Obituary: Shigeaki Mori – “Shigeaki Mori, Survivor Of Hiroshima Who Led A Search, Is Dead at 88,” New York Times, March 23, 2026. On the morning of August 6, 1945, Shigeaki Mori was an 8-year-old student on his way to school when the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima. He survived but 140,000 residents of the city did not. As he and his family tried to rebuild, he heard rumors that a dozen American POWs were also killed in the blast. Although both governments denied this, Mori pursued the rumors and, after more information was declassified in the 1970s, had proof of that fact. He made it his life’s work to find the families of the POWs. He eventually succeeded. One of those killed was Normand Brissette of Lowell. He was a crewmember on a Navy aircraft shot down during an earlier raid on the city and was held in the city’s jail, awaiting transport to a POW camp. He was among 12 Americans, ten of whom died in the blast while Brissette and another held on for a few days before succumbing to their injuries. Mr. Mori gained international fame in 2016 when Barack Obama became the first President to visit Hiroshima where he laid a wreath on a memorial. Sitting on stage, Mr. Mori’s embrace of the President yielded an iconic photograph of the event. In 2018, Mr. Mori traveled to Lowell for the dedication of a memorial to Normand Brissette which was unveiled that day, May 28, 2018, at the Centralville Veteran’s Park. Here’s a link to my blog post about that event. 

Movie Review: A Complete Unknown – This 2024 film is about the early years of Bob Dylan’s musical career and stars Timothee Chalamet as Dylan. I like Dylan’s music, but I’ve never followed music as closely as I do other parts of popular culture, so I wanted to see this movie for educational purposes with the caveat that every movie parts with reality in some ways. The movie begins with 19-year-old Dylan arriving in New York City with a guitar and a small backpack, then follows his entrance into the music business and concludes with his historic performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. That was historic since it was the first time he used an electric guitar in concert. This created an uproar among folk music aficionados who saw it as a sellout to rock music and commercialism. Real life musicians who feature prominently as characters in this movie include Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, and Woody Guthrie. The Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the Civil Rights movement provide dramatic background for the movie which focuses on Dylan’s prolific songwriting during this time in which he churned out classic hit after classic hit.

Book Review: “Book and Dagger” – The subheading of this 2024 nonfiction book is “How scholars and librarians became the unlikely spies of World War II.” Written by Elyse Graham, a history professor at Stony Book University, the book explains how the United States, in the years between the two World Wars, failed to establish and operate any kind of a national intelligence collection and analysis organization, so when the country entered World War II, it was woefully behind other combatants. Into that void stepped William Donovan and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Usually when one thinks of the OSS (which was the forerunner to the CIA), it is about saboteurs dropping behind enemy lines and daring escapes from the Gestapo. But this book tells a different side of the OSS story. Donovan and his associates recruited hundreds of history professors, archivists and librarians to the OSS to engage in what is called “open-source collection.” Ubiquitous printed materials such as phone books and bureaucratic transportation studies proved to be intelligence gold mines in the right hands. This book is mostly about the process of finding and collecting that material which often brought seemingly mild-mannered academics into dangerous situations. The concluding chapter of the book makes some universal observations about the kaleidoscope of people necessary for a country to create, obtain and understand important information. It shows how before the 1930s, Germany was the leading country when it came to scientific research, but when the Nazis came to power and enforced their concepts of racial purity over ability and intelligence, Germany faded as a leader in science, surpassed by the United States which welcomed those who Germany rejected. Although the author makes no  further comment, I couldn’t help but think that many of the policies on immigration and academic freedom imposed on the United States by the current regime, place this country in the role of Germany in the 1930s. I just wonder which other nation will be the beneficiary of this short-sightedness. 

Book Review: A Short Stay in Hell – This 2009 fantasy novella by Steven Peck was enthusiastically recommended to me and since A Short Stay in Hell requires just a short time to read at just 98 pages, I zipped through it. The book explores the experience of hell, but a hell unlike anything we in the west have ever had described to us. Instead of a Dante-like inferno of constant physical pain, this hell was more psychological. The author, who happens to be a Mormon evolutionary biologists, critiques those who believe there’s is “the one true religion” since in this book, even devout, good  people end up in hell. That’s because the one true religion of this world is Zoroastrianism. Anyone not an adherent – and very few are – is condemned to hell. But here, hell is a customized experience. The main character liked to read so his hell was set in an enormous library filled with millions and millions of books, most of complete gibberish, others with a random word and a few with a snippet of text. To be released from this hell, one must fund the book that contains the story of their life, a search that can take millions of years. They are not alone in this library. There are thousands of other similarly situated people, both men and women. All appear in their late 20s and in good health and recall every detail about their lives. But they are all American, white, English-speaking, and lived between 1920 and 2070. They can be injured, grow ill, or die, but each morning they are revived in perfect condition. The punishment is the monotony and the sameness of this new existence which is a type of torture. This is not the kind of book I would normally read but I’m glad I did.