Album review of Super. Sexy. Heartbreak by Mary Spender

This is a low-resolution version of the album cover

 

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This is a very well-crafted debut album by a talented musician who has spent a lot of time and effort building her reputation, skills and confidence via live performances and her popular YouTube channel. Streaming services, however, have been politely declined in favour of offering her audience a tangible product of lasting value. Musical production values are high by any standard, let alone a self-produced debut by a singer-songwriter with no big name or big-money backing. The CD booklet contains a good, themed original Art-Noveau-style illustration for each song. Big money would never have invested this much love and care on anything! It wouldn’t actually have invested the money either.

All of which is highly commendable, but is the music itself any good?

Well, yes, it is all is. I found the drum beat on track 4 “Do You Wanna Play” a trifle annoying but I still enjoyed the track. Mary’s voice is rich and enticing. Perhaps that voice is sometimes given more support than it needs, though?

Track 1, “You Can Have Chicago” is a “big” number by which I don’t mean either “loud” or “lengthy” but rather setting a style for the whole album which I think will find fans on both sides of the Atlantic.

Track 2, “Getaway Sun” is a quieter bus trip. (The bus, evidently, was NOT a Bristol LoDecca!)

Track 3, “One Kept Secret” has a more elaborate structure rather than a more elaborate arrangement, something which several of the following tracks share.

Track 4, has been discussed above. It’s nice, but it might be at least as nice without the drum just keeping time.

Track 5, “Make me an Offer” is gentler.

Track 6, “Church Bell” is my favourite and the mix here is suited to the style and feel of this album. It might be even better with a simpler folkish arrangement and a more Catalonian feel than American? That wouldn’t fit on this album, but might make a nice single or YouTube offering at a later date.

Track 7, “Wake Up To You” is fine, too.

Track 8, “Drop, Drop, Slow Tears, Drop” features the instrumental skills of Ariel Posen as well as Mary’s vocals and writing.

Track 9, “One to the West Coast” is another “big” number.

Track 10, “I Blame Myself” sounds nice, but the lyrics actually READ as if Mary had a near miss with a manipulative sociopath!

Track 11, “I’ll Stay Quiet” winds things up gently.

Super. Sexy. Heartbreak. By Mary Spender is available directly from the artist’s website from, I believe the 4^th of October 2023, at:

https://maryspender.teachable.com/p/supersexyheartbreak

Review copyright (c) by Matthew K. Spencer 1^st of October 2023.

Book Review of Kennedy 35 by Charles Cumming

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Cracking third spy thriller in a popular series.

(This review is based on a free review .pdf from the publisher via Net Galley UK)

This is a well-written and thoroughly-researched novel about the Rwandan Genocide and its aftermath.

Set mainly in Senegal, London and to some extent New York and Paris as well as other locations, this is a story about how an attempt to deliver justice for the victims of the nightmare of 1994 becomes a smaller nightmare in its own right, in 1995, leading to a significant accomplice escaping justice and being used by a (French) traitor to help him build a huge fortune by laundering money for terrorists. 28 years later, an opportunity arises to put things right, but not without more danger and a further terrible sacrifice. The concluding adventure sequence delivers justice in a satisfying way, but the leading character is left on the cusp of seizing personal disaster from his professional triumph. (This makes the reader wish that someone would hit him briskly on the shins with a cricket bat, but it no doubt sets the scene for the next volume in the series.)

The French government (especially in 1994, but also that of 2023) does not come out of this at all well and it’s very hard to argue, from the evidence in the public domain, that this is in any way undeserved. The DGSE are portrayed as making the CIA look like boy scouts and that might not be too far off the mark, either.

The central premise of the BOX 88 series, though, is a joint Anglo-American intelligence agency acting below the radar. In any kind of real-world practice this might be a recipe for internecine warfare rather than successful cooperation. In actual fact, there was a vitally-important joint UK-USA photo-reconnaissance organisation during WWII, which a Colonel Roosevelt (the president’s son) recommended, on the eve of the D-Day invasion of Normandy, be wound up because the Limey-faggot RAF was in charge! And it is unlikely that BOX 88 could operate “below the radar” in a world where a US Senator on the intelligence and foreign relations committee can be found in possession of a closet full of unexplained gold bars and carrier-bags of banknotes!

