TV Review: Bodyguard (2018). Netflix.

This 6-part mini-series from the BBC was a nice surprise when I finally decided to give it a try, after Netflix repeatedly displayed it prominently on my “you should see this” list.  Only one season was made, but a February 2022 online story suggests that the producers may be gearing up to make a new season 2.   In any event, the first season stands on its own as a complete story, solidly rooted in the geopolitical traumas and anxieties of our time. 

The main protagonist, Sgt. David Budd (played by Richard Madden) is a veteran of 10 years of war with the British military in Afghanistan and Iraq, who now works as a personal protection officer (a bodyguard) for the Scotland Yard division that protects important British government officials.

In an early scene, while riding with his two young children on a train, he recognizes a terrorist plot unfolding, and intervenes to stop a suicide bombing before it happens, thereby saving both the train’s passengers and the woman bomber, and in the process becoming an instant hero in the press.

In a very believable story of “no good deed goes unpunished”, David is quickly rewarded for his heroism with a new assignment as the personal bodyguard for Julia, the Home Secretary and top Conservative woman MP in the government (Keeley Hawes), who is campaigning to undermine and replace the current Prime Minister.

To her new Police Sergeant protector, the Home Secretary represents all the worst judgment, bad policies, jingoism and hypocrisy that led to the disastrous wars he fought in, which have left him psychologically damaged, bitter and now alienated from his wife.  Nevertheless, his devotion to duty won’t allow him to do anything but guard her ferociously with his life, and try to anticipate the evolving threats which she seems to draw like a magnet.

Without revealing the full plot and spoiling it, I would say that this excellent series reminds me more than anything of the long-running HBO show Homeland.  In both shows, we see an exceptionally competent and dedicated agent, each with a heavy load of psychological damage from their respective war experiences, trying to stay one step ahead of complex terrorism plots, while also trying to deal with layers of bureaucratic intrigue in their own organizations, and their own disturbed personal lives, loves and families.  It makes for an absorbing and complex story in both cases.

Bodyguard also includes several of the most adrenaline-pumping action scenes of a character under threat of immediate death, trying to hold things together and get everyone safely through a moment of impending mayhem, that I have seen in recent years.  In an entertainment world full of spectacular CGI car crashes, gratuitous gunfire and colorful explosions, these scenes stand out for their close-up focus on the drama of characters trying to survive under the pressure of imminent catastrophe.

This is a fine example of the contemporary political thriller, with plausible scenarios and realistic threats unfolding in the uniquely British context of the post-Forever Wars world.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Unrequited Infatuations (2021). Stevie Van Zandt.

This rock and roll autobiography is an unusual one, in part because it is told by someone who is not the “front man” for a band, or a major solo act himself.  This is a “sideman’s” story.  

For those who don’t know, Van Zandt, also known as “Little Stevie”, is a close friend and confidante of Bruce Springsteen.  He became a founding member, guitarist and backup singer of Springsteen’s E Street Band, and Springsteen’s right-hand man in the early years, only to quit in the 1980s, just as the band was reaching its peak years of popularity. 

As he recounts, he returned to the band many years later, but only after building his own separate life and identity as a musician, political activist, actor, script-writer and producer, as well as a celebrity gadfly, solo artist, band-leader, project organizer and friend to many other stars.  

His style of story-telling seemed to verge at times on the bombastic, self-admiring and grandiose, and might have been intolerable except for the fact that all the outrageous claims he makes and the crazy stories he tells are apparently true, and are often very funny.  It also helps make it more bearable that he openly shares his failures and insecurities too.  

But yes, he did play a huge part in organizing financial, political and celebrity support in the U.S. against South African apartheid, and in support of Nelson Mandela.  He did become an actor, and a major star in The Sopranos, one of the top TV series of all time.  He did star in and help produce another improbable but popular gangster-related Netflix show set in Norway, Lilyhammer.  And he does seem to know just about everyone in the celebrity world, and has wild stories and gossip to share about his interactions with many of them.  

If you’re looking for a fun read, and lots of tall tales from the life of a high-powered Forrest Gump of the entertainment world, this book might fill the bill.  Recommended.

Book Review: Born to Run (2016). Bruce Springsteen.

The Boss's long-awaited autobiography finally appeared in 2016.  It explores in the first person the same kind of personal and emotional territory as was covered in the Tom Petty biography Petty, which I previously reviewed.

In fact, Springsteen and Petty, the two most beloved and iconic American rock stars of our age,  have similar stories in so many respects:  growing up poor, surviving abusive and neglectful fathers, youths spent in 1960s garage rock bands, struggling with depression throughout their careers, and tending to the difficult process of building and managing extraordinarily tight-knit bands of gifted musical subordinates and collaborators over long periods of time. 

They both experienced the incredible highs of performing live in front of huge adoring audiences, writing hundreds of popular songs, creating great records in the studio, and working with many of the other luminaries of the rock music world over their respective 40+ year careers.

Yet at the same time, in both these books, we see them going through many of the same kinds of personal and family ups and downs that we all have in our own lives. 

Fortunately for the millions of fans worldwide of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, he's still here, and still making great music, as he demonstrated last year with the release of his first rock album and accompanying movie in seven years, Letter to You, also previously reviewed here.  Highly recommended.

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.