TV Review: Virgin River, Seasons 1-3. Netflix.

This popular series was initially a promising discovery on Netflix. We saw Season 1, which was released on Netflix in 2019, early in 2020, and then saw Season 2 when it was released late in the same year. This series is based on a book series of the same name by Robyn Carr.

The premise for the show is that Mel Monroe, an attractive youngish nurse practitioner and midwife from Los Angeles with a tragic personal backstory (played appealingly by Alexandra Breckenridge), takes a one-year job in a remote northern California town, working with a curmudgeonly 72-year old doctor who has the only medical practice in town.

This doesn't turn out to be an easy adjustment for anyone, but in the course of her trying to fit into the rural community, we slowly find out a lot about her sad recent history, and why she came to Virgin River, as well as more about the assortment of various rural characters she encounters, works with, cares for and falls in love with. It was a very watchable and likeable “fish out of water” show for the first couple of seasons.

I found by the third season, though, that I had become deeply tired of it. The plot seemed increasingly outlandish, many of the characters’ behaviors and choices were overly-dramatic, and the plot situations thought up by the show’s writers seemed to be geared toward trying ever more desperately to drum up some excitement and emotional impact for viewers by creating a story where there really wasn’t any left.

In other words, it had turned into a true prime-time soap opera. At that point, I stopped watching it, although I understand that Netflix has agreed to future seasons 4 (dropping later this month) and 5 (sometime next year?), so I assume plenty of fans must still be enjoying it.

Based on that, I would cautiously recommend it, but only until you reach the point in the series where it starts to exceed your personal “jumping the shark” tolerance, and you've lost the ability to suspend disbelief about the increasingly ridiculous plot developments, and visceral dislike for at least some of the major characters you're presumably supposed to like and care about.

To me, it’s a particularly good example of the frequent situation where show producers should recognize after a few seasons (but often don’t) that they’ve mined a vein until it ran out, and it’s time to close the mine, before the whole thing collapses under its own weight.

Book Review: Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime (2017). Ben Blum.

Ranger Games is another take on the by-now familiar elite special operations training story, but this one turns strange in a big hurry, as it morphs from an account of the determination of a dedicated young soldier to succeed and achieve in one of the Army’s most challenging combat organizations, into a true crime story about “all-American” young men whose lives go off the rails under the pressure of a grueling training program and their imminent deployment to a deadly war zone. 

In the process of telling this baffling story of a young soldier and his world, it explores many of the difficult and dark psychological and social forces at play in the U.S. military during the height of the long-lasting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The subject of this book is the author's cousin, a seemingly normal American boy, a nice kid from a middle-class home with a lifelong dream of becoming a soldier, who completes his training, and becomes a newly minted Army Ranger, but then incomprehensibly ends up as the getaway driver in a bank robbery in Tacoma shortly before his scheduled first deployment to Iraq.

The author is trying to piece together an explanation for what really happened, from the many details provided by the participants in the robbery, their families, Army soldiers and all the friends and associates around his cousin.

It’s gripping, and Rashomon-like as he peels back layers of truth, family mythology, lies, mental illness, manipulation, subjective interpretations and general bizarreness in the course of the unfolding story. Recommended.

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.