Book Review: Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II (2017). Liza Mundy.

This story is reminiscent of the excellent book and movie Hidden Figures, but without the racial discrimination component to the story. It tells the story of how young women (mostly white) with high math and language aptitudes were recruited by both the Army and the Navy from top American women's colleges in the early 1940s, and then went on to play a crucial role in cracking enemy codes throughout World War II.

It’s yet another inspirational story about previously-unheralded women who contributed to the victories and legacies of the Greatest Generation at war. Recommended.

TV Review: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Season 1 (2022). Disney+.

The first two live-action streaming TV series that Disney launched, based on the Star Wars universe, were The Mandalorian (Seasons 1 and 2, so far), and The Book of Boba Fett (Season 1). Both stories are set in the Star Wars galaxy and timeline, but at least initially have little connection to any of the main plots and central characters of the eleven feature-length Star Wars movies that have been made.

Although there are aspects to both of these Disney TV series that will appeal to die-hard Star Wars enthusiasts, these first two Disney Star Wars TV shows have left me (as a dedicated Star Wars fan who has enjoyed all the big-screen films since the first one was released in 1977) feeling distinctly underwhelmed, and missing some of the vital appeal and magic of the movies.

This is all just background and prelude to the new (and third) Disney Star Wars live-action streaming TV series Obi-Wan Kenobi. And I am happy to say: “This is the droid (oops, I mean, the Star Wars TV show) you are looking for”. Thus far, I’ve only seen the first four of six episodes of Season 1 (and I do hope they make a bunch of seasons). But they have been extremely enjoyable, and fully worthy additions to the Star Wars canon.

To begin: having Ewan McGregor reprise his role as the (then-young) Obi-Wan Kenobi from the prequel trilogy is marvelous good fortune. He is appropriately aged in real life to be playing Obi-Wan as he is now, as his story resumes, ten years after he defeated Anakin Skywalker in The Revenge of the Sith, but then was forced to flee as a Jedi refugee from the Empire just to stay alive, and to guard the life of the hidden child Luke Skywalker on Tatooine.

McGregor is a wonderful actor, who captures perfectly the defeated, discouraged and isolated former hero he has become, now hiding out alone in a desert wasteland, with only a tiny spark of his former brilliance or his many talents visible. Watching him carve off and hide small bits of alien meat product every day for his trusty mount, at his dead-end meat-packing job on Tatooine, conveys better than any words how far he has fallen from the glory of his former Jedi Master days.

But there are plenty of new adventures awaiting Obi-Wan. He will have to confront new and old enemies, and he'll be drawn into unexpected events, and a dangerous plot initiated from the planet Alderaan, which will bring Luke’s hidden twin sister Leia into the story.

And the young Leia Organa (as played by Vivien Lyra Blair) is a delight – a petite, 10-year old girl with preternatural awareness of the adult world around her, a kind and generous spirit toward droids and other lesser beings, a wise guy mouth, and an irreverent, non-compliant attitude that is completely consistent with the young adult Carrie Fisher version of Princess Leia we have all come to know and love from the original trilogy.

I can’t say how this series will end, or whether we will have more seasons ahead to which we can look forward (I would assume so). But for now, it's looking good! If you love Star Wars, watch Obi-Wan Kenobi as soon as you can on Disney+ (new episodes each Wednesday). And May the Force Be With You.

Book Review: Kindness Goes Unpunished (2008). Craig Johnson.

This is the third Walt Longmire mystery novel. Sheriff Walt’s daughter Katie is viciously attacked and put into a potentially fatal coma in Philadelphia, where she has been working as a young lawyer and has an apparently abusive boyfriend.

Walt and his best friend Henry Standing Bear, in town for a display of Native American cultural artifacts, go looking for her attacker, while meeting Walt’s deputy Vic's whole family of Philly cops. Vic comes back from Wyoming to help Walt, and there is a race to see whether she or her divorced mother (or both) might end up in bed with Walt. No spoilers here! But another worthy addition to the Longmire saga, this time in an East Coast urban environment. Recommended.

Book Review: Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter that Changed America (2020). Jim Rasenberger.

This book was a bit slow and academic in style as popular biographies go, but had a very iconic American mid-nineteenth century historical figure as its subject. Of course, everyone has heard about Samuel Colt, his invention of the Colt revolver, and the old line about “God made men, but it took Colonel Colt to make them equal”. But there is a great deal more to Colt’s story.

