Española-Island, Galapagos, Ecuador

Española is the southernmost of the Galapagos Islands and is also one of the oldest. Geologists estimate it is about four million years old. Española is a classic shield volcano, created from a single caldera in the center of the island. Over thousands of years, the island slowly moved away from the Galapagos hot spot where it was formed and the volcano became extinct. Erosion began to occur, eventually resulting in one of the flattest islands in the archipelago with one of the lowest elevations. Because Española is one of the most isolated islands in Galapagos, it has a large number of endemic species — the Española mockingbird, the Española lava lizard, and the waved albatross, to name a few. The mockingbird is quite charming, having a very long bill that it uses to bust into things to eat, very little need to fly so it mostly hops from place to place, and a very charming nature—one came and ate flies, which were ubiquitous, right off our legs in a gentle and adorable manner.

Waved Albatrosses are the largest birds in Galapagos. They are remarkable birds, standing nearly 1 m high with wingspans of 2 to 2.5 m and living up to 40 years. Every year the entire world’s population of adult Waved Albatrosses returns to Española during the nesting season, from April to December. The nesting site is the only one in the world, and it was closed to visiting due to bird flu being reported on several islands.

Indelible City by Louisa Lim

Do cry for Hong Kong. This is such a bittersweet story, told as a triptych, with three powerful narratives woven together to tell this city’s story. They are firstly a macro-level history of Hong Kong and its relationship with its two colonial masters: the United Kingdom and China. Then there is a micro-level history of a not-so-mentally-stable street calligrapher, the King of Kowloon, whose art and bearing embody the dispossession and defiance that frame the macro-level history. And finally the author shares her own personal narrative of growing up in Hong Kong and witnessing the transformation of the city in recent decades. It is no real surprise that Hong Kong’s return to China since 1997 has been an unmitigated disaster. Hong Kong is a culturally diverse, socially complex, rule-of-law-conscious, and politically engaged community: all traits for which China’s post-1989 leaders have had little patience and that has been playing out in big and small ways. The most telling part of this for me was how China managed the "negotiations" which was to basically ignore everyone, especially Hong Kong leadership and focused solely on the date that they would take charge. Something to remember as they set their sights on other options in the South China sea.

Golda (2023)

There are a lot of negative reviews of this movie, which focuses on Golda Meir during the 19-day Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Arab forces, led by Egypt, attacked Israel during its holiest time of the year. It was a dire and deadly situation to be sure, and it severely tested Meir, who remains the only woman ever to hold that leadership position in Israel. There is a lot of dissatisfaction with the make up required to turn the svelte Helen Mirren into the matronly Golda and her constant smoking are both distracting. I myself do not share that view—it is a shocking reminder of how ubiquitous chain smoking was in that time period (the same is true in Maestro as well), but to eliminate it takes away a dimension of the stress, tension, and fatigue that was in play at that time. I found Mirren’s portrayal of Meir to be nuanced and while I do not know much about her, neither do the reviewers, or at least that was not the focus of the criticism. The added dimension for me is that I watched this while the escalated war between Hamas and Israel is ongoing, that the more time that passes does not diminish the peril of the situation in the Middle East right now, and the history of what happened in 1973 is only part of the bigger story. Meir was an inspirational woman, who was born in Ukraine (another country under siege right now), grew into adulthood in the United States, and helped guide a young Israel at a time of great threat.

The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi

Reviews call this smart and satirical--and I think it was perhaps too clever and too much satire for me to fully enjoy it, and maybe I also did not appreciate it enough either. At the center is a gifted but unsuccessful Pakistani translator in London makes pennies subtitling Bollywood movies, until her English boyfriend introduces her to an organization called the Centre. Cult-like and secretive, the Centre puts translators through an immersive process that makes them idiomatically fluent in any language within 10 days. At first she cannot believe it, then she gets invited to live and breath it, and then, after becoming the success that she had always yearned for, it starts to rot a bit for her. If you could become fluent in any new tongue as if by magic, have you really earned the right to know it? Do you really understand its culture, its heritage, its nuance? If you gain a skill without doing any work, are you cheating? Is paying a high fee to collect languages so facilely an extension of colonial greed, an entitled white hipster gimmick – or something even more sinister? The result of the apparent worldliness of multilingual people is not increased idiosyncrasy, equality or self-expression but translators who speak without accents, the kind you sometimes find in global cosmopolitan elites raised in the international schools and gated compounds. The deeper she digs the less she likes what she finds.

