Chris D’Amelio Life and Death at Cape Disappointment

We like our heroes larger than life, to the extent that “larger than life” is practically a prerequisite for heroism.  Alas, we are, at best, life-size.  How then might we describe those who are heroic?  In his memoir Life and Death at Cape Disappointment: Becoming a Surfman on the Columbia River Bar, Christopher J. D’Amelio offers an excellent example realistic heroism.  

In this book, you meet an everyday sort of fellow, married with children.  His chosen career as a member of the US Coast Guard puts him in the path of yes, life and death at Cape Disappointment, a Coast Guard station in Washington state.  He meets this harsh landscape, not just as a man, but a married man with children, entranced byi his demanding, dangerous job.  What makes a hero? In this book, it’s not (just) man versus nature, it’s man versus life.

This is not to say that Life and Death at Cape Disappointment is a domestic drama; it’s not.  If you’re coming here for watery dangers and tales of rescue, you’ll find a lot to like.  D’Amelio tells a number of tales, from heartbreaking to sobering to “Are people really that dumb?”  He enjoys and is rather addicted to the danger.  He’s good at his job, and the writing [with Reid Maruyama] is crisp and clear.  

But there’s more than just a series of greatest ocean danger hits here.  D’Amelio also has a home life, made difficult by his other marriage to his job.  He strikes a balance, not easily.  We get the details of domesticity that are emotionally engaging, sans bombast and self-import.  The result is an engaging weave of low-key middle-income married life and the hard work of derring-do without the aid of high-tech gadgetry or fantasy superpowers.  

Life and Death at Cape Disappointment has a lot of appeal.  D’Amelio clearly has an attraction to heroics, but the life he actually lives is very much “life sized,” and that’s enough.  D’Amelio’s memoir describes the sort of heroism that is the reward of a life lived every day by those who think of themselves as husbands and fathers, the heroes we actually know.

Chris D’Amelio is every bit as low-key and engaging in person as he is on the page.  Here’s a link to download our conversation, or you enjoy your derring-do and your mildly safe lubberhood by listening below in the happiness of your home.

Dalal Mawad All She Lost

Dalal Mawad was in Beirut on August 4, 2020, making her one of thousands who experienced the largest non-nuclear explosion ever created by humans.  In All She Lost: The Explosion in Lebanon, the Collapse of a Nation and the Women who Survived, she tells the stories of women who survived not just the explosion, but Lebanon itself.  All She Lost powerfully weaves personal oral histories against the backdrop of a failed state, contrasting terrifying stories of women coping amidst disaster with the brutal impunity of a self-serving bureaucracy whose ineptitude and greed created the conditions for catastrophe.  

All She Lost is compelling even when it is difficult.  Mawad alternates between impersonal, if infuriating, descriptions of Lebanon’s history and in-person, up-close interviews that describe a solid, proud citizenry confronted with a destructive force of unimaginably violent power.  We learn that very little is known about the explosion, which is pitched as an accident involving ammonium nitrate stored with fireworks.  (Mawad does reveal some shocking details that have not been overly publicized, to wit the involvement of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.)  

But though the explosion is seen as an “accident,” the feel of the women’s stories, parsed between bits of Lebanon’s decadent, awful history, is more that of the victims of a violent aggressive war than those of a disaster.  Mawad remains true to her interviewees and herself.  The injuries they describe and she reports are specific and horrific.  The interview episodes read like war stories, with years of bad actors in high places making things worse until hell itself is unleashed on earth – a description reported more than once in Mawad’s interviews.

Mawad does an amazing job here as a writer, conveying years of bureaucratic violence, which she herself experiences, that conclude in a violent bloodbath.  She sticks to the facts of the events, and presents her own and her interviewees reactions and emotions, understandably, anger, fear, terror, horror, and even greater anger, as factual and reasonable events as well.  This difficult feat is accomplished with an even tone and a cool (but not frigid) gaze.  All She Lost will likely make you cry and make you angry.  Mawad also makes it clear that those reactions are reasonable, that facts are facts and that in this case, at least, feelings are facts.  The truth is ever difficult, compelling and real.

Dalal Mawad knows what she and her book are about, and she spoke of both in a manner involving and direct.  Download our conversation from this link or listen below. Unpleasant truths must be understood if one is to effect meaningful change. Understanding might feel difficult, but only until one experiences enlightenment, and sees change is possible, personal.  

Andy Greenberg Tracers in the Dark

The virtue of cryptocurrency was flouted in that word; Bitcoin, its progenitor, was described as anonymous and untraceable. It was meant to usher in a new age of faceless transactions as a means of giving its users freedom from the financial surveillance of business or government entities. Unsurprisingly, freedom lagged far behind unscrupulous criminality, and the first result was an influx on websites that offered the sales of illegal stuff with no consequences. Welcome to the 21st century!

As a journalist for Wired, Andy Greenberg was on the case early. He bought Bitcoin when it was cheap. And when the early dark web sites started showing up – for example Pirate Bay and The Silk Road – the IRS and law enforcement also wanted to track the webmasters down. It was supposed to be impossible. But given the structure of Bitcoin, all the data was there. An oddball group of academics and law enforcement officers managed break the unbreakable and trace the untraceable aided by online criminals who made what were in retrospect rookie errors.

