Movie Review: Holiday in the Wild (2021). Netflix.

This movie on Netflix was a nice evening's diversion as a light entertainment.  A wealthy New York woman (Kristin Davis), whose only son had just headed off to college, is dumped out of the blue by her husband.  

To make things worse, the newly empty-nest couple in this movie plot had had a "second honeymoon" planned, an exotic African safari, so the suddenly single wife decides to go on the trip to Africa by herself instead.  

At the first hotel stop, she meets a seemingly rough and boorish local character at dinner (Rob Lowe), only to discover the next morning that he is her pilot for the flight out to the start point for the safari.  But along the way, he lands the plane in the African wilderness to save a baby elephant, and she goes to work at the nearby elephant rescue camp, where she rediscovers her calling as a veterinarian, and slowly falls in love with the pilot.  

It seemed to me to be a sort of modern Out of Africa lite, but with more romance and comedy. Recommended.

TV Review: Babies (2020). Netflix.

This is a six-part documentary series on the first 12 months of babies' mental and physical development, and glimpses into ongoing research at universities around the globe into the many aspects of babies' growth.  

Its basic thesis is that much of what we used to think about babies as being "tabula rasa" or blank slates is simply not true.  Instead, they arrive with seemingly miraculous stores of built-in knowledge and skills, which they then actualize through their many strange and wonderful behaviors in the first year of life, which are demonstrated by babies in families from different places around the world.  Perfect for new parents (and grandparents)!   Recommended.

Book Review: Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (2020). Bill McGibben.

This is another in the genre of books about the accelerating global climate crisis, written by the noted environmental and climate change writer and activist Bill McGibben.  However, in addition to considering the existential peril of climate change, McGibben also looks at a couple of other looming threats to human survival and identity:  genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. 

In the course of a very thoughtful and philosophical analysis, he suggests that we need to look critically at these technological marvels we are being offered, and think about what their adoption will do to the human story, and what it means to be a human on this planet.  

He asks, do we want to live in a totally human-managed environment, given how little we really know about how nature works, and how badly many of our attempts to manage the environment have turned out?   Do we want every person (or at least every child of the most wealthy among us) to be an engineered product, who will inevitably be followed by newer and "better" versions?  What about the ethics and good sense of trying to create artificial "intelligence" to replace our own human minds and activities -- is this either desirable, or moral?   

These are all very urgent questions, well considered.  It’s an interesting and in some respects more hopeful treatise than we might expect, given the dire nature of our current technological times and problems.  Recommended.

Book Review: A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age (2015). Matt Richtel.

This morning, I read an excellent opinion piece from yesterday's New York Times by Jay Caspian Kang, entitled "Touch Screens in Cars Solve a Problem We Didn't Have".  It describes the evolutionary design process by which for most new cars today, the designers have replaced the old familiar knobs and buttons that were simple to find and easy to use for controlling all the car's environmental systems, with ever larger touch screens that require the same sort of complex viewing, touching and menu-searching we have to do with our phones.

In the article, Mr. Kang argues that not only did we not need these new solutions to how to control the heat, air conditioning and sound systems in our cars, but in fact these screens have created a major new safety problem, by creating an array of new distractions that take our eyes off the road and our minds off the task of driving, while we search for little icons and  hard-to-find virtual buttons, and page through menus of options to try to manage our cars' systems and environment.

With this in mind, today I'm posting a short review of the 2015 book A Deadly Wandering, also by a New York Times writer, which is the brilliantly told, gripping and emotional account of one of the early cases of a fatal automobile accident caused by a teenager texting while driving. 

The author weaves a spellbinding story, as he cycles the narration between the personalities and lives affected by the accident, the psychologists working on trying to understand the brain and the science of attention, and the political and legal players trying to adjust and respond to new distracting technologies as they affect drivers and the public interest.   

One of the most important points the book drives home is what the scientific research has shown about how long it takes our conscious minds to return to fully and effectively doing what they were doing before (such as driving the car and being road-aware) after changing focus to send a text, or otherwise engage in some computer-related activity.  The numbers are sobering: in the case of Mr. Kang's article this morning, the figure he quoted for the new touch screens was 40 seconds.  That's a long time to have nobody driving your car while it's in motion.

A Deadly Wandering is a crucial book for all of us as drivers, to understand what we risk in trying to operate our phones (or our touch screens) while we're driving.  It ought to be required reading for automobile designers and manufacturers, and government safety regulators as well.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: X Troop (2021). Leah Garrett.

This is another story from the endless byways of World War II, and the many different individual and collective experiences of it.  Garrett’s book reveals the existence of a small but highly effective and lethal unit of Jewish commandos in the British army in World War II, made up exclusively of young refugees from Europe.  

I was expecting that this book might be a real-life “Inglorious Basterds” story, and there were elements of that, but the most important and disturbing part had to do with how they ended up as elite special operators for the British.  The unexpected story there, which I had never heard before, was that many of the Jewish children and young adults who escaped from European countries to Great Britain in the early years of the war were initially treated as “Enemy Aliens” by the British.  

Despite their hatred for Hitler and fascism, they were put into individual family homes and children's’ detention camps, where they lost communications with their families in Europe and the outside world, were often treated harshly as possible Nazi sympathizers, and were sometimes imprisoned in close quarters with real Nazi supporters who were also being held as enemy aliens. 

Several groups of these young Jewish refugees (who were basically regarded as prisoners of war by the British government) were sent to other Commonwealth countries.  One of the worst of these forced deportations of young Jewish men took the form of a hideous voyage on a freighter full of young European “enemy” refugees, taking them to detention camps in Australia.  On this particular long passage to the south Pacific, the young Jews aboard the ship were tormented and subjected to harsh abuse not only by Nazi-sympathizing fellow “enemy aliens”, but also by the sadistic and anti-Semitic English ship captain.  