But, as a literary device, the Anglo-American BOX 88 with America as by far the senior partner allows the DGSE to be the not-quite enemy in a way that would be enormously offensive to a large swathe of pro-EU opinion if BOX 88 were British! Which is all good fun.

Kennedy 35 by Charles Cumming is published by Harper Collins on the 26^th of October 2023.

Book Review of The Bone Chests by Cat Jarman

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Using old bones and science to answer historical questions and, perhaps, ask new some ones.

(This review is based on a free review .pdf from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

This book tells the story of Wessex, Mercia and then England in the five centuries or so leading up to the reign of William Rufus, through modern attempts to literally unscramble bones mixed up by an act of sacrilege another five centuries after that, in THE English Civil War. Along the way, reference is made to other English civil wars and numerous Viking raids, occupations and two actual conquests. Which by itself shows how much more complex our history is than our general understanding of our own history.

As well as showing us what science can tell us about the fairly distant past, this well written and well-researched work shows us which kinds of historical question science cannot answer: science can tell us whether a traditional account or even a contemporary record is possibly true and it can sometimes tell us when it definitely isn’t true. But that isn’t the same as knowing what really happened in any detail not evident in the long-term consequences of an historical event.

Whilst nearly all of the evidence cited here was found in Winchester, the case cited to best exemplify the limitations of forensic science as well as its power comes from the discovery of the bones of King Richard III under a car-park in Leicester. Because, even though the DNA evidence (popularly supposed to be the gold standard of forensic evidence in modern criminal cases) is actually a bit open to question, pretty well ALL the circumstantial evidence favours the bones discovered in Leicester being those of Richard III, not least the fact that the body was more or less exactly where one researcher had already predicted it might be (and the first place she looked), based on years of work with available records. The body was on its own, it had been buried with no reverence whatsoever, the deceased had suffered from the right sort of long-term skeletal health problems and had died in battle not wearing a helmet and suffering more than one potentially-lethal injury. Possibly several enemy soldiers had gone for the same man at the same moment, which suggests that either they were running out of targets, or he was the target that would end the war!

Despite all that, this work does tell us which Saxon and Norman-era legends and myths might well be actual history and gives some clues as to which might well be fabrications. What it does NOT do, is apply the same patient methodical analysis to the Civil War-era accounts of the desecration of the bone chests and Winchester Cathedral, upon which the whole narrative is hung. That’s not so much a failing as an opportunity for further study and further questions:

If you chuck bones that are between two and five centuries old at stained-glass leaded lights of any quality, do those bones retain anything like the mass and density (“ballistic coefficient”) to actually wreak anything like the destruction claimed?

If men inside the cathedral break the windows by any means whatsoever, how does the glass end up mingled with the bones, also inside the cathedral?

Parliamentary soldiers systematically and habitually desecrating OTHER cathedrals and churches hurled (and shot) much more effective projectiles than very old, almost certainly lightweight and friable human bones!

Wouldn’t a more likely scenario have been something more like the Parliamentary soldiers doing what they had some considerable practice at doing: smashing the windows and doors in from the outside in order to concentrate the broken glass in the space used by (kneeling, if non-Puritan) worshippers before coming inside to see what else needed to be smashed?

How likely is it that the bone chests were actually the LAST thing the Parliamentary soldiers set out to desecrate (definitely the hardest objects to reach, not immediately obviously important), thus explaining why their officers became impatient and called a halt before ALL the bone chests were broken up and their contents thrown around inside the cathedral to mingle with the broken glass?

Might the old and friable bones have done so little damage that soldiers simply got bored with throwing them at things which didn’t break in a spectacular way? Or had they already broken every available glass object by other means?

Using old bones to answer long-standing questions is applied science.

Real science is using the evidence (old and new) to ask new questions.

The Bone Chests, Unlocking the Secrets of the Anglo-Saxons, by Cat Jarman is published by William Collins on the 14^th of September 2023.

