Book Review: The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age (2020). Steve Olson.

In my senior year at university as a political science major, I wrote two long papers on different aspects of the Manhattan Project and the development of nuclear weapons, one of which focused particularly on why the U.S. government made the decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II, and whether that was the right decision, based on all the complex geo-political and military calculations that American leaders had to take into account in making that world-changing and city-destroying decision at the end of the war.

In the intervening half century, the history of the development of nuclear weapons and how we began the perilous nuclear age has continued to draw the interest of historians, philosophers and scientists. We might have expected that almost everything about the Manhattan Project and the race to beat Hitler’s Germany in developing atomic weapons has been researched and published by now, but that turns out not to be true.

In The Apocalypse Factory, we learn about another key chapter in the story, which has received relatively less historical coverage: the story of how plutonium, a radioactive element which occurs rarely in nature, became the essential ingredient in atomic weapons, and how it was first manufactured for the American nuclear weapons industry.

Olson relates the history of the academic chemists in the late 1930s who first created plutonium from uranium through complex chemistry experiments, how plutonium and the ability to manufacture it as a byproduct of uranium-based fission solved key problems of bomb-making, and how Manhattan Project scientists and leaders, in combination with the DuPont company, quickly created a factory at Hanford, Washington, to turn plutonium creation into an industrial process.

From the history of the invention of nuclear weapons science and technology, and how the industrial processes were developed, the author goes on to provide a brief social history of the Tri-Cities area in eastern Washington, which grew rapidly from rural desert scrub land under the wartime urgency of the project, as thousands of workers poured into the area under conditions of strict secrecy. 

It’s a particularly interesting look back for those of us in Washington state who know about Hanford and it’s terrible waste disposal problems, but not as much about the more human story of how the three cities grew together, and developed their own distinct local culture.

The latter part of the book tells the story of the Nagasaki bombing, which is uniquely tied to the Hanford plutonium story in that the Hiroshima bomb (the first bomb dropped on Japan) was a one-time design, using uranium as the bomb fuel, where the two masses of uranium to be combined to start the runaway fission process were fired at each other down a gun-like barrel. The Nagasaki bombing used the plutonium implosion design, which has become the model for all subsequent atomic bombs. In that sense, the Nagasaki bombing is more closely tied to the work done at Hanford than at the other Manhattan Project sites.

After exploring the human and infrastructure impacts of the bombing, the author talks a little about the legacies of plutonium production: the permanent threat of nuclear weapons to human civilization which has thus far eluded real solutions, and the environmental problems of waste cleanup at the Hanford site. None of it is news, especially to those of us in the Northwest, but Olson does a good job covering the backstory, and the lasting problems left over from the war-driven invention of this monstrous technology of destruction. Recommended.

Movie Review: The Beatles: Get Back! (2021). Disney+.

Another month has slipped by, and here we are – it’s Rock and Roll Friday at The Memory Cache blog again! Today I’d like to begin by posing the question: what happens when you take more than a hundred hours of archival film of the most important rock and roll band ever while they were in the studio during the recording of their final album together, and hand it to one of the greatest filmmakers in our lifetime to make a documentary mini-series?

The very exciting answer to that question is that you get the three-part Beatles docuseries The Beatles: Get Back! by Peter Jackson, running about eight hours total, covering a 21-day series of recording sessions at Twickenham Studios and then Apple Studios in London with the Beatles as they made the Let It Be album in 1969. The mini-series is available on the Disney+ streaming service, and was released in late November of last year.

As Beatles fans and historians know, the film footage shot during these sessions was originally used to create the documentary film The Beatles: Let It Be, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. That film has long been regarded as a depressing and negative farewell send-off to the Beatles, focusing as it did on the tensions in the band that were driving it toward the inevitable breakup that followed shortly thereafter.

