TV Reviews: Never Have I Ever, Seasons 1-3, Netflix, and The Summer I Turned Pretty (2022), Amazon Studios.

You may have noticed that it's been a little slow the last week here at The Memory Cache blog. There's a reason for that (well, several reasons), but the main one is that I've been putting most of my creative time and energy into my music lately. That happens sometimes! There are only so many hours in the day, have you noticed?  The good news though is that I will be releasing several new singles (with videos) in the very near future. I'll have more news about that soon.

In the meantime, today I thought I'd do short reviews of two lightweight but entertaining series with similar themes and scenarios, one each from Netflix and Amazon Studios.

Netflix's offering, Never Have I Ever, is now in its third season. The story is centered on a brilliant but socially insecure teenage girl, Devi Vishwakumar (played charmingly by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan). 

Devi is the daughter of a successful East Indian immigrant family in California. She is trying to figure out high school, romance and sex, and how to be popular and socially successful in a typical American school, while surrounded at home with all the influences, expectations and strict rules for girls of her family's traditional Indian culture. 

But that's not quite all of it. At the same time she's dealing with all her own teenage insecurities, family problems, new desires and her drive to succeed in school and with her friends, she's also trying to navigate the psychological devastation of her father's unexpected recent death, and the void it's left in her life, as well as that of her physician mother.  

With all that apparent heaviness, it might seem that this show might be depressing or serious, but in fact, it's anything but that. This is definitely intended as a situational comedy. It depicts the real and common teenage adjustment problems of bright girls from immigrant families in their teenage years, but with a soft touch, and plenty of amusing humor and sensitivity.  The episodes are only a half hour each, so it's easy light entertainment. Recommended.

Amazon's series The Summer I Turned Pretty (2022), tells the story of Belly (real name Isabella Chung, played by Lola Tung), an Asian-American girl who returns at age 15 (going on 16) with her mother and older brother to the lovely summer home of a wealthy white family with whom they have been sharing summer vacations since Belly's early childhood. 

The backstory on this "melded family" is that the two mothers have been best friends since college, and both are now having marital issues with their respective husbands. More important to Belly, though, is that for the first time, she is seeing her two "older brothers" in the other family with a romantic eye, at the same time they are noticing her as a blossoming young woman instead of just a sort of fondly regarded kid sister or cousin.  

This sets up a love triangle situation (fairly innocent in terms of any actual behavior other than kissing) which somewhat taxed my credulity, since most kids I have known who grew up in these kinds of close family/friend situations tend to look elsewhere for romance. But still, I'll concede it's not impossible.

Along with the main romantic story line of Belly and the two brothers in the other family, there are a number of other family and young adult challenges, including how the children deal with their parents' breakups, the differences in outlook between the middle class Asian family and their rich friends (and their community), an adult extra-marital affair or two in the mix, Belly's involvement in an upper class social "coming out" process at the behest of her mother's friend, and the threat of a potentially fatal disease to one of the parents, with its emotional impacts on the family members.  In other words, there is plenty of grist for the drama mill.

This 7-part series, which apparently has been renewed for a second season, is more earnest and less comedic than Never Have I Ever, but still tells a watchable story of families and their teenagers' early strivings and romantic longings, in the context of friendships that cross both class and racial lines in modern America. It's not serious drama, but it is a reasonable entertainment if you enjoy watching family stories aimed at young adult audiences and situations. Recommended.

Honorable Mentions: Democracy, Authoritarianism, and American Politics.

Today I'm doing another of my "honorable mentions" posts, featuring another five good books I've read that focus on similar or related topics. Today's list includes a sampling of the best of the political science and history books related to the threats to democracy posed by autocratic authoritarian movements, including that of the Republican Party under Donald Trump.

 

Book Review: How Democracy Dies (2018). Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt.

An excellent political science book analyzing how democracy is being and has been eroded toward autocracy, comparing various scenarios and steps in other countries to what was going on during the Trump era.

This was an early warning that democracy has guardrails, in the form of legal and institutional checks and balances, and norms, and that these were heavily under assault in Trump era America. This theme is certainly far less surprising now than it was when written, but nevertheless it’s an excellent political science exploration of the ways in which democracy can be undermined and ultimately destroyed. Recommended. 

