Book Review: The Sweetness of Water (2021). Nathan Harris.

I picked up this recent first novel by Nathan Harris, which became an immediate bestseller and an award-winner last year, based on rave reviews from my wife and several friends in her book club who had already read it. It did not disappoint – it’s a beautifully told story of white and black characters trying to survive and find meaning in the deep South, in the midst of the social turmoil at the end of the Civil War.

The slaves have been freed, and the Union Army arrives in town to enforce the new social order. That doesn’t protect the freed slaves from the hostility, fear, racism and hatred of much of the white population, but it has opened the door to some new opportunities and possibilities.

If this were just a book about the struggles of recently freed slaves in the aftermath of the Civil War, it would still be remarkable, but it is so much more than that. At the center of the story is an old white man George and his wife Isabelle, living alone on their farm outside of town, as they await news of the fate of their son Caleb, a Confederate soldier in the war. 

Caleb turns out to be a complex character himself; once we learn his story, it’s revealed that he is something of a disgrace, and is carrying several heavy secrets that could exact a terrible price on him and his family if they were revealed. Yet he is an only child, and is still loved by his parents.

Then there are two young brothers, Prentiss and Landry, freed slaves who George first encounters in the woods near his home. Out of their basic human decency and kindness, and perhaps measures of guilt, both George and Isabelle each slowly become involved with the two brothers, and try to help them get a start on their new lives, in part to fill their own feelings of loss and loneliness.

Under the stresses of their world and their individual situations, we come to learn ever more about these five people, and a number of other characters that come in and out of their lives. Through their eyes, we experience something of the intense social pressures at play in the small southern town, and we feel the savage cruelty and intolerance of the many, but also the human kindnesses and vulnerabilities to be found among individuals, even within a community poisoned by prejudice.

The exploration of the emotional dynamics of the marital relationship between George and Isabelle is particularly moving. It captures perfectly the search for balance and harmony between two different (and difficult) personalities in a long-term love relationship, and probes some of the different ways in which compassionate people try to come to terms with their own guilt and responsibility for the monstrous crimes of the unjust society they inhabit.

The Sweetness of Water is one of the most satisfying and realistic stories I’ve read about what social life looked like in the late 1860s in the South, as the Civil War ended and southern society tried to figure out what to do next. It is certainly not a hopeful portrait of where things were headed, yet for these characters, we’re left with some sense of redemption and the promise of better lives for the future.

This is a truly excellent fictional account of a difficult historical period, with strong resonance in our own society today, more than a century and a half later. Highly recommended.

TV Review: Alaska Daily (2022). ABC.

Our local Seattle paper, The Seattle Times, is one of a few major city newspapers nationally that is still family owned and independent. Four generations of the Blethen family have owned and shepherded the paper through more than a century of American history, including wars, depression and recession, the rise of the internet, and the onslaught of the colossal media empires that have consolidated (and frequently gutted) most of the other news organizations across the country under the control of a few super-rich owners and private equity firms.

Because of the paper’s own history, The Seattle Times editorial board carries regular coverage of the ongoing struggle of local journalism to survive in the face of massive revenue losses and media consolidation, and the paper advocates tirelessly for the support of local journalism as a critical source of important news and investigations on the local level, as an indispensable component of a functioning democracy. 

So it was not surprising that in a column I read in The Seattle Times on this same topic last week, there was a review and a pitch for a new prime-time ABC dramatic series, just launched, called Alaska Daily. 

Loosely based on a real newspaper, The Alaska Daily News in Anchorage, it tells the story of Eileen Fitzgerald, a successful, driven New York investigative journalist (played superbly by Hillary Swank). Disgraced and unfairly forced out of her prestigious job because of an inadequately sourced (but true) story about a corrupt official, she is recruited by an old colleague to move to Anchorage to work for a small, poorly funded local newspaper, the fictional Daily Alaskan.

Having now watched the first two episodes of Alaska Daily, I am really excited about this show and its prospects. I don’t watch many shows from the “big 3” old networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) – The Good Fight is the only other show from these networks in my active list at the moment – but this one is off to a great start.

