The Oligarch’s Daughter by Joseph Finder-Book

From a Google Image Search – AP News

The Oligarch’s Daughter by Joseph Finder is a thriller that brings Russia to America. Arkady Galkin lives large and seems to be wired into power in two nations that we usually think of as enemies. However, when Paul Brightman falls in love with and marries the oligarch’s daughter, Tatyana, it becomes quite clear that the Russian is somehow connected to powerful people in America and that Paul is at risk. Paul had a job at a hedge fund, a job he liked with people he also liked. Galkin pressures Paul into working for him in his “investment firm”. As Paul learns that Galkin’s business involves illegal financial moves, Paul becomes aware that his new father-in-law will not tolerate any disloyalty. He decides that he needs to run.

The book opens with a man with two names fighting for his life. Grant Anderson/Paul Brightman wins this battle, but it’s just the beginning of a war for his own survival. Paul’s father was a survivalist who lived much of his life in the deepest forests of America. Paul, who lost his mom at sixteen, thinks his father is a nut. He finds him embarrassing. Little does he realize that the survival skills his father taught him are about to come in handy.

As we switch back and forth from Paul’s past with Tatyana to his present life as Grant Anderson, we find Paul caught up in running from dangers he should have been aware of as he courted Tatyana. Why are the FBI and CIA involved in all this, and why are they not on Paul’s side.

It’s a good thriller, although a bit offbeat from a classic one. We share Paul’s anxieties and his controlled panic. We travel to Moscow and back in the years of Paul’s marriage and then we run with him through the woods chased by people who should not be chasing him in the present. Of course, people die.

There is a section in the middle of the story which gets a bit bogged down in complexities and details. slowing our fevered dash from danger. It’s complicated. But soon it’s a headlong adventure in survival and Paul learns to take new pride in his father’s lifestyle. Who survives and who doesn’t? What happens to Paul’s wife Tatyana and Grant Anderson’s girlfriend, Sarah? It’s a good read, but not on my best thriller’s list.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey – Book

Being a physical chicken made me realize that I could never be an astronaut although I love science fiction stories that take place in space. No Blue Origin for me. No Mars on the Space X Starship. However, it no longer matters because Orbital by Samantha Harvey will allow even the most cowardly human to travel in space for a too-brief time. We travel with Anton, Roman, Pietro, Shaun, Chie and Nell, a diverse six pack of astronauts, aboard the space station.

No plot, no conquest of space and time, no spin-out into emptiness, only small dramas. Just the day-to-day minor miracles in the lives of these six people, eating, sleeping, conducting experiments in space science, their travels across time zones, across dawns and evening and nights. The earth in daylight appears unpopulated – at night the clusters of lights from cities and towns makes life visible from space, but the stars glowing in inky space outshine the city lights.

These astronauts have been through years of training to sleep in sleeping bags that hang without gravity. The descriptions reminded me of the way whales sleep, hanging vertically in the salty ocean, sleeping together in pods.

“Outside the earth reels away in a mass of moon-glow, peeling backward as they forge towards its edgeless edge; the tufts of cloud across the Pacific brighten the nocturnal ocean to cobalt. Now there’s Santiago on the South American coast in a cloud-hazed burn of gold. Unseen through the closed shutters the trade winds blowing across the warm waters have worked up a storm, an engine of heat. (p. 2)

“They retreat inside their headphones and press weights and cycle nowhere at twenty-three times the speed of sound on a bike that has no handlebars, just a set of pedals attached to a rig, and run 8 miles inside a slick metal module with a close-up view of a turning planet.

Sometimes they wish for a cold stiff wind, blustery rain, autumn leaves, reddened fingers, muddy legs, a curious dog, a startled rabbit, a leaping sudden deer, a puddle in a pothole, soaked feet, a slight hill, a fellow runner, a shaft of sun. Sometimes they just succumb to the uneventful windless humming of their sealed spacecraft.” (p. 16)

“How the earth drags at the air. See how the clouds at the equator are dragged up and eastward by the earth’s rotation. All the moist warm air evaporating off the equatorial oceans and pulled in an arc to the poles, cooling, sinking, tugged back down in a westward curve. Ceaseless movement. Although these words – drag, pull, tug – they describe the force of this movement but not its grace, not its what? It’s synchronicity/fluidity, harmony.” (p. 83)