 

Book Review: The Retreat of Western Liberalism (2017). Edward Luce.

Luce provides an eloquent description of the macro-level global economic trends now shaping the world, to the advantage of rising Eastern countries and economies (especially China) and the increasing disadvantage of the West.

He provides a high-level view of why populism, nationalism, protectionism and autocracy are on the rise here and in Europe, as the middle class thins out, fast-growing economies abroad and automation at home threaten jobs and living standards, the gap between rich and poor expands, and a frightened working population in the West is turning to authoritarian solutions over traditional liberal democracy. Recommended.



Book Review: Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020). Anne Applebaum.   

Applebaum is an excellent writer for The Atlantic, who is also an historian and subject matter expert on Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet world and authoritarianism. In this account, she draws in part on her own experiences living and traveling in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe over the past two decades to provide illustrative cases of democracies sliding into illiberal democracy and then authoritarianism.

She uses the case of Poland’s transformation under the Law and Justice Party as her point of departure, then also discusses other recent illiberal democracies and anti-democratic movements, in Poland, Spain and Turkey, as well as Brexit in the UK and the rise of Donald Trump, with his authoritarian Republican brand of politics in the USA.

Applebaum has an interesting background from which to make this critique. Her ideological preferences and associations as a writer and person (as she shares in the book) are definitely on the right end of the political spectrum, but these tendencies don’t appear to act as ideological blinders. As a historian, she is clear-eyed and even-handed in seeing the tendency toward authoritarianism within individuals and societies as being equal opportunity: it can and does arise regardless of the ideological background of the leader and his followers.

A very good account of the recent rise in authoritarian movements, and the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of democracy around the world. Recommended.  

 

Book Review:  A Warning (2019). Anonymous: A Senior Trump White House Official.

The same unknown person (now identified as Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor) who wrote an editorial in The New York Times in 2018 claiming a bunch of good people inside the administration were protecting us from Donald Trump has now written a book in which he tells us what it's like to live inside the insane Trump bubble.

And oh, by the way -- those reassurances in the editorial? It turns out they were wrong (big surprise). The author now believes that no one can keep Trump from trying to do what he wants to do, which is to destroy American democracy and become an autocrat. It is an interesting and by now completely normalized view, but nothing we don't already know.

There are many other insider accounts of the Trump administration and his pathological behavior by now, most of which I’m probably not going to read. There will be even more written. I’m afraid they’ll be writing books, plays and movies about Trump and his bizarre administration far into the future. But this book is a reasonably good representative of the contemporary genre, if you’ve never read one before. Recommended. 

 

Book Review:  The Road to Unfreedom: Russia * Europe * America (2018). Timothy Snyder.

Timothy Snyder, the noted Yale University history professor and a leading expert on modern European history, wrote one of the earliest and most excellent guidebooks to surviving the Trump presidency and preserving democracy. Little more than a pamphlet in size, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons for the Twentieth Century (2017) broke down the experiences of Hitler’s fascism and Stalin’s communism into twenty easily digestible rules and principles of how autocracy develops, and what the signs of its onset are.

In The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder provides a detailed history of recent developments in autocracy, and threats it poses to democracy around the world, focused primarily on the disappointing collapse of democratic efforts in Russia after the demise of the Soviet Union, and the ominous career of Vladimir Putin as Russia's leader.

He uses Putin’s rise as the most important contemporary instance of modern autocracy, especially in Putin’s creation of what Snyder calls “the eternal present” – an information environment where the past is rewritten to support the leader’s preferred beliefs and interests, the present is made unknowable by the careful propagation of conflicting and contradictory narratives and conspiracy theories, and belief in a different future is impossible because of the lack of any mechanism for succession of political control beyond the life of the current leader.

A portion of this book, which was written before the beginning of the Ukraine war in February, also covers elements of Putin’s ongoing plans and attempts to gain and consolidate control over Ukraine during the past decade. It provides valuable insights into why Russia invaded Ukraine, and also some history to explain why Ukraine’s resistance has been so spirited. Recommended.

Book Review: Sea of Tranquility (2022). Emily St. John Mandel.

This is an earnest first attempt at a real science-fiction novel by the author of Station Eleven, which follows a number of ordinary human characters in different earth eras, from the early 20th century to an imagined future a few centuries ahead, where there are human colonies on the moon, and in deep space too.

