Tommy Shelby is back in Birmingham. In this feature-length sequel to the acclaimed gangster series, Cillian Murphy’s notorious crime boss returns home after years in exile. Tommy’s illegitimate son, played by Barry Keoghan, has been running the old gang with reckless brutality when a British fascist sympathizer courts his help to tip England and thus the outcome of World War II in favor of Germany. Tommy must step in to put things right.
Friday, March 20, Netflix

by Stephen Grosz

Though Stephen Grosz’s first book was a critically acclaimed best seller in the U.K., said Daphne Merkin in The New York Times, his second “carries more of a depth charge.” Once again, the American-born, London-based psychoanalyst unfurls a series of case studies from his practice with the skill of a short-story writer. But because his subject this time is love, the new case studies add up to “a surpassingly wise investigation of the ways in which we trip ourselves up in the pursuit of our heart’s desires.” Grosz’s central insight about love is that our difficulties with sustaining it arise from each individual’s prior experiences of loss: If you’re not at peace with the losses you’ve endured, including the simple loss of childhood, you may never cease repeating the adolescent habit of heaping too many expectations on love. But reaching full self- understanding takes time, often years. Grosz’s “illuminating” narratives make every search compelling.

In each story, “Grosz is the psychoanalyst-cum-detective, listening for clues until the unconscious forces that are driving his patients’ behavior are made visible,” said Kathy O’Shaughnessy in the Financial Times. One patient who claims to love her fiancé can’t bring herself to mail the couple’s wedding invitations. A married man obsesses over his wife’s underwear because he prefers inconclusive evidence that she’s cheating to strong evidence that might rule out that possibility. Grosz openly admits that he hasn’t always been right in his initial diagnosis of the root of these patients’ hang-ups. But Grosz’s work is all about peeling through layers and seeking to continually see each person’s story anew. Love’s Labor is “categorically not a selfhelp book.” Instead, it’s “a compressed, brilliant distillation of 40 years of clinical experience and deep thought, written to last.” 

“The title refers to Grosz’s belief that the work of love is to learn to see oneself and others clearly,” said Sophie McBain in The Guardian. Of course, that’s “also the work of psychoanalysis and, arguably, of life.” In one of his stories, two of his female friends who are fellow psychoanalysts have a falling-out because one is sleeping with the other’s husband, and the heart of the conflict appears to stem from the women’s differing views of the purpose of both psychoanalysis and life. Grosz aims merely to listen long and well and constructively enough to help his patients gain deeper self- knowledge. “What a privilege it must be to accompany another person so closely as they try to figure out the challenge of  living—of change and love, and accepting love and change. And what a privilege it is for the reader to catch a glimpse of this process.”

The counterculture icon who rallied Woodstock

Through his darkly funny folk songs, Country Joe McDonald narrated the struggles of a generation radicalized by the Vietnam War. He was best known for his Vietnam War protest anthem, “I-Feel-LikeI’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” (1965). But it was the cheer he led just before that at Woodstock that rallied the audience to the cause. He and his psychedelic folk-rock group Country Joe and the Fish used to open shows with a chant of “F-I-S-H” and have the crowd shout along. By the time they got to Woodstock, they’d replaced that with a more vulgar four-letter word. “From the moment I yelled ‘Give us an F,’ it became a folk protest moment,” McDonald said in 2002. “There was a certain in-your-face Kurt Cobain–ness about it that matched the attitude of the time pretty well.” 

Raised in El Monte, Calif., by Communist Party members who “named him for Joseph Stalin,” Joseph Allen McDonald was born to be a leftist and an activist, said The Washington Post. After a stint in the Navy, he attended college in Los Angeles and planned to transfer to UC Berkeley but ended up busking on the streets there instead. He became a major “presence in the Bay Area music scene,” dating Janis Joplin, putting out the arts and politics magazine Rag Baby, and writing psychedelic folk songs. His seminal “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” was completed in less than an hour, said The Guardian. The deadpan talking track was a “mock celebration of war and early, senseless death” from the jaded viewpoint of a draftee. “And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for? / Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn / Next stop is Vietnam.” The song established him as a counterculture icon. 

McDonald never achieved the mainstream success of peers like the Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane, but he “remained true to his musical instincts and lyrical themes,” said The New York Times. One album explored feminism, another environmentalism, and his 1986 album Vietnam Experience looked back at the effects and legacy of the war. His final studio album, 2017’s 50, celebrated his own half-century as a singer- songwriter and political rebel. “I think the ‘Summer of Love’ thing was manufactured by the media or something, because I don’t remember us thinking, Wow, this is the ‘Summer of Love,’” he said in 2018. “I never felt a part of it, but I was really thrilled and happy to be a hippie.”