Book Series Review: The Dune Chronicles: Dune (1965), Dune Messiah (1969), Children of Dune (1976), God Emperor of Dune (1981), Heretics of Dune (1984) and Chapterhouse: Dune (1985). Frank Herbert.

Today I'm doing something a little different.  Instead of writing a review of one book, I'm doing a quick summary of a series of related books by an author that deserve to be recognized as a whole body of work. There are several such series that are lifetime favorites of mine, so I'll begin with Frank Herbert's Dune Chronicles, a 6-book set written and published during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.  

(I am not including in this discussion the many other Dune novels spun off and written by Herbert's son Brian Herbert, and several other writers with whom he collaborated, even though I understand that many of them were based on notes and ideas for stories which Frank Herbert had created).

There is no doubt that the Dune Chronicles is one of the greatest book series, if not the greatest, in all of science fiction.  I re-read all three of the first three Dune books recently for the first time in decades, and then kept going with the other three books in Herbert’s 6-book epic Dune series, in part to see how well they have withstood the test of time.

I’m pleased to report that they are still every bit as relevant, as prescient and as timeless as they seemed when I first read them long ago; in fact, some recent commentators have suggested they’re even more relevant now, given the geopolitical, military and ecological developments on planet Earth since Herbert finished the last of the books in the 1980s.

The first three and best-known novels in the 6-book set, Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune, trace the rise and fall of a galactic empire under a young nobleman, Paul Atreides, who becomes the messianic leader of an oppressed people on the desert planet of Dune when he acquires the ability to see the future. Its narrative arc is centered around a classic “hero’s journey” story line, inextricably linked to a long tale of revolution, imperial foundation, conquest and dissolution.

The stories feature great power conflicts and intrigue on a bleak desert planet, a poor but well-adapted nomadic people with a mysterious, fierce religion, and a valuable resource they control that is key to all interplanetary travel and trade. Sound familiar? It did in the 1960s and 1970s too, even before the 1973 Oil embargo and the Middle East Forever Wars of our recent times.

The remaining three books (God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune) are somewhat more esoteric. God Emperor of Dune brings a final end to the Paul Atreides-centered imperial era, by revealing how his son Leto II acquired godlike powers and near immortality, and then instituted a forced era of peace and civilizational stagnation across the galaxy spanning thousands of years.

Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune then trace various further developments in the long history of interstellar humanity, and the ultimate fates of several of the secretive organizations and movements that played such important roles in the first three Dune novels.

I actually found the latter three books better, and more memorable and intriguing this time, than when I read them when they were first published in the 1980s, but I believe they are more of an acquired taste. They may be too complex and too far removed for many readers from the simpler “hero’s journey” and “rise and fall of an empire” themes of the first three books.

Nevertheless, all these stories are rich in ecological, political, religious, military and economic speculation, and come with loads of intrigue and adventure. They were also exceptional compared to most "golden age" science fiction stories, in Herbert's interest in and explorations of the power and importance of women and their social roles, intellects and abilities in the human story, as well as those of the men. Very highly recommended.

Movie Review: Te Ata (2021). Netflix.

This is a short historical docudrama about an early 20th century young Chickasaw woman from Oklahoma, known as Te Ata, who became a famous actress and performer despite discrimination and prejudice against her as a Native American and a woman.

She eventually became a friend of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and a legendary storyteller and performer of traditional American Indian cultural stories and myths. I had never heard of her before, so this was an interesting and worthwhile revelation. Recommended.

Book Review: The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb (2019). Sam Kean.

This history book is an account of the small number of scientists, OSS (U.S. Office of Strategic Services) and SOE (British Special Operations Executive) members, political and military figures and oddballs who worked to prevent Hitler and the Germans from developing atomic weapons in World War II.

It includes the story of Mel Berg, a well-known Major League Baseball figure and Red Sox catcher (and a secret OSS agent), some of whose exploits, including an attempted assassination of the German physicist Werner Heisenberg in Switzerland were also the subject of a recent very good spy movie, The Catcher Was a Spy (2018).

Numerous other famous and less well-known figures also played a part in the narrative, and the efforts to deny the Nazis the atomic bomb. This was an intriguing look down another of the endless little byways of the World War II story. Recommended.

From Wayne: Blog News and Brand New Driver Song Release.

As most readers know, The Memory Cache blog is my personal platform for sharing my writing, ideas, useful information and reviews with a reading audience.

Since I launched it back in February, I've been very pleased to see that there does appear to be a small but regular group of people who are coming back regularly to see what's new, and what books, movies and TV shows I've reviewed recently.

I noticed the other day that the site's page view count has gone over 2,500 since I launched it. It's not millions, but it's still gratifying!

Thank you so much for your interest, and please let your friends and family know about the site too, if you think they might enjoy reading it, and using its categorized lists of different types of content to find good books to read, good shows to see, and interesting topics to discover and learn about.

Meanwhile, some readers may not know that the other creative project I started early in the pandemic, as a new hobby, was writing and recording my own original rock, country and folk-influenced songs.

I released my first three singles last year, with music videos, which you can hear on all major music streaming services, and also see on my YouTube channel, which you can find by clicking on the link to my music under the Favorite Links heading on the right side of the page. You can also find my artist social media accounts on both Facebook and Instagram at @wayneparkernotes. Please feel free to follow me there if interested.

In that vein, I'm delighted to announce the release today of my latest song, Brand New Driver, which is now available or arriving soon at all major music streaming services, as well as on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Check it out! And I do hope you enjoy it.

Have a great day, and rock on!

Book Review: In the Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown (2018). Nathaniel Philbrick.

