Book Review: Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (2014). Peter Pomerantsev.

A perfect companion piece to Red Notice by Bill Browder and The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder (both previously reviewed here), this book was written by a western filmmaker and journalist, based on his ten years in Russia during the early post-Soviet era.

Pomerantsev set out as a young film maker and journalist in the exciting years of Russia in transition in the early post-Soviet 2000s, but learned (as did Bill Browder) that he was trying to operate based on assumptions about the existence of western-style rules and open values in a society where the lessons of a century of totalitarian rule, and hundreds of years of Russian autocracy, could not be so easily overlooked or overcome.

He describes the ways in which Putin and the oligarchs came to power, by using state power and the courts to steal and centralize assets, after the Soviet collapse caused the sell-off of state businesses. He vividly depicts the way the early "gangster" behaviors and style of tough young men in Moscow in the 1990s gave way to the power of the oligarchs; the toll taken on the beautiful young women trying to survive in a predatory macho environment utterly controlled by a new class of strong men; and other social aberrations, such as the widespread rise of cults and conspiracy theories, all supported by and promoted through Putin’s state control of the news media.

A chilling social history of contemporary Russia, and a shocking wake-up call to those of us who were not paying attention to the dissolution of the dream of a more open and democratic Russia in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, and the danger posed by the rise of Vladimir Putin as a new autocrat of the Russian nation. Recommended.

Book Review: Varina (2018). Charles Frazier.

This is a beautifully written, haunting novel about Varina Davis, the much-younger wife of Jefferson Davis, and First Lady of the Confederacy, by the noted author of another Civil War epic and award-winning novel, Cold Mountain (1997) (which was also made into an outstanding movie of the same name in 2003 starring Nicole Kidman, Jude Law and Renee Zellweger).

Varina is written in a non-sequential fashion, jumping from her youth and adolescent years, to the story of how she ended up married to Davis, with important moments, insights and experiences she had from before, during and after the Civil War, and then from episodes and periods later in her life.

In the story, we gain a sense of a young woman who made understandable choices out of necessity early in life that unexpectedly took her to a position of power and influence in a revolutionary moment, yet who was sensitive enough to realize along the way, and in the aftermath, the profound injuries and injustices of the course and the cause she’d chosen, and to regret her complicity in them.

I don’t know if this fictional portrayal of her character is fully accurate to the life and person of the real Varina Davis, but in Frazier’s telling, we get a very three dimensional portrayal of an intelligent woman trying to find her way through a life that was (for a time) exceptionally privileged, yet achieved at the expense of the suffering of so many others. 

She becomes increasingly aware of that suffering through the events and hardships she experiences as the southern rebellion collapses, and she has to find ways to go on with her life as a wife, mother and then widow, as well as a venerated celebrity in the South for her role in a failed cause that was considered traitorous and despicable by most of the rest of American society, and perhaps as well by her own conscience.   

Another interesting aspect of the story is Frazier's exploration of the extent to which Varina was automatically held responsible by many for the decisions and actions of her husband and the other powerful Confederate men around him, but on some levels had little agency in those decisions and their consequences, as a woman in 1860s American society.

I found it a gripping human story, powerfully told, despite the fact of her inherently unsympathetic supporting role in history as wife and First Lady at the center of the moral calamity that was the Confederacy. Recommended.

TV Review: The Good Lord Bird. (2020). Showtime.

Based on the recent novel by James McBride, previously reviewed here, Ethan Hawke stars in this Showtime mini-series as the abolitionist John Brown, as seen through the eyes of a young freed slave boy in a dress (played by Hubert Point-Du Jour), who's been mistaken by Brown for a girl.

It's a compelling performance in many ways -- Hawke vividly portrays a complex, driven man, who on the one hand is buffoonish and often ridiculous in his religious fanaticism and his conviction in the odds of success for his divine mission, but who also is shown to care deeply and passionately for his family, his religion and the enslaved people he hopes to save.

As with the book, having the story told through the voice of the young boy, as he tries to make sense of John Brown's astonishing actions and his own precarious, evolving situation, adds both humor and a much-needed black slave’s perspective to the unfolding drama, and to Brown's crazed yet morally righteous viewpoint and utterances. Recommended.

Book Review: A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution (2017). Jennifer A. Doudna & Samuel Sternberg.

This is a personal account by one of the principal inventors of the CRISPR gene editing technology of how she created these astonishing tools for manipulating the underlying chemical structures and design of life forms, with reflections on the ethical and political issues, and technological potential of these new tools for humans to engineer and alter not only nature, but our own inheritable traits as human beings.

It covers some of the same territory with respect to genetic engineering and humanity's future as Bill McKibben does in Falter (previously reviewed here), but from a perhaps more optimistic perspective.

Since this book first appeared, there is now a new version or off-shoot of CRISPR technology which provides far more advanced and specifically targeted gene editing (think character-level search and replace) than the first generation CRISPR tools did, a development which will only increase and accelerate the risks and possibilities explored in this book.

The author, Jennifer Doudna, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for her work. She is now also the subject of a lengthy biography by the noted biographer Walter Isaacson, called The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing and The Future of the Human Race (2021).

A Crack in Creation, though, allows this brilliant chemist and researcher to explain her life and her groundbreaking work in her own way, and to share her own thoughts on the ethics of the technology she has helped to invent, and what it all means for the future of humanity. Recommended.

TV Review: The Queen's Gambit (2020). Netflix.

This series we enjoyed might not need much introduction, since the few people in the U.S.A. who haven't seen it have at least heard plenty about it by now -- it was one of the most acclaimed TV shows of 2020.

