Category: Three Stars

Book Review: The Little Book of Robo Investing – by Qian Lui and Elizabeth Macbride

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Three StarsLeave a comment

The subtitle “How to Make Money While You Sleep” makes it sound like this is a get-rich-quick book with some shady theme. Not at all.

The authors are seasoned professionals in the investment industry who have collaborated for many years and worked at a number of investment companies.

If you are a seasoned investor and you want to learn about the modern, automated online platforms for portfolio investing, this is your book. You can read it in a few hours and know exactly what your next steps should be.

If you do not know about investing but you realize you should start putting money aside and start building wealth, or at a minimum start saving for retirement, this book is absolutely written for you. It teaches about assets and asset classes, diversification, minimizing fees and taxes, and leveraging the power of compounding. If you think investing is buying stocks in companies directly, this will teach you what the risks are with that, and why diversified portfolios, in the long term, always beat the market.

If there is a modern book on Investing 101 – this is it. You should buy this book, work through it, and no matter how much or how little money you have to start with, you should pick one of the recommended platforms and sign up. It takes 20 minutes. You will see your money grow immediately and daily. You will feel like you know what you’re talking about and you will be comfortable with the process.

Most importantly, you will be on your way to a healthy financial future.

Enjoy Robo Investing.

Book Review: Unshakeable – by Tony Robbins

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Early in my career, when I was just a 30-year-old computer programmer, I picked up a tape program from the mail order firm Nightingale Conant, which eventually became the largest audio program publisher. The tape program was called Unlimited Power and was narrated by Tony Robbins, and it was based on the book with the same name. It came out in 1986 when he was just 26 years old.

I put the cassettes in a portable player and over lunch walked the hills behind the business park in Carlsbad where I worked, and over the weeks and months that followed, Tony Robbins changed my life. Unlimited Power taught the young me techniques and habits that over time significantly contributed to who I am today. Needless to say, I always admired Tony Robbins. I attended some of his seminars in person, and I read and listened to additional programs he produced over his long career.

When I was out browsing at Barnes and Noble recently I stumbled upon Unshakeable and picked it up without hesitation. It turns out it was a great read, and true to my history with Tony Robbins, I learned a lot. He teamed up with several exceptional people in the financial world to educate the reader about how to invest safely and profitably, including Peter Mallouk, who has been ranked the #1 financial advisor in the US for several years by Barron’s.

The book analyzes the ups and downs of the markets, and we learn that after every bull market comes a correction. It’s a great reference work if you want to find out the difference between investing in stocks directly, or in funds, what mutual funds are, the significance of index funds and how to pick a financial advisor. Unshakeable teaches you how to put together an actionable plan designed to deliver financial freedom.

No matter your income or your current stage of life, this book will provide the tools to help you achieve your financial goals more rapidly and with confidence and safely.

The only downside – Unshakeable was published in 2016, just as the first Trump administration went underway. It does not cover what happened since, and of course the entire disaster that the financial world underwent due to Covid had not happened yet. However, the message Tony Robbins delivers here is timeless. If you read this book and only benefit one tenth as much as I did from Unlimited Power almost 40 years ago, it will be well worth it.

Movie Review: Lee (2023)

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, Movies, Three StarsLeave a comment

I must be on a Nazi grand tour. After reading Slaughterhouse Five and then Woman at 1,000 Degrees, both of which deal with Nazi atrocities and how they affected the individual lives of innocent contemporaries, I now watched Lee, a biopic about the war correspondent Lee Miller, starring Kate Winslet.

Lee Miller was an American fashion model who eventually became a photographer. Before World War II she was in France working for Vogue magazine. As Germany occupied France and Paris, she asked to be sent to the front lines as a war correspondent. As she followed the action, she came in contact with the local populations, including the innocent women and children. What she saw compelled her to tell the story in pictures, and she quickly made a name for herself. Eventually she ended up at the Dachau concentration camp at the time of the liberation by the Americans and there she witnessed the full impact of the Holocaust. Ravaged by post traumatic stress syndrome for pretty much the rest of her life, she was not a very happy or successful mother to her only son, Antony. She said she did the best she could.