Santa Cruz, Galapagos, Ecuador

Los Gemelos (the twin craters) Long ago when Santa Cruz island was an active volcano, lava flowed freely from the highlands summit down to the coast. Lava tunnels (or tubes) and magma chambers form when the top level of lava is slow moving and solidifies, while the lava below continues to flow. The result is a hollow chamber or tube, covered over by a thin layer of solidified lava. In the case of Los Gemelos, the fragile lava surface caved in due to erosion or tectonic shifts. When the chamber roof collapsed it revealed these huge sink holes. An impressive eight of the thirteen Darwin Finch species can be spotted here. The differences between finches is quite subtle; look for differences in color, beak size, body size and behavior to correctly identify them. We mostly did not go to that level.

Bellavista Lava Tunnel. This is the largest lava tube I have ever been in. As you descend into the tunnels via stairs, you quickly lose sight of the sun and enter the darkness. Even though they have lights hung throughout. you still have limited visibility. My spouse spotted two barn owls in the gloom, but mostly it is just a very cool place to hike through.

Anatomy by Dana Schwartz

This is a Young Adult novel that very clearly fits that bill. The time is 1817 Scotland. Hazel Sinnett is a lady (like in the royal birth sense of the word) who wants to be a surgeon more than she wants to marry. Jack Currer is a resurrection man who digs up the recently dead and sells them to people who want to study bodies. When Hazel, who has been attending anatomy lectures in the guise of the dead brother, gets discovered and kicked out, she makes a bargain with the lecturer--if she can pass the physician's exam, she will be admitted to the profession and be able to apprentice under him. So she needs Jack, and what he can offer her in terms of corpses and the knowledge she can gain from them, and he helps her with that, but then he brings her patients, and she starts to work with the poor, who have little in the way of options. Together they discover a secret, and she finds an answer that she does not want to find. It is a good story, a bit gothic in tone, and I would read the next in the series.

Spiderman: Across the Spider-verse (2023)

For me, a casual Spider-Man fan, the multitudes of Spider-Men were already a source of great confusion, and this movie does not change that perception. In the Miles Morales Spiderman worlds, Spiderman is animated, and this movie boldly throws out any restraint at all and leans full tilt into the zaniness of a visually and thematically kaleidoscopic world. In the usual Spiderman fashion Milo is struggling with the coming of age dynamics that he has with his parents and keeping his super hero multiverse role a secret. Into that emotionally volatile space enters The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), a scientist turned supervillain whose body is covered by interdimensional portals which make for some creative battles. The Spot blames Miles for his plight and vows to take down him and everyone he cares about. But his personal vendetta has a much grander consequence if he succeeds – the destruction of all universes. The critics and audiences overwhelmingly love this movie, so I am a stand out in that I did not.

Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo

The beauty and the tragedy of reservation life are on offer here. This is strictly a memoir, not an indictment of the 400 years of maltreatment of Native Americans, but that is certainly the subtext. The author is the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. Her mother remarried, but to a similar man who revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Her success drove her stepfather mad, and what he couldn't control he tried to destroy, and she became essentially homeless at a young age. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by colonialization. An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage. She in many ways recapitulated what her mother had done, but with a difference. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality of her ancestors.

Darwin Center, Santa Cruz, Galapagos Ecuador

The Charles Darwin Research Center was created in 1960 by an international committee in order to promote research, conservation, and education in the Galapagos Islands.erIn In addition to the exhibition center, the tortoise rearing house and the adult tortoise house, provide opportunities for visitors to observe the 11 subspecies of tortoises up close. In the rearing house, hatchlings and young tortoises are nurtured until they can be released, at about four years of age, to their home islands. Nearly 2000 young tortoises have been released so far.

Tortoises that cannot be released back into the wild find their home in the adult tortoise house, an area with several different enclosures for the education and protection of tortoises from each subspecies. Handling the tortoises is prohibited, but this is a great place to get close up photos of the tortoises feeding on cacti and snoozing by the artificial pond.

Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Cespedes

While this shows up on the New York Times Notable Books of 2023 list, it was published in 1952 and only recently translated. As such, it feels very dated, a kind of reminder that while the status of women is vastly inferior to that of men, not that long ago it was even worse. The author opens this book by stating that owning a notebook is in itself forbidden. She was born in 1911 and her family was involved in anti-fascism politics, but this is not about that, but rather it examines a form of suppression that women recognize as global: the suppression of their thoughts. The book is written as a diary, that paradoxical form that offers both privacy and exposure. Privacy produces candor, and the diarist may say things on paper she would never say aloud, but transcription itself is communication, creating text that can be read by anyone. The writer is Valeria, 43, happily married to Michele. Their children, Riccardo and Mirella, are university students living at home. Postwar Italy is poor, but Michele has a good job in a bank, and Valeria, unusually for her generation, also has a good office job. And yet, as time goes on, the constraints in her life weigh more and more heavily on her. Check this one out.

Desperate Souls, Dark City, and The Legend of Midnight Cowboy (2023)

I loved this. I think It really helps to have seen Midnight Cowboy before you watch this, because it was such a special movie. Midnight Cowboy is about loneliness. It is about dreams, sunny and yet broken. It was about gay male sexuality and seeing it, for the first time, in a major motion picture. It was about the crush and alienation of New York City: the godless concrete carnival wasteland. The movie is also about the larger sexual revolution. It is about money and poverty and class and how they could tear you apart. It is about how the war in Vietnam was tearing the soul of America apart. A half century after its release, Midnight Cowboy remains one of the most original and groundbreaking movies of the modern era. With beguiling performances from Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman as two loners who join forces out of desperation, blacklist survivor Waldo Salt's brilliant screenplay, and John Schlesinger's fearless direction, the 1969 film became the only X- rated film to ever win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Its vivid and compassionate depiction of a more realistic New York City and its inhabitants paved the way for a generation’s worth of gritty movies with complex characters and adult themes. But this is not a documentary about the making of Midnight Cowboy: it is about the deeply gifted and flawed people behind a dark and difficult masterpiece; New York City in a troubled time of cultural ferment; and the era that made a movie and the movie that made an era. Featuring extensive archival material and compelling new interviews, director illuminates how one film captured the essence of a time and a place, reflecting a rapidly changing society with striking clarity.

Also A Poet by Ada Calhoun

This is a circuitous book from start to finish. It began as the author's attempt to complete the biography of Frank O’Hara that her father, the late art critic Peter Schjeldahl, never finished. Like her father, Calhoun was thwarted in her efforts by the Frank O’Hara literary estate and, to be sure, he book is a product of this thwarting: it is a memoir that does surreptitious triple duty as a partial, unauthorized O’Hara biography, a meditation on the purpose and function of the genre, and an unanticipated investigation into the powers of literary estates to determine what, when, and how an author's legacy is managed. She started when she discovers dozens of interviews conducted for her father’s ambitious, authoritative O’Hara biography stored on dusty cassette tapes in their East Village basement. Schjeldahl’s biography had been authorized by O’Hara’s literary estate, and he was well acquainted with him personally, but then it wasn't--thwarted by Mr. O'Hara's sister. Ms. Calhoun tries to do what her father failed to, and while she ran into the same road blocks, she somewhat remarkably moves around them, and probably much to the chagrin of the aforementioned estate, manages to leave a decidedly unflattering portrayal of Frank O'Hara in her wake.

Giant Tortoises, Santa Cruz, Galapagos, Ecuador

Santa Cruz is the second-largest island in Galapagos and it hosts the second largest population of the second-largest dome-shaped giant tortoise. Giant tortoises have traditionally been known to forage on the western slopes of the island, which is typically wetter and more densely vegetated. Humans followed a similar pattern when they settled in Santa Cruz, choosing the tortoises’ natural areas to do farming and cattle ranching. The Galapagos National Park, however, came in not long after and set aside 97% of the land surface and established it as a protected area, leaving 3% for settlers to carry on with their lives and daily activities.

But tortoises ignored this human decree and continued migrating annually to the wet highlands in order to feed on grass – right there on the very properties that were set aside for the colonists! So, on Santa Cruz Island, if you want to see giant tortoises, you must visit a cattle ranch! Tortoises like it better there, especially during this time of year. In the end, cattle ranchers lost their territorial battle yet realized tortoises brought no harm to their economy, in fact, they actually improved it.