The main character, Beth Harmon, is a sad, pathetic orphan child from a bad home (played by Annabeth Kelly as a 5-year old, and then Isla Johnston as a pre-teen), who ends up learning to play chess from the maintenance man in the orphanage. While there, she also picks up a wicked drug and alcohol problem.

The series then shows her meteoric rise to the top of the pro chess world, due to her mental brilliance and amazing recall abilities, along with her struggles to succeed under the burden of her psychological and dependency issues. As the character moves into her teenage years and young adulthood, the role is taken over and played brilliantly by Anya Taylor-Joy. 

Along the way, there are a number of important themes being explored through Beth's unusual experiences, including the loneliness of the top-level competitive chess player (or perhaps any type of high-achieving superstar), the struggle of a young woman to succeed and win in a completely male-dominated activity, and the toll and interrelationships between traumatic life experience, mental illness and substance abuse.

This series has first-rate acting, scripting and plot, with what were apparently accurately staged versions of high-level competitive chess matches. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump (2019). Andrew McCabe.

The author, a former acting director of the FBI and deputy director, who worked with and then succeeded James Comey, combines a biography of his life and career with the FBI from the 1990s to the present, where he worked as an agent on Russian crime groups, the 9/11 aftermath, Al Qaeda and ISIS terrorism, the Boston Marathon Bombing and other top threats to the USA, with an in-depth account of his hair-raising and discouraging encounters with Donald Trump and his top administration officials.

McCabe, who was unceremoniously fired by Trump the day before completing the twenty years of service that would have entitled him to a federal pension, in an act of vindictiveness and spite that was almost unbelievable, comes off as a dedicated and idealistic public servant with deep insight into many of the major issues in federal law enforcement and national security we have faced for the past three decades.

He later settled a wrongful termination suit against the federal government, in which he was exonerated of wrongdoing, restored to good standing and granted retirement with his full 20-year pension benefits, but only after a new president and new Justice Department leadership were in place.

This week, McCabe is back in the news, on the basis of a New York Times report confirming that both he and James Comey were the targets of an extreme form of IRS tax audit in the years immediately following their dismissals by Trump. An internal IRS audit by the inspector general has been announced, to discover whether they may have been targeted as another form of revenge for their refusal to cooperate with Trump's attempts to suppress investigations of his 2016 campaign and its relationship with the Russians.  

McCabe's descriptions of several conversations he had with the Bully in Chief are particularly revealing and disturbing, although not that unusual or surprising given the volumes of information now available about the mob-boss culture and pervasive corruption endemic to the Trump White House. Recommended.

Book Review: American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (2019). Diana Walsh Pasulka.

I heard about this book a couple of years ago, when Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist and podcaster, interviewed the author on his podcast, The Ezra Klein Show.

Dr. Pasulka is a PhD Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of North Carolina, who stumbled into the world of UFO believers and researchers when she realized that there were extensive Biblical and historical references in her own Vatican archives research to stories of miracles going back to the early Middle Ages, which, if stripped of the belief system of whatever religious perspective was at play in these accounts, seemed remarkably similar to modern-day UFO sightings.

This led her to begin to explore modern UFO believers and their claims, and to take their stories more seriously as real physical or psychological phenomena which should be studied scientifically as well as philosophically. She was also fascinated with new forms of religious belief and experience in the age of “miraculous” technologies, such as we’ve seen since the mid-20th century.

In the process of researching and investigating the history of the modern UFO era, she discovered for herself (before the New York Times revealed it to the world in 2017) that there were many very serious scientists, government officials and wealthy tech individuals pursuing UFO research, but that until recently they almost uniformly refused to admit it publicly, for fear of being ridiculed or undermining the more conventional parts of their careers.

American Cosmic is somewhat unique among UFO books, in that it is a scholarly and philosophical exploration of UFOs and UFO literature in the context of religious experiences going back to ancient times, and forward into our modern technological era. It makes for an interesting and thought-provoking read on this puzzling phenomenon. Recommended.

Book Review: Sea Stories: My Life in Special Operations (2019). Admiral William McRaven.

This is the autobiographical account of a distinguished career as a Navy SEAL and U.S. special operations warrior by probably the longest-serving and most famous recent SEAL of them all.

McRaven rose to the top of the U.S. special operations world in the post-9/11 era, in the course of which he was there and in charge of some of the U.S. military's most famous operations, including the capture of Saddam Hussein, the rescue of Captain Phillips (of the Maersk Alabama cargo ship) from Somali pirates, and the killing of Osama Bin Laden. He also participated in and led literally thousands of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Admiral McRaven is a good story-teller with a career full of participation in and command of complex, difficult special operations events. As an increasingly high-ranking officer, focused on issues of team formation and organizational leadership rather than individual martial prowess and exploits, he brings a very different and welcome perspective to the story of the SEALs and the larger special operations community of the U.S. military.

I recently reviewed Code Over Country by Matthew Cole, which delved into the significant problems that developed within SEAL Team Six and its veterans over the past three decades, particularly its tendency to value loyalty to the unit commander and the team above its members' larger duty to the country, and the extent to which some of the veterans of this unit both covered up mistakes, and also began to use their wartime experiences for self-promotion and self-aggrandizement after their retirements.

Admiral McRaven was specifically identified in that book as someone who had stood in opposition to these negative tendencies as they were developing within SEAL Team Six, so it is interesting and enlightening to hear his own account and perspective on his entire career, and the challenges and issues he identified and faced in the SEALs and the special operations community during his many years of service. Recommended.