Bicentennial Man (1999)

This is an odd movie, which is maybe a bit too long, but features an AI robot played by Robin Williams.
The movie is based on a novelette in the Robot series by the master science fiction author of the mid-twentieth century, Isaac Asimov.  It was awarded a couple of prestigious awards for best science fiction novelette of 1976, a time when artifical intelligence and a robot who thought and felt like a man seemed very far off indeed.  Not so much so today.
According to the foreword in Robot Visions, Asimov was approached to write a story, along with a number of other authors who would do the same, for a science fiction collection to be published in honor of the United States Bicentennial.  However, the arrangement fell through, leaving Asimov's the only story actually completed for the project.  It is the basis for this movie.
So the story is solid.  Richard Martin (Sam Neill) buys a gift, a new NDR-114 robot. The product is named Andrew (Robin Williams) by the youngest of the family's children. The movie follows the life and times of Andrew, a robot purchased as a household appliance programmed to perform menial tasks. As Andrew begins to experience emotions and creative thought, the Martin family soon discovers they don't have an ordinary robot, and slowly but surely trouble ensues.

We All Need to Be Greta

Two things.  The fury that Greta unleashes is so real, so deep within her, and so inspiring.  Her speech before the United Nations brought tears to my eyes.  The second is that people who disagree with her are afraid of her. So afraid that even though she is just a girl they treat her with such anger that you know she has them running for cover.  She is right, and very soon, everyone will know it.  As it stands the oceans are rising.  There are heat waves that course through the water.  The skies are less predictable and the wind and rain that form hurricanes will be common place.  The coastlines as we know them will disappear and unless we start changing things right now, we are in in bigger and bigger trouble.
It is clear that the fury of youth will be the wave of momentum that will wash us towards change, just as it did in the late 1960's.  She is one of many, but her fearlessness and ferocity makes her stand out above the rest.  She has adoring eyes for those who have been working for the planet for decades.  The picture of her with Jane Goodall is priceless.  Everything they are thinking is so transparent that a caption if completely superfluous.  She is the change I want to see in the world. 

Death in the Rainforest by Don Kulick

 I am on a non-fiction kick these days and so when I read a review of a book on a subject that I know nothing about, I put it on my library hold list, and this is one such book.  The loss of language is like all the other extinctions we will be watching unfold, and understanding what we lose when that happens is well worth thinking about.
As a young anthropologist, in 1985, Don Kulick, the author of this book, traveled to the most remote reaches of Papua New Guinea to study how a language dies. Motivating his quest was a haunting consensus then emerging among linguists that fully half of the world’s 7,000 languages are teetering on the brink of extinction. As he made his way across the vast mangrove lagoon at the mouth of the Sepik River, wading through malarial swamps to reach a narrow slit in the jungle that would be his home for many months, he was acutely aware that every fortnight, somewhere in the world, some elder carries into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue, and another language is lost. His destination was the village of Gapun, home to just 130 people, 90 of whom were fluent in Tayap, one of 600 extant languages kept alive by fewer than 100 speakers.
Papua New Guinea, a nation the size of California with a population of 8 million, has more than a thousand distinct languages—not dialects, but actual languages, 350 of which have never been spoken by more than 500 people.  He went back over the next three decades and what he has to say about his experiences are like nothing I have read before.  Honest, frightening, and enlightening.

Find Me (2018)

I really loved this indie film featuring an accountant's road trip, where the real attraction is some really spectacular scenery in three National Parks.  Given that the current administration is rolling back public access and protection in these parks and ramping up private use of public lands, the timing couldn't be better to drum up a little support for keeping some parts of the country natural.
Joe is the accountant, and he has hit a rough patch following his divorce.  He reluctantly looks out for his aging parents who pressure him constantly, he works, he has the same take out dinner every night, and he spends time with his son.  The highlights of his work day is his interactions with his work friend, Amelia.  She encourages him to get outside of his comfort zone and live a little.  She has been.  In recent weeks she has been gone a lot, and she tells him tales from the wilderness.  There is a crisis where she shows up at his house in the middle of the night, and disappears the next morning for good, leaving him a diary entitled Easy Adventures, which in her mind start with flat accessible hikes and end in spectacular scenic glory.  Weeks pass and Amelia doesn't return, so when he gets a letter from her pleading with him to find her, he drops everything, and goes on a scavenger hunt first in Zion, then Death Valley and the road ends in Yosemite.  Scenery so great that you will be tugged to return to those places, and a good story holding it all up.  Streaming on Amazon Prime.