G-Man by Beverly Gage

The author states in the opening chapter that if Hoover had retired in 1959, as he intended to, that his legacy would have been substantially different than it ended up being, and I see what she means, but the thing I walked away from the book with is that he was a very consistent man across his career, but that the times they were a-changing, and his public persona of tough on crime hid his persistent law breaking tactics to get what he wanted from whomever he wanted it from. anarchists and communists in 1919 posed a real threat to government officials and citizens in several American cities, but the 1960's got away from him. He took a real threat, made it into something that was bigger than it was, and continued to do that for the rest of his career; he was bad to the bone and out for himself from day one. He was both smart and politically savvy from the get go. He became a government employee right out of law school, doing that instead of soldiering in WWI, and was head of the newly created FBI from 1924-1972. He worked for (and sometimes against) eight presidents and he professionalized the FBI, turning it into one of the most respected law enforcement agencies in the world. He was a white supremacist cast in the Southern racist mold, who created the FBI in his own image. The miraculous thing is that he was as openly gay as you could be in the first half of the 20th century, traveling with a man, making him his right hand man at work and at home, spent his whole life in the company of men, and despite his homophobia, you didn't have to dig too deep to figure out his sexual preference. He was dislikable in so many ways and this exhaustive biography roots them all out.

Beyond Utopia (2022)

This is the story of North Korea, and the fate of those who dare to try to leave. Documentaries with life-or-death stakes, not to mention wider resonance in our increasingly unsettled geopolitical world, don’t get much more nerve-racking than this one. The world’s bad-actor states are well-known from the worrying news they regularly produce. But only North Korea’s brand of isolated, propaganda-fueled tyranny seems to inspire reportage steeped in the weird — thanks in part to the dangerous whims of its current leader and the coddling by America’s former president. This is a stark rebuttal to anyone who thinks that you can negotiate with this kind of paranoid leadership. There is a mix of situations presented here, and the cinematography is poor, mainly because there is no recreated footage, all the scenes with people are legit, and therefore quite grainy at times. That does nothing to lessen the emotional impact of this film. It focuses on a family leaving illegally, but mixed in with the account of someone who escaped and another who's son is captired escaping and his ultimate fate. The family leaving are the Roh's, and they are helped by pastor Seungeun Kim in Seoul, who has links to the vast Underground Railroad that helps smuggle people from North to South Korea. It is quite the journey, because crossing the demilitarized zone is not an option--there are an estimated 2 million landmines on the border dividing Korea. So you must go north, to China. Crossing that river border, we learn, is only the start of the danger: the pathway requires traversing the length of China, crossing Vietnam and Laos, before real safety is achieved by entering Thailand. At any point before then, authorities could catch the Rohs and deport them back to a North Korea brutally vengeful toward defectors. The treatment of the disloyal, as detailed by interviews with experts including U.S. official Sue Mi Terry, author Barbara Demick and defector-activist Hyeonseo Lee, is more chilling than you can imagine. The story ends with COVID, which makes travel through China impossible, and threfore shuts down the whole operation. This is a must see documentary.

The Lost Year by Katherine Marsh

This is a great young adult book, which juxtaposes Matthew's year of being locked down as a teen with school closed and Zoom classes because of COVID-19 with discovering his great grandmother's secret. He is living through something that he sees as hard and difficult to bear, but through GiGi he learns that when she was a girl, back in 1932 in Ukraine, there was a famine that wiped out her family. There is something great about a book that puts our current situation into perspective, and also demonstrates that Russia has been working to crush Ukraine for 100 years. Putin, walking in the shoes of Stalin, cares nothing for the people of Ukraine, they both simply want control over them, to crush their culture and their people, starving or bombing them out of existence, it matters not. Matthew and the reader learn some perspective and some history, all the while enjoying a good story well told.

Post Office, Floreana, Galápagos, Ecuador

Floreana is the site of the first “post office”, established in 1793, and it was a pit stop for 18th-century whalers traversing the oceans. After months, or even years, on the job, the homesick seamen came up with an ingenious system of getting letters to their families. They erected a barrel on Floreana Island and left their mail for sailors on passing ships to deliver. The first mention of the post office appears in the Journal of a Cruise, Captain David Porter’s account of his 1813 trip to the Galápagos, according to a timeline crafted by John Woram, author of Charles Darwin Slept Here. In his book, Porter recalls a crew member returning with papers “taken from a box which he found nailed to a pot, over which was a black sign, on which was painted Hathaway’s Postoffice.”