In addition to those sci-fi story creations and plot premises, she also includes a time travel element, and plays with the contemporary fascination with the possibility of reality being nothing more than an advanced computer simulation. In this book, she imagines a world where that may in fact be the case, but also poses the question of whether that actually matters to the people experiencing that reality.

There’s also a global pandemic in the story, and an author separated from her family, on a book tour at its onset, who may or may not die as a result of the disease. Remember that this story is coming from a popular real author, who had previously written a real novel about a global pandemic (Station Eleven), then had to keep functioning as a professional writer and mother during an actual pandemic. There’s something so familiar sounding about that scenario! A little projection onto her fictional character, perhaps?

As with her other books, Mandel’s strength is in creating believable characters with whom we can empathize, and believable dialogue in unusual or unfamiliar situations. Even though the story suggests themes of the COVID-19 era of the past two years, and our collective experience of it, it is still an entertaining and engaging tale. Recommended.

TV Series Reviews: Dune (2000) & Children of Dune (2003). SyFy Channel (On Blu-ray DVD).

These were two 3-part SyFy Channel TV mini-series versions of Frank Herbert’s Dune stories, made in the early 2000s. They are available on Amazon in a Blu-ray DVD format, so you may have to buy them to watch these shows. I’ve had little luck finding them on any streaming sites, although they may reappear from time to time.

I saw them when the two mini-series first came out, and decided to see them again recently, since I had remembered they were good, and I had been re-reading the books. I thought after watching them again that they held up well to repeat viewing, even all these years later.

Since the first publication of Dune (as a book) in the 1960s, there have been repeated efforts by various Hollywood producers and studios to turn it into a blockbuster movie, most of which have failed to even reach the production phase. This gave rise to the widespread industry belief that the books are unfilmable.

The only full-length feature version that made it to the big screen (until last year's spectacular Dune, Part 1 production) was released to great fanfare in 1984. It was directed by David Lynch, and starred local UW drama grad Kyle McLachlan.

Unfortunately, it was a notorious bust. I still remember waiting eagerly for the release, then sitting in an overheated downtown Seattle theater and fuming when the projector broke in the middle of the show, which proved to be a lackluster and unexciting event even when they did finally manage to get it running again. What a disappointment! It couldn’t hold a candle to the joy and excitement of a Star Wars movie launch from that era.

However, Lynch’s failure didn’t mean that these stories were really unfilmable. Perhaps only Peter Jackson, with his marvelous Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies, has ever taken on a movie-making mega-project based on a widely-loved book series of comparable difficulty and aced it (and it’s interesting to note that the Lord of the Rings trilogy was also for a long time thought to be “unfilmable”, after its own decades-long series of production attempts and failures).

In any event, given the huge sweep of future historical time, the plots and intrigue, strange technologies, vital characters, mysterious organizations, warring cultures and action across the first three Dune books, it was never going to be possible to tell the whole story in one two-hour show. A TV mini-series in retrospect looks like a much more reasonable way to approach a story of this complexity and length.

It’s true that these SyFy channel Dune TV mini-series versions have special effects that are not that impressive by contemporary CGI standards, but the most compelling features of Dune for fans have always been more about the characters and the plots than the visual aspects, at least until the release of the excellent new Dune movie last year, which I previously reviewed. And these SyFy Channel series did do a credible job of presenting the characters and the plots of the first three books, a cinematic feat that has not been matched yet by any other producers or directors.

So while we’re waiting for the big-screen release of Dune, Part 2 in a year or two, these two TV mini-series do convey the essential elements of the first three books (Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune) for enthusiasts who can’t wait, and they do a very respectable job of it if you can find the shows to watch. Recommended.

Book Review: How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World (2014). Steven Johnson.

For those who haven't heard of him, Steven Johnson is probably one of the top science historians writing for popular audiences today. Awhile ago, I reviewed his most recent book Extra Life (2021), his thorough inquiry into causes of the rapid increases in human longevity over the past couple of centuries. It’s the latest in his still-growing list of fascinating works of history about science, technology and innovation, and their roles in the development of modern social life and its conditions.