I generally enjoy a good “fish out of water” story, especially the ones where the main protagonist is a big city slicker suddenly forced to survive in a smaller, rural community, where the opinions, resources and relationships are different, but the people, their lives and loves are just as real as back in the city, and where the need for personal change, adaptability and growth (for all the characters) are the inevitable drivers of the dramatic tensions in the story, and the clash of two cultures.

In just two episodes, Swank has set up this story and her character powerfully and convincingly. As a journalist, she comes across as a force of nature – fast-moving, quick to understand how to get information and find sources to interview, yet direct to the point of rudeness, arrogant and inflexible in her dealings with her colleagues, and almost ruthless in her determination to get the story.

She seems cold and unlikable on first impression, but she also struggles with emotional anxiety, and shows glimmers of a passion and care for the people whose lives are affected by the stories she covers that hint at much more depth than the self-centered careerist ambitions we (and other characters) might assume are driving her. In other words, she’s a complex and interesting character, ripe for the sort of change and personal growth we expect in a "fish out of water" story like this.  At the same time, it's clear already that her big-city sophistication will bring new tools and effectiveness to the dedicated small-town reporters around her.

I would watch this show just to see how her character develops, but there is a lot more going on too. Much of it has to do with showing the fascinating reality of the lives of local journalists – the relationships between the reporters, editors and newsroom staff, the perils of asking tough questions of vulnerable and often hostile sources, and the creative ways investigative journalists find information and verify it in solving mysteries and telling stories, much like police detectives, but without the power of guns and the state to compel cooperation on the part of witnesses.

One of my other all-time favorite shows was The Newsroom (on HBO), produced by Aaron Sorkin, about a fictional cable news organization during the Obama presidency (also highly recommended, if you haven’t seen it). Alaska Daily is the first dramatic series I've seen since then that appears to be ready to portray the lives of working reporters investigating real-world stories. 

The Newsroom gave a fictional view of cable television journalists following major national news and politics; Alaska Daily instead shows print journalists in a small media market, working on major regional stories, beginning with the ongoing tragedy of Indigenous women who continue to be abducted, trafficked and murdered at a horrifying rate in Alaska and across the west, in most cases with little apparent notice or accountability.

This particular first investigation in the show mirrors a real one that has been conducted and published by The Alaska Daily News. But I expect in the course of Alaska Daily’s opening season, and perhaps future seasons (if the show is continued), we will see other story lines and investigations as well.

One other thing that is noteworthy about this new show – it’s about Alaska. In 2019, just before the pandemic, my wife and I took our first trip to see Alaska, including Anchorage. And it really is a special and unusual place, which I felt again immediately when I started watching the show.

Alaska has such unique features, like the fact that you can’t get to many places in the state except by flying in small planes; the routine presence of very large wild animals nearby, like moose, elk and bear; the extremes of the seasons, the long summer days and the long winter nights, the bitter winter cold and isolation – all of these factors and more make for a special kind of place, where communities are small and close-knit of necessity, yet are still torn by the same political splits, personality clashes, prejudices and competing economic interests we find everywhere else. These are themes I also expect to see explored in this show.

One can never make a completely accurate prediction about the fate, or the ultimate quality, of a brand new television series, based on the first couple of shows. And I may be wrong, but I think that Alaska Daily has more going for it out of the gate than most other new series I know about, particularly on the big 3 networks. Check it out, and see what you think! Highly recommended.

Movie Review: A Call to Spy (2019). Netflix.

In the past few decades, many of the greatest espionage secrets of the British and American governments from World War II have finally been revealed. As I’ve mentioned in several other reviews, this has led to a growing awareness and increasing coverage of the important roles played by women in some of the most dangerous and sensitive Allied secret organizations and operations, in helping to win the war against the Axis powers.

The many books, memoirs, movies and TV shows that have followed these gradual revelations are endlessly fascinating and intriguing, while also making some of the same points over and over: women were often effective as spies, code breakers and operatives in part because they were less suspected by the opposition than the men were. 

