Love and Marriage by Monica Ali

The author writes what she knows, which is being a Bangladeshi born woman who grew up in England. This book is set in London in the wake of the Brexit vote and centers on Yasmin, a trainee doctor who is the daughter of Bengali immigrants. She’s about to marry her colleague, Joe, who lives with his subtly domineering mother, Harriet, a feminist academic still famous for posing nude in her 70s heyday. The setup starts off as a meet-the-parents comedy quickly becomes something quite serious indeed. The breezy tone soon give way to the drama of a busy plot rife with secrets and lies. Yasmin gets a shock when a nurse on her ward lifts the lid on Joe’s double life, foreshadowed in segments told from his therapist’s point of view. An even more seismic upset follows the revelation that her parents’ cross-class marriage was a murkier affair than let on by the family lore of an unarranged love match. The whole mess is revealed, and the engagement is the least of the things that end up unraveled at the end.

Joan Miro Foundation, Barcelona, Spain

I am so happy that we decided to do all the museums in Barcelona that we had enjoyed 25 years ago but not been back to since, this museum included. We used our 3-day metro passes to take the bus up to the top of the hill where this is located (very easy, one bus that we took from the start of it’s route to the last stop—even without Google maps it would be hard to screw that up). This is a must visit museum in Barcelona. The Fundació Joan Miró was created by Miró himself, at first principally with works from his own private collection, with a desire to set up an internationally recognized center in Barcelona for Miró scholarship and contemporary art research, and to disseminate the collection. The Fundació opened to the public on 10 June 1975 and has since become a dynamic center in which Joan Miró’s work coexists with cutting-edge contemporary art.

Miró. His Most Intimate Legacy unveils a relatively unknown facet of Miró as a collector of his own work, which was expressed in the creation of three personal collections: his own; that of his wife Pilar; and the collection of his daughter Dolors. These two paintings are from that exhibit. This project seeks to renders homage and express gratitude to the artist as well as to the three generations of the Miró family that have shown leadership in the universal artist’s commitment to the Fundació Joan Miró and the city of Barcelona.

Code Girls by Liza Mundy

The subtitle is The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II, and as is so often the case with the subtitles of non-fiction books, it pretty much sums up what the book is about. The "why now" of it is that it took advantage of recently declassified government documents to highlight the little-known work of the hundreds of women involved in cracking Japanese and German encryption to help bring WWII to a successful conclusion. We get a flavor of just how amazing the whole thing was, that women really had few opportunities in 1930's America, and yet some of them (a low percentage) went to college--the military recruited women studying language, math, and sciences and then trained them to work in teams and to crack codes. The work was demanding and stressful, and we see that through the telling of the stories of a few of them, down to the places they lived, the sacrifices they made, and what motivated them--they had brothers, boyfriends, and husbands who were in combat that they were working to help give them a strategic edge and survive the war. It is occasionally too detailed and long-winded, but overall is a fascinating story, and for many of these women, their days together working as code breakers were the most exciting and meaningful of their whole lives.

Julia (2021)

It is true that there has been a lot written and put up on the big screen about the life of Julia Child and the effect that she had on the generation of women who were her contemporaries, and then by virtue of that, on all of us who followed, but for me, who has both read and watched many of these, there was a lot to take pleasure in here, and a few things to learn. This is kind of documentary light. It has an inclusive and conversational touch as well as a fun attitude—qualities that also define the fascinating subject at the heart of their film—the co-directors manage to whip up a highly engaging documentary anyway, stirring in pieces of archival footage, old photographs, and contemporary talking heads interviews into their stew with well-managed proportions. I liked that they did not linger too long on how exacting the co-authors of Mastering the Art of French Cooking were in putting the recipes together. They were blazing a trail in the wilderness that had never been done in an American cookbook, and while the success of their translation of traditional French cuisine into a format that could be produced in the average American kitchen while shopping at the local grocery story was a herculean feat, it is not much to look at. They did a nice job of walking us through how book tours and cooking shows have their roots in this book and Julia herself—I particularly liked learning about how a public television studio without a test kitchen managed to pull off filming The French Chef—they went a bit lighter on her at the end of her life, and things that might have been less desirable about the American queen of French cooking. This is well worth watching, especially if you are a fan.