Double Chocolate Bundt Cake

The cookbook for the Food 52 Baking Club is The Artful Baker this month, and this cake is an exceptionally good chocolate bundt cake.
We took it to a fancy dinner centered around truffles, and it was the clear winner.  Follow the timing included for best results.

For the cake

5 ounces (140g) bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped

1/2 cup (50g) Dutch process cocoa powder, sifted if lumpy

1/2 cup (125ml) heavy cream

1/2 cup (125ml) strong coffee

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 cups (280g) flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

7 ounces (200g) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 3/4 cups (350g) sugar

4 large eggs, at room temperature

For the glaze

5 ounces (140g) semisweet chocolate, chopped

3/4 cup (180ml) heavy cream

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Preheat the oven to 325ºF (160ºC). Set the rack in the center of the oven. Generously, and thoroughly, butter a 10-inch (23cm) bundt pan.

2. Put the chopped chocolate and cocoa powder in a medium sized bowl. Bring the heavy cream and coffee almost to a boil, remove from heat, and pour over the chocolate and cocoa powder. Let sit for 30 seconds, then stir until the chocolate is melted and smooth. Stir in the vanilla.

3. In a separate medium sized bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

4. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or by hand in a large bowl, beat the butter at medium-high speed until smooth and creamy. Add the sugar and continue to beat until light and creamy, about 3 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time, stopping the mixer between additions, to scrape down the sides, so the eggs are incorporated.

5. Remove the bowl from the mixer and use a spatula to stir in one-third of the flour mixture. Add half of the melted chocolate, then another third of the flour mixture. Finally add the rest of the melted chocolate then the last of the flour. While you're mixing to reach down to the bottom of the bowl with the spatula, as the dry ingredients tend to sink to the bottom.

6. Scrape the batter into the prepared bundt pan, smooth the top, and bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out almost clean, but with moist crumbs still attached, about 50 minutes. Don't overbake.

7. Cool the cake on a wire rack for 10 minutes, then turn the cake out onto the rack and cool completely.

8. Make the glaze by putting the chopped chocolate in a medium-size bowl. Heat the heavy cream in a small saucepan until almost boiling then pour over the chocolate. Let stand for 30 seconds then stir until the chocolate is smooth and melted. Stir in the vanilla extract.

9. Set the cake with the wire rack over a sheet of parchment paper. Use a spoon or ladle to cover the cake with the glaze. My glaze was pretty thick (as you can see from the photos in the post), but if yours is too runny, let it cool down a bit until it's thicker.(Any glaze that slides off can be saved to spoon over ice cream, according to Cenk. I stirred it back into the glaze, because there wasn't any cake crumbs in it.)

Serving: Serve the cake at room temperature. It's a pretty rich cake although could be served with whipped cream or ice cream,
Storage: The cake will keep for up to three days at room temperature, covered.

Empire State South, Atlanta, Georgia

I was in Atlanta for a meeting a couple of weeks ago and I was able to meet a good friend for lunch, and she took me here.
It is always good to catch up with people that you have known, even if under limited and largely unhappy circumstances (our sons were both diagnosed with the same type of brain tumor, a situation that makes a lot of current, past, and to an extent, future relationships complicated).  The thing about it is that you get each other on a level that a lot of people really cannot quite achieve, and so it is a breath of fresh air to see her again.
This restaurant is what I would call bold American food with a Southern flair.  They had exceptional iced coffee and remarkably have a selection of options.  For this alone they deserve judos.  I had the shrimp and grits, was was exceptionally good, but did not compare with the farm egg fried rice.  It is made with Carolina Gold Rice, and had an almost popped rice tooth feel and the flavor was really explosively great.  Highly recommended.