Twenty-five years later, another explorer documented the practice of bottling notes and leaving them to be taken back to America by fishing vessels. Those same fishermen “would never fail, before their departure, to touch at this island to take on a supply of tortoises.” The consumption of giant sea tortoises during this period is one of the reasons why Charles Darwin found none left on Floreana Island when he arrived in 1835. One of our postcards, the only one addressed to us, was delivered about 2 weeks after we got home, in our mailbox, no stamp!

Didn't Nobody Give A Sh*t About Carlotta by James Hannaham

I basically loved this book, not so much for the story it tells, which is very good, but for the voice of Carlotta Mercedes, the transgender Black Colombian star of this novel. Seriously, there’s no one quite like her, and she really inhabits the role and all that comes with it. We start in New York, 2015; Carlotta is out of prison after 20 years for armed assault, when a woman was shot and changed in big ways for life. A very serious crime. She tells her story in a hectic clamor, all street music, black vernacular, and convoluted sentences that interrupt themselves. When a book is as funny as this there’s a danger that the serious stuff gets swept away but beneath the chaos there is a plot. First there is a parole hearing which Carlotta scrapes through but everything that comes before pretty much convinces you that she has zero chance. Then we’re off on some routine activities than are anything but – family reunion, job application, car journey – they are only routine if you haven’t been locked up since 1993 and Carlotta brings that home loud and clear. She marvels that there is little wonder that “people used the same term for coming home from prison and coming back from outer space. Re-entry.”

Stamped From The Beginning (2023)

If you are looking for a deep dive into the history of racism in the United States and world wide, go to the book of the same title. It is a phenomenal book, one which is being banned in some southern states have been banning; presumably because it flies in the face of what white supremacists want their kids to learn, both in school and in life. This is a wonderful overview of some of the book’s content, using animation, archival imagery, interviews, needle drops, and high-speed editing to fashion more of a vibrant shout than a traditional conversation starter. Some reviewers have talked about how disjointed it felt to them, that there are many good things covered, but not much of an opportunity to do a deep dive. I loved the organizational structure, which is to connect modern issues of racial inequity to things that were born in slavery, to men who agreed with that proclamation that not-white people were lesser and found ways to reinforce it in every aspect of society. Using interviews and archival footage, the documentary reveals how much that deigned inferiority has been reestablished in things like over-criminalization, hyper-sexualization, and blatant falsehoods. It is a nice prequel or paired film with the documentary 13th. Highly recommend. After watching it, I put David Waldstreicher’s new book “Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery And Independence on my reading list, to better understand individual stories.

Revolution In Our Time by Kekla Magoon

The Black Panthers were complicated. This book tells the far ranging story of them and manages to encompass that range—from militant revolutionaries to human rights advocates working to defend and protect their community. The former got a lot of play at the time they were on the rise, but it is the later that resonates with me, that they tried to ally all people of color, especially those living in poverty, and address things on Maslow's hierarchy of needs--food and health care in particular--as basic human rights. This is a comprehensive, inspiring, and all-too-relevant history of the Black Panther Party, where the author introduces readers to the Panthers’ community activism, grounded in the concept of self-defense, which taught Black Americans how to protect and support themselves in a country that treated them like second-class citizens. For too long the Panthers’ story has been a footnote to the civil rights movement rather than what it was: a revolutionary socialist movement that drew thousands of members—mostly women—and became the target of one of the most sustained repression efforts ever made by the U.S. government against its own citizens. Here is a work that puts the Panthers in the proper context of Black American history, from the first arrival of enslaved people to the Black Lives Matter movement of today.

Floreana Island, Galapagos, Ecuador

Floreana was the first island to be colonized by Ecuadorians in 1832. It was a penal colony that didn’t last long because of the lack of fresh water. A fish canning plant was established there by Norwegian immigrants in 1924; it lasted only a couple of years. A few years later, Friedrich Ritter, a German doctor, arrived with his female companion Dore Strauch, who suffered from multiple sclerosis. A doctor of holistic medicine, Ritter removed all of his teeth and took with him stainless-steel dentures to avoid any dental complications. Together, they set up a very successful garden and lived off the land.