Even when Great Britain finally decided that perhaps these angry young Jews might add something to the fight in Europe, for more than a year they were limited to serving in a nonmilitary support organization, until the Churchill government finally realized they had a group of determined, well-educated and tough young Jewish survivors, with extensive knowledge of European cultures and languages, that could be put to effective use in the armed struggle against Hitler. 

The second half of the book recounts the combat and intelligence exploits of some of the most prominent members of this group, which were heroic, but similar to the war stories and experiences of many other Allied special operations fighters and spies.  Recommended.   

Book Review: After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (2021). Bruce Greyson, MD.

This recent book by one of the world’s leading scientific experts on Near Death Experiences (NDEs) is an account of what is now known about NDEs, based on his career of collecting data about them, analyzing the data, researching historical NDE anecdotes and beliefs, and working with other researchers. It is also an account of his personal journey in deciding to study them, and then dedicating a major portion of his career as a physician to designing and carrying out this unusual research on what he knew from the outset was a controversial topic.

Dr. Greyson faced many of the same sorts of institutional skepticism and resistance to his pursuit of understanding of this phenomenon that other researchers have confronted in what I call “mysteries of life” topics (i.e., frequently-reported phenomena that are “paranormal” or unexplained by conventional materialist science). Nevertheless, as a practicing psychiatrist, he kept hearing descriptions of these strange and psychologically impactful experiences, many of them sharing common features, and ultimately couldn’t avoid trying to understand this puzzling reported experience which kept turning up in patients he treated who had been through serious medical emergencies.

It was intriguing to me that although he has taught at several different prestigious university medical schools during his career, he ended up at the University of Virginia, working closely with both Dr. Ian Stevenson and Dr. Jim Tucker, two of the leading psychiatrist researchers into the phenomenon of young children who appear to remember details of past lives.

All three of these doctors, and others among their colleagues, seem to share a deep curiosity about what is behind the shades of what we normally accept as material reality, and particularly the nature of the relationship between mind and brain, which has been a central philosophical and religious issue since antiquity.

As with recent attempts to study other “paranormal” phenomena using scientific methods of interviewing via a structured approach, and applying quantification and analysis of frequently recurring aspects to patients’ stories (techniques that Greyson pioneered with respect to NDE research), at the end we’re still left with unresolved questions. Do minds exist independent of physical bodies and brains? We still don’t know, but Greyson’s account adds more evidence to the possibility that they do.

But beyond those cosmic questions, Dr. Greyson’s research also yields many fascinating insights into the psychological impacts of NDEs on experiencers, and the people around them. There is an insightful exploration of how NDEs can change the personalities of those who have them, not always for the better in terms of their own happiness, although gaining a heightened appreciation for preserving life and being more kind and loving to others seems to be a common tendency among many survivors. 

He reveals other surprising commonalities across reported NDEs. One category of cases involves people in the near-death state who seem to know about the deaths of other people in remote locations, before it is known to them in their waking state, or to the people around them.

He describes other cases where patients in this NDE unconscious state seemed to have viewed details of what was going on around them and nearby (outside the room where their body was lying) when they were definitely unconscious, including one eerie episode which happened to him when he was first practicing medicine, and played an important part in convincing him to undertake this line of research.

Another fascinating finding he revealed was that while most NDE experiences seem to involve meeting or becoming aware of an all-powerful deity of some sort, there was no consistent correlation between that and the experiencers’ prior or subsequent religious beliefs, or lack thereof.

For anyone interested in NDEs, and how they fit into the other mysteries of our existence, this is an intriguing, compassionate and ultimately comforting introduction. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers (2019). Andy Greenberg.

This book is about the rise of cyber war over the past 15 years, particularly with respect to the Russian intelligence teams that have developed, stolen and tested attacks that shut down and destroyed physical infrastructure as well as computing and data resources in Estonia, Georgia, and especially Ukraine. 

With the NotPetya worm, they attacked major businesses and organizations around the world, causing billions of dollars in losses, and disrupting key social infrastructure, including transportation, power grids and utilities, financial institutions and many other businesses and health care organizations. 

The notorious social influence operations of these Russian teams (including the U.S. 2016 presidential election) is mentioned throughout, but the main focus is on their attacks with direct impacts on the physical machinery and computer systems that support modern life and civilization.

One of the best behind the scenes accounts I've read on these ongoing IT security threats to our infrastructure, which is of elevated importance now due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Russia's deteriorating geopolitical and financial situation.  Recommended.

Book Review: Eager: The Surprising, Secret Lives of Beavers, and Why They Matter (2018). Ben Goldfarb.

One of the best full-length books about nature and ecology that I've read recently, this book by writer and "Beaver Believer" Goldfarb explains how the beaver, that funny-looking rodent with the big tail that chops down trees to make ponds, is actually one of the most important mammalian species for restoring natural environments and landscapes.  

In the course of the book, we learn about how beavers, who Goldfarb describes as “nature’s engineers”, shaped the earlier natural environment of America before the European settlers arrived, with its endless marshes, swamps and wetlands full of life, but how that rich and boggy terrain was transformed and damaged by the wholesale slaughter of beavers during the fur-trading era of North American exploration and European settlement.  

We also find out about the modern naturalists who have figured out how brilliantly these little nuisances can design and build dams and ponds, to great effect in restoring and reclaiming damaged landscapes, and how the more annoying results of their work (as they affect farmers and cattle ranchers) can be successfully managed and mitigated.  

A wonderful story of wild animals, their complex roles and inter-dependencies in the natural world and our ongoing human attempts to understand and interact with them.  Highly recommended.