“And when the ocean comes again you think, oh yes, as if you’ve woken up from a dream in a dream until you’re so dream-packed that you can find no way out and don’t think to try. You’re just floating and spinning and flying a hundred miles deep inside a dream.” (p. 189)

“You are looking now straight into the heart of the Milky Way, whose pull is so strong and compelling that it feels some nights that the orbit will detach from earth and venture there, into that deep dense mass of stars. Billions upon billions of stars that give off their own light, so that it’s no longer true to speak of darkness.” (p. 191)

In this space station, “far from the earth” they watch two earth events – an enormous typhoon and a moon launch. Although they think about what will happen to the humans in the typhoon’s path and they envy the astronauts going to the moon, they are not sorry they chose this mission. These events, in the end, do not change life aboard the space station. You should go on this mission. I doubt that Samantha Harvey ever went to space, but she nailed it – the beauty, the possibility for disaster, the tedium, the homesickness. The full-color-palette beauty of earth overrides all. Orbital is a trip.

**I have a Space playlist. It begins with Space Oddity by David Bowie, then Major Tom (Coming Home) by Peter Schilling, Rocketman by Elton John, Starman by David Bowie, Shooting Star by Bad Company, Drops of Jupiter by Train, and A Sky Full of Stars by Coldplay

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson-Book

From a Google Image Search – CNN

In the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, the author puts Jobs in a class with Einstein and Leonardo Da Vinci because Issacson also wrote about those great men. Was Steve Jobs a great man? He was certainly complicated. He loved perfection in design, but he knew that he was not perfect. Some people in Jobs’ life believed that the fact that he was adopted may have been at the bottom of some aspects of his personality. The author uses the adjectives “abandoned – chosen – special” to sum up the emotional impacts Jobs experienced as he wrestled with being given away by his actual parents. In fact, Jobs refused to meet his birth father.

Steve had a daughter, Lisa, when he was very young, and he did not see her for years although he later tried to include her in his life. He also had a half-sister, Mona Simpson, a novelist. He did not have an easy-going personality, in fact he could be cutting and cruel, but he also had access to considerable charm. He raged at employees and suppliers, he sometimes cried when he was frustrated, and he had very bizarre eating habits (lots of fasting, mostly vegetarian or vegan). There were, however, saving graces.

He visited Japan and was very taken with the spareness and spirituality of Japanese design, and all things Japanese. He grew up with Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and many more rock stars, eventually meeting most of them. He had an interest in Eastern religion and philosophy, as many famous figures did in the 1960s and 70s.

Steve Jobs is the myth. Jobs did drop out of school to tinker with computers in his parent’s garage for a while (with friends). He envisioned a future for computers, a future where everyone had a computer of his/her own. The computers he wanted to design had to have that same spareness he loved in Japanese culture, but he wanted these computers to be proprietary machines, not sharing hardware or software with Microsoft computers or any of the other companies that were racing to produce popular computers. He was fired by his own company and went off unsuccessfully on his own to create other brands but when Apple was in trouble he went back to the company, and he stayed. Although Jobs eventually agreed to allow Apple computers to use Microsoft Office, it was a tough compromise for this purist.

Find out how Jobs named Apple. Find out how Jobs got involved with Disney and Pixar. Isaacson’s book is very readable and detailed. Find out how and when he met his wife Laurene Powell and about the family they made. Jobs loved to make deals during walks with suppliers and creators who interested him. Many deals were hammered out on these long walks. The weather in California colluded with him on this. Bill Gates, with his completely different personality, showed up in Jobs’ life from time to time. They were rivals, but Gates was not as mercurial as Jobs. They didn’t collaborate much, but they were contemporaries in a field that was exploding with innovation.

Find out how Jobs made his very seductive ads, how he imagined the iPod, iPad, iCloud, and iTunes. Jobs made each roll out of an Apple product into a ‘magical mystery tour.” He kept new products shrouded in mystery until the magical reveal. He was not only a great product designer; he was an expert at marketing.

It’s a very good book about a very interesting person and his too short life. It is a long book but spending all that time with Jobs and his A team, his family, his temperament, and his amazingly creative mind is time well spent. Unlike Einstein and Da Vinci, Steve Jobs lived in some of the same decades we have lived in. He is not a historical figure. He is a contemporary and we forgive him his bad behavior because his creative genius inspires us to believe that even flawed humans can accomplish great things.