A pregnant Margret Wittmer arrived in 1932, with her husband Heinz and her step-son Harry. They built a house and also established an agricultural lifestyle before giving birth to their son Rolf, the first person to be born in Galapagos. He established the Tip Top fleet of yachts to bring tours to the islands, and we were on one of those boats. Floreana is most well-known for being the site of several mysterious disappearances in the 1930s—the one receiving the most attention being that of a supposed Austrian baroness, who had arrived shortly after the Wittmers with her three servants, and was quite imperious in her treatment of any and all. So more a question of who murdered her rather than why it happened. A finger was pointed at the Wittmers, but she denies any part in it in her book, published in 1962, and there was no one alive to refure her story. Coincidence? Probably. Several copies of her book Floreana were on the boat we were on, and for others, it is available on Hoopla.

The Migrant Chef by Laura Tillman

This is a welcome break from the chef-hero book (which is not my favorite, I will admit right off the bat--I prefer the grittier versions of a rags to fame stories)--Lalo Garcia is a great story of who crosses the US-Mexico border and why. The author originally wanted to learn more about the experiences of the cooks, servers, and dishwashers who served Mexico’s elite amid the nation’s widening wealth gap at Máximo Bistrot, a fine dining restaurant in Mexico City. But when chef Lalo García came to the phone, he offered her something else: his experiences of midnight border crossings, migrant field work, imprisonment, deportation, and an unprecedented rise from being a dishwasher in Atlanta to becoming one of Mexico’s most respected culinary talents. And it is just that wild a ride. García’s grandfather began migrant work under the Bracero Program, which permitted Mexican men to work in the U.S. on short-term contracts. Years later, after Bracero ended, García’s father, Lupe, started migrant farm work and was eventually able to earn a green card under President Ronald Reagan’s amnesty for agricultural workers. García was still a boy when he joined his father on the trail from rural Mexico to work on farms between Florida and Michigan, gathering fruit as the seasons flowed from April to November. As a teenager, after his family had settled in Georgia, García turned to restaurant work. His dexterity and speed honed in the fields shone while washing dishes and prepping food, earning accolades from cooks and gradually securing his place on the line. He earned enough money to buy fashionable clothes and a brand-new Mustang. But in a moment of youthful impetuosity, he drove the getaway car for a robbery and was caught. After serving a prison sentence, he was deported to his grandparents’ home in Mexico. He does return to the US when his father is dying but he realizes that the future is much brighter for him in Mexico. He has a lot of foibles, he is bad boyfriend material, but he is a talented chef and someone who treats his staff with respect. This story is worth knowing, and it made me want to spend a week eating in Mexico City before too long.

Still (2023)

This is a lovely look back at Micheal J. Fox' career, with the perspective of his Parkinson's disease diagnosis, is his attempt to say that he is full of life, funny, and resilient. On the evidence presented here – a dazzling collage of interviews, dramatisations, snappily chosen film and TV clips, family footage and narrated biography – it’s hard to disagree. Obviously, he’s found it tough, yet the 61-year-old’s sparkiness and dry humour shine through. Having achieved stardom in his early 20s, Fox found himself in his 30s hiding from, and then publicly facing up to, a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease – a condition that he believed (as many do) only affected older people. As a child, he was always on the move, constitutionally unable to sit still. It was partly that kinetic quality that landed him teenage roles in TV shows. He became the star of Family Ties thanks to his electrifying comic timing – a scene-stealing ability to make the softest of gags land with a bang, a quality that launched him into his fabled movie career. The real revelations, however, lie in the depiction of Fox’s family life, most notably his marriage to actor Tracy Pollan, who first won his heart by calling him “a complete fucking asshole”, and whose unswerving love leaves him all but speechless when he’s asked what she means to him, save for one word: “Clarity”. When the narrator asks him “How’s Tracy?” in one unguarded moment, he replies “Married to me,” before adding with perfect timing: “… still.”