Colt spent decades trying to invent things, frequently impressing people with his ambition and his inventing skills, but constantly being short of money, and continuing to tinker with his revolver design over many years, before he was finally able to convince the U.S. government to start buying it.

He is considered to be the real father of industrial mass production, which he created by building his own factories for gun manufacture. He survived several scandals, including the notorious trial of one of his brothers for murdering a young woman, and only saw his fortunes finally take off as a result of the Union’s industrial build-up for the Civil War.

By the time he died, he was presiding like a lord over his own “company town” in Connecticut, filled not only with the factories where his guns were made, but also the planned housing of his employees, for whom he had the same sort of godlike status as a modern-day Gates, Jobs or Zuckerberg.

Revolver is an interesting account of a controversial American industrialist, inventor and public figure, and the mid-nineteenth century American society in which he lived. It also gives some important historical context to how lethal modern repeating firearms were first developed and marketed to American society, culture and the government, long before our era of the NRA-supported gun industry, high-capacity pistols and military-style assault rifles. Recommended.

Book Review: News of the World (2016). Paulette Jiles.

This is a very satisfying Western story about an old man, a veteran of several American wars of the early and mid-19th century, who travels from town to town across the post-Civil War west, eking out a living putting on one-man shows, where he reads and comments on stories from the newspapers of the time.

At one stop, he reluctantly accepts the job of returning a 9-year old white girl, who's been abducted by and lived among Indians, to her surviving family members.  It’s a great Western adventure tale about two lonely but strong-willed people, who learn to love and care for each other across the wide bridges of age, culture, language and understanding between them.

I previously reviewed the movie version based on this book, starring Tom Hanks.  I would rate the book as even better than the movie, due to its sensitive and powerful evocation of the complex emotions and slowly-developing relationship between the old man and the girl, and its focus on the unusual history of whites kidnapped by Indians, who then didn't want to return to white society, or to be "rescued" from their Indian families and tribal life.  Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Being the Ricardos (2021). Amazon Prime.

This movie was heavily reviewed last year, mostly favorably, and was written and produced by Aaron Sorkin.  It features Nicole Kidman playing the role of Lucille Ball, during a particular week of filming of the second season of "I Love Lucy", in which she and her husband Desi Arnaz ((Javier Bardem) are trying to deal with tabloid reports that she is a Communist, how to reveal the fact that she is pregnant with a new TV season ahead of her, and pressures in the marriage as Lucille finds out that Desi may be cheating on her.

Kidman's performance is excellent, but the script doesn't require her to re-create many of Lucy's hilarious "physical comedy" performances in the show -- instead, she shows the "behind the scenes" Lucille, especially her genius at envisioning what would make a scene hilarious and believable, and her tough, calculating professional actress side, as she tries to get and retain the fame and respect she seeks. 

There were some disorienting "flash back" scenes, where I lost track of when the scene was taking place relative to the main story line.  But in general, this was an interesting and believable story of two famous Hollywood and TV icons, and their complex professional and personal relationship.  Recommended.

Book Review: Code Over Country: The Tragedy and Corruption of Seal Team Six (2021). Matthew Cole.

This book presents us with the dark side of one of the most legendary and highly-esteemed U.S. military units in our history.  It’s about the U.S. Navy SEALs, and especially the most elite SEAL team and its members, known as SEAL Team Six.

The author first tells the story of the Navy SEALs, going back to their initial formation as UDTs (underwater demolition teams) in World War II, divers whose job was to swim ashore on landing beaches to scout the terrain, and blow up obstacles that would otherwise impede troops as they landed on the beaches.  He then traces their evolution through the growing U.S. emphasis on developing special operations capabilities in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, including the rise of other groups like the Army’s Green Berets and Delta Force, as well as the SEALs.

Everyone knows about SEAL Team Six, who are by now the most famous of all the U.S. special operations groups.  Their members included the snipers who killed the Somali pirates who had kidnapped the captain of the hijacked American cargo ship Maersk Alabama, and also the team that attacked and killed Osama Bin Laden at his hideout in Pakistan.  These were both astonishing feats of military technical skill, planning and heroism, and they have been rightly celebrated by Americans.