Walter Isaacson is one of our quintessential biographers. He gives us the real Steve Jobs, if that is possible to do in a biography. Credit is due to Steve Jobs also for allowing Isaacson to depict him honestly.

Source Code by Bill Gates – Book

From a Google Image Search – Gates Notes

Bill Gates’ memoir of his early years, Source Code, is readable and interesting. For all you nerds who are kicking yourself in the slats (a saying from my dad) for not tinkering in your garage or your basement until you came up with a multimillion-dollar product, that is not the path that took Bill Gates to his enormous fortune. While it is true that Gates did not finish college, he was lucky to have parents who, although they at first tried to rein him in and polish him up, eventually learned that he needed space, not supervision and they were able to adjust their parenting tactics. They sent their son to a school that catered to high IQ kids.

Until the point that Gates was enrolled in Lakeside Academy, he never felt that he belonged, and other children did not accept him. He had learned to be the class clown which won him some popularity, but did not challenge his true talents. Who knows, perhaps if he had continued in public school, he would have been a stand-up comic rather than a computer geek. Lakeside had access to a very early computer, which had to be connected to a main frame computer outside of the school grounds. Companies often agreed to put these monsters in schools where professors, teachers, and students could take advantage of them. An added advantage of this arrangement was the innovations that come out of young minds.

This first computer, a PDP-10 was great for writing reports, but it didn’t do anything fun. Memory which consisted of paper cards or tapes and was kludgy, messy, and offered little security. Gates set out with some friends to write BASIC programs that tweaked this behemoth. There was no such thing as a personal computer.

Bill Gates and friends read about a set you could buy to build your own computer, from a company called Altair. The computer had no keyboard, no monitor, and very little memory. But lots of nerdy folks wanted to build one. Bill Gates, et al, wrote code to beef up the little Altair computer so it could actually be used for tasks and rudimentary games. As more and more companies saw that computers were going to be good for both work and play, that they would make money, other companies produced personal computers. Gates worked with a company called MITS and wrote a BASIC code that was making that company more profitable (for a while). MITS entangled the Gates group of guys into signing away their rights to their “source code”. Before his crew could sell any more code as software, they had to go to court to win back the rights to their own source code. Fortunately Bill’s dad was a lawyer.

Eventually Gates and his friend Paul Allen formed the company Microsoft. Bill did not do most of the coding, although for a while these friends and others who drifted in and out of the group spent time coding nonstop for many days and nights, sleeping on floors in computer rooms, to meet deadlines for coding products. Gates, in later days, worked the business side of Micro-soft which became Microsoft.

Bill Gates’ parents were not wealthy, but they were not poor either. His dad was a lawyer, and his mother eventually headed the United Way in Seattle, Washington. Gates was a reader. He also joined the Boy Scouts and became a hiker, a climber of smaller mountains, and he grew to love the outdoors. His family rented a cabin at place called Cheerio and eventually built a summer home there, shared by his whole family. He was fortunate that his parents came to understand his learning style and sent him to a progressive school.

Although he did drop out of Harvard before his junior year, he had so many chances to work on rare computer systems, to learn coding, and to do so in an age when computer nerds wanted to get computers to do more (especially in gaming). Gates has two sisters, Kristi and Libby. They were a close and supportive family. Some computer developers may have had to tinker in the garage or the basement, but this is not true for Bill Gates. Quite a while ago I read a biography about Warren Buffet, The Snowball: Warren Buffet and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder. Although Buffet was not a computer guy, his early life is very similar to Bill Gates’ early years. Alas, neither book offers a clear path to financial greatness unless you are cut from the same cloth as these guys. Gates is working on another memoir which begins where this one leaves off.

The Secret Life of Sunflowers by Marta Molnar – Book

From a Google Image Search – Wrote a Book

In this cold, dark winter, The Secret Life of Sunflowers by Marta Molnar called to me because sunflowers are so sunny and all I could see from my windows was white snow and gray skies. I did not immediately associate sunflowers with Vincent van Gogh because they had become a symbol of Ukraine, a nation defending itself against invasion. But this is a story about Theo van Gogh’s wife Johanna Velar, married name Johanna van Gogh-Bonger born in 1862. It is also the story of Emsley, with the author flashing back and forth between Emsley’s fictional modern life and Johanna’s real 19th century life.