The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang

There is a modern and culturally Chinese version of Brother's Karamazov running through this book from start to finish that is hard to miss. The exception to that characterization is the scope. This is focused : one restaurant, one town, and one crime that will transform the family’s fortunes and it all takes place in Wisconsin. Leo Chao is the patriarch and he has all the personality traits that made Fyodor so unlikable. He is crass, openly disappointed in his offspring, competing with them to bed women, deriding them when it doesn't happen, and most of all, telling him that he controls the purse strings at least until he is in the ground. His wife Winnie is still alive, but she has moved into a spiritual house and escaped, leaving her sons behind. Dagou is the oldest, and like Dmitri before him, he finds it hard to cut the apron strings, and is a bit hopeless with money, making him more vulnerable to his father's manipulations. Ming is the successful version of Ivan, and James is the virginal innocent like Alyosha and none of them have shaken the mantle that their father has impressed upon them. Much like in Dostoevsky's version of this story, we empathize with and are infuriated by each of the brothers, and the criminal justice system doesn't come out looking much better either.

Baked on Maui, Haiku-Pauwela, Maui, Hawaii

In their own words, this is a bakery that was created by a local family hoping to provide quality baked goods, made from scratch, that reflected local ingredients as well as making real, fresh food. It is located up a small country road (truly, there is not much that would be classified as a highway on Maui, so this part does not stand out), in a small town in a building that once housed the Libby Pineapple Cannery. One regret I had at the end of my trip is that I did not go to the abandoned sugar factory that we passed almost every day on our way to get somewhere else, and I did not dig much into the legacy of corporations, farming, and Hawaii, but it was nice to see this warehouse repurposed. That is the history, but it is the coffee and the food that would bring us back. We stopped en route to the Road to Hana, and got some quite acceptable sandwiches to tide us over, but it was the breakfast pastries that really knowcked our socks off—so delicious and flakey and flavorful!

Left Bank by Agnès Poirier

There are apparently a lot of historical innacuracies in this book as well as literary ones, but it was an enjoyable read, none-the-less. I Sought it out from an article in The Economist suggesting 7 books to read to better understand modern day France. The subtitle is Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50. The author, a French journalist who, like de Gaulle, lives between London and Paris, walks the reader through the decade in which Paris rose from wartime shame to assert its claims to be world capital of art, philosophy and turtlenecks teems with such vignettes. The book focuses mostly on the authors who lived in Paris through this time period and how their thinking shifted and eventually shaped up. Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus, Hemingway all get a voice, as do some artists beyond Picasso of course. There is a fair amount of white washing, or ignoring, what was going on across Europe while Paris was occupied, but it does cast a vision of how the experience of occupation might be seen to shape post-war France. The Americans in Paris who prove most sympathetic in Poirier’s story are black. She traces the experiences of three African Americans – Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Miles Davis – each blindsided by finding romance and creative stimulation away from the US. Poirier, though, doesn’t nail why Paris, today hardly a byword for racial harmony, was then so appealingly color blind. This is gone now, but let's not forget it existed. She also doesn't deal head on with de Gaulle, who left, and the Resistance, which stayed. When I think of the courage and heroism of Volodymyr Zelenskyy itr makes me cringe all over for how de Gaulle decamped France, and then refused to admit he left a defeated country. But all this for another time--one of the other books on the list is de Gaulle biography.

Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road (2021)

There has been a lot of Brian Wilson’s story that has been told on film, and I have seen a number of them, but this one has such a charming demeanor, and tells his end story so nicely that it is well worth watching. Brian Wilson is a pop genius to be sure, but he did more than write great pop music. He turned pop songs into hymns, soaring chorales, sublimely delicate and jaunty effusions of sweet-souled sound laced with an underlying sadness that celebrates the joyfulness of an emotional life. The movie cuts back and forth between the saga of Wilson and the Beach Boys and a “Carpool Karaoke”-style conversation between Brian, still hale and hanging in there with his tentative, blunted, anxiety-ridden, doggedly sincere approach to everyday experience, and Jason Fine, an editor at Rolling Stone magazine, who met Wilson during the course of doing a feature on him in the mid-’90s. The two began to hang out and became friends, and in “Long Promised Road” they cruise around L.A., talking and listening to Brian’s music and stopping at key locales: Paradise Cove, the home of “Surfin’ Safari”; the site of Wilson’s now-demolished childhood home in Hawthorne; the houses he lived in during the ’60s and ’70s; the home of his late brother Carl; and the Beverly Glen Deli, where the two chat over Cobb salads and ice-cream sundaes. In the end, I felt a little bit better about Brian Wilson’s end game, and how the story all came out.

Infinite Country by Patricia Engel

This is a compact, stirring, surprising, and ultimately thoughtful novel that starts with Talia, a 15 year old who has escaped reform school, where she was sent because she burned a man for murdering a cat. She is the youngest daughter of Elena and Mauro, who at the beginning of the millennium leave their native Colombia for the United States. Exhausted by the violence that has ravaged their country and eager to provide safety and financial security for their baby, Karina, the couple acquire six-month tourist visas and head to Texas. They plan to find work, save as much money as they can and return home better off than before. This goes about as well as you would imagine. The feeling that they will forever be viewed as foreigners in this land becomes overwhelming, and Elena and Mauro decide to return to Bogotá. But when Elena becomes pregnant, they make the difficult choice to stay in the United States, where they will live in fear of deportation but will also cling to the hope of permanent residency and the belief that their American-born son, Nando, will have more opportunities than they do--but at what price for the rest of the family. It is a very well told story.

Eskimo Candy Seafood Market, Kihue, Maui

One lesson that I wish I had learned earlier or known about eating in Hawaii in general and on Maui in particular is that you should definitely avoid places with printed menus, table settings, and even to a large extent, indoor seating. This is one such place. It didn’t start out selling food and that is still not it’s primary aim. Eskimo Candy's origin business has always been providing wholesale seafood, poultry, and meat to restaurants, hotels, and grocery stores.

After becoming success in the wholesale industry, they moved into the retail realm. In 2003, Eskimo Candy Seafood Market and Cafe was opened to the public. The desire is to serve the best Maui fresh fish and the top of the line quality food with affordable prices—the poke bowl is amazing food at an amazing price (and in a very down scale presentation), and we would go back for that and the coconut shrimp every trip we make to the island.

The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas

Dumas' last major historical novel is a tale of romantic love, jealousy and obsession, interweaving historical events surrounding the brutal murders of two Dutch statesman in 1672 with the phenomenon of tulipomania that gripped seventeenth-century Holland. Two brothers Cornelius and Johan de Witt (Grand Pensionary/prime minister of Holland) were charged with treason and sentenced to exile. Cornelis von Baerle, their nephew, had been tortured with the hope that he would confess to plotting with the French king. He did not, but he kept the papers safe so he was a political target Our Cornelius von Baerle, also the nephew of history, is also a respectable tulip-grower and he lives only to cultivate the elusive black tulip and win a magnificent prize for its creation. But after his powerful godfather is assassinated, the unwitting Cornelius becomes caught up in deadly political intrigue and is falsely accused of high treason by a bitter rival, a neighbor who wants both the prize and the glory for himself, even if he has to cheat to get it. Condemned to life imprisonment, his only comfort is Rosa, the jailer's beautiful daughter, and together they concoct a plan to grow the black tulip in secret. There are familiar themes here for Dumas fans, but the length and scope of the novel make it something you could read in a day or a week, whereas his longer form works can take a month or more. He has a very accessible writer, easily walking his reader through complex plots and nefarious deeds.

