The Wager is about a shipwreck in 1741, and the desperate conditions the castaways found themselves in on a desolate island in Patagonia. It is about what happens to humans when they are deprived of everything, comfort, security, purpose, water, food and most of all, hope.
An Armada of British ships sails for the Pacific around the southern tip of South America during the war with Spain, hunting for a treasure-filled Spanish galleon. All but one of the ships perish. The Wager is one of them. This book tells the story of the castaways and their quest for survival.
The life of a sailor was rough. If they reached their objective and conquered a ship, the rewards could be huge. A sailor’s share could be worth as much as 20 years of wages, and the captain would be set for life with a fortune to retire. However, it was hard to get men to sign up for the terrible risks, and for being away from wives, children, family and home for several years at a time. To solve the problem, the navy employed “press gangs” which were militarized units that simply captured hapless men who were at the wrong place at the wrong time, bound them, and hauled them onto ships. Drunken men might wake up miles from shore, never to return. Their families would simply know that they never came home one night. Those men, if they then stood up for themselves, were mutineers, and would be hanged for the offense. And thus was the glorious life of a sailor in His Majesty’s Navy.
The Wager is a non-fiction account of the journey, through the eyes of several of the key participants, mostly recovered from their journals. It is entertaining, captivating and shocking at the same time. In a world, where we can fly from Chile to London in 14 hours, it is difficult to imagine that in 1740, it took a year – if you succeeded to get around Cape Horn – and that was a big IF.
While talking about shipwrecks and sailing, I have read several books about sailing and shipwrecks over the years and reviewed them here:
Endurance – by Alfred Lansing – I read and reviewed this book in 2016; it tells the story of the Shackleton expedition to Antarctica in 1914.
More about sailing: Two Years Before the Mast – by Richard Henry Dana – Read in 2017, this tells the story of a two-year journey in the 1830s to California around Cape Horn from the point of view of a sailor.
It was Tuesday night, and it had been a long time since we had been out for a movie. My wife suggested Civil War, because it had gotten “pretty good reviews.” It seemed fine to me, so we both sat down in a movie theater for a movie neither of us knew anything about. I expected a movie about – well – the Civil War.
But we were wrong. It was not about the Civil War, but rather about a hypothetical civil war in modern times. We have all heard one of our presidential candidates proclaim that we’d have a civil war if he were not going to be elected. It’s about that kind of civil war.
I didn’t care for the movie much when it started. The acting wasn’t all that good, and the story didn’t make much sense to me.
Apparently two large western states, Texas and California, seceded from the union and formed the western alliance. Their flag is the United States flag, but with only two stars. The president of the United States of course is fighting a war to defeat the secessionists. That’s pretty much all we know. There is a war going on on American soil, of one American against another, some in uniform, some in vigilante pseudo uniforms, but everyone armed with military weapons. Nobody can be trusted, nobody is safe, anywhere. The country is a dystopian wasteland.
Four journalists, including one young girl who wants to be a journalist, make their way to DC in a press SUV to interview the president. The story is told pretty much from their point of view.
I said above that I didn’t care much for the movie when it started because it didn’t make any sense. The journalists were running in the line of fire completely unnecessarily, magically not getting shot, all just for some photographs? Perhaps the director wanted to glorify the noble profession of war journalism. But to me they didn’t look noble or brave, they looked stupid, took unnecessary risks, did impossible feats all movie long, for pictures that would likely never see publication anywhere.
As I always do when watching a movie, since I know I will review and rate it later, I made mental notes of what I’ll say, and how I’ll rate it. Something strange happened while watching Civil War. It started as a one-star movie, and it gained another star every half hour. I had never had that happen to me before.
When I walked out, I was stunned. I could not really talk about it. I was numb. The shock and the violence of a military operation is something most of us never experience. But it came through in the last 30 minutes of this film. I felt I was right there. I was wondering whether all the people that talk about needing a civil war because they don’t like how we treat gay people, or immigrants, or whom we give tax breaks to, or what overseas allies we support or don’t support, or what god we pray to, whether all these people realize what it would mean to have a civil war in this day and age in this country?
And there you have it. The acting of this movie is mediocre. The story obscure. The plot outright silly. But the dystopian scenes are brutal and they hit you in the face with a fist. Go ahead, have your civil war, see how that helps you, your country, your loved ones, and your grandchildren.