 

Book Review of Steel Girls at War by Michelle Rawlins

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(This review is based on a free review .pdf from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

A city, workplace community and families under the stress of war.

If the previous titles in this series seemed a bit rose-tinted, it’s perhaps because the opening months of WW2 actually were a bit rose-tinted. Dire pre-war predictions of massive civilian casualties hadn’t yet come to pass (and in the UK they never quite did) but the phoney war lulled many people into no longer expecting anything really bad to happen -and then, of course, it did. This book in the series covers the summer of 1940 when the really bad stuff happened and it didn’t look as if Hitler would ever be stopped in his tracks. (NB: even winning the battle of Britain didn’t immediately change this perception, no matter how it’s presented in the feature film of that campaign.)

This story is about what it was like for real people on the receiving end of both real bombing raids and the more shapeless threat of invasion and conquest that lay behind them. And it’s well told:

A woman already driven to the point of collapse with worry about the fate of her husband, missing in France, learns that he’s now in hospital in Portsmouth: one of the cities now being bombed. The psychological impact on the man in question of his frying-pan to fire experience being well described. Another woman and her daughter are coping with a husband and father still traumatised by his experiences in the first world war. Food is short, unless you have somewhere (and the time) to grow your own.

Other characters are still loving and hoping and to some extent this is what allows those in a worse situation to feel a bit of hope themselves.

The author sets out to show how destructive selfishness, even excusable selfishness, can be in high stress, high-risk situations and that, I fear, is a lesson we all need to learn, because the coping mechanisms of nineteen-forties British society have largely been suppressed and dismantled in the present day.

If, in the earlier books in this series, the levels of neighbourly love and community spirit seemed absurdly high to the modern reader, the summer of 1940 was when those “absurdly” high levels of neighbourly love proved to be just barely enough.

Steel Girls at War is published in the UK by HQ on the 31^st of August 2023

Book Review of Reykjavík by Ragnar Jónason and Katrín Jakobsdóttir

(Translated into English by Victoria Cribb.)

 

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Icelandic chiller thriller with a resolution!

(This review is based on a free review EPUB from the publisher via Net Galley UK)

The narrative of this well-written and competently-translated novel stretches from August 1956 to November 1986 (there is a reference to prior events in 1955), with most of the story happening in the run-up to the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavík when a decades-old missing persons case is revealed to be a murder case which comes to a head and is resolved on the day of the summit meeting itself.

This structure sets the scene for the thriller whilst giving the readers a series of snapshots of Icelandic society changing (and the economy and population growing) as changes in communications, travel and entertainment technology bring the outside world closer to Iceland than it has ever been before, before the world’s most powerful leaders arrive in Reykjavík to thrash out their differences and focusing the whole world’s attention there.

Almost all the action takes place in Reykjavík or its suburbs, or on the “remote” island of Videy, which bears about the same geographical to Iceland’s capital as Hayling Island does to Havant. (This may or may not help British readers from North of the Trent.) The one, interesting, exception is when the heroine has to travel to her home community in the North of Iceland for her brother’s funeral. Buildings there being painted in bold colours (as they are in Port Stanley and some Hebridean communities) in a brave attempt to stop the settlement blending any further into the landscape than it already has.

The heroine herself is brave and brilliant, though she only discovers this in herself when tragedy forces her to take on her older brother’s mantle and complete his journalistic investigation into what might happened on Videy before either of them was born. She has to cope with generational differences as well as those of politics and social class. Though when push really comes to shove, she gets prompt support from those she thought most conservative and disapproving of her -even as someone she trusted acts with monumental treachery. Though the story shows us some divisions within Icelandic society, these fade away as soon as the shocking truth, which no-one can excuse or accept, is exposed.

If there is a moral here (and in Nordic thrillers there often isn’t) it is that it’s not the presumption of innocence that allows the rich and powerful to get away, literally, with murder, but their own blithe assumption of immunity. Guilt and innocence are irrelevant to those who are never required to account for their own actions. And in the summer of 2023, we have all seen a lot of evidence of that!

Reykjavík by Ragnar Jónason and Katrín Jakobsdóttir is published in the UK by Michael Joseph on the 17^th of August 2023

Book review of Delicate Condition by Danielle Valentine

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A gestation thriller!