Antony never knew his mother’s past and legacy. He only discovered her documents, her photographs and mementos after she had died in July 1977. He documented her life and wrote her biography, which became the basis for the movie.

Lee is not a feel-good movie. It’s hard to follow at times, especially in the beginning. But it builds, and without sensationalizing war, without explicit battle scenes, it tells a story of great suffering and immense evil. And in these times, where dictatorships seem to be in vogue again – pun intended – Lee is a good movie to watch to remind yourself about what happens when one group of people suddenly decides to give one person the power to persecute and harm entire populations of others they don’t understand and therefore they don’t like.

Book Review: Woman at 1,000 Degrees – by Hallgrímur Helgason

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, Books, Three StarsLeave a comment

Not too long ago I read Slaughterhouse Five, which has as one of its central themes the firebombing of Dresden during World  War II. The novel Woman at 1,000 Degrees starts with this sentence:

I live here alone in a garage, together with a laptop computer and an old hand grenade. It’s pretty cozy.

Jonas, my hiking guide in Iceland earlier this summer, recommended the author Helgason and specifically this book when I asked him about Icelandic literature. Not only did I read about life in Iceland, but I read about World War II from the view of an Icelandic girl named Herra Björnsson who, at the age of ten, through a series of events resulting from very bad luck, ended up alone in Europe during the war. The story around the firebombing of Dresden in Slaughterhouse Five painted horrific picture of what went on during that war. The experiences of Herra in Denmark, Germany and then Poland illustrate what it was like for a child, a girl, to be abandoned alone in the maelstrom of chaos. She was cast out, abused, starved and raped again and again, over years, and only through seeming miracles she found her way back home after the war. The story tells the plight of the innocent population, Germans, Poles, Russians and Danes, during the Nazi regime and its wars of aggression and racial extermination. It rang home for me, as I recalled stories my own father has told me again and again of the horrors of war he himself had to face when he was a ten-year-old child refugee from the east as the Third Reich was collapsing.

Helgason tells the story in vignettes, showing Herra as an eighty-year-old woman dying in a garage in Reykjavík, then as a young girl in Iceland, as an adolescent during the war in Germany, and as a young woman in Argentina as she had to flee Germany with her Nazi father. We follow Herra at various stages of her life, not in chronological order, but in order of increasing horror as we witness the atrocities she is forced to endure that eventually end with her on her deathbed, lonely, yet full of spunk, in a garage.

Herra narrates the story of her life. She is quite insightful, as this excerpt shows:

She was married to an Italian countertenor who was now a pilot in Mussolini’s air force. He had participated in the invasion of France, one of the most ludicrous operations in the total absurdity of the Second World War: Italians in the flower of their youth sacrificing their lives so that the word TABAC could be changed into TABACCHI on some tobacconist’s signs in a few Alpine villages.

Helgason, Hallgrímur. Woman at 1,000 Degrees (p. 96). Algonquin Books. Kindle Edition.

If you have been reading my blog you will likely know that I love languages, and Icelandic strikes me as a particularly exotic language. With that in mind, you might understand why I especially enjoyed the following page, where Herra characterizes some of the languages she knows:

We Icelanders therefore walk around with gold in our mouths, a fact that has shaped us more than anything else. At least we don’t squander words unnecessarily. The problem with Icelandic, however, is that it’s far too big a language for such a small nation. I read on the web that it contains 600,000 words and over 5 million word formations. Our tongue is therefore considerably bigger than the nation. I did get to know other languages pretty well, but few are as solemn, because they’re designed for daily use. German strikes me as the least pretentious language, and its people use it the way a carpenter uses a hammer, to build a house for thought, although it can hardly be considered attractive. Apart from Russian, Italian is the most beautiful language in the world and turns every man into an emperor. French is a tasty sauce that the French want to savor in their mouths for as long as possible, which is why they talk in circles and want to ruminate on their words, which often causes the sauce to dribble out of the corners of their mouths. Danish is a language the Danes are ashamed of. They want to be freed of it as soon as possible, which is why they spit out their words. Dutch is a guttural language that gulped down two others. Swedish thinks it’s the French of the north, and the Swedes do their utmost to relish it by smacking their lips. Norwegian is what you get when a whole nation does its best not to speak Danish. English is no longer a language but a universal phenomenon like oxygen and sunlight. Then Spanish is a peculiar perversion of Latin that came into being when a nation tried to adapt to a king’s speech impediment, and yet it is the language I learned the best. Few of these nations, however, have mastered the art of silence. The Finns are Icelanders’ greatest competitors when it comes to silence, since they are the only nation in the world that can be silent in two languages, as Brecht said. We Icelanders, on the other hand, are the only country in the world that venerated its language so much that we decided to use it as little as possible. This is why Icelandic is a chaste old maiden in her sixties who has developed a late sex drive and desires nothing more than to allow herself to be ravished by words before she dies.

Helgason, Hallgrímur. Woman at 1,000 Degrees (p. 56). Algonquin Books. Kindle Edition.

This is not a book you’re just going to pick up at Barnes and Noble as you browse through their offering. Icelandic authors are not generally prominent in the United States. Nonetheless, I recommend you find Woman at 1,000 Degrees and experience a novel of an entirely different kind.

Book Review: Hillbilly Elegy – by J.D. Vance

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Political, Three Stars1 Comment

Published in June 2016, when Vance was just 32 years old and about three years after he graduated from Yale Law School, Hillbilly Elegy is a remarkably good book and a must read, no matter what your political bent may be. There is also a Netflix movie that I have reviewed here.

Vance wrote the book long before he had political ambitions. It is a passionate and highly descriptive narrative of his own personal life and upbringing. He is only one year older than my daughter, so I could relate to the chronology of when and how Vance grew up and what shaped him.

The odds against such a child just simply surviving the desperate fight out of drugs, poverty and despair, let alone being successful, and achieving a stellar political career, are astronomical. In the end, I took away that the United States Marines saved the boy, made him a man, and served as his springboard. Vance tells not only his and his family’s personal story, but he shows us what social and class decline feels like in huge swaths of this nation. It helps us understand the decline of the rust belt, and the impact of manufacturing leaving our country for she shores of Asia.

It is therefore no surprise to see how some of Vance’s political views were shaped. I have a hard time understanding where some of the controversies come from that he has created since he associated himself with Trump. After reading his book, the Trump-Vance alliance seems unlikely and I can’t quite figure out how it happened. It almost does not make any sense. Perhaps it’s just the next logical step for him to ascend the ladder. While he obviously disagrees with some of Obama’s policies, views and strategies, he admired Obama and modeled some of his own life to Obama’s rise. That, I speculate, might have driven him to Trump as a stepping stone to the national stage. After the Trump era is over  and Trump is gone, Vance will still be a young man and now we all know him, don’t we?

There is also nothing about any couch in this book, and nothing objectionable that might push you away from Vance as a character. On the contrary, you want to meet him and chat with him at a backyard BBQ.

I am not going to vote for Trump-Vance, but I am telling you that Hillbilly Elegy is a remarkable book. If you are at all interested in understanding the decline of America’s white middleclass, you need to read it.

Book Review: The Wager – by David Grann

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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.

Caliban’s Shore – by Stephen Taylor – Read in 2009, this is about a shipwreck in the 1780 timeframe on the east coast of South Africa.

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.

And while we’re at it, you might be interested in Empire of Blue Water – by Stephan Talty – which I reviewed in 2008. It’s a book all about pirates.