When Jackson, a lifelong Beatles fan, was approached about the possibility of revisiting the source film to make a new version of essentially the same subject as the The Beatles: Let It Be documentary, he was reportedly reluctant to take the project on, until he saw all the film, and realized there might be a more interesting and uplifting story to be told in retrospect than had been presented in the original documentary.

And indeed, that is what he has done. It’s worth noting there was also a formidable technical challenge involved, which was that much of the 50-year old source film was not in good condition, so he had to use the same kinds of advanced cinematic magic he had employed in restoring and enhancing 100-year old archival film for his 2018 World War I documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old, to make a movie that had the look and feel, and the visual and sound quality, of a contemporary production.

But the main challenge for Jackson, with the help of Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, and the support of Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, was always going to be to show the Beatles as they really were, together, at work and in a private setting, this incredibly talented group of four professional musicians whose astonishing history together had welded them into a close-knit family, even with all the pressures and animosities that were by then corroding their ability to stay together as a band.

I can see how this show might not be for everyone. The three episodes are each long (2-3 hours apiece), and for much of the time, not that much is happening in terms of action or plot. The four Beatles come and go, with their friends, wives and lovers, and their entourages, while the others are trying out new bits for the songs they’re writing together, or pairing up to play some of their old songs just for fun. We hear their playful banter with each other, which was real – we can see that it wasn’t something they just put on for the media in public, or created for their movies. We also hear them discussing their relationships, like an old married couple squabbling about the frustrations of a long domestic life together.

But we also get to see the miracle of their music creation process. Unlike most of the earlier Beatles albums, the songs on the Let It Be album were written in the studio, in real time. It wasn’t like most of their albums, where John, Paul and George would show up with songs already written, and ready to record. In this documentary, we watch them coming up with new lyrics, guitar bits and chords, and Ringo’s unique drum tracks, right before our eyes. And to them, these creations were all new – they hadn’t heard them as iconic sounds of the 1960s, played millions of times since around the world for over a half century, as we all have.

The documentary ends with their famous roof-top concert, where they played their last public performance together, and showcased many of the songs that would be on this final studio album they made together. It’s a triumphal moment, and another demonstration of the close bonds between the four of them, even as things were falling apart. We see the sheer joy and fun of playing for a live audience again, after more than three years of not touring, that captures for a final time the magical connection they had together as a close-knit brotherhood of legendary performing artists, which was such a powerful part of what has made them so beloved by generations of fans.

For anyone who is interested in the Beatles, this documentary is indispensable. It definitely has its bittersweet moments, and it inevitably shares some of the unavoidable facts about the state of their relationships at that time that made The Beatles: Let It Be seem like such a bummer, but it also highlights much of what the Beatles still shared with each other, particularly their joy in creating and playing their unique brand of generation-defining rock music. Highly recommended.    

Book Review: The Lincoln Highway (2021). Amor Towles.

The Lincoln Highway is the third and most recent bestselling historical novel by Amor Towles, who left a twenty-year career as an investment professional to become (more or less out of nowhere) one of our most skilled contemporary novelists and storytellers. It has some similarities to the other two novels, but diverges in its narrative approach, which entails jumping back and forth between the stories of four different characters, all tied together by their roles in a youthful road trip.

Towles’ specialty seems to be in focusing in on the lives of rather ordinary fictional characters, and artfully depicting their everyday growth and struggles, while bringing alive the historical eras in which their lives take place. In the process, his beautifully drawn main protagonists also come into contact with other interesting characters, and find themselves in unexpected situations that range from the amusing and mundane to the morally challenging and dangerous.

In his first novel, Rules of Civility (previously reviewed), his main protagonist is a young woman from a lower class background, trying to work, party and find her way into the elite social world of New York’s upper class during the 1930s. In A Gentleman in Moscow (also previously reviewed), Towles’ main character is a former member of the Russian aristocracy, now trying to build a life under house arrest in Moscow in the post-revolutionary 1920s.