Sing 2 (2021)

Let’s be very clear—this is an animated musical that is long on slapstick humor and short on plot driven dialogue. There was a song in it that was on the Oscar short list for Best Song, but it did not make the final cut. I make a very big effort to watch all of the Oscar nominated movies in advance of the ceremonies, despite the fact that I rarely watch the awards themselves. It is just a way to keep current and the moves are largely quite good. I rarely have regrets, even though I don’t love everything. Then later, sometimes much later, I try to go back and watch some of the short listed movies that didn’t make the final cut, because those too are often very good, especially the documentaries and the international movies. This, however, is not a movie that I would highly recommend. Here is the scoop. With his theatrical company a local success, Buster Moon (a koala) is dreaming of bigger things. Unfortunately, when a talent scout dismisses their work as inadequate for the big time, Buster is driven to prove her wrong. With that goal in mind, Buster inspires his players to gamble everything to sneak into a talent audition in Red Shore City for the demanding entertainment mogul/mobster Jimmy Crystal. Against the odds, they catch his interest with the lie that they personally knowing the reclusive rock star, Clay Calloway, who has not been seen in 15 years. Once hired they face a tight production window with only a vague story idea and dire consequences for failure, Buster and his friends must all stretch their talents put on a show against all odds. But, this being an animated feature, it all works out.

The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid

I am a bit in awe of this author, who wrote the Booker nominated book Exit West. In this story he explores the nature of skin color and the impact it has. Anders, the protagonist in the book, wakes up to discover that he has changed race. He looks in the mirror to see not the familiar white face, but the black man who had been Anders. He doesn’t seek to explain why this dramatic transformation takes place, but rather to explore the impact that it has on the people of the unnamed American town in which Anders lives. For although he is one of the first to undergo the transformation, he is not the last-- eventually there is just one white man left, and then there are none. The fascinating part of the story is that this transformation breeds violence and anger rather than a greater understanding of how meaningless the prejudices held based solely on skin color are. As more and more people are transformed, online unrest spills out on to the streets. Militants take control of the town, protesting against the fact that it has become a different--and less desirable--place. Anders finds himself no longer welcome at the gym, where previously the only other member of staff who wasn’t white was a janitor. It spirals downwards and people are absurd and believable in their response to their inevitable transformation.

Hawaiian Shave Ice

I agreed with the rest of my traveling companions that we did indeed need to try Hawaiian shaved ice while we were in Maui for a wedding, but I have to say that I was not enthusiastic about it. I saw it more as a chore, an obligation rather than a cultural exploration. I was 100% wrong in every possible way. The first is that I wasn’t approaching it with an open mind. That can often be said of me, even as a young woman, and nothing about that has much improved with age. So good to be reminded of that and work to do better. The other is that this is an astoundingly delicious treat. Unlike snow cones, which I am not fond of, shave ice is made with finely shaved, not crushed, ice. This results in a powdery, fine consistency, like freshly fallen snow. It is more like kakigori, and the flavored syrup toppings, while looking garish, are delicious and fruity. The addition of a soft serve ice cream hidden in the center, or fresh fruit. I recently had kakigori in a fancy restaurant in Barcelona, with fresh strawberries and a crème anglaise and was reminded that while in Hawaii it is a fast food, it can be dressed up as a very elegant upscale dessert.

Hurricane Girl by Marcy Dermansky

Wow this is such a wild coming of age in the time of climate change story, every extreme of what that entails is explored and the reader is boomeranged about in this wonderfully scary and all too believable book. Allison escapes an abusive relationship with a seemingly respectable screenwriter in LA by buying a beach house on the opposite side of country in North Carolina. It is a short-lived refuge, being blown to the ground in a hurricane. In the aftermath of the first of many disasters, Alison goes home with a man she doesn't know, endures a life threatening attack, has brain surgery, and that's just the start of it. I loved how believable it is to follow Allison's stream of thought, how her post-concussive brain makes decisions and no one around her is really looking out for her, even when she is wildly inappropriate. One of those in her sphere of influence is her mother and another is her neurosurgeon. But, no, she is on her own. At the beginning I feared for her life, but in the end I loved it.