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

Apparently you really need to have four hours of movie in order to really understand the story of  David "Noodles" Aaronson (Robert De Niro) over the course of his live.  
The movie tells the story of five decades in the lives of four gangsters from New York City -- childhood friends who are merciless criminals almost from the first, but who have a special bond of loyalty to each other.  Noodles has a couple of breaks with the gang.  The first is that he goes to jail for the sake of the gang after killing a rival gangster who is twice his age at the the time.  The second is an act that the viewer sees about mid-movie and that is the one that both haunts him and is mysterious.
The movie shifts between their growing up in a Lower East Side slum  in the 1920's, their antics in the 1930's running booze in Prohibition, and then their next criminal enterprises, and then 1968 when Noodles returns to the scene of the crime after decades in hiding to come to terms with his past.  There is a lot of story to digest here, and I am not sure that I really got the deeper meaning of it all, but it is an impressive De Niro movie I had missed up until now.                                             

Smashed Potatoes with Green Sauce

I just joined the Food 52 Cookbook Club, and this month's cookbook is The Little Swedish Kitchen.  I made this for a dinner that was high stakes, in that were was definitely going to be great food and guests who were very discerning.  I had made it for a family dinner, and while I thought it was good, thought that there should be more of the green sauce and so I augmented that component.

1 3/4 pounds of new potatoes
3 Tbsp. butter

Green Sauce:
4 Tbsp. olive oil
4 Tbsp. cider viengar
2 Tbsp. capers
1-2 Tbsp. honey
2 bunches of greens that can include dill, oregano, tarragon, chives, parsley.

Boil potatoes until tender, in water with some salt.  Put into serving dish, salt and peper them, then dot the surface with butter.
For the green sauce, put all ingredients into a Vitamix or food processor and blend until very smooth.  Dot the surface of the poratoes, and serve.

Laos Cafe, West Liberty, Iowa

Last weekend we were out on the east side of Iowa City, way east actually, and while a pig was roasting we needed some ready food, and decided to try this place.
Wow.  This is the best Asian food that I have had in a while in Iowa.  The green curry was blow you away delicious.  Spicy, very flavorful and replete with silky eggplant, it was a flavor bomb.  The pad thai was good, as was the pad see maw, both of which need to be at least decent in order for everyone to be happy.  The General's chicken was nothing like the Chinese version of the dish and quite wonderful.  The standards of fresh spring rolls, fried egg rolls and crab Rangoon were good.  For my return trip though, I plan on getting a yellow and a red curry to really flesh out what the curry options are.  Do not miss this treat.

The Book Shop (2018)

This is a quiet movie, based on a book of the same title.  The three principle stars are top notch actors.  It has an adorably quaint setting, a 1950s-'60s seaside town in England.  It features books and shops and has as its heroine a brave widow who loves to read and is willing to stand up to the village doyenne, one of those villains whose superficial graciousness and courtesy are only cover for ruthlessness and fury.
Emily
Mortimer plays Florence Green, whose husband was killed in WWII. She met him in a bookstore, and she dreams of opening one of her own in an old abandoned building in a small East Anglian town. She is patient but firm in her dealings with the lawyer and banker who clearly think she should not be worrying her pretty head about business.
Florence underestimates how formidable a foe she has in Violet Gamart (Patricia Clarkson), the wife of a retired general who treats the village as though it was under her command.  The movie winds up as a cautionary tale of what happens when people let bullies get their way.  All with gorgeous scenery Bill Nighy to enjoy.

Pasta all'ortolana

This variation is from Diane Henry's Simple cookbook.  I made it with four summer squash, almost equal to the amount of noodles and it was very popular.

• Salt
• 10 oz. spaghetti
• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 1 teaspoon butter
• 1 yellow onion, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 3-4 summer squash, yielding 4 cups baton shaped
• Salt and pepper
• 4 egg yolks, 2 whole eggs
• 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese (plus more for topping)
• 1 teaspoon lemon zest
• 1/2 cup basil leaves, sliced thin

Add the pasta to the boiling water to cook: Add pasta to boiling salted water. The pasta should take about 10-12 minutes to cook until al dente (cooked but still a bit firm), which is just about the right amount of time you'll need to cook the vegetables. Cook with a rolling boil, uncovered. 4 Sauté onions, garlic, summer squash: While the pasta is cooking, add the onions, garlic, and summer squash. The heat should be medium high.
Stir the vegetables so that they are all coated with oil from the pan, then spread them out in the pan, generously salt and pepper them. Cook until they are just lightly browned, stirring only occasionally. Remove from heat.

5 Beat the eggs, add Parmesan and lemon zest: In a medium bowl, beat the eggs and mix in the grated Parmesan and lemon zest.

6 Add cooked pasta to vegetables, stir in egg mixture: When the pasta is ready, reserve 1/2 cup of the cooking liquid, then drain the pasta. Add the pasta to the squash and onions (or add the veggies to the pasta, depending on the size of your pans).
Pour the egg, Parmesan, lemon zest mixture over the pasta mixture and quickly stir in with a wooden spoon. The heat from the pasta will sufficiently cook the eggs.

Add a little of the reserved pasta cooking water if it looks a little dry. Stir in the prosciutto and basil.

American Prison by Shane Bauer

Shane Bauer is a reporter for Mother Jones who spent two years detained in an Iranian prison.  Interestingly, he can back and not too long afterwards decided to be an undercover prison guard in a private prison.  The short answer is that it was triggering for him.  Go figure.
The story is the key here, though.  The US penal system was unable to house its exploding population by the 1990s. The country couldn’t build prisons fast enough.  And as so often happens, someone looked at a national crisis and saw a business opportunity. Terrell Don Hutto, a former warden of prison complexes in Texas, cofounded the Corrections Corporation of America (since renamed CoreCivic) in 1983, to great economic reward.  More recently CoreCivic and other private prison companies have found another lucrative growth opportunity: running ICE detention facilities.
But outsourcing incarceration to private companies has an inherent problem. The avowed goal of  the US penal system is humane treatment and rehabilitation of prisoners; but housing, educating and caring for people is expensive, and shareholders expect the biggest profits possible.  Suffice it to say that doesn't happen.  This is a must read in an era of our inhumane treatment of asylum seekers.

Red Joan (2019)

I just saw Judi Dench play Shakespeare's wife, and here she is in this movie playing an aged British spy.  Some women have all the luck.
The movie alternates between the war and the turn of the 21st century.  She lives a quiet life in a British suburb and tends to the cookie-cutter demands of her uneventful days in the present. Except, this simple old woman (whose story is based on the real-life case of Southeast London’s Melita Norwood) doesn’t seem to be all that ordinary—soon enough, the British Secret Service pulls her out of her quiet retirement and arrests her on the grounds of treason. But did she really commit those crimes and give away Britain’s secrets to the Russians as a KGB spy in the 1930s?
The answer is yes, and we know that it is about to happen and how it comes to be as the movie opens with the young Joan becoming friends with some Russians who are communists.  She has a head for science and the story is a fascinating one.

Tradition

Twelve summers ago we had a flood that was impressively destructive as well as interrupting attendance at a life event.  It temporarily closed the interstates as well as resulting in lots of property damage, even to buildings that had been standing for over a hundred years.
Out of that experience came a thought about this barn, the Secrest Octagonal Barn, built in 1883, the enormity of it not diminishing into modern times and it's grace and beauty largely unscathed in the intervening years.  The one amongst our friends who is absolutely the last person to suggest that we have an enormous party posited that we should do just that, have a party for no other reason than having good music, good food, and good friends.
This year both of my granddaughters anchored down the younger end of the attendees and it struck me just how great it is to have this tradition of one big party with everyone invited for no other reason than that we are celebrating each other.

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

This is a very good (and not terribly long) book about how to visualize your own end of life, and perhaps more importantly, the end of the lives of people who are dear to you.  The thing that is seen over and over again in medicine, and the author himself struggled with is when to stop treating a patient and start to ease their passage into the here after.
He argues that physicians are not particularly good at framing the questions that come up at the end of life, and therefore we end up doing our patients a huge disservice.  We are full steam ahead with what to do next if this intervention fails, but we are not as good at including the patient in the decisions about what to do.  It is the embodiment of a patient centered approach to end of life.
The author describes some unpleasant outcomes that flow from the do everything approach, then talks about his own father's decline and his reaction to it, and then using what he learned from that experience to be a better doctor for a terminally ill patient he was caring for.  It is a must read before you put a loved one through unnecessary pain and suffering.