At the same time, they had to constantly battle within their own organizations for respect, assignments and positions due to the same heavy sexism and “old boy networks” that dominated the leadership of all the warring societies of the times. And they could be very tough and resourceful, sometimes more so than most of the men around them.

Among the by-now most widely recognized and revered women spies who fought in the secret war against the Nazis are the three who are the main subjects of this Netflix docudrama, A Call to Spy. The first, Vera Atkins (played ably here by Stana Katic), was a Jewish woman from Romania who was an early recruit to the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Winston Churchill’s secret organization for waging clandestine war against the Axis powers. From a humble start in a clerical position, she rapidly rose to a role as a leading organizer of SOE secret operations in Europe.

The SOE’s primary assignment was “to set Europe ablaze” with sabotage, spying and subversion. Atkins’ storied career included some dangerous early assignments she herself carried out, but her greatest contribution to SOE was in recruiting and running female agents, and helping to build the clandestine networks the SOE set up in occupied France.

Virginia Hall (Sarah Megan Thomas) was one of the agents recruited by Atkins to the SOE, who became one of the Nazi’s most hunted enemies in the secret war in France. An American woman with a partially amputated leg from a hunting accident, who wore a wooden prosthetic leg as a result, Hall was nevertheless a brilliant operative and network leader, who survived many dangerous actions and repeatedly avoided capture to become one of the leading Allied agents in France. 

Remarkably, and despite her physical handicap, she did all this during two different long tours in France, the first with the British SOE as an agent/network leader early in the war, and then later (after the SOE considered her "blown" because of her notoriety and the German price on her head) with William Donovan’s American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where she served as a wireless operator and a key agent in organizing support for the French resistance. She went on to a long career with the American CIA after the war.

Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte) was an Englishwoman, born in Russia of Indian parents, who became a wireless operator in the WAAF (the British women’s air force auxiliary), from which she was recruited by Atkins. She eventually become the first female wireless operator sent into occupied France. 

Wireless operators had the difficult but vital job as secret agents of serving as the main communications link back to the SOE in England for entire networks of spies in France, by quickly tapping out coded radio messages from fellow agents on a teletype key. They carried out this dangerous mission, while having to constantly move to new “safe houses”, and find new hiding places for their suitcase-sized radio equipment and antennas, while also trying to evade aggressive radio tracking by French police and Nazi counter-intelligence agents.

Khan’s doomed career was particularly noteworthy, because she was the first Moslem agent in the British secret services. She was arrested in 1944, and sent to Dachau concentration camp, where she died before the end of the war.

The remarkable and heroic stories of these three famous female spies, their close relationships with each other and with their colleagues, and the sacrifices they made, is a lot to pack into a single movie, but A Call to Spy is a worthy attempt. It’s a suspenseful and moving entertainment as well as an inspiring World War II story of women at war. Recommended.

Book Review: Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (2022). Douglas Rushkoff.

I just finished reading this interesting new book by Douglas Rushkoff, a professor of media theory and digital economics at Queens/CUNY, who is also an award-winning author of numerous books, a podcaster, and a long-time technology observer and critic. 

It’s not quite what I thought I was going to be reading, which was just a travelogue through all the ways in which the stupendously wealthy are planning to escape their most feared social and human catastrophes, although it does have plenty of elements of that.

Instead, the author had a broader criticism of the ultra-rich tech magnates in mind, which has to do with what he labels “The Mindset”. The Mindset as he describes it is an intellectual framework coming out of Silicon Valley and other tech centers that combines boyish fantasies and science fiction, “techno-solutionism” (the desire to find tech solutions to every human existential and social question), Ayn Rand-style selfish individualism and libertarianism, misogyny, and a desire to dominate the world while accruing vast wealth and power.

One ironic outcome of The Mindset for the tech billionaires, Rushkoff suggests, is a need to imagine and devise complex personal survival and escape plans, funded by their vast wealth, to survive the very crises their businesses and technologies are helping to cause. These crises include all the familiar ones we’re concerned about these days: political polarization, the climate emergency caused by our fossil-fuel based economy, civil unrest, the threat of war and nuclear disaster, and the rise of authoritarianism around the world.