The Lincoln Highway is primarily the story of Emmett, an 18-year old Nebraska boy in 1954 rural America, who is being driven home at the beginning of the story to his late father’s farm. Emmett is driven by the warden from the reform school where Emmett had been incarcerated for the past year, for accidentally killing another young man with an angry (if perhaps justified) punch. Waiting there for him at the farm are his exceptionally bright 8-year old brother, as well as a neighbor girl (who appears to be fond of him) and her farmer father, who wants to acquire the farm.

In the course of the first chapters, we realize that Emmett is basically a good kid, who lost his temper and made a mistake, but who’s done some growing up as a result of his hard life experience. However, his immediate prospects are discouraging: the family farm is forfeit because of his father’s inability to make it work, so Emmett has a different plan. He wants to abandon the farm, take the small amount of money he inherits, and set out with his younger brother in his well-maintained Studebaker sedan to California, where he hopes to start buying and renovating houses, and building a good life for the two of them.

Unfortunately, fate has different ideas, in the form of two of his fellow young prisoners, who appear unexpectedly after escaping and stowing away in the warden’s car, with their own plan to join Emmett and his brother on their road trip. These two young fugitives have come up with a plot to steal one of their inheritances on the way, and share the loot among the four of them. What could go wrong? But of course, plenty could and does go wrong, and eventually they will all end up not in California, but in New York instead.

Along the way they get separated, face different dangers, meet unusual new characters, reunite, and bring their strange road trip to its unexpected end, with powerful and life-changing consequences for each of them.

At the beginning, as soon as the two escaped prisoners showed up and revealed a little about their respective characters and backgrounds, I could barely stand to keep reading. It was so obvious that they were going to spell trouble for Emmett and his little brother, and that their clever plot would go wrong. Three teenage young men with histories of poor judgment, and a vulnerable but precocious child, heading off in a car on a seemingly larcenous and crackpot quest? It sounded like a prescription for a heart-breaking disaster.  

Fortunately, the plot twists and surprises continued to be intriguing and unexpected, and new revelations continually added depth to each of the characters, so I kept with the story just to find out what would happen next. It turned out to be well worth the trouble, as the pace steadily picked up, and the suspense increased all the way to the dramatic conclusion. Recommended.

TV Review: Dark Winds (2022). AMC+.

I just finished watching the first season of this very good new mystery series, based on the Tony Hillerman series of novels and characters, and co-produced by George R.R. Martin (of Game of Thrones fame) and Robert Redford.

The story takes place in the early 1970s, on a Navajo reservation in the Southwest. The tribal police chief, Joe Leaphorn (convincingly played by Zahn McClarnon, who also played tribal police chief Matthias in Longmire), is trying to solve several crimes on the reservation which he suspects may be linked, with the help of a new deputy, Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon), and Joe's more experienced female deputy, Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten).

What stands out about this series is the way it weaves together traditional crime story elements with many culturally and historically relevant factors for the time and place. For example, there is a Native American militant group involved in a deadly armored car robbery in a nearby town, which is being tracked by a cynical and shady FBI agent as well as by the Navajo police. This leads to the usual jurisdictional conflicts, very true to life, between tribal authorities, the federal government and the FBI.

There is murder on the reservation too. There are Navajo traditional spiritual beliefs to be considered, and perhaps even some black magic, along with rural poverty, discrimination and the lives blighted by it, that all must be factored into the process of solving the crimes. And there is the lingering aftermath of an explosion at a uranium mine on the reservation that took several native workers’ lives, and the unresolved mysteries surrounding that community trauma.

It took me a couple of episodes to warm up to this series, but then I began to really appreciate the authentic characters, the complex plot, the growing suspense and the sensitive portrayals of native life and family dynamics. I also thought the show created convincingly realistic challenges for Leaphorn, Chee and Manuelito to face in trying to solve these crimes, and provide good law enforcement and social justice for their people, in the harsh and often hostile environment of the reservation. 