Boy Erased (2018)

I am still working on the movies that I haven't yet seen that were widely acclaimed but passed over for an Oscar nomination.  It delves into the conversion therapy world in a way that is shocking but not extreme.  Jared (played by Lucas Hedges, who demonstrates that his performance in Manchester by the Sea was not a fluke) is a young gay man who is being raised in a small conservative community.  He has His father (Russell Crowe) is Baptist minister who believes that his son won’t be loved by God unless he beats his homosexual urges, and against the advice of Jared's doctor, sends his son to a facility to convert him back to heterosexuality.  It is a harrowing experience, with lots of public humiliation and deprivation of free will.  Jared initially works the program, but after a boy who was beaten by grown men to exorcise the devil went on to commit suicide that Jared wakes up and demands to leave.  There is a lot of effort put into detaining him against his will, but his mother does manage to prize their hands off her son and supports his choices.  You can see all of this coming down the pike from the get go, but the telling is worth watching.

Marto Brewing Company, Sioux City, Iowa

This is a great new addition to the Sioux City beer and dining scene.  For one thing, it is a beautifully refurbished building in downtown on Fourth Street, with an historic fountain to boot.  The design is really quite nice, and for that alone it is praiseworthy.
The second is that the beer is interesting.  We had two of the five 5 oz. samplers for the table and were able to try ten of the eleven beers brewed on site.  I really liked the fruit sours and the scotch ale, and a number of our party enjoyed the IPA style brews.
Thirdly they have a wood fired oven with very good pizza, as well as chicken wings, pastas, and an enormous pretzel, all of which were pretty good.  So two thumbs up for this if you are in Sioux City any time soon.

The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani

I struggled a bit with the plot of this book, which is that the nanny kills the two children in her care.  I am not giving anything away--the book opens with this grizzly event being discovered by the parents, and then the book goes back in time to before the nanny was hired and then throughout her time with the family.
The book is loosely based on an event in late 2012, when news broke around the world that a nanny on the Upper West Side of Manhattan was accused of fatally stabbing two young children in her care. As the children bled in the bathtub, reports said, the nanny—who was so close with her well-to-do employers that they had earlier that year spent several days visiting her relatives—slashed her own throat.  She survived, and has pleaded not guilty to killing the children. To most parents, the headlines were a chilling reminder of the vulnerability of children and the potential for cruelty that their adult caregivers are capable of.
There is so much material here to work with, all of it richly explored.  There is the dependency on the nanny that many have experienced.  There is the loneliness and the emotions associated with the job.  There is the invasion of privacy that is a one way street--the nanny knows all but reveals little.  There is the power differential.  And so much more.  I did not end up with sympathy for the nanny so much as a glimpse of how such a horror could come to occur.  Well written.

All Is True (2019)

Kenneth Branagh has brought several of Shakespeare's plays to the silver screen and now he has tackled Shakespeare himself.  I did not recognize the actor by looking at him.  There is a lot of make up involved here, and the film might well be in line for a make up Oscar nomination, so transformed is the actor in order to resemble the character he is playing.  When he opens his mouth, however, we know who is behind it all.
The story is fictional, but revolves around the real history that the famous Globe Theater, where the lion's share of the bard's plays premiered, burned to the ground in June of 1613.  In this account, Shakespeare returns home to the bosom of a family that resents his absence.  Judi Dench is Anne Shakespeare to perfection, and her daughters are a mix that portrays the very real restrictions on women in Renaissance England.  Basically, they were more or less trapped, regardless of the fame and fortune that Shakespeare himself has bestowed upon them.   Sir Ian McKellen plays the Earl of Southampton, who comes to visit Shakespeare while in town on other business. This is the guy to whom the Bard supposedly wrote those famous sonnets, and that scene is pure gold.  The film is entertaining and the costuming and staging are all that you would expect.  Well worth it.