In the course of the book, the author recounts many of the most egregious and often ridiculous ideas, pursuits and beliefs that have become part of what he calls The Mindset. For example, he talks about the obsessions of men like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson to somehow get themselves and their wealthiest peers into space, in the belief that if they can just make space travel and life possible, they can survive the global collapse on Earth they all fear is coming.

Early in the book, Rushkoff takes us behind the scenes, to visit some of the survival estates and hideouts the super-rich have created, to try to stay alive when everything on Earth goes to pieces. He provides insights into tech-driven phenomena like the rise of blockchain and crypto currencies, which I have long thought (as does he) are massively complex and costly solutions to non-existent problems. He also talks about the plans of some tech leaders to find a way to upload their minds to computers, and to thereby achieve immortality, removed from the needs or reality of our ties to our human bodies, or alternatively to discover and invent medical technologies that will eliminate aging for themselves and their families.

Rushkoff clearly has a political opinion about all this, and constantly contrasts what he characterizes as the cold and narcissistic nature of The Mindset, and its most powerful believers, with a more humane, cooperative and altruistic world view and way of being. And I’m very sympathetic to his general outlook and moral orientation, although in some cases his analysis seems a little too simplistic and rigid.

Nevertheless, Survival of the Richest is a very thought-provoking and detailed look at some of the peculiar fantasies, excesses, projects and ambitions of the super-wealthy tech leaders of our era. Recommended.

TV Review: Behind Her Eyes (2021). Netflix.

Wooh-hoo! This is a great one for the Halloween season, if you like really scary psychological thrillers that turn out (spoiler alert) to have a bit of a supernatural twist to them. We binged it in a few days, because it is riveting and addictive, even though you know as the plot unfolds that there is something deeply sinister and scary going on.

Behind Her Eyes, the Netflix six-part mini-series, is based on a 2017 thriller by Sarah Pinborough (which I haven’t read). It begins with our introduction to Louise, an attractive but recently divorced black single mother in London (played convincingly by Simona Brown). Louise is just getting by, trying to take care of herself and her pre-teen son, while living in a small apartment on a modest salary, and working a clerical job.

One night, at a friend's urging, Louise goes to a bar, where she runs into a tall handsome Scotsman (Tom Bateman). They end up talking, and on the way out the door after too many drinks, they share an impulsive but passionate kiss – there’s definitely chemistry there, as well as the alcohol effects. Will they end up in bed together, as we might expect?  But then the man stops, mumbles something about “I can’t do this”, and runs off.

Of course, when she gets to work the next day, she discovers her unfortunate mistake from the night before is her new boss at the psychiatric clinic where she works. It's very embarrassing, but let’s all be grown-ups about this, shall we? And of course, he’s married. 

Soon we meet the wife (played chillingly by Eve Hewson), and start learning her backstory, which seems to involve great family wealth, and a tragic fire, but also a history of serious psychiatric problems. And we also will soon meet a strange lower class male drug addict friend of hers (Robert Aramayo), who she knew and bonded with as friends while they were both in rehab.

That’s as much plot as I can give away. As we are inexorably drawn into their webs of love and hate, friendship and deceit, and admiration and envy, the relationships become increasingly dangerous and fraught. We’re never sure who the evil one(s) are, who the victims are, and what any of the characters’ real motivations and personalities will prove to be. We only see that their relationship decisions and moral choices keep being the wrong ones, the ones that will lead inevitably to conflict and disaster.

It’s one of those “slow motion train wreck coming” shows, rich in well-drawn character flaws and a sense of impending doom, but which is also fascinating and intriguing, as you try to figure out the mysteries and behaviors of each of the characters, and where it’s all leading. And it is definitely also a good mystery story, with unexplained crimes and secrets lurking in the background.

It's an excellent piece of entertainment, very well crafted, with fine acting from all four of the leads, if your nerves can stand the psychological strain. And I can almost guarantee that you won't figure it all out until the very ending. Highly recommended.

Personal Note: A New Song, and New Video!

Oh my -- it's Thursday already, and I haven't done a single post to The Memory Cache all week. It's okay, though, I hope -- I haven't gone anywhere, and I do have several new books and shows I'm ready to review, which I will get back to within the next couple of days.

