Lamar Odom went from making buckets with an NBA championship team to nearly kicking the bucket in a Nevada brothel. A new season of the sports documentary series Untold opens with an episode tracing Odom’s precipitous downfall. An integral player on the Los Angeles Lakers’ 2009 and 2010 championship teams, Odom spiraled during his tumultuous marriage to Khloe Kardashian, which made him a reality TV star, then hit bottom in 2015 in a drug- fueled, near-death incident at Crystal, Nev.’s Love Ranch. 
Tuesday, March 31, Netflix

by Ian Buruma

“Dictators thrive not on love but on indifference,” said Kevin Peraino in The New York Times. That’s the underlying message of Ian Buruma’s “crisply told and uncomfortably relevant” new history of wartime Berlin. The veteran author and journalist has pulled from letters, diaries, interviews with aging survivors, and many other sources to chart how life and behavior shifted in the German capital from 1939 to 1945. During most of those years, “Berliners turned looking away into an art form,” first by flocking to concerts and movies as if nothing had changed, later by ignoring the danger of Allied air raids while filling soccer stadiums.  Jewish citizens had no such choice, of course, though not because their neighbors were all committed Nazis. Buruma’s book, by detailing the moral compromises they made, mounts “a passionate challenge to the corrosive power of indifference.”

The book’s diary-style structure “lets Buruma incorporate a wide variety of view points,” said Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker. “Students, Nazi maidens, and members of the resistance are all allowed to speak for themselves,” and we see both the hard choices some people had to make and how prone others are to evasions. British bombing of the city of 4.3 million began in August 1940. By that point, the 80,000 or so Jewish residents who hadn’t fled were being herded into segregated housing. A year later, deportations were escalating, and one elderly Jewish woman is quoted as saying that in every subsequent encounter with an acquaintance, the first question asked was “Are you going to commit suicide, or will you let them deport you?” By 1944, when much of the city lay in ruins, the terror spread. Nazi “snatch squads” began roaming the streets, shooting or hanging citizens deemed to be “defeatists.” 

“Of course, no descent into moral darkness is total,” said Katja Hoyer in the Financial Times. Buruma finds a few heroes, including a woman who ran a resistance group and who spent the last days of the war roaming the streets surreptitiously scribbling “Nein”—“no” to Hitler’s entire project—on walls and houses. More typical is Buruma’s own Dutch father, Leo, one of hundreds of thousands of citizens of nations occupied by Germany who were forced to work in Berlin. Twenty-year-old Leo didn’t support the Nazis, but he enjoyed the aspects of city life that he could, and was left burdened with guilt. Though the author is sympathetic, he admits that his father made compromises to survive. And though he calls his book a love  letter to Berlin, “the depressing moral of Stay Alive is that most people don’t challenge the circumstances they find themselves in. They adapt to them.”

The respected FBI chief who investigated Trump

Robert Mueller began his term as FBI director on Sept. 4, 2001, just a week before the 9/11 terrorist attacks that refocused the agency’s mission. A decorated Vietnam veteran who’d spent years prosecuting major cases as a U.S. attorney—and earned a reputation as a by-the-book lawman of the highest  integrity— Mueller knew right away that the bureau faced a new era. Over a 12-year term under Republican and Democratic presidents, he expanded its focus from domestic crime to thwarting terrorism. Four years after that term ended, Mueller became a household name as the special counsel investigating ties between President Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. Issued in 2019, the resulting Mueller Report found numerous links between Trump’s team and Russia but stopped short of declaring a criminal conspiracy. Trump said the report was the work of “Trump haters.” But pursuing justice was Mueller’s “only lifetime motivation,” said biographer Garrett M. Graff in 2017. He “might just be America’s straightest arrow.” 

Raised in a “stately manor” outside Philadelphia, Mueller was “born into privilege,” said The New York Times. He attended the “elite boarding school” St. Paul’s, where he captained the hockey and lacrosse teams, and then went to Princeton. 

Upon graduating, he volunteered to join the Marines and led a rifle platoon in Vietnam, earning a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. He then studied law at the University of Virginia and became a federal prosecutor. Stationed in San Francisco and then Boston, he “rose swiftly through the ranks,” and in 1990 headed the Justice Department’s criminal division, where he oversaw winning prosecutions of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and mob boss John Gotti. Tapped by George W. Bush as FBI chief, he “built a reputation for nonpartisan rectitude and stonefaced reserve,” said The Washington Post. When the Bush administration proposed to extend a secret wiretapping program on U.S. citizens, he threatened to  resign—and Bush backed down. 

As special counsel in the Trump investigation, the tight-lipped Mueller maintained his “oldschool, buttoned-down style” as he led a probe that riveted the nation, said the Associated Press. In the end, he brought charges against six Trump associates, but his “nebulous” report—which left to Congress the question of whether Trump obstructed  justice—“did not deliver the knockout punch” Democrats hoped for. Still, Mueller did explicitly refute the president’s claim that there was no substance to the Russia investigation. “Absolutely,” he said, “it was not a hoax.”