2021- The Best Of

 

It was a weird year,  the second full year of COVID19 restrictions.  During this topsy turvy year, the Vatican slapped restrictions on saying the Latin Mass.  The Illinois Holocaust Museum made “show me your papers” a requirement for admission and then squelched dissent on the internet.   At least it didn’t have a loudspeaker at the entrance, barking “Mach schnell!” to give it the full effect.  That’s where we are now.

There was an attempt to return to normalcy by summer.  Baseball was played.  Ravinia had somewhat of a season, although it was very lightly attended.  Movie theaters re-opened. 

It this tentative and somewhat abbreviated year, there were some highlights, nonetheless.

Film

I have to confess, I have some catching up to do.  I saw relatively few films this year and I will try to catch up during the icy months.

But of the films I saw, I liked Minari, a film about a young Korean family that emigrates to Arkansas after immigrating from Korea and tries to make a go of it by working the land.   It’s somewhat of a remake of The Grapes of Wrath story, with all the family drama.  A Quiet Place II wasn’t bad, especially since there has been a paucity of good sci-fi and horror films lately.

Nomadland received best picture at the Academy Awards but I thought it was awful- dark, depressing, spartan with uninteresting characters.  It was especially tedious since we are living through a dark, depressing, dystopian period.   Similarly, Land was predictable and tedious, and I had high expectations for it.

The more interesting medium were a few mini-series that I liked a great deal.  At the top of the list was Queen’s Gambit, starring Anya Taylor-Joy.  Queen’s Gambit was magnificent.  The acting was very good.  The writing was excellent and the character development was superb.  Anya Taylor-Joy was a wonderfully complex character.  The writers were able to translate a slow moving game into a riveting experience.  The Beth Harmon character was a bit of a composite of Bobby Fischer and Janis Joplin.  Marcin Dorocinski played her Russian nemesis, Vasily Borgov.  Dorocinski is actually Polish and is one of a raft of excellent Polish dramatic talent that surfaced in the last couple of years.

World on Fire was a WWII drama and PBS mini-series, starring Helen Hunt.  The first installment was centered on early WWII.   It was a sweeping project, developing characters on several continents.  Like Queen’s Gambit, I found it to be quite authentic (except for a couple of Woke nods).   Helen Hunt was outstanding and the scenes in Poland were done by Polish actors, headed up by the young, beautiful and talented Zofia Wichlacz.   I’m very much looking forward to Season 2. 

PBS Masterpiece also pulled off another masterpiece with All Creatures and Small.  The beloved James Herriot books were wonderfully done in this remake.   Season 2 starts soon and can’t get here fast enough. 

Books

Fiction

This was a tossup.  I really liked Should We Stay or Should We Go by Lionel Shriver.  This novel is about an older couple that makes a mutual suicide pact to avoid the inevitable decline and expense of old age. The twist is that Shriver ingeniously provides alternative endings.   Shriver’s biting and incisive intellect just drips out of this novel.  Also very inventive was Klara and the Sun by Kazou Ishiguro.  In this futuristic (but not far off) novel, a family purchases a synthetic companion for their chronically ill daughter.

Both these novels deal with themes that baby boomers will likely have to confront in the near future.  And both authors handled these issues in very original ways.

Nonfiction

There were several excellent candidates in this category.  We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China’s Surveillance State by Kai Strittmatter was very good as was This is How the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth.   Nuclear Armageddon is no longer our sole humanity ending dread.

But my vote for best nonfiction book goes to the dean of American History, Gordon S. Wood for his short and very readable concise volume, Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution.  In less than 200 pages, the 87 year old Wood spins out an essential primer on our great Republic.  In seven short chapters, he lays out an essential foundation of how we came into being, and the origins of our Constitution.  Best of all, Wood devotes an entire chapter entitled Slavery and Constitutionalism to destroying The 1619 Project and the falsehoods being propagated by Nicole Hannah-Jones without even naming her or The 1619 Project.  He utterly upends her basic argument:

The Revolution changed everything: unfreedom could no longer be taken for granted as a normal part of hierarchical society.  Almost overnight black slavery and white servitude became conspicuous and reviled in ways that they had not been earlier.

He goes on later to assert:

With independence, nearly all the independent states, including Virginia, began moving against slavery, initiating what became the first great antislavery movement in world history. The desire to abolish slavery was not an incidental offshoot of the Revolution; it was not an unintended consequence of the contagion of liberty.  It was part and parcel of the many enlightened reforms that were integral to the republican revolutions taking place in the new states.

And just like that, Hannah-Jones argument is laid waste.

I had an opportunity to hear Gordon Wood speak and meet him a couple of years ago.  With Samuel Eliot Morison, Page Smith, Edmund Morgan and Bernard Bailyn gone, Wood is one of the last to hold up the candle of the miracle of the origins of America.  American History departments have been shrunk to almost nonexistence and have been stuffed with the gender studies and grievance studies people.   Wood is a treasure and, at 87, this may be his last, but best effort.