But as I mentioned recently, I've been heavily focused this late summer and early fall on recording and preparing a number of new songs for release, a process which I've now chosen to make more labor intensive, but also even more artistically rewarding, by taking on the challenge of making my own music videos to go with my songs.

I learned enough about video editing and production by making the lyric video for Brand New Driver last summer to be able to at least provide a pleasing background for displaying the words of the song in a music video, but this time I wanted to see if I could actually create a visual presentation of the song's story, in music video format.

Today you can actually check out the results of my experiments. This morning, I released my latest rock single, Canadian Girl, on all music streaming services, along with not one but two Canadian Girl music videos on YouTube. They are essentially the same video, but the official lyric version includes the lyrics on screen for those who want to read along with the song.

If you follow the link on the bottom right side of this page to my YouTube music video channel, you can see both new videos, along with the others I've released since I started this mad post-retirement rock musical adventure. I hope you like the new song and video, a musical tale of young summer romance with a glockenspiel in it!  And I'll be back with new reviews here shortly.

Honorable Mentions: Automation, Data and the Big Companies of the Tech Economy.

Today I thought I'd share another group of reviews of five good books I read from a few years back, in my ongoing "Honorable Mentions" series. The topics for today are books about high tech: the companies, our computers, phones and automation, big data, social media and the impact of these contemporary features of life on us as individuals and on society. Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

 

Book Review: World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (2017). Franklin Foer.

The author of this thoughtful critique of the role of the major tech companies on our lives, and particularly its effect on the state of our public discourse, is a well-respected writer from major periodicals such as The New Republic and The Atlantic. He also wrote a popular and fun book about soccer and its place in international sports, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (2010), which I enjoyed, and which has been translated into dozens of languages.

This book is an eloquent rumination on the negative impacts on human society and freedom resulting from the economic and social dominance of the new technological corporate giants of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. Of particular interest are some of the chapters where he extrapolates from his own experiences, for example when he was involved in the attempted “reboot” of The New Republic after it was bought by an early Facebook gazillionaire, Chris Hughes.

Foer explores the philosophical, psychological, ethical, economic and political aspects of our current situation, living in a global economy dominated by monopolistic technology companies and their financial imperatives. Recommended.

 

Book Review: The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (2014). Nicholas Carr.

It can be hard to remember (even for those of us who were there back then) that as recently as the first five or six years of the 2000s, we all lived in a world where no one owned a smartphone, and social media as we now know it was still in its infancy. When these tech innovations first appeared, we were a little skeptical, but mostly full of wonder, for the promise of all the benefits they might bring to our lives.

There is no question that these creations have changed our lives, and in many respects for the better. Yet from early on, some of us also wondered how the world being created by ubiquitous computerization and automation would change and negatively impact us as individuals and as social creatures in the world.

Carr was one of the early social critics of the automation revolution we have experienced since the beginning of the 21st century. He focuses particularly on the changing nature of work, our human creativity, and what it does to us and our freedom to become so entirely dependent on machines to do much of our thinking, production and decision-making for us.

This is a thought-provoking analysis of how our clever devices and high tech inventions in the areas of automation and artificial intelligence are changing us, and not necessarily for the better, as individuals and as a species. Recommended.



Book Review: Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race and Identity: What Our Online Selves Tell Us About Our Offline Selves (2015). Christian Rudder.

This and the following book, Everybody Lies, are among my favorites in this genre of modern tech social criticism and theory, because of their focus on what can be learned about whole populations from the vast databases of personal and individual information that we voluntarily provide, often unwittingly, to major online applications and the corporate giants who own them.

Dataclysm was written by an early and very successful entrepreneur in the online dating marketplace, as a co-founder of the dating site OkCupid. In it, he explains how dating and social media sites quickly learned to use the data gathering and population analytics tools of social science and “big data” to make their romantic matching algorithms more effective and successful. But as an unintended consequence, in the process of improving their matching techniques, their data analysts also uncovered vast troves of information about the extent to which the view of ourselves that we want to project to the world differs from the way we really are, and from the opinions, beliefs and prejudices we actually hold.