It all comes together in Greenberg’s Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency, which follows a twisted trail through four major busts featuring IRS-CI agents, Bakersfield cops, academics, start-up techno-geniuses, and a variety of mostly sort-of young men hoping to make it big. And they do, until they don’t.

Greenberg manages to keep up a sense of toe-tapping tension and inject it with a science-fictional sense-of-wonder. He keeps the info-dumps terse and enjoyably informative and crafts careful characters on both sides of the law and the readers’ moral sensibilities. 
The cases he follows his LE protagonists through are varied in nature and engagingly explained. He masterfully combines true crime reporting with explorations of rapidly-maturing technologies as they are abused and analyzed for weaknesses by actors on all sides. He understands the appeal of anonymizing communication and the dangers of invisible surveillance, but is inclined present the facts he uncovers and leave readers to discover their own opinions.

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency is a compulsive experience that reads like a “cyber-thriller” with the thrills of being a non-fiction vision of our science-fiction present. We live in a world of unsuspected wonder with wonder-filled suspicion. The usual suspects are now quite unusual, hoping to remain quietly anonymous. Greenberg cuts through a variety of veils with a wickedly entertaining knife.

Andy Greenberg is clearly at home here in our non-anonymous future. Here’s a link to our conversation, or listen below, with an audience of non-anonymous spies.

Priya Guns Your Driver Is Waiting

Damani Krishnathan is a driver for RideShare in an unnamed city.  She’s barely holding it together.  Her father has recently died, and she lives at home with her mother, who is not holding it together. She has a group of friends that she spends slivers of time with when she’s not working or taking care of her mother. An encampment of immigrants just outside the city is becoming an ever-increasing addition to the social unease and malaise that is tightening its grip.  This is a good day.

It picks up when Damani bumps into a pedestrian with her car.  The pedestrian (Jolene) is not hurt, but she is beautiful (and rich and white), and Damani quickly realizes she is falling in love. 

Your Driver is Waiting is a fast, compulsive read, propelled by Damani’s first-person narration.   Her outlook is pragmatic and her voice is hilarious.  Guns, who took the movie Taxi Driver as a loose inspiration, carefully crafts a Kafkaesque vision of capitalism as an almost Lovecraftian presence, a formless monster draining the life out of those in its grip, which is pretty much everyone.  For a few shining moments, Damani and Jolene look like a match made in heaven even if they reside in a current day dystopian hell.  But hell hath a bucketload of fury, more than enough to engulf a city.

Your Driver is Waiting makes great writing feel easy.  In one sentence, Guns can be sweet, funny, harrowing and insightful.  She creates a city and Damani’s friends with the sort of specificity that feels real, while the anonymity of the setting lends the story a surreal sensibility.   You’ll laugh a lot while reading this, then develop real feelings for the characters.  (I did.)  When you sleep, you’ll have nightmares. (I did.)  Rest assured you’ll read this as fast as possible, and that after, you’ll find yourself seeing the world through Damani’s eyes.  You’ll feel better for gift of Guns, and worse for the world.  You might be tempted to do something.  It’s unlikely you’ll want to drive – or call – a ride-sharing service.

Unsurprisingly, Priya Guns is even more entertaining than Damani.  Hear her voice by following this link to the podcast file, or fasten your seatbelt and listen in place.  RideShare requires all passengers observe the rules of safety, even if you are certainly, eternally, unsafe.

Natalie Haynes Divine Might

The stories of Greek myths, those enduring tales of gods and goddesses, are ever-appealing and pertinent because the Greeks portrayed their immortal rulers as such human characters.  With every turn of the tide, with every day and change, they are there to act as mentors and mirrors. In Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth, Natalie Haynes snatches the mirror from Perseus to reveal the image of our 21st century Medusa.  It turns out we’re complicated, hilarious, and still inclined to underestimate women. 

Haynes plunges right in and takes readers on a very modern tour of very ancient characters. From the first page, it’s clear that Haynes has her own story to tell, and that she will do so in a manner so engaging that the book will prove impossible to put down.  With every sentence, she combines keen insight, common sense and a delightful sense of humor as she steps readers through ancient history, modern interpretations (read: Disney), and brand-new conclusions about the stories that have an eternal shelf-life. 

Haynes has the sort of talent to make everything she writes about – from the Muses to the Furies – compellingly relevant, intensely personal (to both reader and writer) and laugh-out-loud funny, the latter in a manner that directs the humor to the here-and-now.  The insights she brings are brilliant in a way that light up the subject (and the reader) and livens up the prose.  She’s quite nimble in her exposition, with the ability to take the reader on intellectual journeys that cover millennia in a few minutes of reading. 

The structure of the book is straightforward, and yet the reading experience is varied and always fun.  While it’s obviously about goddesses and written by a (very smart and funny) woman, Divine Might is not really feminist.  Haynes is a humanist, and the mirror she holds up is an equal-opportunity entertainer.  Her writing is utterly captivating.  Once you find your way into this book, you’ll not need to lash yourself to the mast.  Her voice will keep you riveted.

As for the interview, see above.  She’s equally riveting when speaking about the book.  Avoid the unupholstered plank, seek the Comfy Chair and follow this link to download our chat, or listen below and be riveted in place.  De-riveting is left as an exercise for the listener!