You have to watch Civil War, just to get that slap in the face, if you can stand it.
When I reported my experience with the solar eclipse in August 2017 in this post, I made this statement at the end:
But I was a different person. I had seen an eclipse. It was too short. I wanted another one. How dare they be so rare!
The next eclipse in the U.S. will be on April 8, 2024, and I will be there. There is no way I will miss that. It will arch up from Texas to Maine, and Chautauqua, one of my favorite places in New York, will be right in the path. And I will be there.
Then, the next coast to coast eclipse will be in 2045. I will be 89 years old. I will be there too.
I have seen a total eclipse, and things are different now.
We planned the trip for the 2024 eclipse for several years. We were going to go to central Texas, since I believed we’d have the best chance of clear skies at that time of the year. We were going to make it a road trip, so we bought our trailer last year. One other couple joined us, and our little caravan left San Diego on April 4th. We spent the first night in Picacho Peak, Arizona, the second in Deming, New Mexico, the third in Pecos, Texas and we finally arrived in the very tiny hamlet of Millersview, Texas on April 7th, where we camped in a funky campground literally “in the middle of nowhere.”
The plan was to camp there and then drive down a couple of hours into the path of totality. Our goal was Lampasas, Texas. However, when we researched the weather the night before, it predicted clouds and rain on April 8th in large swaths of central Texas. We settled on the town of Llano, Texas as our best chance.
It was a two-hour drive to Llano, and the skies were mostly cloudy with occasional holes for the sun to peek through. We had several hours to wait. Llano is a very idyllic Texas town, and it was full of visitors. There is a river, and a park, and hundreds of people decided to view the event there. It reminded me very much of our experience seven years ago in Idaho Falls. A small town, many visitors, a park by the river, and an eclipse.
As the partial eclipse started, we saw the sun sometimes, but often it was shrouded by clouds. It was disheartening to imagine that so many people had come so far just to experience the darkness and not see the sun and moon themselves. But we got very lucky. About five minutes before the scheduled totality, the sky opened up and was clear for the next 15 minutes. Llano, with 4 minutes and 20 seconds of totality, had one of the longest duration totalities in the country. We saw the whole event in all its glory, and it took my breath away again.
I am not a photographer, and there are thousands of photos on the Internet by much better photographers, so I spare you my very bad shots. Here we are waiting for it to happen:
But here is the more important picture. Our grandsons saw the eclipse from their home in Denver, where it was obviously only partial. They were not with us, but in my heart they were:
Melody Adams works for NASA as a physicist and astronomer. One night, in Hawaii, she discovers an odd object near Pluto with attributes that don’t make any sense. She and her associate quickly come to the conclusion that the object must be coming from outside the solar system. Furthermore, it does not behave like a natural object. When she goes public with her discovery, she quickly loses credibility with the scientific community and NASA, and gets fired.
Fast forward a few years, when the object is observed again near Saturn, slowing down. All doubts are erased. Melody quickly gets back in good graces with NASA, and she eventually gets the commander post as an astronaut on a mission to rendezvous with the object. Once on the journey, things quickly go wrong, and a rift develops between the crew on the ship and Earth and its petty politics.
The book, even on its cover, is portrayed as hard science fiction. It plays in the near future, and the characters all use today’s technology. But I don’t think this is hard science fiction, like Andy Weir’s The Martian. Actually, I found it kind of hokey. Melody Adams, the protagonist, is one of those female astronaut superheroes. She is smarter than everyone else, she has a Ph.D. in physics, she is at the top of her astronaut class, and – as you would not suspect – she sleeps with Jim, the NASA administrator. That whole side plot of being in love with Jim makes no sense, does not contribute to the plot, and I could not quite figure out why it was there.
Without spoiling the book for you, I just have to add that it’s always baffling when there is a space mission where Earth selects its best and brightest to go to meet an alien vessel, and those brilliant super astronauts do really, really stupid things once they are out there on their own. Perhaps that makes for an exciting plot, but for me it’s just distracting. These people are idiots out there, and when I read the story, it does not draw me in. It loses me and I want it to just move on and be done.
Seldom do I get 50% into a book before I decide I am no longer interested. This is one of those.