From what I can find on the internet, it appears that this series has been continued for at least another season. I look forward to more episodes of this entertaining new mystery show from AMC+ whenever it returns for that new season.  Recommended.

Movie Review: The Janes (2022). HBO Max.

This inspirational new documentary of events from half a century ago could hardly be more timely or relevant to current events, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Dobbs case to overrule Roe v. Wade, and thereby revoke the constitutional rights of women to control their own reproductive freedom, specifically the right to obtain abortions.

The Janes is the story of a small collective of young women in Chicago, who in the early 1970s came together to create an underground network to help women obtain abortions, which were still illegal at that time. 

Building on their own experiences, and those of friends and family members, the group tried a variety of approaches for providing illegal abortions. In the beginning, they relied on existing illegal abortion providers, and used their organizational skills to handle information dissemination, set up secret communications, and provide scheduling, funding and transportation for young women who lacked the skills, connections and money to find abortionists themselves. That in itself was a remarkable achievement for a small group of young amateur conspirators.

However, as several of the now-elderly members of the group recount in the film, they soon realized that the skills required to safely do an abortion as a routine medical procedure were not impossible to acquire, even for people who had not been trained or certified as medical doctors or nurses. 

Eventually, several of the young women learned to perform abortions themselves, and were then aided by the collective in setting up constantly-moving one-day clinics in borrowed homes and apartments, to which the patients would be driven using the same sort of clandestine operational methods used by spies, terrorists, resistance fighters and criminals. And they were criminals – at least to the local police in Chicago, based on the existing laws and social norms at that time.

For a short time, they managed to safely arrange and carry out many hundreds of abortions. But like most ongoing black market activities involving many consumers, eventually the authorities got wind of it, and managed to raid one of their pop-up clinics, capturing several of the principals and charging them as illegal abortionists. And it would have gone badly for them, except for the timely intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Roe v. Wade in 1973 (by a 7-2 margin) that abortion was a constitutional right of all women in the United States, before their prosecution could be concluded.

The story of the Janes collective, so well told in this documentary, has become legendary as an example of the kinds of bold early feminist militancy that arose in the 1970s, where women began to make the difficult decision to consciously refuse to be limited by sexist laws and male-imposed control over their bodies and reproductive choices. 

As we are seeing in the resistance to the Dobbs decision, this determination of women to control their own bodies and their destinies has not abated in the intervening half century. Their determination is being demonstrated in the rapid rise of new political and legal activism in support of the right to prevent and end pregnancies, as well as in the formation of new networks (again, sometimes clandestine) to provide information, medications and services to women living in areas where abortion has been outlawed.

This film provides an enlightening history of the desperation women feel when their right to choose has been taken away by law and society, for the particular enlightenment of several generations of Americans who have never lived under these conditions. It also shows the kinds of creative acts of resistance to state control and meddling in private medical decisions that can be expected whenever abortion is banned, as is now happening again in so many states. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (2020). Mary Trump, PhD.

I decided after a year or two of the Trump presidency that I wasn’t going to read most of the tell-all books about Donald Trump, his life, his corrupt administration, and all the bizarreness that constantly surrounds him. I read several of them early on, but quickly concluded that reading these books was a joyless and monumentally depressing exercise.

Having recognized before he was even elected that Donald Trump was clearly a sociopath and a narcissist, I soon discovered that reading more details of his pathetic existence and chaotic administration brought me few additional insights into his condition and behavior, and no enjoyment whatsoever. Another disincentive to reading Trump-related books was the fact that every shocking new detail of his story contained in the latest sensational book release immediately appeared on every cable news show and in the constant news coverage of Trump, so there was never anything new or surprising to be learned by the time any of these books reached the bookshelves.

