Feldman's Faves: May 29, 2023

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

It’s an exciting time to be an NBA basketball fan. If somehow the Celtics win tonight (having been down 3-0 to the Heat) this will be historic and beyond epic.

Just a reminder that our summer students are now fully trained and know more about how the firm works than the rest of us – so please get them involved in your files.

Quite a few recent birthdays in our group over the last week or so – best birthday wishes to Owen, Shannon and Jennifer.

Finally, I want to take this opportunity thank Jennifer for all of her great work during her Articles. Her last day is on Thursday so please join me in congratulating her on this great achievement and wishing her a great summer of travel.

This week’s theme is historical in nature.

Prisoners of the Castle By Ben MacIntyre – Thanks to our resident boxer, Susan G, I read (on her recommendation) Ben MacIntrye’s book, “The Spy and the Traitor” which was the fascinating real life story of Oleg Gorievsky, the Soviet double agent that played a huge part in ending the Cold War. The book was James Bond type stuff. So when I saw that MacIntyre just wrote a new book, Prisoners of the Castle, I was intrigued. I consider myself a history buff with a keen interest in WWII but this story falls into the world of esoteric tales of which I had ZERO familiarity. In this book MacIntyre goes into great detail about the life, society and crazy antics that took place in Colditz Castle (a place I had never heard about), which was supposed to be the prison that held the Nazi regime’s most prized prisoners – people of high military rank, relatives of Churchill and a few celebrities. This book spends a lot of time focusing on the social arrangements of this prison, which was a combination of ‘Lord of the Flies’ and a microcosm for the world back home (focused on class and status – where officers had servants of lower rank in the prison tending to their daily needs). The fun part of this book is the stories of all the various ways that prisoners tried to escape, outsmart their guards and try to make an interesting life for themselves in a time of tedium and boredom. As one reviewer notes, “In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend. But as Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape. Its population represented a society in miniature, full of heroes and traitors, class conflicts and secret alliances, and the full range of human joy and despair. In Macintyre’s telling, Colditz’s most famous names—like the indomitable Pat Reid—share glory with lesser known but equally remarkable characters like Indian doctor Birendranath Mazumdar whose ill treatment, hunger strike, and eventual escape read like fiction; Florimond Duke, America’s oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent; and Christopher Clayton Hutton, the brilliant inventor employed by British intelligence to manufacture covert escape aids for POWs. Prisoners of the Castle traces the war’s arc from within Colditz’s stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler’s war machine faltered and the men feared that liberation would not come soon enough to spare them a grisly fate at the hands of the Nazis. Bringing together the wartime intrigue of his acclaimed Operation Mincemeat and keen psychological portraits of his bestselling true-life spy stories, Macintyre has breathed new life into one of the greatest war stories ever told. ” This story is very interesting and a perspective and experience from the war that I had never known. Here’s a good review from The Washington Post - https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/09/26/prisoners-castle-review-ben-macintyre/

Throughline - What's Your Worth? – The history of credit is a history of society. The advantages to those people that have access to credit over those that don’t compound over years and over the generations. I won’t get into the details here because they are pretty shocking but if you are interested in learning about income inequality and structural injustice, this PODCAST does a great job in showing how credit plays such an important role in their creation. Here is an excerpt from the PODCAST itself, “The credit score: even if you don't think much about it, that three-digit number can change your life. A high score can mean the keys to a new apartment or a new car, while a low score can keep you locked out of the American Dream. Around 40% of people in the U.S. have a low credit score or no credit score at all. So what happened? Today on the show, we talk with media historian Josh Lauer about credit's origins as a moral judgment, and how a tool intended to level the playing field has instead created haves and have-nots.” https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/throughline/id1451109634?i=1000611644274

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon