The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
This book has an interesting premise. A small minority of people actually live their lives over and over in cycles. They die and are born again in the same year and their memories of the past lives emerge around age 3 or 4.
Jonathan Hickman did something similar with Moria MacTaggert in X-Men when he retconned her into a secret mutant a few years back.
In this book, Harry August continues to be born again and again in 1918 and usually lives to the 1990s or so. But not always.
There is peril.
A way exists to kill these immortals. Other time-looping immortals can kill their parents before they're born.
And someone starts doing just that as the course of history starts to change. Advanced tech starts coming decades too early, and the accompanying environmental problems come with it.
Harry determines that it's another time-looping immortal, and he must do something to stop it.
In this life or the next.
Very well written and Peter Kenny did a great job narrating it.
Oppenheimer
This is one of my new favorite Christopher Nolan movies. I put it up there with Memento, Dark Knight, and Inception.
Chronology is again played with, but I think it works well with the three focal points of the Strauss Senate hearing in the late 50s, Oppenheimer's infamous security clearance meeting in the mid-50s, and the buildup to Los Alamos and Trinity in the 30s and 40s.
Cillian Murphy shows Oppenheimer as a flawed man who's a genius, but also a reckless womanizer. Everyone does a fantastic job. I didn't even realize Robert Downey Jr. was Strauss until the credits rolled.
Really heavy stuff with the implications of theory colliding with reality at the advent of the atomic age. Highly recommended.
(And I did get my Barbenheimer bingo card checked a week later when I saw Barbie.
It was a fun and silly movie, but a bit preachy at times.
Still, America Ferrera's monologue in the third act was good fodder for discussion with my wife. Yes, women do feel everything she described.
And that's valuable to know.)
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