Water Mirror Echo
By Jeff Chang ’89
Chang’s biography of Bruce Lee focuses on the man, not the legend. In the process, the author illuminates the martial artist’s fight against Hollywood gatekeepers and Asian typecasting.
Perhaps best-known for his 2005 hip hop history, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, Chang locates Lee squarely in his time: born in the US in the 1940s, growing up in Hong Kong, then returning to the States at age 18, the actor was largely a product of a postwar America grappling with racial tensions, immigration, and the explosion of mass entertainment.
Chang draws on Lee’s personal letters and diary entries to document his professional challenges. Despite his breakout role as Kato in The Green Hornet television series, Lee had difficulty securing financiers to back projects that centered on Asians as heroes, rather than as willing sidekicks or exaggerated villains. When Lee’s Enter the Dragon became a commercial success, it helped shatter those stereotypes.
It’s a legacy he didn’t live to see. Lee died suddenly, at age 32, of cerebral edema—a month prior to the film’s release.
—Hussain Khan
Tell the Whole Damn World!
By Ahmad Anderson ’83 and Reza Sirafinejad ’99
Listen up, diehard Golden Bears fans: Here’s a show for you. Sirafinejad cohosts this unabashedly rah-rah Cal sports podcast with an assist from CAA board member and former Golden Bears defensive back, Anderson, the man behind the “Bear Territory” chant from which it takes its title. Kicked off last year, the podcast, which has a decidedly homespun look and feel (you can also watch on YouTube), has now logged nearly 60 episodes and appears to be going strong. Guests have included Cal women’s head basketball coach Charmin Smith; television analyst Mike Silver ’88; and former Cal running back and all-time leading rusher, Russell White ’93. Occasional episodes delve into Cal history with amateur historian and third-generation alum Leslie Mitchell ’81 as guide. Fanaticism and facts. Go Bears!
—Pat Joseph
Beast in the Machine: How Robotics and AI Will Transform Warfare and the Future of Human Conflict
By George M. Dougherty, Ph.D. ’02
Every new war gives rise to fresh horrors, novel ways of killing. WWI gave us, among other things, mustard gas, tanks, and modern machine guns. WWII gave us mass-scale aerial bombing, rockets, and nuclear weapons. Vietnam gave rise to guided missiles. And napalm. Now, in Ukraine, we’re seeing the rise of drone warfare, including the use of off-the-shelf quadcopters mounted with cheap explosives and used like kamikazes to dive bomb soldiers. That’s awful enough, but nothing compared to what’s coming. Imagine swarms of AI-driven, self-organizing drones with precision weapons. Think fully roboticized armies and navies.
Dougherty, a former active duty Air Force officer, argues that the US and other democracies must immediately embrace first-wave drone technologies while also working to foster ethical use of AI on the battlefield. That may sound futile, but consider: No one uses mustard gas anymore and use of chemical weapons generally is verboten.
It’s not too late to shape the future of drone warfare, the author argues, but it may be soon. Less a book for the general reader than for the generals and War College faculty.
—P.J.
Lost & Found in Cleveland
Co-directed by Marisa Guterman ’09
Guterman makes her directorial debut in this understated comedy. The film follows five characters whose paths cross when a traveling appraisal show stops in Cleveland, Ohio—“the best location in the nation.” Think PBS’s Antiques Roadshow with Best in Show vibes, Christopher Guest on the Cuyahoga. The ensemble cast stars Martin Sheen, Jon Lovitz, June Squibb, and Stacy Keach.
—P.J.
Echoes of Our Origins: Baboons, Humans, and Nature
By Shirley C. Strum ’69, MA ’72, Ph.D. ’76
Strum was 25 when she encountered her first troop of baboons. It was 1972 and, ignoring the practices of her male predecessors, the young primatologist made a bold, career-defining decision: she got out of the van. “Close physical proximity to the baboons seemed so fundamental,” she recalls in her new memoir, Echoes of Our Origins. “Only then could I begin to consider what baboons might tell us about human evolution.”
Then a grad student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Physical Anthropology, Strum had taken a course with anthropologist Sherwood Washburn (“the father of modern primatology”) and was intrigued by his “highly unorthodox idea[s]” about field studies. Under his tutelage, she set off to Kenya to test theories about olive baboon social behavior and, as she recalls, “my romance with nature began.”
Strum faced her share of challenges. Echoes traces her more than 50-year career, recounting conflicts with soldiers, media misrepresentations of her research, environmental change, and the unprecedented 125-mile translocation of three baboon troops. Strum’s studies gave her unique insight into baboon behavior, ultimately enabling her to “dismantle the image of baboons” as aggressive and male-centric. Ultimately, her account confronts the reality of human-wildlife conflict and what it would take to work towards lasting coexistence.
—Leah Worthington
Nuremberg
James Vanderbilt’s feature film Nuremberg depicts one of the most significant moral and legal judgments of the 20th century, one that established international criminal law as we know it. The film is based on Jack El-Hai’s The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, a book about psychiatrist Douglas Kelly M.D. ’31, whose evaluations of Nazi leaders helped give rise to Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “banality of evil.” As if to illustrate, Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command, is portrayed as charming and charismatic.
The film invites the viewer to confront complex questions about justice: What does it mean to hold men accountable for monstrous crimes? Who do you put on trial when so many are guilty? What do you charge them with? In the chaos of postwar Europe, victory offered no clear moral relief. The International Military Tribunal became a stage for humanity’s self-reckoning, as nations attempted to define justice on a global scale.
—Daniela X. Sandoval
Good Things
By Samin Nosrat ’01
Good things are better shared, says award-winning author and chef Samin Nosrat in her new cookbook.
If you know Nosrat, you know that a recipe book goes against the ethos of her 2017 bestselling debut, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, where she set out to free cooks from recipes entirely. Instead, she wanted them to learn to develop flavors through trial and taste. “I could never escape the feeling that each one felt like an attempt to capture, quantify, and define the ineffable,” she writes in Good Things.
But then a global pandemic happened. The lockdown plunged many, including Nosrat herself, into a new and profound loneliness. The experience made her ask, “What is a good life?” and changed her view of recipes, which she now sees as “rituals that promise transformation.”
In addition to recipes, readers of Good Things can expect tips on cookware and ingredients, like the kind of oil to reach for in the grocery store, (always extra virgin, she insists, because your cooking’s only as good as your olive oil).
Nosrat says cooking provides moments for creativity. And when caught up in the daily deluge, finding those moments is precious—an undeniably good thing.
—Lizzy Rager
