Book Review: Autumn of the Black Snake: George Washington, Mad Anthony Wayne, and the Invasion that Opened the West (2018). William Hogeland.

This is a dense, very well-written history of the early days of American western expansion, and the immediate post-revolutionary war era, particularly its Indian politics and the hostilities between the natives and the white settlers who were moving into the western territories.  

The book reveals and documents the fact that many of our Founding Fathers (especially George Washington) were major land speculators, who also did want a national army, as opposed to many of the "no standing army!" militia supporters who were so vocal during the aftermath of the revolutionary war, in the period when the nature of the United States and its form of government were being negotiated.  

Hogeland uses this background information to provide insight on some of the personal motivations that may have influenced Washington's political decisions and actions with respect to settlement of the western frontier lands, and the new government's relations with the native people and tribes.

As Hogeland describes, Washington used his political skills and influence to have his newly approved national army deal with an immediate Indian war crisis on the western frontier. To accomplish this, he appointed the revolutionary war hero “Mad Anthony” Wayne as the army's founding general, with his prime directive being to take care of the problem with the tribes who were blocking westward expansion.

General Wayne, coming off a disastrous and humiliating period in his post-revolutionary war personal life, proved to be brilliant in his assigned role, and with his leadership and organizing skills, a standing U.S. Army was created, the war was won, and the western land-grab began. Much of the book describes the people, places and events involved as this process played out in the late eighteenth century, during the early years of the new nation.

This is a fascinating and complex story of a short period in American history most of us have never heard or thought much about, but which was a pivotal time in shaping the future of the United States, its territorial expansion across the North American continent, and the beginnings of the U.S. Army, which has continued to play such an important role here and in other parts of the world ever since. Recommended.

Book Review: Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (2017). Nancy MacLean.

I previously reviewed Dark Money, Jane Mayer’s essential study on the long-term plans, motivations and activities of the Koch brothers and their circle of other right wing billionaire families (especially the Mercer and deVos families), and their efforts to use their vast wealth to undermine the foundations of American democracy, in the interests of ridding themselves of governmental regulations and any obligation to help provide for the less wealthy and fortunate.

I consider Dark Money to be one of the most revealing books on contemporary American politics ever written. I would encourage everyone to read it, in order to understand much of why our country’s politics and our common commitment to democracy seem to have unwound before our eyes in recent years.

Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains is a vital case study of the broader phenomenon which Mayer documented so thoroughly. It is a chilling book that documents the life of an influential right-wing academic, whose entire career provides a clear example of the radical right billionaires' use of self-financed academic influence operations over many decades to try to develop, justify and popularize otherwise deeply unpopular ideas, and promote political and economic opinion that supports their business and financial interests rather than those of the general public.

It provides abundant documentation from the archives of this major economic theorist of the libertarian right in the late 20th century, James Buchanan, of a multi-generational effort and plan to destroy American democracy, in favor of "liberty" for the super-wealthy at the expense of everyone else, or in other words, plutocracy.

It was possible to tell this story, because the author gained access to Buchanan’s files and notes spanning a half-century of his career, including correspondence, academic papers and other types of private documents, showing how these extreme right-wing political influence operations were planned and carried out, particularly within and supported by conservative and libertarian academics, and certain sympathetic universities and economics departments that were well supported and rewarded financially for their efforts.

This is a notable and important book about the roots of American radical right movements, their academic thought and political organizing over the past fifty years, and the money and individuals who brought it all to us and to our political system. Recommended.

TV Review: Anatomy of a Scandal (2022). Netflix.

This is a riveting political and sexual drama about a “perfect” upper class British marriage of two Oxford graduates (played by Sienna Miller and Rupert Friend) that slowly comes apart under the pressure of a cheating scandal involving the husband, a popular and rising Tory minister in the British government.

As the minister’s affair first hits the tabloids, it looks like the usual guilty politician's playbook unfolding, with sad and "honest" confessions to the wife, public apologies, and professional PR assistance in trying to ride out the rough parts and get back to business as usual. That strategy all starts to come unglued, though, when the young paramour and minister's aide brings rape charges against the minister, revolving around whether she had given consent to a post-affair sexual encounter.

Michelle Dockery stars as the prosecutor who brings the rape case against the minister, with a hidden agenda and secrets of her own. Throughout the unfolding story, new issues and mysteries keep appearing about other dark personal secrets in the lives of the minister and his wife, dating back to their shared Oxford days, and the social activities of the husband and his close friend, who is now the Prime Minister, when they were both members of a campus club of rich bad boys called “the Libertines”. 

This excellent mini-series combines several hidden crimes and mystery plots, a fine legal courtroom drama, a story of a seemingly happy marriage under the pressure of cheating and betrayals, a familiar portrayal of the extent to which political power, privilege and wealth can protect people from the consequences of their crimes and bad acts, and a thought-provoking exploration of the difficulties of identifying and proving consent to sex on the part of the woman, in the context of ongoing sexual relationships and unplanned moments of passion. Highly recommended.

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.