Despite all that, I recently read Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough, the only book to appear so far written by an actual Trump family member. The author is someone who knew the long history of the family members and their relationships from close-up personal experience. Her insider’s account is enhanced and made even more credible by the fact that she is also a PhD clinical psychologist, who specializes (not surprisingly) in the sorts of dysfunctional psychological conditions which appear to abound in the lives of many of the Trump family members.

Of course, much of the most interesting content from the book was also immediately revealed through the mass media as soon as it was published, partly through broadcast interviews with the author herself, so again, the amount of new information in the book that wasn’t already a part of the gigantic trove of public knowledge of Donald Trump by the time I read it was fairly limited. Nevertheless, there was value in hearing the whole story and her clinical analysis directly from her, in book form – it made it more believable, more complete, and more emotionally comprehensible and resonant than most of the Trump literature.   

Mary Trump was the daughter of Donald Trump’s older brother Fredy. The story she tells about the family is almost Shakespearean in its dramatic excesses and its notorious, conniving characters. At the head of the family was Fred Trump, a driven entrepreneur and family patriarch who built a real estate empire in Brooklyn, and became fabulously wealthy, but had little time or love for anyone else. Like most patriarchs, he looked originally to his oldest son, Mary’s father Fredy, to become his principal successor and heir in his real estate business.

The problem with this plan was that Fredy had little interest in or aptitude for his father’s real estate business. He went off to serve in the army, which he liked and where he did well, but this disgusted his father, who had no use for the military or the concept of service. Fredy loved boats and airplanes too, and had the money to buy them and learn to operate them, but his father also had nothing but contempt for these activities. At one point, Fredy even snuck off to become an airline pilot, a goal which he actually achieved on his own, and was able to pursue successfully for a brief period of time, thereby further enraging his father.

But that didn’t last, because Fredy also had alcohol and drug problems, caused no doubt by the constant stress of trying and failing to satisfy his father's plans for him. So Fredy kept coming back to his father and the family business each time he failed at his own projects, trying hopelessly to find a role in the business he could play well, to win his cold-hearted father’s approval, and eventually be able to support his growing family.

Meanwhile, Donald (Fred's second son) was observing Fredy’s failures to meet their father’s harsh and unforgiving expectations, and decided to modify his own behaviors in ways that would gain him “favorite” status with his father Fred. The behaviors he chose were exactly those that we recognize in the troubled and extreme personality we know today. 

He would become a “killer”. He would be the person who disparaged and mocked “losers”, ironically eventually even including his father, after Fred was afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease. He would learn to treat everyone – even his closest family members – as worthless objects, to be despised, used and manipulated for his own purposes, without any sympathy or empathy for any difficulties they might be experiencing. And he would learn to excel in creating a fictitious public image of himself as a powerful, wealthy, and indomitable businessman, regardless of his lack of any demonstrated abilities or personal achievements independent of those enabled by his wealthy father.

According to Mary Trump, every one of the destructive and dysfunctional behaviors Donald tried out on those around him just gained him more approval from Fred Senior, and more leniency from this cold-blooded father for his obnoxiousness, cruelty and misbehavior. It was ironic, as Ms. Trump points out, that none of Fred's indulgence could ever actually reassure the chronically insecure Donald deep down that his father really loved him. And he probably didn't. Fred didn't appear to have the capacity to love or empathize with others either, just as Donald doesn't.

This is an extremely disturbing but highly credible insider’s look into the dark heart of a family with serious behavioral and psychological disorders, who somehow produced the strange and historically anomalous figure of Donald Trump, whose ambitions, unchecked rage, sociopathy and incompetence have so clouded the recent past, present and perhaps near future of our country. Recommended.

TV Review: Ridley Road (2021). BBC/PBS Masterpiece.

Ridley Road is an intriguing short TV mini-series (of four episodes) from the BBC, which we watched on Masterpiece Theater on PBS. It is fictional, and based on the 2014 novel Ridley Road by Jo Bloom, which in turn was loosely based on real historical situations, groups and people in early 1960s England.