Movie Review: The Boys in the Boat (2023)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Three Stars1 Comment

I knew very little about rowing. The son of one of my colleagues was on the UCLA rowing team during his four years in college. I knew it was a strenuous sport, and somehow I associated it with New England, particularly Boston. During visits to Boston and Cambridge I remember seeing rowing teams practice on the river there. I didn’t know it was an Olympic sport.

A friend recommended the book by Daniel James Brown, and when he stated that the movie was out, I thought I’d skip the book and go right to the movie, directed by George Clooney.

The story is a fairly predictable sports drama set in 1936 in Seattle, Washington, during the height of the Great Depression. A few underprivileged but ambitious boys applied for the junior rowing team at the University of Washington, not because they thought of themselves as champions, but because the were desperately trying to somehow pay their way through college. Getting on the team came with room, board and tuition.

The sport is brutally hard, not only on the physical level, but also emotionally. It is truly a team sport. Eight rowers and and one coxswain must be completely coordinated as one machine. There is no room for any ego or heroes on the boat. It’s all about the boat.

The Washington team is the underdog. It shows their training by a very competent coach and it follows them through local and national tournaments all the way to Hitler’s 1936 Olympics.

I found myself in the edge of the seat, as it is expected in a sports movie (remember Rocky, Chariots of Fire, Ford v. Ferrari, and a hundred others). At the end I walked out of the theater very satisfied. The underdogs won. I learned a lot about a sport that I had not paid much attention to. I gained respect for rowing.

I very much recommend you go see The Boys in the Boat.

 

Movie Review: Oppenheimer (2023)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Three Stars1 Comment

Oppenheimer is a biography about the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the effort of the United States to build the world’s first atomic bomb.

Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is America’s foremost theoretical physicist with nobody of his stature challenging him. Driven by the military with relentless pressure, led by Major General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), Oppenheimer almost singlehandedly assembles a team of world-class scientists, builds a town from scratch in the New Mexico desert, and creates a terrifying technology that nobody, including himself, fully understands. At one point he states that he does not know for certain whether setting off the bomb would not create a nuclear chain reaction that could destroy the world.

Along with the tremendous work and achievements of the scientists, the politicians of the time are paranoid about leaks, spies and Nazi infiltration. Communism looms large as the enemy, and anyone with communist connections is automatically suspicious. It does not help that Oppenheimer brings his brother into the project, who joins the Communist Party against Oppenheimer’s warnings. His wife (Emily Blunt) and his mistress are both former Communists. Interleaved with the storyline of the development of the bomb is always the congressional investigation into Oppenheimer and the scientists around him.

The story is huge, and its participants include Einstein and Truman. And with a running time of three hours it is of epic length. I found it overwhelming  at times, slow and repetitious at other times, but exciting nonetheless. When I walked out I was quiet and dumbfounded about the stupidity and arrogance of humanity.

I am giving this movie “only” 3 stars, but something is nagging me: I think this is the kind of movie I need to watch more than once. The first time is just to get familiar with the story and the characters. It won too many awards, it is too highly lauded, for me to give it a down-graded score. I will take another opportunity and watch it again – and I may write another review at that time.

Book Review: The Armor of Light – by Ken Follett

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, History, Three Stars1 Comment

The Armor of Light is the 5th book in the Pillars of the Earth series.

The story plays in England, centered around Kingsbridge, in the 1770ies and goes through the Napoleonic Wars all the way to Waterloo in 1815. That was a period in western history when a new era of manufacturing disrupted the status quo. The wool industry in England was upset first by spinning machines, then automated looms. Workers who were used to making a living spinning and weaving now found themselves displaced. The entire establishment, the legal system, and the class system of common men and aristocracy by birth was rigged against the worker.

Follett tells the story through the eyes of a handful of people who lived through that era. One of the young boys whose father died through the negligence and arrogance of the son of their landlord grows up to be a brilliant engineer. He eventually joins the army and goes to war on the continent, as an aide to the Duke of Wellington, who is most famous for defeating Napoleon in Waterloo. Right after I had finished reading The Armor of Light I went to see the movie Napoleon, and I enjoyed the scenery and graphical images of war in Waterloo that I had just read about in this book. The book and the movie complemented each other for me.