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

The author is basically saying that he liked being in the world and the time of Harlem Shuffle that he had to keep writing about it. Who can blame him? After watching Summer of Soul, I , too, wanted to be in Harlem in the late 1960's and early 1970's to experience it--it probably would not have gone as well as I might hope, but I loved the music and the vibe so much. So here we have round 2 with Ray Carney. Ray is a hustler of stolen goods who threads his way through New York's yesteryear in a sometimes heroic, sometimes tragicomic attempt to figure out life, fatherhood, and identity. What is changing from one book to the next? A generational shift is afoot, and it's not just happening to Ray. Black culture, socioeconomic hardship, institutional racism, and New York City itself are morphing rapidly. Staying on top of it is like tiptoeing on quicksand. In true Ray fashion, he makes an ill-advised request of Munson, a less-than-up-and-up cop, who agrees to help Ray get some concert tickets; It's a desperate, unforced error done for the noblest impulses, which has long been one of Ray's biggest charms and biggest flaws. Naturally, he gets sucked into a web of capers, coincidences and catastrophes that would be funny if they weren't so deadly. If you liked Harlem Shuffle (and yes, you should read that first), you will undoubtedly enjoy this.

Urbina Bay, Isabela Island, Galápagos, Ecuador

Giant tortoises! The giant tortoise is an iconic species from the Galápagos and is only found on these islands. They are the largest living tortoise in the world. It used to be four islands. On June 24, 2012, the world-famous giant tortoise affectionately known as “Lonesome George” passed away. He was the last surviving land tortoise from Pinta Island, one of the northern islands in the Galápagos. Thought to be 100 years old, Lonesome George lived at the Charles Darwin Research Station since he was found in 1971. For more than three decades, the Galápagos National Park tried to save the Pinta subspecies by finding George a mate. Unfortunately they did not succeed. Sadly with Lonesome George’s passing, there will be no more Pinta Island tortoises.

Urbina Bay is one of the youngest features in the Galápagos. It was mainly formed in 1954, when a sudden uplift of the land raised the seabed by over 5 metres, and pushed the coastline over 1 km further away. This has resulted in the astonishing site of heads of coral stranded far from the water. Exposed to the air and elements, the coral heads are rapidly deteriorating and are one of the sights of the Galápagos that won't be around for much longer.

Live To See The Day by Nikhil Goyal

This is a tale of how brown skinned children end up being more handicapped than white children are; a story in three parts. This is the tale of three different children--Ryan, Corem and Giancarlos--with three different sets of circumstances and three different bad breaks. They are all from Kensington, and babies born with an address in Kensington aren’t expected to live beyond their 71st birthday — a staggering 17 years less than children born to families in Society Hill, less than four miles away. A chunk of the book is spent world-building so readers can grasp the muddy terrain these children navigate, and Goyal does so by layering social systems atop one another so readers can draw connections. As Goyal explains it, underfunded public schools are at the heart of the issue. Schools are governed by racist educational policies that push students into the criminal system through the use of metal detectors, zero-tolerance rules and temperamental resource officers. Children leave the schoolyard and return home to families drowning because of crippling poverty, food insecurity, chronic joblessness, inequitable access to physical and mental health care, domestic violence, evictions, and addiction.

The Holdovers (2023)

This is a modest movie--my spouse commented on that fact. He loved it, but wondered if it was too small in scope for a Best Picture nod, but with the expansion of that category from 5 to 10 films allows for movies like this to be in contention. It is about people who don’t share their feelings easily, so when it does decide to wallop its viewer with emotion, it can really catch you off guard. This is a role made to fit for Paul Giamatti, allowing him to use all the physical comedy that he has at his disposal. He plays Paul Hunham, a notorious hardass of a history adjunct at Barton Academy, a New England boarding school where the sons of the wealthy and powerful are fed and exercised until they’re old enough to be sent off to the prestigious colleges their parents have been lavishing with donations. Paul is a Barton man himself, albeit one who attended on a scholarship, and while he claims to be a true believer in how the school aims to shape its young men, the truth is that these days he seems to genuinely loathe everyone who troops through his classroom. They, in turn, can’t stand him, though, over the course of the film, Paul charms the hell out of the audience by revealing the vulnerabilities, as well as the compassion, beneath that irascible exterior. Do not miss this!

Son of Elsewhere by Elamin Abdoul Mahmoud

This is a short, not too sweet but very believable and relatable memoir of a man who emigrated to Canada from Sudan. Going from being one of thousands if not millions who look like you to entering a country where you stand out in every crowd you are ever in is a huge shock. He says that it was the first time he realized he was black--previously he had just thought he was a person, that the color of his skin was unremarkable. The same with being a Muslim--again, when you don't know anyone who is not a Muslim you don't realize how it might define you to someone else. This is all told with a hint of humor rather than the resentment one might feel and it would be a great cultural viewpoint book for a middle school diversity training, and any of us who could use the opportunity walk in someone else's shoes for the course of a book.

