Book Review: The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb (2019). Sam Kean.

This history book is an account of the small number of scientists, OSS (U.S. Office of Strategic Services) and SOE (British Special Operations Executive) members, political and military figures and oddballs who worked to prevent Hitler and the Germans from developing atomic weapons in World War II.

It includes the story of Mel Berg, a well-known Major League Baseball figure and Red Sox catcher (and a secret OSS agent), some of whose exploits, including an attempted assassination of the German physicist Werner Heisenberg in Switzerland were also the subject of a recent very good spy movie, The Catcher Was a Spy (2018).

Numerous other famous and less well-known figures also played a part in the narrative, and the efforts to deny the Nazis the atomic bomb. This was an intriguing look down another of the endless little byways of the World War II story. Recommended.

From Wayne: Blog News and Brand New Driver Song Release.

As most readers know, The Memory Cache blog is my personal platform for sharing my writing, ideas, useful information and reviews with a reading audience.

Since I launched it back in February, I've been very pleased to see that there does appear to be a small but regular group of people who are coming back regularly to see what's new, and what books, movies and TV shows I've reviewed recently.

I noticed the other day that the site's page view count has gone over 2,500 since I launched it. It's not millions, but it's still gratifying!

Thank you so much for your interest, and please let your friends and family know about the site too, if you think they might enjoy reading it, and using its categorized lists of different types of content to find good books to read, good shows to see, and interesting topics to discover and learn about.

Meanwhile, some readers may not know that the other creative project I started early in the pandemic, as a new hobby, was writing and recording my own original rock, country and folk-influenced songs.

I released my first three singles last year, with music videos, which you can hear on all major music streaming services, and also see on my YouTube channel, which you can find by clicking on the link to my music under the Favorite Links heading on the right side of the page. You can also find my artist social media accounts on both Facebook and Instagram at @wayneparkernotes. Please feel free to follow me there if interested.

In that vein, I'm delighted to announce the release today of my latest song, Brand New Driver, which is now available or arriving soon at all major music streaming services, as well as on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Check it out! And I do hope you enjoy it.

Have a great day, and rock on!

Book Review: In the Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown (2018). Nathaniel Philbrick.

Another excellent popular American history work by Philbrick, this book covers the last three years of the American Revolution, focusing on the battle for the South during that period, and Washington's growing understanding of the need for naval power to counter the Royal Navy's control of the American coast.

Philbrick documents Washington's ongoing efforts to get the French to commit a large naval force to the war, which caused him endless frustrations and delays, but ultimately led to the Battle of the Chesapeake between British and French fleets.

Philbrick portrays this sea battle, where the French navy forced the British fleet to escape to the north to refit and regroup, as the decisive development that set up the American victory at Yorktown, by cutting off Lord Cornwallis's forces from resupply or escape by sea. 

It's a lively read, and a good military and political analysis of this less well-known phase of the Revolution. Recommended.

Book Review: Children Who Remember Previous Lives (2001). Ian Stevenson.

Some years ago I heard about the work of a University of Virginia Medical School psychiatrist, Dr. Jim B. Tucker, who has spent his long academic career (up to the present) researching thousands of cases of the phenomenon of very young children who claim to remember details of previous lives, which has been reported in societies around the world. I then read two earlier books he had written, recently combined into one, Before: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives (2021), which I reviewed here. From this I learned that Dr. Tucker is almost certainly the world’s current leading academic authority on this unusual phenomenon.

However, as I learned from Dr. Tucker’s books, an earlier researcher, Dr. Ian Stevenson, was actually the original study founder, and Dr. Tucker’s predecessor, mentor and academic advisor in the long-running University of Virginia research study of children with previous life memories, which has now been underway continuously for the past fifty years.

In Dr. Stevenson’s book, which is remarkably dry, clinical and scientific for a topic which you might expect to be eerie, sensational and speculative, he presents an intellectual defense and report on his life’s work, his approaches to compiling and analyzing reports, and the rigorous research and interviewing methodologies he devised early on, with which the study has been conducted.

He begins by describing how the study came into being. He lists all the countries around the world where he and his colleagues have collected reports, and discusses cultural factors and differences between sets of reports from different countries. He delves into many aspects of solved and unsolved cases (a solved case is one where the deceased person whose memories the child claims to have is identified, so that the facts claimed by the child can be compared to official documents, and usually the memories of families and friends of the deceased).