C'Mon, C'Mon (20210

This is a very interesting movie, with a small cast, a small scope, and more introspection than action. Johnny (played by Joaquin Phoenix, demonstrating that he can do more than demonic or debilitated well) is an audio producer asking countless kids their thoughts about the future and their communities. Some are fearful, some are hopeful, some want the world to get along, others just want the world to see them as they are. He doesn’t do much in the way of parallel reflection on his own until he lives with an inquisitive child with his own set of questions. Johnny has little in the way of actual experience caring for kids until he agrees to help his sister by caring for her son Jesse while she tries to get his psychotic schizophrenic father, her ex-husband, some mental health care. Johnny does a pretty good job being equal parts respectful of Jesse as a person and protecting him as a child, and the movie made me reflect on a number of things as each of the characters was doing their own reflecting. I think this is the point, that through the questions, posed both by an adult on the job and a curious child, and gentle pacing, the movie taps into our own memories of when something was happening to our families that we didn’t yet fully understand, but can now look back on them as adults and maybe process what happened.

Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson

I read this because it was on Obama's 2022 summer reading list, which is where I often find a great read that I might otherwise have overlooked, and also where I am never disappointed, even if I don't love the book. This one is a keeper, a slim volume that packs a punch. The unnamed narrator of this book runs into an old acquaintance from college some 20 years later in an airport where they are both waiting to board a flight to Frankfurt. The Flight is delayed and the old friend, Jeff, invites him to wait with him in a members only setting--who would refuse? Not I. Ensconced in the lounge, Jeff starts to share his tale. A few years after college, he rescued an older man from drowning in the waves off a Santa Monica beach. The saved man, Francis, turns out to be an art dealer. In revelations that are slowly uncovered — and that continue up until the last page — Jeff becomes enmeshed in the man’s life. He goes to work for him, not revealing who he is. He dates the man's daughter. He becomes part of the family in a weird, classist, worker bee kind of way. And he reflects on the saving of a man's life. It’s no spoiler to say that Francis turns out to be a manipulative jerk, and that there is a bit of the "what if" about this that twists and turns and comes to what for me was a very satisfactory conclusion.

Tin Roof, Kahului, Maui, Hawaii

This is our number one favorite place to eat in Maui. It is nothing to look at, and the food is available exclusively through take out, but there are daily specials and you can order and pay on line through a very functional website, so it is slick and easy to get food. We ordered when we flew in and drove to our Airbnb to eat it. It is owned and operated by Sheldon Simeon, who wrote Cook Real Hawai'i, which is an exceptional cookbook. If you eat here and love what you eat, you can get this cookbook for about the cost of an entree and make it yourself.

We loved the Garlic Shrimp and recommend it as is, no additional add-ons. It comes with 8 shrimp, perfectly cooked, replete with garlic, and the cost was $14 (to give a sense, we ate at a sit down place in Kula where we got 6 similarly sized shrimp in a dish for $39 and it wasn't even as good). The prices here are another thing that make it stand out--very affordable and very delicious food.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I read this book because it was showing up in a number of my Goodreads friend's list of books read or want to read, and while I don't read book reviews often (just the New Yorker and The Week), I do like to choose some of my reading selections based on popular demand. That is why I had no idea that the book came out 5 years ago, that there is a dramatization of the book in the works, and that it is about the tell all biography of a fictional Hollywood glamor girl (think Marilyn Monroe with a Latinx heritage). This is not the sort of book I generally read, a sort of scandalous tell all, even a fictional one, but unlike in real life, there can be a story arc that is worth reading, and for me, this was very enjoyable. The story is one is a story of scandal and ambition, but it's also that of identity, love, and the complexity of wanting to have a family and a career. Evelyn is sexy, glamorous, and talented at a time when Hollywood required that women play second fiddle to men, both on screen and off. The talent couch was a thing, and while Evelyn didn't fall prey much to that, she was unlucky in love. This is a great story well told, and while a bit of fluff on top, there is an LGBTQ underbelly that changes it for the better.