He has several other good books which I hope to review in the future, but for today I wanted to go back to the first of his books that I read, which is still probably my favorite of his. It’s called How We Got to Now, which might seem to be an absurdly broad and overwhelming topic, if he hadn’t limited it to looking at the outsized impact of a few discoveries and technologies which have had truly profound effects on the way we live, and what we as individuals and societies now have and can do.

As his fans know, Johnson’s strength as a historian of science, particularly evident in this wonderful book, is to notice obvious things hiding in plain sight, the things we are all aware of but rarely stop to consider how important they are, and to then explore them..

He begins with a chapter on glass, for example, that ubiquitous material that humans have made for millennia by melting sand, and even used to create art, windows and useful household objects. In Johnson’s telling, though, glass only began to have a truly revolutionary effect on the human condition when a few amateur experimenters learned how to create lenses with it.

As their experiments led to greater understanding of light and the visible spectrum’s physics, other researchers and hobbyists discovered that a lens could cure many eyesight problems (through the creation of glasses), while allowing scientists to far more effectively see and study both the grand and distant (the planet and the universe, via telescopes), and the very small and near (such as microscopic-sized life forms in the body and the environment). These new tools caused an explosion in our scientific and practical knowledge of the material universe around us, and the bodies we inhabit, over a relatively very short period of historical time.

From there, he explores yet more new inventions which have been made possible through our steady progress in learning how to mold and form glass, including the development of fiberglass and glass-based composite materials; the development of the fiber optics at the center of our global communications networks; the television screen that has so profoundly changed our societies; and the glass vacuum tubes that were prerequisites to the beginnings of radio, television, and computing. And that’s all just in one chapter!

For each such area of vital innovation he describes, he tells the fascinating stories of the people who in many cases stumbled unexpectedly into their discoveries, then shows the ways key information was shared and passed along, and how the initial discoveries had their impacts amplified through social networks of other curious and inventive people. He does a great job of tracing other serial developments that flowed from early breakthroughs, and illustrating the mechanisms by which invention and innovations spread and change through society.

It’s a surprising , eye-opening and highly entertaining tour through the science history of a half-dozen of the most important human discoveries that have shaped the world in which we live, told by an expert and insightful narrator. Highly recommended.

TV Review: The Rings of Power (Lord of the Rings), Season 1. Amazon Prime.

There isn’t really enough of this new television series available to do a proper review yet: the long-awaited prequel story from Amazon Studios, which takes place a thousand or more years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings, was just launched on the 1st of September, with only the first two episodes available so far. New episodes will appear every Friday through the end of the first season.

Still, I wanted to share my first impressions and some information about the show immediately. I believe this is likely to become an immensely popular series, because it appears to be far above the standard of much of the new programming I’ve watched lately, and it brings new content to one of the greatest and most popular intellectual properties of our times.

The Rings of Power is not exactly based on a book or book series – instead, it is loosely based on the notes and appendices the author, J.R.R. Tolkien, included in The Lord of the Rings, and other writings, in which he sketched out the elaborate histories of ancient peoples, wars, cultures, languages and characters in his imaginary world of Middle Earth.

This lack of a specific and well-known plot is probably an advantage for the producers and writers, and the viewers as well, in that unlike Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, which were beloved and well-known books, read by millions of readers over generations before they were successfully made into movies, this series is more of a blank slate in terms of the stories to be told.

Of course, we do have an expectation about the quality of the TV shows, and what their look and feel should be, based on Peter Jackson’s fabulous Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movie trilogies. This new TV show does not disappoint in that respect at all. The first two episodes feature gorgeous mythical landscapes, ancient maps, and high-definition scenes of the characters, costumes and settings, looking very similar to the fantasy world that Jackson created for his two series.

On the other hand, there are some subtle differences – it’s an earlier time in Middle Earth history. The races, their homes and their wardrobes are not identical (for example, the proto-Hobbits are called Harfoots), and most noticeably, this series is more inclusive and diverse than the Jackson movies in terms of the actors and characters, a welcome improvement that reflects the changing times and improved opportunities for minority performers since Jackson’s movies were made.