Another excellent popular American history work by Philbrick, this book covers the last three years of the American Revolution, focusing on the battle for the South during that period, and Washington's growing understanding of the need for naval power to counter the Royal Navy's control of the American coast.

Philbrick documents Washington's ongoing efforts to get the French to commit a large naval force to the war, which caused him endless frustrations and delays, but ultimately led to the Battle of the Chesapeake between British and French fleets.

Philbrick portrays this sea battle, where the French navy forced the British fleet to escape to the north to refit and regroup, as the decisive development that set up the American victory at Yorktown, by cutting off Lord Cornwallis's forces from resupply or escape by sea. 

It's a lively read, and a good military and political analysis of this less well-known phase of the Revolution. Recommended.

Book Review: Children Who Remember Previous Lives (2001). Ian Stevenson.

Some years ago I heard about the work of a University of Virginia Medical School psychiatrist, Dr. Jim B. Tucker, who has spent his long academic career (up to the present) researching thousands of cases of the phenomenon of very young children who claim to remember details of previous lives, which has been reported in societies around the world. I then read two earlier books he had written, recently combined into one, Before: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives (2021), which I reviewed here. From this I learned that Dr. Tucker is almost certainly the world’s current leading academic authority on this unusual phenomenon.

However, as I learned from Dr. Tucker’s books, an earlier researcher, Dr. Ian Stevenson, was actually the original study founder, and Dr. Tucker’s predecessor, mentor and academic advisor in the long-running University of Virginia research study of children with previous life memories, which has now been underway continuously for the past fifty years.

In Dr. Stevenson’s book, which is remarkably dry, clinical and scientific for a topic which you might expect to be eerie, sensational and speculative, he presents an intellectual defense and report on his life’s work, his approaches to compiling and analyzing reports, and the rigorous research and interviewing methodologies he devised early on, with which the study has been conducted.

He begins by describing how the study came into being. He lists all the countries around the world where he and his colleagues have collected reports, and discusses cultural factors and differences between sets of reports from different countries. He delves into many aspects of solved and unsolved cases (a solved case is one where the deceased person whose memories the child claims to have is identified, so that the facts claimed by the child can be compared to official documents, and usually the memories of families and friends of the deceased).

Stevenson reviews the frequency and characteristics of many of the common elements of reports, such as: average time between lives in reports from different cultures, familial connections between current and reported previous lives, birthmarks coinciding with circumstances of death of reported previous lives (such as birthmarks or deformities in the same place on the child’s body as the site of wounds on the deceased), frequency and behavioral effects of sex change between lives, presence of vivid “announcing dreams” to pregnant mothers of children who subsequently report memories of a past life, and many other commonly-occurring features of cases.

Stevenson also evaluates alternative explanations to reincarnation in these cases, the effects of widespread cultural belief or disbelief in reincarnation on the frequency of reporting and the characteristics of reports taken from different parts of the world, and considers philosophical and religious implications of differing proposed explanations relative to the major world religions.

Most importantly, he makes it clear that as a scientist, he doesn’t claim to know whether this phenomenon and his study of it “proves” reincarnation. But he does suggest based on exhaustively documented reports from thousands of case histories, and the fact that young children don’t have the experiential knowledge or the access to information to make up the detailed, very specific sets of facts they frequently recount (which are often verified in solved cases), that reincarnation may provide the least convoluted and perhaps most likely explanation to fit the inexplicable nature of this phenomenon.

This book is an important foundation for understanding the study of children who remember past lives, by the leading and original scientist in this unusual research field. It can be heavy going in parts, because of Stevenson’s dry, dispassionate and unsensational writing style, but that in fact lends to its credibility. Recommended.

Miss Fisher's Mysteries. Seasons 1-3 (2012-2015). Amazon Prime (Acorn).

Although this popular Australian mystery series had an amateurish feel to it (or perhaps it was just done that way to deliberately mimic a much earlier movie-era style), it nevertheless featured the oddly charming if improbable story of an heiress and World War I survivor who returns from Europe to Melbourne in the 1920s, and decides to help the local constabulary solve murders and other crimes.

The wealthy Miss Phryne Fisher (played by Essie Davis) is beautiful, uninhibited and sexually liberated, a stylish dresser, a pilot, a horseback rider, a race car driver, an actress, a femme fatale, a mentor to young girls, an inspired crime-solver, and a heroine who's always ready with her signature gold-plated snub-nose revolver whenever things get dangerous. Is there anything she can't or won’t do, for the sheer thrill of it, while solving the mystery and catching the criminal?

It was corny and old-fashioned, but fun. I also saw the movie, Miss Fisher & the Crypt of Tears, released in 2020, which was essentially more of the same. Recommended.

Book Review: Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine (2016). Antonio Garcia Martinez.

Chaos Monkeys is a gossipy but amusing personal account of life in the fast lane of post-2008 crash Wall Street investment firms, Silicon Valley startups, and Facebook, by a young man who experienced it, and was there in the middle of it as it was all taking off. It's cynical, funny and outrageous, with very good insight and commentary on how things really work in the high-stakes worlds of big money and venture capital.

It also contains the clearest descriptions that I have ever read of how online real-time advertising markets work in the virtual world of Facebook, Google, Twitter and others. These mechanisms and algorithms, which daily supply all those eerily relevant and timely ads on your smartphone, as you're browsing some seemingly unrelated app, are technologically impressive, at the same time they are truly disturbing and annoying on the level of the invasions of our personal privacy which are required to make them work.

Martinez's descriptions of how these uncanny and often creepy systems and markets were developed, and how they function, is crucial reading for anyone who wants to understand the strange social media and internet world all around us, which most of us now take for granted (although it shocked me today to recall that the iPhone and its ubiquitous smartphone descendants have only been around for about 15 years). Recommended.