Emsley’s life is changing in ways she seemingly has no control over. Her beloved and flamboyant grandmother, Violet has died. Emsley’s business, an auction house in LA which auctions donations from Hollywood celebrities to raise money for politics is in trouble. Her boyfriend and business partner Trey switched his affections to her friend (and roommate) Diya and the three of them have been living uncomfortably together. Violet lives in New York City and after the funeral Emsley has to stay in NYC to clear out Violet’s brownstone. While sorting through Violet’s life as a NY bon vivant, Emsley finds a small green book and some papers written in Dutch.

As Emsley tries to unravel her business difficulties and mourn the loss of her beloved grandmother, she reads through what appears to be the diary of Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, wife of Theo van Gogh. Both Theo and Vincent die, and Jo is left with all of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings and no income.

How both women cope with the disastrous events in their lives should inspire women living through life’s setbacks to hope that through their own choices they can reboot their lives. Both women struggle to succeed in the face of opposition and must find ways to support themselves. Although it wasn’t the sunny infusion I expected, I have my own ambitions, and I am a woman, so it did set me back on a productive path that the winter blues had interrupted.

Speaking Yiddish to Chickens by Seth Stern – Book

From a Google Image Search – Apple Books

My best friend married a Jewish man who became a good friend to all of us. He was trying to learn Yiddish for a while, so when I saw this book on Amazon called Speaking Yiddish to Chickens by Seth Stern, I decided to read it and to get my friend a copy of the book. I thought it might be humorous or full of lost Yiddish words, but this did not turn out to be the case. That is not to say that it wasn’t fascinating. I did not know that Jewish refugees from Europe after World War II often found life in NYC or other urban places too crowded and, after all their trials, too chaotic. They longed for peace and a way to remake their shattered lives.

The Jewish Agricultural Society (JAS) suggested to some refugees that chicken farming in southern New Jersey was becoming a popular lifestyle choice for refugees. The book is centered around two Grine (Grin-ah) (the category used to describe postwar Jewish refugees) named Nuchim (New-kim) and Bronia (Bron-yah) Green who decide to buy a south Jersey chicken farm in a place called Vineland. These two are the author’s grandparents and he talked with them many times while writing this book. Their daughter, Ruth Green, married a Stern. The author is Ruth’s son.

Both Nuchim and Bronia spent a part of the war in a forest in Germany as underground fighters and to hide from deportation to a concentration camp. When Bronia got to the US she weighed only 80 pounds. Deprivation was a common denominator for Jewish people who survived. They decided to buy a farm with another couple, the Liverants. Both couples had one child, both girls.

I bought a copy of the book on Audible so I could hear the correct pronunciation of all those Yiddish words that weren’t there, but it was still a good story to listen to.

As we follow Seth Stern’s grandparents through the years when they pursued chicken farming, and as the children in the community got older, we see the family more involved in a community of people, eventually enjoying trips to a nearby beach, playing cards, and enjoying other social occasions. By this time Bronia and Nuchim have their own farm.

However, chicken farming is hard work. Chickens can’t get too cold, especially baby chicks. Chickens must be fed every few hours. The eggs must be washed and dried by hand, then candled to make sure they meet government regulations. There were few hours for playing, at least until people started inventing automatic feeders, egg dryers, and ways to candle eggs without handling each one separately. The economic security of chicken farmers was very dependent on the market price for eggs, and this price varied from season to season and year to year. No one was getting rich.

The author interviewed the children (his mother and her contemporaries) asking about what life on the farm was like and about how they were treated in school. They told him that they had been subjected to plenty of antisemitism in public schools. He interviewed the parents to find out how they were dealing with the terrible things that happened to them in the war. Many parents did not want to ever talk about what they had experienced. Others were very vocal about the abuses they endured.

I’m very glad I read this book. Here is a little corner of American Jewish life that I knew nothing about. There are many more such corners to explore but not all are documented in books. Speaking Yiddish to Chickens is a true nonfiction book with an index and bibliography. Because it focuses on two people related to the author and expands outward from there, it is not overly academic and is very readable.

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney – Book

From a Google Image Search – Chicago Review of Books

Sally Rooney wrote Intermezzo, a story of two brothers, the Kubek brothers. An intermezzo is an intermission. We meet the younger Kubek brother first. Ivan is in his twenties, and he considers himself socially awkward. All his previous encounters have not gone well. He would become filled with anxiety and unable to approach social situations with an acceptable level of poise. He used his alone time, and it was considerable, to become an expert chess player. When he goes to a small town to play some chess against amateur players, he meets a beautiful 36-year-old woman, and he becomes involved with her. She does not find him the least bit awkward.

Peter is Ivan’s brother. He’s 35 and dating the 20-something Naomi. Peter is also involved with Sylvia, who he intended to marry. She was in a terrible accident, and although he still loves her, she can’t be there for Peter as a wife because she lives with constant pain.

Ivan and Peter recently lost their father and have not yet dealt with the pain of their loss. Their parents were divorced when Ivan was quite young, and the boys lived with their father. Since Peter is so much older than Ivan, he soon went off to college. There is that dynamic of who did Dad love best. Losing their father throws them temporarily off balance. Does the title refer to the time spent adjusting to this major change in their lives?

Rooney add in some Wittgenstein, a physicist I find quite abstract (pg. 399). Schrödinger’s box makes an appearance. Conversations between Sylvia, a professor, and Peter were too esoteric for me, a reflection, I imagine, of their level of intellectual sophistication, and a contrast to Naomi, who is needy, pretty, good company and surprisingly wise for someone so young but no intellectual. I usually like brain puzzles to unravel but this time I will have to go back over that part of the book to see if it is worth trying to grasp what these two characters are saying, or if the author is just showing off her erudition. (Sally Rooney wouldn’t do that.)

“Something about fascism he says, and they go on walking, talking about fascist aesthetics and the modernist movement. Neoclassicism, obsessive fixation on ethnic difference, thematics of decadence, bodily strength and weakness. Purity or death. Pound, Eliot. And on the other hand, Woolf, Joyce. Usefulness and specificity of fascism as a political typology in the present day. Aesthetic nullity of contemporary political movements in general. Related to, or just coterminous with, the almost instantaneous corporate capture of emergent visual styles. Everything beautiful immediately recycled as advertising. The freedom of that, or not. The necessity of an ecological aesthetics, or not. We need an erotics of environmentalism.” (pg. 393)

Since the story takes place in Dublin and small towns nearby, the odd sentence structure may reflect local dialect. Sentences often seem to be written backwards to avoid the use of conjunctions. Is this a Rooney thing or an Irish thing. I do not know. I found it interesting but not annoying.

“Terribly childish wish he feels once in his life to do as he’s told.” (pg. 410)

Sally Rooney gives us characters who seem like real people we could meet and know. Ivan and Margaret, Peter, Sylvia, and Naomi could be friends of ours. How they deal with traumas in their lives, how they deal with nontraditional relationships, how they come of age, regardless of their age in years; these are the interactions that hold our interest. If the ending seems a bit too happy, I don’t mind.

The Queen’s Fool by Philippa Gregory – Book

From a Google Image Search – Flickr – (C)KIM BECKER

A friend gave me the book The Queen’s Fool by Philippa Gregory for Christmas. I had read several Philippa Gregory books, but not this one. Gregory writes period fiction, usually about English history, especially royalty. These books are very readable and immersive. In The Queen’s Fool Gregory focuses on the short reign of Edward, too young to be king and too ill to rule for long and the sisters who followed him on the throne of England.

Many readers know this story well because two half-sisters were waiting to be queen. Mary was first in line. Mary was the daughter of Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine Parr. He divorced her mother to marry Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth was the child of this marriage. Although she was declared illegitimate when Anne Boleyn was executed, she was later declared legitimate.

Mary was not the queen most of the English people wanted. Henry, her father left the Catholic church (and the authority of the Pope) when he wanted a divorce, and the church would not grant it. England was turned upside down as Henry closed the monasteries, took the riches that had been amassed, and executed formerly powerful church officials. He eventually founded the Church of England which was closer to Protestantism. Mary was a devout Catholic who, once she became queen, turned England upside down again by restoring the Catholic church and punishing prominent Protestants. Subjects who wanted to stay alive had to return to behaving like loyal Catholics. Mary’s half-sister was not old enough when Edward died to be queen, but she was a Protestant who had no fixed ideas about God or the Church.