Tyson's Run (2022)

This is 100% a candy coated feel good movie, and I wouldn't really go so far as to recommend it. So why talk about it at all, and on the anniversary of 9/11 to boot? Well, this is also the anniversary of our son finishing his last chemotherapy. We were just remembering that day with the woman who we hired to help us manage all the hospital stays and medical appointments and staying with him in school, thew woman who made it possible for us to work, and allowed our son to be with someone who was young, upbeat and practical rather than his extremely stressed parent. Her daughter was getting married, and we were lucky enough to be invited, and this day in history is forever marked for us by our shared experience in the hospital. The first tower of the World Trade Center collapsing happened just as we were about to hand off the baton to her, and it is a seared memory for us that involves not just terrorism but cancer. So why this movie? It is a Hallmark story about a boy with autism who has trouble with the social landscape but has great strengths as well, and in order to find them, he needs acceptance and support. We have been very fortunate to have had that and this move reminds me that it is important today and everyday to spread that message, even in this sugar coated way.

Nothing To See Here by Kevin Wilson

For me this book hovers between a four and a five star book, but regardless, I definitely enjoyed it. This is about the family you choose rather than the family that you have--all the characters have flawed but very believable families of origin that they have not successfully shed, but do successfully create something of their own. Lillian is in her late twenties and working dead-end cashier jobs while living in her mother’s attic. She gets an unexpected phone call from her high school best friend Madison with whom she has had a checkered past. Despite this, they have maintained contact, and a friendship of sorts. Madison is now married to a rich senator who has been nominated for Secretary of State and is also mother to a toddler. The senator’s previous wife has just died and their two kids are now in his custody. These children have a genetic disease where they spontaneously combust into flames at will. Madison would like Lillian to do her a solid and become their temporary governess while they figure out what to do about their condition. Yes, for real, fire children. Lillian comes to love the combustible twins—Bessie and Roland—they are unkempt, wary, and distrustful of everyone after their mother’s botched attempt to kill them while attempting suicide. Lillian identifies with them on some level, and she is their go between on many levels. There are so many levels to think about this on, but at base it is quirky and funny and very charming.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

I would have gotten around to reading this on my own eventually, but put it on my hold list when it appeared on Obama's summer reading list. The novel takes place mostly in the 22nd and 23rd centuries, but it begins in 1912 when Edwin, a young Englishman who offended his wealthy father, finds himself exiled to the wilds of Western Canada. He has some vague notion that he’ll take up farming, whatever that might entail. In the meantime, he pouts and drifts. This opening scene is brief, but it is the trip wire against which the book boomerangs as it shifts between centuries, and between planets in the rest of the story. There is a lot of bad news packed into this thin volume. The world is utterly transformed, and the changes are mostly implied, with allusions to China’s primacy and various independent regions of the United States. Rather than focus on technological advances and gee-whiz gadgets, the book concentrates on the psychological implications of living in domed colonies on the surface of the moon in the era of cycling pandemics and the extremes of climate change. This is science fiction that keeps its science largely in abeyance, as dark matter for a story about loneliness, grief and finding purpose.