Reflection on Mixed Blessings

I was on a flight returning home last week and I met a woman who was a nurse on the pediatric oncology floor on this day in 2001.  My youngest son was an inpatient that day eighteen years ago, and as two airplanes ran into the World Trade Center, he was getting his final dose of chemotherapy.  It had been a very long year and a half for all of us, and instead of a triumphant end to it all, we were plunged into what amounted to a period of national mourning.
I had been in a period of suspended animation for months as a result of having a young child with a life threatening illness.  The time between diagnosis and the completion of treatment had done nothing to heal my wounds, and so oddly and suddenly, every one else was right there with me emotionally.   I was trying to navigate what it meant to be done with chemotherapy, which was much more about learning to wait and see than it was to celebrate the end of cytotoxic chemicals coursing through my son's body.  As a health care provider I knew that the fix was in, that over the next months and year we would see whether the treatment had worked and he would live, or that it hadn't and that he faced certain death at a young age.  It was a terrible kind of limbo, but almost everyone around me felt an unsettling uncertainty as well.  The effects of both those events linger on today.

Inland by Tea Obreht

The much awaited second book by this author has magical realism features, like her first book, but this is set in the late nineteenth century in the American West.
There are two intertwined tales. The book begins conventionally enough, with the story of an outlaw, Lurie, who is on the run. The twist lies in Obreht’s affinity for unusual transformations. He has a brief career as a gang member before falling in with the US Camel Corps on its way from Texas to California. While I knew nothing of it, the Camel Corps was a short-lived experiment introducing the animals into the US army as beasts of burden, manned by drivers from the Ottoman empire. Misidentified as a Turk in wanted posters, Lurie finds that his ambiguous ethnicity provides the perfect cover for a new life.  Lurie is just one of many wounded trying to remake themselves in a terrain whose emptiness serves as a clean slate for fantasies of conquest and escape. It’s interwoven with the tale of a single day in the life of Nora, a frontierswoman. She is doing her best to get through the Arizona drought as she waits for her husband to return from town with water. She is at home with her young son, her paralized mother-in-law and a servant girl who is convinced she has seen a strange beast prowling about the property in the night. 
Nora has her own ghosts, as she talks constantly to the spirit of her daughter, lost to heatstroke as a baby, while regretting the failed ideals that brought her family west. The portrayal of the American West as wild, dangerous, and prone to hallucinations is well told.

The Ingredients of Genocide

Lets not go back to the Holocaust to look at the beginnings of genocide.  Let's look at a more modern genocide to see where we are here, in the United States, with the current immigration policies that have separated families and left people dehumanized in cages.
Between April and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days.  Most of the dead were Tutsis - and most of those who perpetrated the violence were Hutus.  The genocide was sparked by the death of the Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, when his plane was shot down above Kigali airport on 6 April 1994.  Whoever was responsible, within hours a campaign of violence spread from the capital throughout the country, and did not subside until three months later.
But the death of the president was by no means the only cause of Africa's largest genocide in modern times.  There was violence and ethnic tensions that went back to the 19th century.  There were many ingredients that are listed above in our current administrations treatment of Central Americans seeking asylum.  And let's remember, until the mid-19th century, all the border land in the US belonged to Mexico.  We took the land and then appear surprised that there are Mexicans living on it.  This is no more excusable than the slaughter of Rwandans 25 years ago.

Amazing Grace (2019)

I watched what is essentially a remastered movie while on my way to an amazing quilting experience in the Montana mountains.
The story of this documentary, centering on Aretha Franklin’s two-night performance in 1972 which led to the biggest selling live gospel album of all time, is troubled, which is why it has come to the screen only now, almost 50 years later and after Aretha herself is gone. Warner Brothers enlisted Oscar winner Sydney Pollack to direct multi-camera 16mm footage of the 29-year-old Franklin recording her next album at the New Temple Missionary Baptist church in Los Angeles.
Unfortunately, with his background in drama rather than music docs, Pollack failed to use clapperboards or markers, making it virtually impossible to synch the resulting picture with the recorded sound.  It wasn't until new technology allowed for it to be remastered and released that we get the chance to see the church trained gospel of Aretha's youth, including some footage which includes her father.  Fantastic to watch.