Stevenson reviews the frequency and characteristics of many of the common elements of reports, such as: average time between lives in reports from different cultures, familial connections between current and reported previous lives, birthmarks coinciding with circumstances of death of reported previous lives (such as birthmarks or deformities in the same place on the child’s body as the site of wounds on the deceased), frequency and behavioral effects of sex change between lives, presence of vivid “announcing dreams” to pregnant mothers of children who subsequently report memories of a past life, and many other commonly-occurring features of cases.

Stevenson also evaluates alternative explanations to reincarnation in these cases, the effects of widespread cultural belief or disbelief in reincarnation on the frequency of reporting and the characteristics of reports taken from different parts of the world, and considers philosophical and religious implications of differing proposed explanations relative to the major world religions.

Most importantly, he makes it clear that as a scientist, he doesn’t claim to know whether this phenomenon and his study of it “proves” reincarnation. But he does suggest based on exhaustively documented reports from thousands of case histories, and the fact that young children don’t have the experiential knowledge or the access to information to make up the detailed, very specific sets of facts they frequently recount (which are often verified in solved cases), that reincarnation may provide the least convoluted and perhaps most likely explanation to fit the inexplicable nature of this phenomenon.

This book is an important foundation for understanding the study of children who remember past lives, by the leading and original scientist in this unusual research field. It can be heavy going in parts, because of Stevenson’s dry, dispassionate and unsensational writing style, but that in fact lends to its credibility. Recommended.

Miss Fisher's Mysteries. Seasons 1-3 (2012-2015). Amazon Prime (Acorn).

Although this popular Australian mystery series had an amateurish feel to it (or perhaps it was just done that way to deliberately mimic a much earlier movie-era style), it nevertheless featured the oddly charming if improbable story of an heiress and World War I survivor who returns from Europe to Melbourne in the 1920s, and decides to help the local constabulary solve murders and other crimes.

The wealthy Miss Phryne Fisher (played by Essie Davis) is beautiful, uninhibited and sexually liberated, a stylish dresser, a pilot, a horseback rider, a race car driver, an actress, a femme fatale, a mentor to young girls, an inspired crime-solver, and a heroine who's always ready with her signature gold-plated snub-nose revolver whenever things get dangerous. Is there anything she can't or won’t do, for the sheer thrill of it, while solving the mystery and catching the criminal?

It was corny and old-fashioned, but fun. I also saw the movie, Miss Fisher & the Crypt of Tears, released in 2020, which was essentially more of the same. Recommended.

Book Review: Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine (2016). Antonio Garcia Martinez.

Chaos Monkeys is a gossipy but amusing personal account of life in the fast lane of post-2008 crash Wall Street investment firms, Silicon Valley startups, and Facebook, by a young man who experienced it, and was there in the middle of it as it was all taking off. It's cynical, funny and outrageous, with very good insight and commentary on how things really work in the high-stakes worlds of big money and venture capital.

It also contains the clearest descriptions that I have ever read of how online real-time advertising markets work in the virtual world of Facebook, Google, Twitter and others. These mechanisms and algorithms, which daily supply all those eerily relevant and timely ads on your smartphone, as you're browsing some seemingly unrelated app, are technologically impressive, at the same time they are truly disturbing and annoying on the level of the invasions of our personal privacy which are required to make them work.

Martinez's descriptions of how these uncanny and often creepy systems and markets were developed, and how they function, is crucial reading for anyone who wants to understand the strange social media and internet world all around us, which most of us now take for granted (although it shocked me today to recall that the iPhone and its ubiquitous smartphone descendants have only been around for about 15 years). Recommended.

Editorial: On Current Events, and Today's Abortion Rights Decision.

Hello, dear readers. Here on The Memory Cache blog, it’s once again Rock and Roll Friday, the fourth Friday of each month, where I try to post several reviews of books I’ve read and shows I’ve seen that relate to popular music and the music industry. In keeping with this tradition, I have posted a book review of Dave Grohl’s book The Storyteller, and the fascinating documentary interviews of Paul McCartney called McCartney 3,2,1. After all, the show must go on, and we need to keep trying to find joy in our lives, and things to celebrate and enjoy.

But it’s hard to feel celebratory in the wake of this morning’s expected but disastrous Supreme Court decision reversing Roe vs. Wade, and striking down abortion rights for women across much of this country. There is particularly ominous language in Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion, which states clearly that today’s decision, and its underlying legal theory, are laying the basis to roll back many other personal rights of privacy, and human rights, that we have enjoyed and come to depend upon for the past half century. Same sex marriage? Contraception? Interracial marriage? All of these rights and others we take for granted now hang by a thread.