The Road To Hana

The sites that are associated with the road to Hana actually extend beyond the town of Hana all the way to the southern entrance of Haleakalā National Park. There are a lot of dire recommendations that you should then turn around and do the whole thing in reverse rather than risk being stuck on the back road home, and that you should maybe just give up all together and go on a tour. If you have a driver who loves to drive, I highly recommend you do the whole road and you do it on your own. It is a long day and having to wait for people on these tours can be even harder, and you can customize where you stop and where you go. So here goes. The Hana Highway (HI-360) has 620 curves and 59 bridges. Each and every bridge is one way, and so the recommendation is that you start early so there isn't too much traffic, but at each bridge it might be an opportunity for the driver to see things too! And if there isn't traffic (the day we did it I would say it was pretty light, so it can happen, even in the summer), you can go slow and maybe even pause on the bridge to relish the view. The road leads you through flourishing rainforests, flowing waterfalls, plunging pools and dramatic seascapes. There is jaw dropping beauty in an enviable variety the whole route and I can see why it is on so many people's bucket lists.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

This is a Christmas time novella, where by a simple story is told in a straight forward way, but a lot simmers underneath the surface. The book opens in New Ross, on the coast of Ireland. The town rises up in all its picturesque antiquity and idyllic holiday celebrations, but with a web of economic and social tensions thrumming beneath the surface. It’s 1985, and New Ross is enduring a grinding decline. Businesses shuttered, the dole lines are long, and the houses cold. Those who can leave have already skipped abroad looking for work, life. The novel's everyman hero is Bill Furlong, whose past and present she sketches with such crisp efficiency that the brush marks of her artistry are almost invisible. Furlong knows he’s fortunate. Though born here into poverty and orphaned early, he became the ward of a wealthy widow who set him up with a little money. Here there is a reference to the Magdalene laundries, which were run for more than 200 years by religious orders, subjected thousands of young women to forced labor, physical abuse, baby kidnapping and even early death. Billy is now married with five daughters, and he sells coal and timber around town. But he is not altogether happy and there are several things alluded to that this uneasiness might stem from, and goes on to show us why. From the elements of a simple existence in an inconsequential town, the author has carved out a profoundly moving and universal story. There’s nothing preachy here, just the strange joy and anxiety of firmly resisting cruelty.

Cyrano (2021)

I have loved this movie since I saw the play in the 1960's with Richard Chamberlain playing Cyrano. Admittedly, I got off to a great start with it, but it is a play that is often produced, and film versions abound as well. The basic story is that Roxanne, a beautiful girl, wants a handsome beau, but also one with some substance. She is childhood friends with Cyrano, who is a gifted poert, but is handicapped with a large proboscis, and while he loves Roxanne, she sees it as strictly platonic. She falls for Christian, a love at first sight sort of situation, but he is just a pretty face, and for reasons that are hard to untangle, Cyrano helps Christian woo her, his words and Christian's looks, and she is a sitting duck. Reconsidering this, it is unfair to everyone involved, and only goes to reinforce stereotypes with a tragic undercurrent. Christian quickly realizes that he cannot do it alone, and when push comes to shove, he urges Cyrano to reveal his true feelings--which he is loathe to do. In this version, Cyrano is a dwarf and the whole thing works brilliantly. Highly recommend this version, despite all the singing, which I am not a huge fan of.

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

The subtitle is The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. This is a meticulously researched account of an appalling widespread conspiracy against the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. At the beginning of the 20th century, when oil was being discovered on Indian Reservations, everyone was clamoring to take land away from native Americans and trying to take advantage of them to the advantage of whites. The undercurrent of this is not the main story being told, but it resonates in the present where this is not ancient history. The Osage had a leg up on other American Indian nations because they purchased their land rather than being granted it, and therefore they owned it outright, and were at the time the richest Americans--which put them in danger. The story centers on an Osage family that died, in ones and twos, of causes ranging from the odd and ambiguous to the obviously violent. First, Minnie Smith, 27 years old, died in 1918 of what doctors termed a “peculiar wasting illness”; then, in 1921, her sister Anna Brown was shot, her body left in a ravine. Their mother, Lizzie Kyle, died weeks later, also felled by an unidentified wasting illness. By this point, her family suspected she’d been poisoned. A bomb killed a third sister, Rita Smith, along with her husband, Bill, in 1923. The last living sister, Mollie Burkhart, made it to 1925 before she sent secret word to a priest that her life was in peril. The story is a bit long winded, but does demonstrate the lack of a coordinated law enforcement agency in the United States at the time, and the development of one in response to this abysmal segment of American history.