The Queen’s Fool, threading her way through all this religious upheaval, was Jewish, a religion that was unwelcome in almost every nation at the time. Jews had to pretend to be Protestants when that was expedient and Catholics when nations were loyal to the Pope. Hannah became the queen’s fool because she had the “sight.” If you remember your history of Mary and Elizabeth, then you remember that Lord Robert Dudley and Elizabeth were an item for a while. Hannah Green once saw Robert Dudley in the street and behind him she saw the angel Uriel. Dudley was the one who recommended her to be a fool for the Tudors. Lord Dudley’s protection kept Hannah alive through many tense moments.

Reading books about royalty is a guilty pleasure that I don’t often indulge anymore but I was happy to enjoy this book. Adding the Jewish faith into this mix, at this time when religions were matters of life and death, was a new twist. Hannah lived with her mother and father in Spain until her mother was burned at the stake by the Inquisition. Hannah and her father kept moving around Europe trying to find somewhere they could live in safety. It was dangerous for Hannah to be involved with the Catholic reign of Mary.

The Jewish people have been hunted throughout history until they found safety in America and Israel, but they realize that this safety could be ephemeral once again. We all live with some religious uncertainties in the twenty-first century, but no people have been as consistently hounded as those of the Jewish religion. Exploring a historical moment we have explored in other books, as seen through the lens of religious turmoil and of one Jewish girl at the mercy of fate, kept me reading and reminded me of how fraught the Jewish diaspora has been for believers in the Jewish faith. Gregory took a timeless story we are familiar with and added another layer.

This book may be out of print.

Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway-Book

From a Google Image Search – Washington Examiner

Spies make for what is often edge-of-the-seat reading. Spy novels often offer references to obscure historical activities that may not have been universally covered by the media and which may have only been uncovered long after the actual events. John le Carré has long been considered the master of spy stories involving classic spy craft methods which may not work as well in our age of high tech. This may be why so many books about spying refer to WWII and its aftermath in the Cold War and the times when a wall divided East and West Berlin. The end of wars often leaves loose ends which reveal themselves much later. Now spying usually happens on a grand scale, as portrayed by events like China’s recent hacking of the US Treasury Department, and classic up-close and personal spying is out of fashion.

John le Carré has passed the torch to Nick Harkaway, his son. In Karla’s Choice Harkaway takes us to the Circus in London with all the quirky characters who help keep the world safe from the forces which oppose democracies. Harkaway also gives us George Smiley, called back from retirement to unravel a situation involving death and a man who is on the run. Smiley may lose his wife over this one.

Harkaway does a good job of capturing le Carré’s style, and the novel takes us back to post-war days. We tune into events happening behind the Iron Curtain as the runner, Róka, who left London leaving a dead man behind, is a Hungarian national with connections to Communism. The backstory of Róka is perhaps a bit too complicated. I found myself tuning some of it out. Harkaway’s inclusion of Szusanna, Roka’s secretary, lent complications to the operation which added value. Szusanna gave us a reason to stay interested enough to get to the real focus of this tale, Karla. Karla is an agent of Russia and has a reputation for being both brutal and ruthless. Smiley offers Karla a choice. Will he take it? Has the Circus lost some of its effectiveness since the end of the war? This is a good legacy book, but not a great one. It may not be due to the author’s skills as a writer but rather to all the ways the world of spying has changed. Still, we are lured on to solve the mystery of Róka.

Playground by Richard Powers-Book

From a Google Image Search – NPR

Did you know that fish go to cleaning stations under the ocean and other sea creatures vacuum them and clean their teeth? I didn’t. Did you know that fish and other sea denizens like to play, even sometimes with humans if they come around often enough. The ocean/s come alive in Richard Powers book Playground. The enormous variety of sea life, the bioluminescence divers see that we landlubbers don’t, the coral reefs, the way sea critters turn human trash into new coral reefs-it’s all fascinating and beautiful as Powers describes it.

But what antics creatures get up to underwater is not the only thread in this novel. Playground is also the name of a social media platform designed by Todd Keane that allows users to play and chat online, for a fee. And with the arrival of AI, the site gets more popular until Todd Keane is a billionaire.