Through the experiences of the various protagonists we learn about the plight of the working class and the immense injustices inflicted upon the hapless and unfortunate during that period of history.

As with the previous books of the series, the Kingsbridge Cathedral with the pillars of the earth is still there, many centuries after is was built by John the Builder. But the people who live in Kingsbridge are all new. There really isn’t any continuity other than it’s the same town.

I don’t know why the book is called The Armor of Light. I can’t seem to remember the title and I kept having to look it up when someone asked me what book I was reading at the time. The obscure and hard to remember title notwithstanding, I loved reading every page, and as it is always with Follett books, I learned an immense amount of history of the time that I would otherwise not have known about. When I put a Follett book down I always think to myself: So much to learn, so little time.

If you have read the Pillars series, you will like The Armor of Light. If you have not read the series, I recommend you start with Pillars of the Earth and work your way through the five books.

Book Review: Remarkably Bright Creatures – by Shelby Van Pelt

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Three Stars1 Comment

Remarkably Bright Creatures was the book my wife’s book club read a couple of months ago, and she kept saying that she thought I’d like it. “It’s about an octopus,” she said.

Indeed, one of the narrators in this book is an octopus named Marcellus. He is in captivity in an aquarium in Sowell Bay, a town in northern Washington, and he tells the story from his point of view inside a tank.

Tova Sullivan is the cleaning lady at the aquarium, a woman in her seventies whose husband recently died of cancer, and whose only son disappeared somewhat mysteriously at age 18 – thirty years ago. Tova is making arrangements for a somewhat lonely retirement.

Cameron Cassmore is a thirty-year-old misfit in Modesto, California who never knew his father, and who was raised by his aunt when his mother abandoned him as a nine-year-old.

Tova and Cameron, along with a number of other colorful characters, will eventually meet at the Sowell Bay Aquarium and learn about themselves. Each has surprises coming, all courtesy of Marcellus, the octopus.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is Van Pelt’s first novel, and it is a remarkable debut. She is a great story teller who had me turning the pages. After getting over the concept of a sentient octopus and how it interacts with humans, the rest fits together nicely and makes for an entertaining read.

Octopuses are indeed remarkably bright creatures. I am reminded of the movie My Octopus Teacher.  I also read another book about octopuses: Other Minds. I was amazed how much there was to learn. Scientists have not yet figured out how octopuses have evolved to have such incredible intelligence with a lifespan of only four years, at the high side.

If you want to learn about octopuses first in a non-fiction science book like Other Minds, or if you just want to go for an entertaining ride with Remarkably Bright Creatures, either approach is well worth your time.

 

3 stars

Movie Review: The Holdovers (2023)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Three StarsLeave a comment

Life is like a hen house ladder. Shitty and short.

This quote is by Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a teacher of ancient history at the Barton Academy, a New England boarding school for boys. Nobody likes Hunham. His students hate him for his rigidity, his fellow faculty members find him pompous, and the headmaster despises him. And he smells.

It’s Christmas 1971. All the students go home for the break to be with their families, but there are always a few that can’t go home for various reasons. Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a misfit 15-year-old, gets a call at the last minute from his mother who scheduled an impromptu honeymoon with her new husband and does not want him with her. Hunham is assigned by the headmaster to stay at the school to chaperone the holdovers. There is also Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school’s head cook, who also has no place to go since her only son just died in the war in Vietnam and this is her first Christmas alone.

The unlikely trio has no choice but to come together and make this work for two weeks over the holidays. Whether they planned it or not, they get to know each other, and learn each other’s deepest secrets. In the process, they bond and learn life lessons and all realize that whatever happened in the past happened, and their future is in front of them.