Shrimp and Eggplant Sitr Fry

This is not the eggplant sitr fry to end all eggplant stir fries but it is very good. Kosher salt 1 teaspoon turmeric powder 2 teaspoons ginger-garlic paste (bottled or made by combining 1 teaspoon each grated garlic and ginger) 2 teaspoons cumin powder, divided 2/3 pound small shrimp, peeled and deveined 1 1/2 tablespoons oil 1 medium red onion, chopped fine (about 1 cup) 2 small green chiles, slit 1/2 cup chopped tomato 2 teaspoons red chile powder 1 teaspoon coriander powder 1 cup water 3 baby black eggplants cut lengthwise into 4 Combine 1 teaspoon salt, turmeric, ginger-garlic paste,1 teaspoon cumin powder, and the shrimp in a medium bowl and set aside. Heat oil in a large saucepan over medium heat until shimmering. Add onions and cook, stirring, until softened, about 2 minutes. Add green chilli and chopped tomato. Stir until tomato is broken down and starting to get dry, about 5 minutes. Add remaining cumin, red chilli and coriander powders and vigorously until fragrant, about 2 minutes. (Add drops of water if you think the paste is sticking to the bottom or the powders are burning.) Add eggplants and stir to coat with spice paste. Add water and season to taste with salt. Cover and cook until eggplant is tender and most of its liquid has evaporated, about 5 minutes. Add the shrimp and stir. Cook uncovered until the shrimp is opaque and curled and the eggplant is cooked through, about 5 minutes. Serve hot with roti or steamed rice and daal.

Circe by Madeline Miller

This book gives us a feminist slant on the Odyssey. It gives voice to a previously muted female perspective in the classics, forging a great romance from the scraps left to us by the ancients. It is very pleasurable to read, combining lively versions of familiar tales (like the birth of the Minotaur or the arrival of Odysseus and his men on Circe’s island) and snippets of other, related standards (a glance at Daedalus and Icarus; a nod to the ultimate fate of Medea after she and Jason leave Aiaia) with a highly psychologized, redemptive and ultimately exculpatory account of the protagonist herself. The author has made a collage out of a variety of source materials–from Ovid to Homer to another lost epic, the Telegony–but the guiding instinct here is to re-present the classics from the perspective of the women involved in them, and to do so in a way that makes these age-old texts alive with contemporary relevance.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2022)

Let me start off by saying that I really did like this movie. I watched it on a transpacific flight and it was just what I needed to get through being in a small space for 9 hours. There are some things that you would totally have missed if you hadn't watched the 1984 film, but the director is apparently the son of the original director so I cut him some slack there. Here goes the story. Callie, a single mother of two, moves her two kids to a brokedown palace in Oklahoma that her father has left her as an inheritance. They go not because they want to--Callie has no affection for her father, who left them when she was young--but because she has zero money. Her son Trevor is a sullen teen with a knack for mechanics and her daughter Phoebe is a misfit science whiz, a gift she apparently inherited from her grandfather. They all schlep to fictional, small-town Summerville to take over Grandpa’s dilapidated farm, but when they get there, they soon realize there’s something strange in the neighborhood. The rest is just would you would expect for a ghost chasing movie with too much of an emphasis on a super curse and the possible destruction of the world. This is sort of a sequel and sort of a reboot, but it’s definitely an erasure of the 2016 “Ghostbusters”, which caused such a stir, maybe because it dared to feature women busting ghosts and maybe because it was not enough of an homage to the original--in any case, good to see the new crew has some females on board.