Hundreds of miles south of the Mediterranean in Libya, the British archeologist Susan Tayler is searching for the tomb of an Egyptian family. Rumors has it that in that general area in the Sahara desert, there was a meteorite that fell many thousands of years ago, before even the pyramids were built. It eventually made it into folklore. Chance would have it that Susan finds just that meteorite in the tomb and tries to take it home to England with her to hand it over to the ESA or NASA.
The book tells the story how she and her bodyguard O’Connor are finding the meteorite. They are promptly ambushed by Boco Haram terrorists, escape, and make their way through the Sahara in an old Jeep with the alien artifact wrapped in a blanket.
It’s a neat idea, but there are so many plot holes, the thing just does not make sense. If you are really an archeologist, why would you take it upon yourself to haul an artifact of such significance through a hostile and terrorist-ridden desert, through many strange countries, just to hand it to NASA? Why would you not just call them in on the coordinates and extract the thing with all the power of the western nations combined? But it was not only that, it was the inane dialog, the stupid things these supposedly bright and super-hero people were constantly doing, that just finally got to me and I put the book down at 50%.
As always when I don’t finish reading a book, I refrain from rating it.
I would never have picked up Goyhood to read. I would never have come across it, had it not been for the author contacting me directly with a request to review the pre-release of the book. The one paragraph synopsis he provided sounded entertaining, so I committed to giving it a try.
Mayer and David Belkin are fraternal twins who grow up in a very small town in rural Georgia raised by a single mom, or perhaps not raised by her. She is definitely in over her head and the boys are pretty much raising each other. What could go wrong?
One day they come home to find a rabbi at their front door talking to their mother. The conversation and introduction to the boys ends up changing the life of Mayer fundamentally. Eventually he leaves the small town to go the Brooklyn, New York, study in a Jewish college and become a Talmud scholar. Through a sequence of sheer luck and being at the right place at the right time, he is invited to marry into a prominent Jewish family. Eventually he is a super-orthodox Jew and completely estranged from his twin brother and his mother.
When their mother dies unexpectedly, Mayer travels back to Georgia and meets up with his brother David. Together they find out family secrets that totally upend both of their lives. To recover, the brothers decide to go on a road trip through the south, from Georgia to New Orleans and back, performing a series of antics and adventures. For both of them, the trip reveals who they really are and what they really want to do with their lives.
This is a road trip story, a little bit like Thelma and Louise, a little bit like On the Road, and a lot like The Lincoln Highway. A group of strange characters get thrown together in a car to work out the mysteries of their lives.
The story is entertaining, but I think you need to be a Jew, or at least interested in Judaism, to really appreciate it. The complications that arose in Mayer’s life that he and his brother had to work through are all based on Jewish doctrine, which has no meaning to a non-religious person like me. I actually felt glad that I wasn’t Jewish and didn’t have what I consider contrived complications in my life.
Most religions seem to try to convert non-believers into their fold. Some have it as their central mission to proselytize and get others drawn in. I have always admired the Jewish for seemingly being the opposite. You don’t get in, and it seems like you’re never really accepted unless you’re born into it, and – as I learned in this book – unless your mother was a Jew. I respect the Jewish religion not for its teachings or its tradition, but simply because it appears to value education as one of its highest goals.
I learned a lot about the lives of orthodox Jews by reading this book, more than I ever thought I would, but I must admit that I skimmed over many sections that went too much into scripture and God just to get the story moving forward.
Arthur C. Clarke first published The Songs of Distant Earth in 1986. It was based on a 1956 short story of the same title, and Clark had supposedly stated that it was his favorite of all his novels. I remember reading it decades ago, probably right around when it was published, but I had forgotten all about it.
It plays in a world about 2000 years in the future where Earth and the entire solar system was destroyed when the sun went nova. Humanity had almost a millennium notice of the event occurring, but as is usual with humanity, it does not always act rationally when obvious doom looms. We have seen this with what Al Gore called global warming in the last century.
The story plays on the planet Thalassa, a human outpost started by a seed ship, a robotic vessel that carried frozen human embryos and the technology and automation necessary to establish a colony on an alien planet. Thalassa is a water world with just an archipelago of three islands, similar to Hawai’i on Earth, and with no other continents. Humans have lived there in a relative paradise and stability for centuries.
