Like many combat veterans, Anthony Marquez returned from Afghanistan suffering from both trauma and survivor’s guilt. His Marine unit had lost 17 Lord have mercy on Dublin’s Garvey sisters. Two years after the death of one sister’s awful git of a husband and the insurance fraud investigation that followed, the deceased’s widow, Grace, is marrying again and life may be returning to normal. But suspicions remain about that initial death, and as is often the case, one murder begets another. Expect plenty of laughs and intrigue in the long-awaited second season of Sharon Horgan’s wonderful, award-winning series. Wednesday, Nov. 13, Apple TV+.

by Alexei Navalny

“One might expect a work by an anti-corruption activist and political prisoner to read like a righteous diatribe,” said David Kortava in The New York Times. But Alexei Navalny was a different kind of Russian opposition leader. His new memoir, published eight months after he died at 47 in an Arctic penal colony, “reveals less about his politics than it does about his fundamental decency, his wry sense of humor, and his (mostly) cheery stoicism under conditions that would flatten a lesser person.” When he started the project, shortly after he narrowly survived assassination by poisoning in 2020, he imagined that the book might read like a thriller dramatizing his attempt to prove the crime was the work of his foe, Vladimir Putin. But then Navalny was imprisoned, owing to his courageous decision to return to Russia. “Wow, what a dramatic turn in my book,” he writes. 

At times, the book’s opening section “reads like a beautifully crafted novel,” said Mikhail Zygar in Vanity Fair. We see Navalny as a boy spending summers with his grandmother in a Ukrainian village near Chernobyl. As he cracks jokes and shares detailed anecdotes, we see the fading Soviet Union he grew up in and the broken Russia in which he reached adulthood. We hear how he met his wife, Yulia, and how beginning around 2010 he harnessed the power of the internet to establish himself as Putin’s chief adversary. But then he describes his decision to return to Russia after his recovery from the poisoning. “It is his choice, his Golgotha”—a sacrifice he knows will likely cost him his life but that he makes for the sake of a freer future Russia. Once he is imprisoned and begins a hunger strike, his writing changes. He’s focused on food, and on dying. “It’s horrifying, but impossible to stop reading.” 

All in all, “Patriot is a bittersweet read,” said Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian. Navalny once appeared to be the person mostly likely to turn the page on Putin’s despotic reign, and “here on the page is the voice of the charismatic, funny, adept communicator who for a time conjured a vision of another Russia.” He died because he knew it was insufficient for him to tell other Russians how to fight while he lived in exile. “He had to show them that Putin’s regime was not to be feared—it was to be defied.” At one point, he writes, half-jokingly, “If they finally whack me, this book will be my memorial.” To his credit, “it’s less a memorial than a handbook on how to stand up to a bully, the mission of his life.”

The comic actress who lent dignity to ditzes

With her sensitive blue eyes and her expert comic timing, Teri Garr turned dumb-blonde roles into characters of poignancy and depth. Often, as in Young Frankenstein (1974), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and After Hours (1985), she played women who had to deal with unpredictable men, but she was more than a foil. She combined vulnerability with deadpan humor even as her characters were melting down—as in the sudden, shrieking tantrum of a jilted lover she gave in Tootsie (1982), which earned her an Oscar nomination. A favorite on late-night TV, Garr hosted Saturday Night Live three times and was a frequent guest of Johnny Carson and David Letterman. Yet despite widespread accolades for her comedic talent, she struggled to find suitable roles. “Women are not taken seriously,” she said in 2008. “If there’s ever a woman who’s smart, funny, or witty, people are afraid of that, so they don’t write that.” 

Born in Los Angeles, Terry Ann Garr was the daughter of a Rockette and a vaudevillian; her father died when she was 11. She started out studying ballet, making her professional debut as a dancer right after high school. Once she started making money from commercials, she dropped out of college. She began getting work in films, mostly as an uncredited backup dancer, and appeared in multiple Elvis Presley movies. Yet “playing showgirls and go-go dancers was less satisfying” than she’d hoped, said The New York Times. Garr wanted to act. She booked a few speaking roles, appearing on Star Trek and The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. But she really “gained attention” as the German lab assistant in Young Frankenstein, said Variety, where her first line was “the memorable ‘Vould you like to have a roll in ze hay?’” 

The last part of her career “was a lot like the beginning,” said NPR.org, “with small roles on big TV shows” like Friends. After years of inexplicable pain and muscle weakness, Garr was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999 and became a spokesperson for MS research, making appearances in her wheelchair. She suffered a brain aneurysm in 2006, spending a week in a coma before relearning to walk and talk. “I really do count my blessings,” she wrote in a 2005 memoir. “At least I used to. Now I get so tired I have a woman come once a week and count them for me.”