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK)

 

 This is a well-written and generally well-thought-out novel with an interesting surprise ending. It describes a nightmare pregnancy during a winter which seems to go on for so long that the setting might be Narnia rather than the Hamptons. That cost it a star, I’m afraid: I know it’s about the way that perceptions change during pregnancy, but a pregnancy supplies a certain timeline and the season doesn’t seem, to the reader, to turn with that timeline. It may be alright in the author’s original plan, but so much of the book happens in winter that it seems eternal.

The other troubling thing is that, until the surprise ending and explanation is reached, it’s hard for the reader to tell whether the pregnant heroine is being stalked by strangers or at least gaslighted by her husband, or if she’s delusional and hallucinating. This isn’t a crime for which any writer can or should be “cancelled” but it carries rather more risks in the real world than most of the things writers are being cancelled for these days. The whole point of stalking and more especially gaslighting is very often to get the victim declared mentally-ill and, most especially delusional. Either to discredit them in court (especially a divorce court) or for someone connected with the stalker to seize control of the victim’s financial affairs. There’s not a stalker in the known universe who wouldn’t be pleased to confuse women’s (or men’s in some cases) experience of being stalked or gaslighted with delusion, hallucination or some allied psychosis. And even when the novel’s fairly startling conclusion is reached, the necessary delineation between abuse and hallucination is not quite there.

This book has some interesting things to say, but the two deficiencies significantly dilute what is good about it.

Delicate Condition by Danielle Valentine is published by Viper (an imprint of Serpent’s Tail) in the UK on the 17^th of August 2023.

What REALLY made those behind the AI revolution panic?

 I published this article on this blog in 2021 and almost nobody read it:

https://mswritingshowcase.blogspot.com/2021/06/ai-and-economics-of-tyranny.html

Until, that is, about two months before the sudden about-face by leading AI researchers, politicians and business leaders, culminating in today's meetings between President Biden and not only the British Prime Minister, Mr Sunak, but King Charles as well. 

And between world leaders meeting in Singapore, supposedly about pandemic regulations, and last week, that article was being seen by hundreds of people located in Singapore every single day.

Now, the most obvious theme of the article is that it suggests that an AI-based economy is the only known way that tyranny can become sustainable (and thus persist for generations or the proverbial thousand years) in the modern world, because it's the only known alternative to letting people have enough freedom and the certainty of ownership of their own ideas to innovate and pursue more efficient solutions, because it's in everybody's interests to do things better.

Somewhat paradoxically, an AI-based economy allows for innovation to be suppressed and efficiencies found which do not actually benefit those who have to implement those efficiencies. So an AI-based world economy would have the benefits of economic sustainability without any of this freedom, democracy and accountability stuff: and the past few years have seen the global elite very much at war with all three of these graces. But that's precisely why the about-face is so strange: it's been very clear for many years that this is what all the decision-makers in the Capitalist and Communist worlds have wanted ever since the "fall of communism" or at least, the failure of the Soviet Bloc. They didn't change their minds because this blog (or any other source of the same basic concept) showed them that continuing on their chosen path would probably have the very results they most wanted!

Thing is, there's the theme of the article, which is obvious, and its implication, which took a bit more thinking time on the part of our lords and masters:

If the Chinese economy benefits proportionately more from the introduction of AI than the American economy precisely because the bulk of its workforce is less-skilled than its American counterpart and expects much less reward, so it can be replaced by AI with little or no economic disruption and very little in the way of compensation and with no imperative to maintain anyone's standard of living, then not only is it possible that those economies where the skill levels are much HIGHER than in the United States (Finland, Japan, Switzerland, South Korea, possibly even Croatia these days) could see a negative economic and social impact from the introduction of AI, those economies with a significantly LOWER technological skills base than that of Communist China (such as Sudan, Uganda or Tanzania?) might derive an even greater proportional economic boost from AI than Communist China.

The panic is really all about the rather belated realisation that the AI revolution will have all the effects the global elite have hoped and planned for, but the resultant power and all other benefits will flow to all the wrong people!