture the lived experience of ordinary people faced daily with unavoidable moral choices between going along with evil or resisting that evil, and having to risk or choose life or death for themselves and others as the price of the choices they must make.  This perspective and Furst’s skill as a fiction writer make for some of the best spy novels ever written about World War II and its prelude.

Under Occupation features the latest in his obligatory middle-aged male leads, this one a writer of detective novels living in occupied Paris.  I had the feeling that this particular character was particularly close to Furst's heart and personal identity, almost as though he was imagining himself (a real-life writer of spy novels) trying to survive and participate in the World War II Resistance.  Most of his other heroes don't do exactly the same kind of work he does. 

But in any case, it’s a very compelling story, with a new set of interesting, likable and complex characters, a couple of artful sex scenes, moments of tension and fast action, and of course some treacherous Nazis and collaborators to overcome.  Recommended.

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.