But, before Keane earns his billions he meets Rafi Young in school. Rafi is a young black man. Both are from Chicago. Both love games. At first, they play chess. When they discover Go, the infinite variety of moves, the complex strategies lead them to replace chess. They play for hours and years before gaming even begins on the internet.

Todd Keane’s father worked in the pit at the Chicago Board of Trade:

“…a warrior of the open-outcry system, he stood in the heart of the octagon as the furious waves of capitalism crashed all around him.” (pg. 9)

Since Todd’s parents fought and made up loudly and often, he sought solace under Lake Michigan. “When I was young, I could breathe underwater.” (pg. 12) Todd and his father played a series of classic games until they got to Backgammon. Eventually Todd could beat his father every time. Todd came from a wealthy family.

Todd’s father lets him choose a book. He chooses “Clearly It Is Ocean” by Evelyne Beaulieu. Eva’s dad helped invent the first aqualung and he had his daughter take it for a test in the pool. Eva learns to dive, even meets Jacques Cousteau, and travels to coral reefs until she ends up on Makatea.

Rafi Young’s father was a Chicago firefighter. When his mom worried about him walking to school through a tough neighborhood, she made him wear a bright orange coat and hat which solved the mom’s problem but made Rafi’s life worse. When his father heard about all this, he punched Rafi’s mother in the face. Divorce followed, and poverty.

While Todd pursues a degree in math and excels with computers, Rafi earns a PhD in educational psychology. They meet Ina Aroita, born in Honolulu to a Navy family and raised on naval bases in Guam and Samoa. For a while it seems that both men fall in love with Ina. It is Rafi who marries her and becomes a teacher on the island of Makatea where he and Ina adopt two orphaned children and Ina becomes an artist. Todd is the only character not living on Makatea. In fact, Todd and Rafi have had a falling out and Rafi doesn’t speak to Todd. Will there be a reunion? My lips are sealed.

Here’s what Todd has to say about the picture book, “Clearly It Is Ocean.” “Thirty thousand kinds of fish. Fish that migrated their faces across to the sides of their bodies as they grew. Fish whose barrel heads were transparent, revealing their brains. Fish that changed from male to female. Fish that grew their own fishing rods out of their heads. Fish that lived inside the bodies of other living creatures.” (pg. 24)

Makatea, a French colony, was found at one time to be a major source of phosphates, most often used in fertilizer. The discovery of phosphates multiplied the amount of food farmers could produce. Given the exploding population on Earth, the demand was huge and the island was exploited for years. Then the mining companies left, and the island’s population fell to 82 humans. Two of these humans were Rafi and Ina. Evelyne Beaulieu, now 92, lives there also, still diving.

Now, a mysterious company wants to build a “seasteading” community at Makatea, throwing the residents into a panic because they remember what happened in the phosphate situation. It will bring jobs, a new clinic, and a high school. What will it do to the reefs around Makatea? How will the people vote? Is constant growth necessary and healthy for our societies and our planet? Here we have a mashup between AI and the health of Earth’s oceans and the whole wonderful, barely experienced, watery environment and all the living creatures in it. What will it be like to live on a planet whose oceans are no longer teeming with life, a dead ocean? What choice does the island make, and how is Todd Keane involved? What choice would you make?

“In the last chapter (of “Clearly It Is Ocean”), the woman I crushed on with all my ten-year-old heart told of a research trip she had made off the coast of Eastern Australia. She stopped one day in the middle of a dive to watch a giant cuttlefish near the mouth of its den. This tentacled mollusk, kin to squid and octopus, was performing a long wild color dance for no one.” (pg. 34)

It is not easy to talk about extinctions and the destruction of biomes when everyone is madly striving to be a millionaire or billionaire. Taking care of declining habitats and populations of creatures that are basically invisible to us and are dying off doesn’t get much viral attention on social media. Powers’ book does a good job of focusing on our choices between capitalism’s drive to perpetual growth, which is pursued mostly to feed people’s greed, and the importance of play to all living things. He reminds us that the oceans surrounding us are full of fascinating life forms and that we need to help them stay that way. This is not a preachy book. It’s especially great when Eva is underwater.