When a starship arrives with millions of refugees from Earth, the balance of culture and society on Thalassa may be upset.
Clarke explores the logistics of a world where travel at relativistic speeds between stars is possible. In such a world, ships may arrive at any given populated planet only every few hundred years and the event would be marked with historical significance. The story also illustrates the cultural implications of inter-planet communications when a starship leaves one planet, scheduled to arrive at another three-hundred years later. All friends, lovers and children left behind would be centuries dead by the time the travelers arrive at their destination and are able to ship messages back.
I am finding that Mad Honey is a maddeningly difficult book to review without spoiling it.
The story revolves around three teenagers going to high school in a small town in New Hampshire. Asher is a star athlete who plays varsity hockey. He is raised by Olivia, a single mom who escaped her abusive husband when he was starting to harm Asher when he was just six years old. Oliva is a beekeeper. She raises bees, rents them out to orchards and farms for pollination, and sells honey at the local markets. Lily is a bright girl and a cello player, very pretty and popular in her school, even though she is new. All the boys have their eyes on her. Her mom is Ava, a park ranger with a passion for nature and who has hiked the Appalachian Trail. Ava is also a single mom to Lily. She too left an abusive husband to protect Lily. Asher’s best childhood friend is Maya, a precocious girl who has grown up with Asher as a buddy, but there was never any romantic relationship. She and Lily have become best friends. Maya has two moms, a lesbian couple.
Mad Honey is narrated in alternating chapters by Olivia, Asher’s mom, and Lily, the teenage daughter of Ava. It tells the story from Oliva’s adult point of view, pretty much in the present tense, and from Lily, the young girl’s point of view, mostly in the form of flashbacks. This makes for a complex plotline and occasional confusion, particularly when trying to align the chronology.
In the first third of the book I was slightly confused and possibly even bored. I am not necessarily very interested in teenage romance. Olivia’s lessons on beekeeping provide a fresh framework for the story outline, but I had trouble connecting the details about the bees, and the title including honey, with the teenage love and associated heartaches.
All the main characters, and even the peripheral ones, are multi-dimensional and well-crafted. They come alive and are real people to the reader.
What I have told you so far is all I can tell you. It does not sound like much of a story you’d be interested in reading, but be assured, there is much, much more.
Mad Honey seems like a book about the birds and the bees and teenagers in love, but there are massive, almost mind-boggling plot twists that appear out of nowhere that make this story worth reading. Mad Honey is not about birds and bees, it’s about something altogether different, and I am not going to tell you what that is.
The book itself, as a novel, is so-so. I would have given it about 2 stars in my rating system of 4. Since it provoked my thinking significantly and educated me about a subject I had dismissed as unimportant all my life, I had to bump the rating to 3 stars.
Mad Honey is definitely a novel everyone in 2024 should read.
Spoiler Alert
Do not read beyond this unless you are okay with spoilers or you have already read the book.
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Out of nowhere, about halfway through the story, it is revealed that Lily is transgender. She grew up knowing she was a girl, trapped in a boy’s body. Mad Honey is about the highly complex problem of transgender issues in our current society, and it illustrates the topic from the point of view of a transgender person, Lily.
I have never much occupied myself with trans rights, or issues surrounding transgender people. I remember when I was a boy in Germany, there was an old woman who we often saw walking the streets of our city. She was conservatively dressed in women’s clothes, carried a purse, and everyone in the city knew her. We knew her, recognized her and secretly made fun of her because she appeared to be a man, wearing women’s clothes. She had the body of a man, the hard features of a man’s face, stubble and an Adam’s apple. She wore longish hair, which always looked like she had cut herself. This was in the 1960s, and she probably didn’t find a barber who was willing to help her. As kids, we just didn’t know what to do with “her.” That was my only exposure to trans people, or even possibly just cross-dressers. I always thought it was a very minor problem, with very, very few individuals affected.
In our current political climate in the US in the 2020s, the matter of LGBTQ people, which I presume includes transgender people, we learn that there are many more of them than I ever realized. I actually personally know at least one (the son/daughter of a friend), I have heard of another one (the son/non-binary of another friend), and of course there are the highly visible examples, the most famous one probably being Caitlyn Jenner.