This book is a fascinating exploration of the ways in which big data from social media and dating sites can tell us larger truths about who we really are, and what we really believe, as opposed to what we tell ourselves and the world, with a particular focus on our true feelings about the endlessly fascinating questions of love, sexuality, sexual roles, racism, identity and other forms of prejudice. Highly recommended. 

Book Review: Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data and What the Internet Can Tell us About Who We Really Are (2017). Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.

As mentioned above, this book and Dataclysm are the two books in this group that focus on social science research based on the “big data” collected by some of our largest tech companies and most popular online applications. The author of Everybody Lies, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, is a Harvard-educated economist and New York Times writer who was formerly a data scientist at Google. His experiences at Google form the basis for much of the story he tells in this book.

The most important point I took from this book had to do with the author's explanation of the differing value and significance of online data collected from two different types of online applications, and the respective usefulness of these two types of data in social science research. The distinction he draws is between the vast troves of information collected from social sites (dating apps and social media, as highlighted in Dataclysm), as opposed to the data compiled from search engine sites, especially Google because of its dominance in the online search market.

The special value of search engine data, as he points out, comes from the fact that unlike the social sites, where people are deliberately trying to create perfected (and therefore often falsified) images of themselves, to show people only what they think the viewers want to see, on search engines people reveal exactly who they really are, by the nature of the questions they want to have answered, in what they presume is a private and anonymous online space.

From this dichotomy between the image people try to present of themselves in seeking approval from others, versus the questions they most urgently want to have answered in private when they think no one is listening, we see how “everybody lies”. 

One of the most compelling anecdotes to demonstrate this point had to do with a discovery made by a researcher in analyzing Google’s data that showed that the relative number of searches for racist jokes about blacks, when broken down by county and voting district, provided an extremely reliable and highly-correlated prediction of voting trends for and against President Obama.

Obviously (at that time, at least, before the Trump era), very few people would put “I’m a racist who hates blacks” on their social media profiles or dating site applications, yet there it was – thousands of people all over the country who thoughtlessly confessed their true beliefs by looking for racist jokes. 

It was a fascinating revelation, that something we take so much for granted now, the use of Google to answer every question that pops into our minds, could show so much about us as a population, who we really are as a people, what we want to know, and what we actually think and believe, as opposed to the images we try to create in our public-facing presentations of ourselves.

This book is an important and readable exploration of the new tools of social science and population research that have arisen as a result of search engines, social media and massive online data collection. Highly recommended.



Book Review: The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google (2017). Scott Galloway.

It’s a measure of how quickly our world has changed in the past twenty to thirty years that a book written in 2017 (only five years ago) already contains some then-startling insights that by now seem like old news, even though they’re about companies whose size, dominance and relevance has only increased in the time since it was written.

Nevertheless, The Four is a valuable and entertaining trip through the world of the four most impactful tech companies (in the author's view) whose creation stories and subsequent successes have so shaped our modern society: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.

Personally, I believe there are really five of these companies. Microsoft has been successfully dodging much of the negative attention now regularly pointed at the other four for many years, due to successful public relations work and corporate image polishing they've done since their own days as the Evil Empire of high tech domination and monopolistic practices in the late 1990s. I applaud the company's efforts over the years to become better corporate citizens, and some of it has been genuine, but I would argue that in their essential nature and behavior, their size and influence, their centrality and importance to the tech world, and in their business practices, Microsoft is not that different from the other four.   

But in any case, Galloway has written a valuable expose’ of each of the other four omnipresent companies who have come to dominate the world of high technology and our modern way of life, and the many ways in which each maintains effective control over its own sphere of influence within the interdependent tech economy. He provides interesting anecdotes and insights into the rise and continuing success of each company and its founder (or founders), along with plenty of interesting commentary. 

Galloway is a professor at New York University, and reportedly an engaging speaker as well as a successful business writer, who brings a very readable mix of humor, outrage, facts, corporate history and good writing to this notable book. Recommended.

Book Review: Life and Death at Cape Disappointment: Becoming a Surfman on the Columbia River Bar (2021). Christopher J. D’Amelio with Reid Maruyama.

