VIEWING
UPLIFTING FILM
On the Basis of Sex (Amazon Prime)
Somehow, I missed seeing this film about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s early career when it was first released. This week seemed the right time. Based on RBG’s life, it isn’t a documentary, but a wonderfully satisfying success story. First in her law school class at Harvard and first in her class at Columbia Law, Ruth was nonetheless turned down by law firm after law firm (after all, she was a woman, a Jew, and the wives of the lawyers in the firm would be jealous).
She became a professor at Rutgers and, from that position, worked with her husband, Marty, and the ACLU to take on a case of discrimination against a man. She won that case and others that followed gaining more rights for women. She and Marty were a great team. Not only did she enable him to complete law school, but he was wholly supportive of her career and her rise to Supreme Court Justice. Highly recommended!
A side note. I am of an age that I recall being asked at my first job interview after graduate school if I planned to have children. The questioner was a man and I was married. It was a personal and inappropriate question, but not illegal. I made some sort of oblique answer and was offered the job. I also clearly remember celebrating when, several years later, I could apply for a credit card in my name only, based on my credit history alone. I was married and working fulltime and, I didn’t really need that department store card. I got it more on principle than need!
CRIME SCENE
Van der Valk (PBS Masterpiece)
Since most of us aren’t traveling these days, and certainly not abroad, it’s refreshing to see a television series set in a city that is familiar from past visits or future forays. Yorkshire for DCI Banks, Dublin for Acceptable Risk, and now Amsterdam for chief detective Piet Van der Valk and his somewhat scruffy team of colleagues. The canals and the streets of Amsterdam, jammed with bicycles, bring back fond memories of a week we spent there five years ago.
This three-part series is the latest remake based on mysteries by Nicholas Freeling. The suspicious deaths are complex cases, often political, with a tangled web of connections between family members and suspects. Unlike some of the other series I’ve watched, the Dutch seem to resort to guns more frequently.
Commissaris Piet is a striking man with steely blue eyes, a blond thatch, and a very prominent jawline. Usually serious, with seldom a smile, his eyes look haunted by past tragedy. Living alone on a houseboat, he has a close relationship with Lucienne, his right-hand person, and while fair-minded, brooks no sloughing off by his colleagues.
READING
TIMELY MEMOIR
Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey
Losing a parent to an early death is an event that stays with one ever after; losing a parent to violence is another level of remembrance and anguish entirely. A former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, Natasha Trethewey has written a poignant memoir about her mother’s death more than 30 years ago. Trethewey was just 19. Her mother didn’t just die; she was murdered by her second husband. For years, Trethewey carried around a load of guilt.
In this work, she details her childhood as the offspring of a white father and a black mother and how the experience of walking around with just one of them differed greatly in other people’s responses. The racism and mistreatment that were rampant during her mother’s childhood and the vestiges that persisted in Trethewey’s own life form the backdrop for this tragic story. It echoes many of the cases portrayed in No Visible Bruises, an award-winning book by Rachel Louise Snyder. (~JWFarrington)
CRIME IN YORKSHIRE
Careless Love by Peter Robinson
This is a recent crime novel featuring DCI Alan Banks. I’d read a bunch of them some years back, but after watching the DCI Banks TV series, decided to re-visit Robinson’s work on the page. This one starts out a bit too slowly for my taste, but then picks up. A young woman and an older man are each found dead and abandoned in suspicious circumstances. Both are dressed up and there appears to be no link between them. When a neighboring crime team presents the suspicious death of another young woman, the circle widens and the hunt for clues is on. Both DS Winsome Jackson and DI Annie Cabbot feature in the investigation along with Zelda, Annie’s father’s companion who closely guards her tragic past. Enjoyable, but I liked some of Robinson’s earlier books more.
Note: Header photo is Florida fall foliage: colorful coleus.