One similarity to the movies is the numerous parallel stories to be followed, as we constantly switch back and forth from one to another. There are also a few familiar characters, most notably Galadriel, the Elven Queen of the Lord of the Rings stories (played so brilliantly by Cate Blanchett in the Jackson films). Galadriel is also present, and clearly a central figure, in this earlier epic too (elves being more or less immortal, or at least very long-lived). We see her here at a younger age (played by Morfydd Clark), as a warrior and Elf leader, obsessively following the trail of the missing Dark Lord Sauron, even while her fellow elves want to believe he has passed away.

But as with Lord of the Rings, there are many other races, characters and stories to be told too, and battles to be fought, as the dark shadow of Sauron’s evil begins to fall across Middle Earth in this earlier age. And we know in advance there are rings of power to be forged, rings that will become so important in the later stories with which we are more familiar.

One of the interesting things I have read out about the making of this show, which is noteworthy from an entertainment business standpoint, is that it is being made with the personal financial backing of Jeff Bezos. He has ordered five seasons, because he is apparently a huge fan of Tolkien’s stories, and perhaps also because he’s looking for his own multimedia fictional universe property for Amazon to control, like the worlds of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Marvel and DC comics that are owned by other studios. One positive aspect of his involvement is that there’s little risk the show will fail too soon for lack of ratings, or for poor quality due to lack of production resources – it would appear we’re going to get five well-produced seasons, whether it’s hugely popular or not.  

But I doubt that’s much of a risk. I’m reasonably confident, based on what I’ve seen so far, that this series is headed for greatness. I've been told that not everyone is a dedicated fan of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, so if you’re not, this might not be your cup of tea. But if you are – watch this show. Highly recommended.

Book Reviews: Honorable Mentions: Fiction, Mysteries and Thrillers.

Today I'm posting another one of my "Honorable Mentions" special features of short reviews of five related types of books.  Today I want to talk about historical novels, spy thrillers and mysteries I've enjoyed. 

Book Review: The Girl From Venice (2016). Martin Cruz Smith.

Martin Cruz Smith is a very good and rather prolific thriller writer, most famous for his nine-book Gorky Park series about Arkady Renko, the disillusioned Russian police detective just trying to do his job while faced with nearly insurmountable political, bureaucratic and international espionage situations in the late Cold War and post-Cold War eras.

The Girl from Venice is one of his creative departures from the Arkady Renko books (I previously reviewed another one, December 6). This one is also a very worthwhile entertainment, and a quick-read historical thriller, about a 28-year-old war-weary fisherman in 1945 Italy, who catches a "dead" young woman in his fishing net, only to stumble into a whole series of dangerous situations as World War II in Italy, and the Allied invasion, rushes to its final chaotic conclusion. Recommended.
 

Book Review: The Red Sparrow Trilogy: Red Sparrow (2013), Palace of Treason (2015), and The Kremlin’s Candidate (2018). Jason Matthews.

This is an excellent set of modern spy novels, written by a real-life veteran CIA agent. When the cold war ended, a lot of us thought it might be the end of the great spy novel era too. As this trilogy demonstrates, there’s nothing to worry about on that front – the world’s second oldest profession is alive and well, along with the literary scene devoted to it.

These books have well-developed characters, a brave and tough heroine, great plots, nerve-shattering suspense, incredible complexity and realistic details of how modern spy operations are planned and carried out. The fact that they centered on the vicious and toxic regime of Vladimir Putin and the political world of post-Soviet Russia, before all of us were fully aware of the nature of his brutal regime, gives the books added authenticity.

The first book, Red Sparrow, was made into a popular spy thriller movie starring Jennifer Lawrence. These books are all recommended.
  

Book Review: Everyone Brave is Forgiven (2016). Chris Cleave.

This is a fictional story of three young people (a woman and two men) coming of age in London and Malta during the Blitz in the early part of World War II. Through their stories, we see the hard choices each one has to make, between their dreams for their own personal futures, and the unavoidable and limited options to be had in a time of war, sacrifice and loss.

There’s a love triangle, and a good English World War II adventure story, with a particularly vivid description of the lesser-known privations and tragedy of the British attempts to defend Malta. 

Apparently the author was inspired to tell this story by love letters from the period by family members. The book is beautifully written. Recommended.
  

Book Review: Midnight in Europe (2015). Alan Furst.

This book is a predictably great read, as we can expect with most Alan Furst novels. For those who are not familiar with him, Alan Furst is arguably the best World War II spy fiction thriller writer of our generation. 