The Nickel Boys by Colin Whitehead

Beware, this is achingly painful to read.  I am not giving away anything that will not be clearly apparent in the first twenty pages of the book.  Worse yet, it speaks the truth (which is really a hallmark of the other two books I have read by this exceedingly talented author).
The long string of horrors that took place at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys wasn't a secret to anyone with half a brain and an eye for a cover up, but it might as well have been. Former students of the Florida reform school had spoken out for years about the brutal beatings that they endured at the hands of sadistic employees, but it wasn't until 2012, when University of South Florida anthropologists discovered numerous bones in unmarked graves that had clear evidence of violence and abuse that anyone took notice.
This is a fictionalized account of what happened at the school, and what sort of things might lead to killing children in the care of the state.  It is not for the feint of heart, but it is yet another piece of our reconciled history of racial violence that came no where near ending with the Civil War.  A must read.  Also, on Obama's reading list.

Edith Lucille's Bait Shack and Wing Depot, Marion, Iowa

Many of my family members read a review of this place in a local magazine, and were intrigued.  The Yelp reviews are not quite as good as the restaurant review would suggest, but when one of my son's texted me as I was flying home, I received it in time to put in and order and we met them there.  The decor is consistent.  It is all about the things that you think your spouse should have gotten rid of but he is just too attached to them to do so.  It is located amongst a number of neighbors who have quite a few non-functioning vehicles in their yards, and is right across the street from a corn field, which is really atmosphere.  The thing I liked the very best was the pork tenderloin--it was one of the best I have had, and if I had a hankering for one, this is where I would return to.  The fries were also very good, and the blue cheese dressing that comes with the wings is top notch.  Other items on the menu were good to just okay, but this is what I would go back for.

Grilled Tofu

I hears a great cooking segment on NPR this summer that dealt with grilling, summer, and the new plant based "burgers", which are highly processed, expensive, and have more or less the same fat content of a burger.  So, not ideal.

The Better Burger spokesman pointed out that it was a step away from factory farmed beef, which is true, kind of like a gateway food to better eating, but the advocate of a vegetarian option that could be grilled but wasn't masquerading as meat offered this option, in addition to a grilled portobello mushroom, as something that could be eaten with all the fixings on a bun and yet still be plant based.

• 2 (14 ounce) packages extra-firm tofu, drained
• ½ cup sherry vinegar
• ½ cup low-sodium soy sauce
• ⅓ cup olive oil
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• ½ teaspoon kosher salt
• ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper (optional)
• ½ teaspoon dried marjoram or thyme (optional)
• ¼ teaspoon black pepper

• Wrap tofu in a clean dish towel and weight it with something heavy such as a large can; leave it to drain for 30 minutes.
  
  Meanwhile, mix together remaining ingredients in a bowl.
  
  Cut each piece of tofu crosswise into 6 thick slices and put it all in a baking dish. Pour marinade over tofu, turning to coat, and chill, covered, turning occasionally, at least 30 minutes or up to 48 hours. Longer is better, but shorter is totally fine.
  
  
  
  Preheat a gas grill on high heat (450 degrees F to 650 degrees F) 10 minutes, then reduce heat to medium (325 degrees F to 375 degrees F)--or do whatever the equivalent is if you're using charcoal. Oil grate.
  
  Transfer tofu from marinade (letting excess drip off and reserving marinade) to grill with a spatula. Cover grill and cook tofu, turning once, until well browned but before grill marks get black, 10 to 15 minutes total. Transfer tofu to a platter and cover with foil to keep warm.
  
  Bring reserved marinade to a boil in a saucepan and boil until it reduces to about 1 cup, about 2 minutes. Pour over tofu and serve hot, warm, or at room temperature.
  