Just coming of age in a still-traumatized Britain two decades after World War II, Vivien Epstein, a modest young Jewish woman (played very ably by Agnes O'Casey), with working class roots and a part of her family living in East London, follows a new boyfriend (Tom Varey) into the anti-fascist resistance against a fast-growing neo-Nazi political group known as the National Socialist Movement (NSM), led by Colin Gordan (Rory Kinnear).

The secret organization she joins, known as the 62 Group, is composed of Jewish people who band together to protect the Jewish community from NSM-led street violence and attacks, a rising tide of mayhem and hate against Jews which they fear is both unrecognized and not of any real concern to the British police and government. The group's initial acts of resistance to this neo-Nazi threat are to try to inform the authorities of what Gordan and his neo-fascist thugs are doing, but when no help is forthcoming from the police, the group organizes its own defenses and combatants to fight the NSM in the streets.

Sensing that they need more inside information, though, Vivien and her boyfriend volunteer to go undercover to infiltrate the NSM. Vivien sets out to gain access to the NSM's highly secretive inner circle, masquerading as an enthusiastic if naive recruit, and ultimately works her way into Gordan's confidence, his home and his family.

Most spy thrillers involve agents who work for government agencies, but this unusual and absorbing drama of England and London in 1962 manages plenty of tension, danger and action in the course of its four episodes, while telling a believable story of a risky self-directed spying operation carried out by civilian amateurs. 

It's a story that also has plenty of resonance in our own time, as we watch private far right-wing armies and paramilitary groups becoming larger, stronger and more emboldened in their violent tactics and hateful objectives. Recommended.

Book Review: Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (2017). Leslie Kean.

It was an odd coincidence to me that Leslie Kean, the New York Times award-winning journalist whose book UFOs I previously reviewed, has also written a book on the other “mysteries of life” topic I have found most challenging to my otherwise rational and scientific view of life. That subject has to do with the question of whether our consciousness may survive in some form and transcend our mortal bodies and lifetimes.

As regular readers of this blog know, there are widely known and well-documented cases of very young children who appear to have detailed knowledge of recent individual past lives which are not easily explainable through rational means, and where fraud or trickery do not seem to be likely explanations.

Kean’s book begins with summaries of a few of the best-known of those cases, and the history of academic and scientific research into this strange phenomenon (prominently led by Dr. Ian Stevenson and then Dr. Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia Medical School). She then moves on to evaluate research into several other related types of "near death" and "beyond death" experiences, both contemporary and historical.

In the course of exploring academic research into other categories of reported “beyond death” phenomena, such as near death experiences (NDEs), apparitions, and mediums, Kean regularly probes the quality and meaning of the reports, the reporters and the data. She also regularly raises and considers the possibility of psychic communications between living people (rather than between the living and the dead) as an alternative explanation for some of the strange events and experiences reported, particularly in cases where subjects report detailed information they shouldn’t have been able to know, which the subjects believed had been conveyed from “beyond life” sources or experiences.   

It's a very intriguing and often hair-curling inquiry. She started to lose me in the later chapters, where it seemed she might be starting to move too much into the realm of New Age belief, especially as she began sharing some of her own personal experiences, which often seemed lacking in verifiable evidence, and which she relates with less of the apparent level of skepticism and critical analysis she typically displays toward paranormal topics in her writing.

I’m always on the lookout for that, because being open to the possibility of paranormal phenomena can easily lead one down some bizarre and perhaps absurd rabbit holes. But there was still much to ponder, and much of interest in this very unusual book.

This world and our existence in it may yet be stranger than they appear. Or then again, perhaps not.  But the essential mystery of our being, where we came from, and where if anywhere our consciousness might go when we depart, make it almost obligatory for many of us to speculate about it, and see if there is more to know.  This book is an interesting and reasonably rational exploration of recent academic research and literature on reported phenomena related to this most universal set of human questions. Recommended.