I discovered this unusual and worthwhile memoir last year in a charming little bookstore in Ilwaco, Washington, on a vacation to the southwest Washington coast. That was probably more than coincidence, since most of the action in this intriguing story of a Coast Guard surfman takes place in and around that same small town of Ilwaco, and at the Coast Guard lifeboat station nearby at Cape Disappointment.

Christopher J. D’Amelio was a 19-year old California surfer and swimmer when he enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1995. In the course of beginning to tell his story about his life in the Coast Guard, he talks briefly about why he enlisted, boot camp, the temporary disruptions to his personal life and his relationship to the sweetheart he eventually (and happily) married when he first joined, and his early tours and adventures aboard Coast Guard ships in Alaska and other dangerous areas.

But the heart of his story is about the decade and a half or so he spent at Cape Disappointment in the early 2000s, the last point of land on the southern Washington coast that ends at the mouth of the great Colombia River, where the river flows into the Pacific Ocean. This coastal area has often been called “the graveyard of the Pacific” for its uniquely destructive combination of high winds, waves, surf, tides, and shoals. Since the beginnings of recorded maritime history, hundreds of vessels have sunk just offshore, and the sea has claimed many lives in the process.

For precisely this reason, the U.S. Coast Guard chose this challenging location to create its training school for surfmen – the elite small boat operators whose job it is to brave the worst weather and conditions, and to captain tiny motor lifeboats (from 23 to about 5o feet long) through rain, wind, huge waves and various sorts of disasters, to save lives and where possible bring stranded ships in to safety and calm waters. This was the role for which the author volunteered and was chosen, and after detailing the rigorous selection and training challenges he faced, he takes us along for a ride on some of his most daring and almost unbelievable rescue "cases".

Of all the military services of the United States, I’ve long felt that the Coast Guard is both the most under-appreciated, and the most inspirational. Their mission above all others is to save lives rather than to take them, and many of their members do this crucial function for the rest of us, day and day out, for years and decades, often under the most horrifyingly dangerous conditions.

As a result, a number of their technical specialties are particularly and almost unimaginably daring to most of us, including their storm-trained helicopter and C-13o pilots, and especially their famous rescue swimmers, who routinely jump out of helicopters into freezing oceans into terrible storm conditions, without much more than a dry suit, a mask, a knife and a pair of flippers to keep them alive while they pull people out of the water and off sinking ships and oil platforms.

The surfmen are in a similar category of bravery and skill. D’Amelio describes the physical danger aboard these tough little covered lifeboats, the huge towering waves, ferocious winds, and the pounding that shakes the crews' bodies to their cores, while they still need to constantly and carefully control engine power and steering to prevent being capsized or swamped by every passing monster wave set. But he doesn’t brag – it’s just what he did, and it is clear it was a passion and a mission for him, one that he felt called to do, and generally enjoyed.

Very much to his credit, he also talks wisely in retrospect about the toll that this “always on call” dangerous work takes on a marriage and family life. He also talks about the difficult form of guilt that he and his colleagues always carry about every life they tried but failed to save. You would think that these men and women might be well content with the number of hair-raising rescues they've performed that did succeed, and the many lives they’ve saved, but oddly it seems that it is the few failures that seem to weigh on them the most, long after the glory of each amazing rescue exploit is behind them.

The author talks honestly and openly about all that, in a way that made the connection for me to all our first responders who take on the role of protecting others, and who often suffer from lingering psychological burdens as a consequence of adversity and losses they experience that are beyond their control. It should make us all value what these first responders do that much more, and be grateful for their willingness to serve, but particularly for those who routinely put their own lives at risk to do it.

This is an excellent first-hand account of what Coast Guard surfmen and their fellows do for the public all over the country, how they do it, and what it costs them. They train in Washington state, but of course they are deployed around the whole country and its coasts, wherever rough ocean conditions or storms occur. I would imagine they’re on duty in Florida today, in the wake of Ian, the latest massive hurricane to hit that region. I hope they’re all staying safe, but of course that’s not in their job description. Highly recommended.