While I had the attitude of disregarding the existence of transgender people for most of my life, considering them a minority of a minority, it never really occurred to me to think much about them and what life might be like walking in their shoes. In America, we have national debates about what locker rooms and bathrooms we should allow them to use. Some states are restricting their access to health care. Some states prosecute doctors who are willing and able to help them.
Just because we happen to not have their problems or challenges, we tend to arrange our world so we can trample on their rights as humans, as citizens and as people. We rationalize that they should just fall in line. We, the majority, have the audacity to box them into our own limited worldview based on the privilege drawn out of the bodies we were randomly born into.
Per the authors of Mad Honey, during the year it took them to write this book, over 350 transgender people were killed around the world, more than a fifth of them inside their own homes.
Reading Mad Honey brought all these issues to the forefront of my awareness, and it may have shaped my thinking into directions I had not considered before. A very worthwhile read indeed.
Recently my wife mentioned the song Knock Three Times by Tony Orlando & Dawn in the course of a benign conversation. That comment jarred me, because I remembered the song from 1970, and I realized I had not heard it ever again since those years. So I went to YouTube and found this link:
This song was a hit song in my youth in Germany. I was 14 years old in 1970 and I didn’t know any English yet. I had just started learning first year English in school at that age. It was my third language. A lot of popular songs on the radio in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s were English (Beatles, Rolling Stones, etc.) and American. So we heard the songs all the time, we liked them, but we didn’t understand the lyrics. Listen to a popular song in a language you don’t know (like some of Andrea Bocelli if you don’t know Italian) and you will understand what I mean. You can enjoy a song, you can like a song, you can hum the melody, without ever knowing what it says.
So it was with me and Knock Three Times. I just listened to it now, more than 50 years later, for the first time, and I magically understood the words. It now has a whole new meaning.
This happened to me over the years from time to time, when I’d hear an old hit for the first time. Another recent such experience was with Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks:
This came out in the summer of 1974. By then I was in my 4th year of school English and I probably knew some of the words, like “we had joy, we had fun” but I definitely, positively didn’t understand the part with the starfish on the beach.
We had joy, we had fun We had seasons in the sun But the stars we could reach Were just starfish on the beach
I remember loving that song, it had such a good beat, and it really personified summer for me in my youth. But when I recently listened to the words for the first time, I was sad and melancholy due to its message, but I also chuckled because the starfish chorus seemed kind of hokey to me.
It is definitely a very unique experience to listen to a trusty old song from your youth and understand the words for the first time 50 years later.
This book caught my attention because it was a “first contact” (with aliens) book. After further research I learned that Cawdron has written many independent first contact books. This one was pretty bad, so I am not sure I will bother with any of the others.
Breezy is a Secret Service agent with a fast trigger finger. Olivia is a call girl who just made a deep fake sex movie to frame an important person. Then there is Buster, a clown and a mysterious “good guy” all around who seems to have a lot of power, influence and abilities. Oh, and there are aliens, too, who have a strong interest in human psychology and the welfare of the human race.
It’s an oddly action-packed story, told in the present tense, which give it a fast pace. You get into the thinking of the protagonists, and there lies the problem. The author is basically lecturing about his political views all throughout the story, and he is in the process forgetting to tell us a story. Most of the action is short, interleaved with endless exposition about various political views. He obviously has a problem with capitalism, is worried about climate change, corruption in the highest levels of government, the America military machine, abuse of women throughout the world, and so on.
He projects an aura of moral superiority which will turn many readers off. I don’t disagree with him on many of those views, but of course half of his readers will. By being so much in our face with politics, the story gets buried, and all those opposing his views will feel insulted. I only felt lectured to.
After the book ends, there is an Epilogue, which basically tells you all you need to know. It’s a cheap way out. He seems to have realized that the book’s story is weak, so he has to button it all up in a tell-all epilogue. There is also an Afterword, where he discusses all the major concepts as well as his various political views and statements.
As a result, you don’t really need to read the book. Just read the Afterword. You’ll get everything out of the book that there is, and you don’t have to read a bad book all the way through. In a way, the author provides the Cliff Notes right in the book.