The Holdovers is an emotional holiday movie, a little like The Breakfast Club from 1985 – could it really have been that long ago? – where a group of people of completely different backgrounds is thrown together and eventually create bonds.

Book Review: A Prayer for Owen Meany – by John Irving

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Three Stars2 Comments

After trying to read The Last Chairlift and getting through about half of the way, I remembered that I had read A Prayer for Owen Meany a long time ago, probably when it first came out in 1989. I remembered that I thought it was a remarkable book, I remembered it was about a boy, and that’s about it.

A Prayer for Owen Meany has a print length of 1,115 pages. This explains why I have seemingly not been reading lately, or at least publishing book reviews. The fact is, it takes forever to read Owen Meany.

The story is about two best childhood friends, and it starts in a small town in New Hampshire in 1953, when the boys are 11 years old. John Wheelwright is the narrator, but his best friend, Owen Meany, is the protagonist. Owen, in a stroke of terrible bad luck, hits a foul ball in a Little League game and kills John’s mother who is among the spectators. Owen does not think this was an accident. He thinks he is God’s instrument.

The story follows the two boys and their friends and family through their coming of age and into adulthood. It weaves a rich tapestry of characters, and when the book finally ends, you will miss them all and the world in which they have been living. After all, you’ll have been spending a lot of time with them.

A Prayer for Owen Meany is a treatise about religion in American society. But it is also about the Vietnam war and the plight that generation of young men went through to deal with the draft and what it did to their lives and American society.

Irving likes to portray unique characters, and there are some similarities across his books. For instance, the protagonist in The Last Chairlift was “very small” as was his mother. Irving has something about small people. Owen Meany is also very small, very light. As an adult, he is just under five feet tall. Also, due to some congenital defect in his larynx, he has a very gravelly, out of this world sounding voice. His voice is so unique, that throughout the entire book, all direct quotes spoken by Owen are done in capitals. “YOUR MOM HAS THE BEST BREASTS OF ALL THE MOMS,” Owen would say to his friend John when they were 11 years old and analyzing — well — what boys that age are interested in. You will get used to Owen’s capitalized voice quickly and it works well in this book.

Besides his highly unusual voice, and his extreme smallness, Owen is brilliant. He gains the respect of the adults around him through his actions and statements, and he tends to command the attention wherever he is present. He is slated to be the valedictorian in his class but gets expelled before the graduation. He eventually joins the U.S. Army through the ROTC program.

Owen, who thinks he is an instrument of God, believes he has a mission in Vietnam, and all his actions and decisions throughout his life seem to point to a single day in Vietnam – where his purpose lies.

Movie Review: All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Three StarsLeave a comment

As the first world war unfolded, which was then known as the great war, since they didn’t know there’d be a second, Germany’s propaganda machine recruited its young men as soldiers. A group of teenagers enlist voluntarily in the army, their faces full of fervor and optimism. But those preconceptions about the honor of war crumble very quickly as they see their first conflict and they realize they put themselves into a situation where it does not appear there is a way out. The hopelessness, the utter despair, the terrifying fear consume the boys as they are falling, one by one. In the end, when an armistice is negotiated by the brass, riding in luxury train cars and sipping wine, the boys are sent out one more time in the last 20 minutes before cease fire.

This movie has been made twice before. The other two are Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), and the lesser-known version by Delbert Mann, All Quiet on the Western Front (1979). This current rendition is supposedly the most expensive German film in the history of Netflix. My wife loaded it up and we found it is a German film, dubbed in English. Which, of course, was better for her, but I would have liked to watch it in its original language. Yet I don’t think I can do it again, it took too much out of me.

The uselessness and injustice of war depressed me, as many war movies will do. Every leader who is in a position of sending other people’s children into harm’s way should be required to watch All Quiet on the Western Front. This happened in 1917, and a hundred years later we still haven’t learned these basic lessons.