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

I put this on my hold list for two reasons.  I have made a middle of the year resolution to try to read more nonfiction, and after that momentous decision, Obama's summer reading list came out, and as is his usual, there is a lot of non-fiction on it.  So here I am, reading a memoir by a plant biologist.
There are a couple of threads in this book, the one that is really fun is the one about plant biology, the way of thinking about plants if you are really into them rather than if you merely grow them.  I am not a science Luddite, but almost everything she says in this vein is either something I didn't know or something that was a new way of looking at something I know.
The other part is her life, mostly her life in science.  The truth is that there is really not a huge amount of time outside her lab when she is awake.  She captures that obsession well, and she also demonstrates that one key to success is having a great lab manager, and her way of making that happen for her was so emblematic of her approach to everything.  Really a great read, even though there are bumps along the way.

Captain Marvel (2019)

There are few things to say right off the bat.  The first is that Brie Larson is great, and if marvel was going to have a first woman superhero, then she is an excellent choice.  I hate to admit it, but I was impressed with her work in Kong: Skull Mountain, which I watched as an Oscar nominee, but ended up being surprised by how much I enjoyed it.  The second is that there are bound to be critics when there is a woman superhero.  It accurately reflects what it is like to be a competent woman, even these days. 
So, here I go.  The plot for this was maybe a bit overblown, but then, it is the Marvel Universe and that probably goes with the territory.  I wasn't crazy about the whole plot being revealed in flashbacks, I thought it made our star look a bit befuddled and didn't really add to her aura--but then, I am not a script writer.  The thing that really nagged at me is that they are constantly harping on the fact that her emotions are her weakness.  This is one of the oldest tropes about women, and to my ear, the movie fans that flame.  On the whole, I enjoyed it, there is another great female character as well, and Samuel Jackson is the best of show.

FDR Labor Day Speech, 1941

On Labor Day 1941 America was still recovering from the Great Depression and unemployment was still at 10%. The ascendant Axis powers had plunged the world into a life and death struggle between freedom and oppression, and the German Army had penetrated deep into Russia. Nazi Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) had begun murdering Jews in large numbers.
On Sept. 1, 1941 FDR gave a Labor Day radio address. It was his first broadcast from the new Presidential Library he had built next to his ancestral home in Hyde Park, NY. 

Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) gives his first broadcast from the presidential library study.  NPx 47-96:1520

It is one of his finest broadcasts, a passionate sermon on the importance of democracy and the threat that dictatorships pose to all free people.  He did not mince his words:

“On this day – this American holiday – we are celebrating the rights of free laboring men and women. The preservation of these rights is vitally important now, not only to us who enjoy them – but to the whole future of Christian civilization. American labor now bears a tremendous responsibility in the winning of this most brutal, most terrible of all wars.”

Roosevelt understood that the free world’s only hope for victory over the Axis powers was the application of America’s incredible industrial capacity to the production of war materials. The success of that effort would require an unprecedented level of cooperation between the government, labor and business.  He speaks of enemies who believe:

“that they could divide and conquer us from within.” “These enemies know that today the chief American fighters in the battles now raging are those engaged in American industry, employers and employees alike.”

Near the end of the broadcast FDR makes his most powerful statement about his commitment to democracy.

“The task of defeating Hitler may be long and arduous. There are a few appeasers and Nazi sympathizers who say it cannot be done. They even ask me to negotiate with Hitler – to pray for crumbs from his victorious table. They do, in fact, ask me to become the modern Benedict Arnold and betray all that I hold dear – my devotion to our freedom – to our churches – to our country. This course I have rejected – I reject it again. Instead, I know that I speak the conscience and determination of the American people when I say that we shall do everything in our power to crush Hitler and his Nazi forces.”

He ends the speech with a simple but powerful statement of hope.

“May it be said on some future Labor Day by some future President of the United States that we did our work faithfully and well.”

September Midnight by Sara Teasdale

Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer,

Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,

Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,

Ceaseless, insistent.

The grasshopper’s horn, and far-off, high in the maples,

The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence

Under a moon waning and worn, broken,

Tired with summer.

Let me remember you, voices of little insects,

Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,

Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us,

Snow-hushed and heavy.

Over my soul murmur your mute benediction,

While I gaze, O fields that rest after harvest,

As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to,

Lest they forget them.