At the same time, we have so many other deeply concerning issues confronting us. Of course, there is the lingering trauma and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic which has caused such havoc to our lives and the world for the past two+ years. There is the ongoing struggle over reasonable gun control measures, and the shock of the constant string of mass casualty shootings, and daily gun fatalities in neighborhoods across the country. There are the hearings in Congress that are revealing the full extent of the attempts to overthrow our democratic system of government in 2020 that led to the January 6th uprisings. There is the danger that these subversive strategies are ongoing, and are now aimed at completing successfully this fall, and in the 2024 election, the insurrection that failed the last time. There is the dangerous and destructive war in Ukraine. And then there is the inflationary moment in the economy, which hits many of us so deeply in our personal finances, and our everyday standard of living.

Behind all of these unending issues and worries sits the most catastrophic looming crisis of all: the climate change which is rapidly destabilizing the planetary environment upon which we all depend for our survival and prosperity. I fear the urgency of trying to solve this confoundingly difficult global problem is increasingly being lost in the noise about all the other more immediate and localized crises that hit the headlines every day.

I believe most of us are trying in some way to figure out what we can do to help. I wonder that too. I know voting for responsible people, and doing what we can to support good people in public service who are trying to fix things and make them better, can go some ways. Standing up to authoritarians who would undermine our democratic system is going to become increasingly necessary and urgent in the days ahead. We will all need to get more involved to save ourselves and the world we want to live in.

For myself, I intend to keep using this blog to bring useful information to your attention. Of course, some of it will be just for fun, and to help keep us sane, but as much as possible, I will be highlighting books and shows that call out problems, identify solutions, explain what’s going on, and fight injustice. I hope you’ll continue to come by the site, and see what’s new, and perhaps it can help you be informed and provide tools for understanding your own situation as it develops, and doing what you can to respond constructively to events as they unfold.

Best wishes to you and yours, and try to stay positive. It looks like a bumpy road up ahead.

TV Review: McCartney 3,2,1 (Season 1, 2021). Hulu.

I recently had the opportunity to watch a marvelously understated little documentary mini-series on Hulu called McCartney 3,2,1. The “McCartney” in the title refers to Sir Paul McCartney, one of the two surviving Beatles, Wings bandleader, genius songwriter (with and without John Lennon) and legendary solo artist throughout the past fifty years of rock music history.

The documentary itself is incredibly spare in action, setting and appearance. It was shot in black and white, mostly in a simple music studio with a mixing board and not much else, and features nothing more than two people talking for the entire six sessions of the mini-series. One of them is McCartney, as he is now, the elder statesman and extraordinary maestro of the rock and roll music world that he and his band-mates in the Beatles played such a profound role in creating.

The other person is the interviewer, Rick Rubin. Many readers may never have heard of him, but for popular music historians and enthusiasts (present company included), he is also a legendary figure, for Rubin has produced best-selling records for and by many of the top stars of rock, country and hip-hop. He is a brilliant sound engineer, with a deep appreciation for the artists, studios, recording history, sonic qualities and music trends which have shaped popular music over the past 50 years, many times with his hands at the controls of the mixing boards during the recording sessions.

Rubin is the perfect interviewer to ask McCartney fascinating and in-depth questions about how some of the greatest Beatles’ songs and albums were created. He has a warmth and sense of humor which draws McCartney out, leading to fascinating personal anecdotes, and so many surprising stories about how iconic sounds in different Beatle songs came into being.

The two of them are also aided in this exploratory process by the fact that Rubin has some of the Beatle's multi-track song recordings loaded into the mixing board, so he can actually play and separate out the sounds in particular song mixes, and then talk with McCartney about how and why things were done as they were.

There are also plenty of personal reminiscences from McCartney about the Beatles’ experiences and influences at different stages of their years together, and their relationships within the band, especially his close personal and creative connection with John Lennon.

This may not be fascinating to people who aren’t Beatles fans, and particularly not if they also don’t know or care anything about the creative process by which original music is made. But for anyone who loves the Beatles and their music, and wonders how on earth they were able to write and record so many different kinds of timeless songs in a few short years, this is all very revealing, and it's an amusing, animated conversation between two old pros that we are privileged to see and hear. Highly recommended.