Of course, the irony is that the French won that war and forced the Germans into reluctant submission. They ended up signing an agreement they knew they ultimately could not accept. We all know that a young soldier named Adolf Hitler was also a grunt in that war and experienced the humiliation of Germany first-hand. It lit up a fire in the chest of that young man, and we all know where it ended.

 

Movie Review: A Man Called Otto (2022)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Three StarsLeave a comment

In March of 2021 I watched a movie titled A Man Called Ove. It was a 2015 movie in Swedish, with English subtitles. I gave it four stars. Here is my review. 

One of my readers at the time commented that there was a Tom Hanks adaptation on the way, and here it is.

This review is difficult to write because I could just copy the Ove review here. It follows the script that closely.

Otto (Tom Hanks) is 59 years old and lives alone in a housing development somewhere in the northern United States, judging from the snow. He loses his job by a forced retirement program. His wife passed away from cancer six months before. He grieves badly and visits her grave every day. He has no relatives or children. He is the self-appointed master of the condominium association of his little community. He does not care about the official roles, and he rules with an iron fist. Daily rounds include checking whether the garbage recycling is done correctly and whether gates remain closed. Driving of any type in the community is forbidden, and leaving a bicycle out is a serious infraction. He is a true curmudgeon and the essence of a grumpy old man.

One day new neighbors move in across the street from his place. Marisol (Mariana Treviño) is from Mexico.  She has two young daughters,  and is pregnant with her next. Her husband is the opposite of handy and has difficulty even driving a car. Otto has them in his sights immediately.

Otto is seriously depressed and he attempts suicide several times in the movie, only to be interrupted by Marisol and her family. An unlikely friendship develops, and gradually he gets drawn back into a semblance of purpose.

A Man Called Otto incorporates many flashbacks to when Otto was young and his romance with his wife Sonya (Rachel Keller). Interestingly, the actor playing young Otto is Truman Hanks, Tom Hanks’ 27-year-old son.

A Man Called Otto is a well-crafted film about an ordinary man’s life from young adulthood to retirement. While I gave Ove four stars, I am giving Otto “only” three. It is a little awkward from time to time where Ove was nothing but authentic. But it’s a good movie, it draws out a tear or two, and it made me think of “the circle of life.”

You should go and see it.

Book Review: Shucked – by Erin Byers Murray

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Three Stars2 Comments

I have never eaten an oyster in my life, neither raw nor cooked, at least as far as I know. Maybe there was one in a Jambalaya or other dish once. But I can say with confidence that I have never been much interested in oysters.

I am not a cook. I always say that I am a grateful eater.

I am also not a foodie. I just came back from three days in Washington, DC and I stayed downtown, a couple of blocks from the White House, surrounded by great restaurants, and I didn’t step foot in one of them. When I am alone, Subway and Chipotle seem to do the trick.

So what was it that had me read a 352-page non-fiction book written by a culinary writer about working on an oyster farm in Duxbury, south of Boston? Simple: a friend recommended it, and I loved reading Shucked.

Erin was a young food writer who wanted to fully understand the farm to table process. Where does food come from, and  what does it take to bring it to her table?

She quit her job writing, and started working on the Island Creek Oyster Farm. Initially she was going to just do one season. She went out on the bitter cold New England bay and did backbreakingly hard labor harvesting oysters in March, learning everything about the farming of oysters over the months. Later on she worked with the seeds, the younglings that would have to be raised to be next year’s crop.

In the process, not only did she learn the mechanics of farming oysters, but also the business of oysters. Working on a renowned farm, she had access to some of the country’s most famous chefs. She was invited for a one-day internship in New York’s prestigious restaurant Per Se, and then partook in a 23-course meal that lasted for five hours.

The author vividly describes work on an oyster farm, shows the challenges of the trade, and provides a glimpse behind the scenes of the running of world-famous restaurants.

I learned a lot. I found myself googling the names of many of the chefs she talks about, and their restaurants. The book was very engaging, informative and never dull.

Now I’ll have to go out for an oyster meal, don’t I?