The problem as Cole presents it is that SEAL Team Six had at its core from the foundation an ethos of loyalty and secrecy to the team and its commander that were counter to the general SEAL values of loyalty to the country, self-sacrifice and a willingness to stay quiet and not seek personal gain from the silent work they are charged with carrying out.  

The original founder of SEAL Team Six, Richard Marcinko, was considered by many to be an egotistical self-promoter, who wrote books about his exploits and did public speaking tours, and who was eventually dismissed.  Based on the example he set, though, others in the organization have since taken the same route, as has been seen in the years since the Bin Laden action, where several veterans of the raid have written “tell all” books, and tried to take credit from each other for firing the shots that killed Bin Laden.

Cole does a thorough analysis too of what the “Forever Wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq have done to the SEALS generally, and particularly to SEAL Team Six, in forcing them to move from being a small, secret elite force used for occasional special missions, to being deployed on a nightly basis for years on end as just another set of skilled killers in the “War or Terror”.  He describes the negative effects on the fighters in terms of PTSD, ruined marriages and family lives, and other familiar symptoms of these wars’ combatants, but also on how some of the SEALs eventually decided to leave the team, and then tried to monetize their special operations skills and experiences by going public about their exploits.

I recently reviewed Ryan Busse’s autobiography Gunfight, in which he describes how in the first decade of the 2000s, the NRA began to lionize elite fighters from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to use them to promote military-style weapons, equipment and combat apparel at NRA Conventions and in the gun industry’s media promotions.  I realized when reading the descriptions in Cole's book of how some of the self-promoting SEALs became “rock stars” of the NRA that they were undoubtedly some of the same people that Busse had been describing.  

We are probably seeing some unintended after-effects of this glamorization of the trappings of elite special operators in the spectacle of young men arming themselves with AR-15s, and wearing camo apparel and body armor to attack their local children’s school or grocery store, as well as in the heavily armed presence and paramilitary appearance of young male political protestors at rallies in the past several years.

Cole is clear in pointing out that most of the men (and they are almost all still men) in the SEALs and other special operations groups are dedicated, brave and highly-skilled American patriots, who routinely go above and beyond the call of duty to do what the country asks of them.  His point, though, is that the very code of the SEAL Team Six organization, and its tendency to keep secrets about problems and individual malfeasance within the group, creates a dangerous opportunity for operational mistakes and corruption to remain unexposed and unchallenged within the team, and by the political leadership of the nation and the public, and thus to continue.

This is a valuable expose’ about serious problems within one of our most storied and revered military units.  Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022). Theatrical release.

For the second time, the producers of the vastly popular Downton Abbey British TV series, about an aristocratic English family living in an old country mansion with their downstairs servant crew, have extended the story line of the show with a theatrical movie featuring all the same characters, actors and of course the glamorous old mansion where almost all the action takes place.  I had the good fortune to see it a couple of weeks ago on vacation, my first trip back into a public theater since the pandemic began, and in the longest continuously operating theater in the country!  It was really fun to be back in a movie theater again.

The first Downton Abbey movie, released in 2019, was set in the mid-1920s, and explored all the tensions and excitement upstairs and downstairs caused by a weekend visit by the king and queen of England (and their extensive staff, of course) to Downton Abbey.  It was well-received by the large world of Downton Abbey fans, but in fact it didn’t have a great deal of dramatic tension – nothing really important was at stake for any of the characters, as I recall.  For fans, though, it was just fun to see all the familiar, beloved characters back again, being together and doing what they do in their glorious old house.

This second outing makes an attempt to get back to more of the sort of intrigue, uncertainty and jockeying for position within the family and the household staff that drove the plot of the TV show.  The end of the 1920s is approaching, the world is changing, and suddenly it turns out that Violet (Maggie Smith), the ailing grand dame of the family, has inherited an exotic villa in Italy from a long-ago suitor, which she intends to pass on to one of her grandchildren.

While some of the family and staff head off to meet the prior owners of the villa, and try to piece together what long-ago romantic events (and possible scandal) caused this unexpected gift, the rest of the family and staff are at home, hosting a film crew that is making a silent movie in the grand old house, just as the industry is starting the transition to “talkies”.

There’s a lot going on in the family and the larger world outside, and it’s all the usual fun and surprises in the relatively safe world of the extended Crawley family.  Recommended.