Tagus Cove and Elizabeth Bay, Isabela Island, Galapagos, Ecuador

Tagus Cove is located on the Northwestern coast of Isabela. It is a historical site visited by Charles Darwin in 1835, where graffiti has been carved into the rock walls by visitors over the past centuries; this happened just before the Galapagos National Park was established in 1959-1960. This cove was a hideout for whalers and pirates, as it is protected by the surf and is also a perfect place to anchor. The name of the site dates back to 1814 when it was visited by a British ship, The Tagus, which had anchored there in search of giant tortoises to be used as food supply on the boat.

he Galapagos penguin is one of the smallest penguins in the world and is endemic to the Galapagos Islands. It is the most northerly occurring penguin species, nesting entirely in the tropics, with some colonies living on the northern tip of Isabela north of the equator. They are closely related to the African, Humboldt and Magellanic penguins, all of which are burrow-dwelling. As there is no soft peat in which to burrow on the Galapagos Islands, Galapagos penguins instead live in caves and crevices in the coastal lava. They, like all penguins, are adorable to watch and you can occasionally swim along side them.

Here we have the full view of the flightless cormorant! It is not only the heaviest cormorant species, but also the only one out of 29 species which cannot fly. They are therefore confined to the lava shoreline and beaches of Isabela and Fernandina. They have stunted wings that are one third the size of the wingspan they would require to fly.

War and Punishment by Mikhail Zygar

This is an exploration of why Russia invaded Ukraine and why now. It explores Russian attitudes to Ukraine over the past 350 years – a tale of big brother chauvinism and oppression, and the colonial ideas continue to shape how most Russians think about Kyiv, with Moscow cast not as aggressor but victim. In summer 2021 Russia’s president published an essay setting out a manifesto for war: that Ukraine was never a state, people, or community. Instead, he claimed that Russia, Belarus and Ukraine were part of an ancient spiritual and cultural space, with their joint origins in the ninth-century princedom of Kyivan Rus. Putin hatched his plan during the pandemic, and truly, it was personal. Putin never forgave Zelenskiy after the comedian did a TV sketch poking fun at Alina Kabaeva, a gymnast and Putin’s alleged mistress. Zelenskiy’s extraordinary career: from student performer to celebrity entertainer and Uranian leader--to be sure, it was a long shot, and entirely improbable and unexpected. After playing Ukraine’s president in the show Servant of the People, Zelenskiy decided to become the real president – a joke that turned serious. Putin hoped to cut him off at the knees, embarrass him on a world stage, and that clearly backfired. Instead he is a globally admired man, while Putin is reviled. This is a well written read, going through the history of the area, the faulty thinking, a play to wipe out a culture and a leader that has gone horribly wrong, even if they prevail in the end.

Oppenheimer (2023)

This is a stand out because despite the fact that this is a solid three hour movie, for once I did not feel that the same story could have been told in a considerably shorter time frame. Once of the reasons it runs long is because it is not just telling the story of Oppenheimer's life or how was came to create the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also about the politics of war. Oppenheimer is depicted as a driven man who saw physical principles in his head, while dreaming and awake. He was not an all round physcicist--he was clumsy in the lab, his math was not up to snuff, but his ability to take the information that was known and create a theory around it and move forward was unparalleled. He was also Jewish and had studied in Eurpoe leading up to the war, and he knew that it was his people that Hitler was targeting, so he was passionate about beating the Germans to developing the atomic bomb. As a person he was complicated at a time when sublety was unappreciated, and he came under fire time and again for Communist ties. Both his wife and his former lover were card carrying members of the Communist Party, as was his brother, so the scrutiny was not unwarrented, and while the film doesn't go too far into this, in J. Edgar Hoover's America being Jewish meant you were suspect, even without the Communist ties, and after the war, people that Oppenheimer had offended plotted to get even with them, including Lewis Strauss (played brilliantly by Robert Downey, Jr.), who was particularly bent out of shape about him, but it is easy to see how it happened--Oppenheimer, as portrayed here, cared little about what people thought of him personally, and struggled with not pissing people off. This is well worth watching.