Last week we participated in the “Tour de Palm Springs” bike ride in – you guessed it – Palm Springs. To get there, we took the Rover to a camp ground in Desert Hot Springs, about 30 minutes northeast of Palm Springs. This was the view from our camp site in the morning:
The mountain in the background is San Jacinto. For my non-California readers, Jacinto is pronounced with an H, like Hacinto. It is 10,834 feet tall (3,302 m) and that makes it the second highest mountain range in Southern California. To give perspective, the highest mountain in the Germany is Zugspitze with an altitude of only 9,718 feet (2,962 m).
I have climbed San Jacinto many times, going to the top, and doing section hikes. Here are some of those posts:
Once I have climbed a mountain, I always see the paths up and I continue to be fascinated by them. Here is a view of the mountain from Palm Springs during the bike ride. I had to pull over to the sidewalk to take this beautiful image:
At the end, we enjoyed the ride and the trip to the desert, along with a lot of intimate views of the beauty of San Jacinto.
We all shook today when we found out that Alexei Navalny died in a Russian prison. The news reverberated throughout the world and in Russia itself. All I know about Navalny I have learned through his portrayal in the western media. This includes statements about Navalny’s character by Ambassador Michael McFaul, who knew Navalny personally and considered him a friend.
Digging deeper, particularly in circles of Russians, Navalny does not appear to be the knight in shining armor that we all think we know. Apparently, many Russians do not support Navalny and even consider him to be further on the right than Putin.
Here is an interesting article in the Workers World, which gives an entirely different viewpoint of Navalny, his history, and his status.
I might warn you, if you have never read anything in Workers World: It is the official newspaper of the Workers World Party (WWP), a communist party in the United States. So you might take its content with a grain of salt. Even in this article they denounce capitalism as a systemic tool of abuse of workers.
I have to state and admit that I do not have more information than what I read in the western media and what sources like Workers World downplay as western liberal propaganda.
If you are interested in learning more about Russia, its propaganda machine, its disinformation engine and its brutal oppression of political opponents, pick up the book Red Notice by Bill Browder.
This experience highlights to me how little we actually know about what is really going on in the world. It does not surprise me when I hear that 70 million people, many of whom consume only information propagated by Fox News, plan on voting for candidate Trump in the next election. They can’t help it. It’s all they know.
Just like I can’t help it. I am not sure I know what Navalny really stood for in Russia, and how much of what I read in opposing articles like the one I linked to above is reality, or just another flavor of Russian propaganda.
This shows how hugely important it is to have a free press and have a choice so we can choose as unbiased a source as we can.
A French gourmet, Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) has developed a romantic relationship with his live-in cook of 20 years, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). He has proposed marriage to her numerous times, and she has apparently rejected him as often. Eventually he starts cooking for her to convince her. This is the story line of the film.
It plays in the French countryside sometime in the 19th century, based on the fact that lighting in the manor is solely by candles and the hearth is wood-fired. It is not clear what Dodin’s profession is other than chef, because we never see him working other than in his own kitchen, serving a handful of his friends in the village. He obviously has a reputation as a superb chef, since he is even invited for dinner by a prince traveling through the area.
The Taste of Things is a French film with English subtitles. I enjoyed listening to the French in an effort to practice my 40-years-rusty French. The photography is exquisite. It made me feel like I was walking around in a Renoir painting.
There was no music, no soundtrack of any type, other than the constant French dialog, which is somewhat musical on its own. The only music I remember was when the final credits rolled.
The movie is two-and-a-half hours long and nothing really happens. They cook. They cook a lot. There are extensive scenes of nothing but cooking complex French recipes, meats, baked goods and lots of sauces. The entire movie is about cooking, more cooking, more cooking, and eating, and cooking, and eating, and cooking. If you are a foodie, or a cook, you might enjoy this. I am not a foodie or a cook, and I don’t remember what I had for dinner yesterday, so all this was meaningless to me. After a while, it got really boring, and I had a hard time staying awake, not that I would have missed anything had I actually fallen asleep.
Apparently when you watch more than two full hours of nothing but cooking and eating without any other action or even music, sprinkled in with 30 minutes of slow action, you get full.
There is a set of trivia I picked up on IMDb: The two main actors who play Dodin and his cook, Eugénie, were once married in real life (1998 – 2003).