His books tend to take place in different locales across Europe in the pre-war 1930s, and during the early war years, and he focuses on portraying the kinds of dangerous situations and unavoidable daily moral choices people faced as a consequence of the simultaneous rise of fascism and Soviet communism during this period.

This particular novel takes place in Paris in 1938, as the Spanish Republicans try desperately to find arms across Europe for their lost cause, the Spanish Civil War against General Franco and his army. It has Furst’s usual cast of mostly middle-aged men and women trying to figure out how to survive and maneuver against Nazi and Soviet spies and sympathizers, the secret police of various countries, local informers and the coming onslaught of total war. Recommended. 

 

Book Review: Another Man's Moccasins (2008). Craig Johnson. Walt Longmire Series #4. 

I previously reviewed the first three books in Craig Johnson’s 20+ book series about his modern western sheriff Walt Longmire, and his fictional Wyoming world of Absaroka County, where he tries to keep the peace and solve murders in his fraught small-town rural community of whites, Native Americans, Basques and others, with the help of a memorable supporting cast, including his Indian friend Henry Standing Bear, his tough young female deputy Vic Moretti, his daughter Cady and others.

Along the way, he usually has to interact with and come to understand a variety of new local characters and competing economic interests, in order to get to the bottom of whatever crime has been committed.

In Another Man’s Moccasins, the main crime at the heart of the story involves the murder of a young Vietnamese woman, possibly but not definitely by a disturbed young Crow Indian man. Without giving away the plot, I’ll just mention that there is a story line about sex trafficking, but also a mysterious link to Longmire’s own history as a U.S. Marine Military Policeman in the Vietnam war, a plot device that allows the author to further develop Longmire’s character and backstory, as well as that of Henry Standing Bear and their lifelong friendship.

This will probably be my last Longmire book review – it’s a very good series, the best murder mystery series I’ve encountered recently (I’m not generally that big a fan of the genre), especially because of the excellent characters and great dialogue. But it is a long series, and after awhile it just becomes an enjoyable pastime to read them. They’re not that individually memorable after you've read a few -- a common problem with long-running mystery series, I find. But still, recommended.

Book Review: Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (2016). Sebastian Junger.

This 2016 book by Sebastian Junger, the noted action journalist and chronicler of people under extreme duress, whether at sea, as in The Perfect Storm (1997), in forest fires, as in Fire (2001), or at war in War (2010), is a short, intriguing discussion of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in veterans, which he explains as an understandable reaction of fighters to the experience of returning from war, and leaving the close-knit fellowship and shared purpose of small combat units, in exchange for the atomized, anonymous and mundane state of individual life in modern society.

Drawing in part from his own experiences and observations, which included months as a journalist embedded with American soldiers in Afghanistan, as well as the literature and recorded history of war and warriors going all the way back to the Greeks, Junger explores the "natural" state of humans living in small groups, with their strong values of mutual aid and communal life, which are now mostly found only in armies, war zones, natural disasters, and in some of the few remaining primitive societies on Earth. 

He contrasts that with the widespread personal alienation and loneliness of life in a mass consumer society, which many returning veterans find so alienating, and which creates so much anxiety for them when they return to civilian life.

In developing support for his viewpoint, he also reviews the well-known and widespread phenomenon of “civilized” people kidnapped into primitive societies where similar bonds of mutual closeness and dependence existed, particularly cases of white settlers on the American western frontier who were taken forcibly into Native American tribes, but once there, did not want to leave, even when freed and given the opportunity to return to the white settler society from which they originally had come.

All of this leads the author to his main thesis (and this certainly has been controversial) that the problem of PTSD may be not so much with the soldiers and their traumatic, violent war experiences, as with the nature of the alienating and isolating modern societies to which they return. 

Without necessarily accepting Junger’s theory as a complete explanation of the problem of PTSD, and the difficulty that warriors have in returning to civilian life, this is a thought-provoking and insightful study of the lingering damages of war to the psyches of combat veterans. But it is also an exploration of the deficiencies of modern advanced societies, and the ways they may fail to meet basic human psychological and emotional needs, although we may not be aware of these deficiencies if we’ve never experienced the sort of intense, inter-dependent connections to the people around us that Junger describes. Recommended.