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PATHOGENESIS: A HISTORY of the WORLD in EIGHT PLAGUES (audiobook) by Jonathan Kennedy

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  Published by Random House Audio in April of 2023. Read by the author, Jonathan Kennedy. Duration: 9 hours, 23 minutes. Unabridged. Kennedy presents a compelling argument that disease has had a profound impact on world history by just telling a history of Europe from the days of cavemen up until now. The first 45 minutes or so of this audiobook seemed to be wandering around and not going anywhere, but Kennedy was laying a strong foundation for the rest of the book. The book makes it painfully obvious that humanity has bounced from one biological disaster to another. Humanity has adapted (either by behavior - like building sanitation systems to deal with body waste to control cholera) or biologically by simply having a large body count until those with immunity can rebuild (the Black Plague is a prime example.) Kennedy persuasively argues that infection and disease helped the rise of Christianity, the rise of Islam, the end of feudalism, the rise of capitalism, and the European conques

GOD IS NOT ONE: THE EIGHT RIVAL RELIGIONS THAT RUN the WORLD - and WHY THEIR DIFFERENCES MATTER (audiobook) by Stephen Prothero

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Published in 2010 by HarperAudio. Read by Paul Boehmer. Duration: 14 hours, 37 minutes. Unabridged. Stephen Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University. The purpose of the book is to inform the reader of the eight greatest world religions, their philosophies and their way of looking at the world. Prothero is very aware that choosing just eight religions is fraught with problems. How do you choose? Is it based on influence? Number of adherents? Importance of the countries it is in? He went through all of those questions again once again when he chose the order he would present the religions he picked. The religions he profiled are: Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Judaism, Yoruba religion, and Daoism. He spends about 90 minutes discussing each religion and includes nearly an hour on Atheism at the end, on the theory that militant Atheism (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens) behaves much like a religion, complete with evangelistic movements an

DESTINY DISRUPTED: A HISTORY of the WORLD through ISLAMIC EYES (audiobook) by Tamim Ansary

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Published in 2009 by Blackstone Audio. Read by the author, Tamim Ansary Duration: 17 hours, 28 minutes. Unabridged. Tamim Ansary has done something that is very hard to do - he has written a long history of a complicated topic without making it boring and after more than 17 hours of discussion, he left me wishing that it was even longer. Ansary makes the observation that most histories that people in the West (Western Europe and the Americas) read are written from a Western perspective. That makes sense. But, the history of the world is not just the history of Western Civilization. There are multiple civilizations on the planet. Mesoamerica (the Mayas, Aztecs, Toltecs, etc.) is a separate civilization. China is the historic center of another civilization. So is India. And between the West and India and China is another one. Westerners usually refer to it as the Middle East. This book is a history of that civilization from the beginning of recorded history (empires like Bablyon) to

LANDS of LOST BORDERS: A JOURNEY on the SILK ROAD by Kate Harris

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To be released on August 21, 2018 in the United States by Dey Street Books. Kate Harris and her childhood friend Mel decided to go on a bicycle adventure that approximates Marco Polo's trip along the Silk Road from Turkey to China. This is not a trip taken on a whim. Harris has read about explorers and dreamed about being an explorer all of her life. She's a scientist by training but she can't stand to be in a lab - she has to get out and see the world. Actually, she started out wanting to go to Mars and actually went so far as to participate in a Mars simulation complete with spacesuits out in the Utah desert.  The simulation told her one important thing - being in a space suit denied her the tactile experience of exploration such as the wind in your hair and the smells. So, rather than Mars, she decides to go to one of the most remote areas of the world, for a couple of Canadians - Central Asia. It has vast deserts, literally the tallest mountains in the world and ar

A SHORT HISTORY of the WORLD (audiobook) by Christopher Lascelles

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Published by Tantor Audio in 2016. Read by Guy Bethell. Duration: 7 hours, 20 minutes. Julius Caesar (100 B.C. to 44 B.C.) Unabridged. The entire history of the world is less than 7 and 1/2 hours? Yep, that's what Christopher Lascelles purports to offer in his A Short History of the World . He acknowledges that this is not a complete history - he never intended it to be. Instead, his aim is to connect some of the dots that the average reader may have picked up in history class, movies and History Channel documentaries (and hopefully spark a bit more interest). Lascelles does succeed in hitting many of the high points and certainly does a better job at not being as Eurocentric as other short world histories have been, such as A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich. Lascelles spends quite a bit of time discussing China, Japan, India and Mongolia. All that being said, there are entire civilizations that are ignored or get nothing more than a passing nod. That is al

JOSEPH ANTON: A MEMOIR (audiobook) by Salman Rushdie

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Published in 2012 by Random House Audio Duration: 26 hours, 59 minutes Read by Sam Dastor Unabridged For most people, Salman Rushdie is, and will always be, that author that the Iranians tried to have killed all of those years ago. I freely admit that this is an accurate description of me. Although I am an avid reader, this is the first Salman Rushdie book that I have even contemplated reading.  Salman Rushdie. Photo by Andrew Lih. Rushdie narrates this autobiography in the third person, which is a little weird and gave me the impression that he is trying to distance himself a bit from his own story. The biggest chunk of Joseph Anton tells about how Rushdie dealt with the fatwa , or ruling against him and his book The Satanic Verses by the leader of the Iranian Revolution himself, the Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini ruled that the author, the publishers and the editors of the book should die for blasphemy and that anyone who died in an attempt to kill them would be consid

1453: THE HOLY WAR for CONSTANTINOPLE and the CLASH of ISLAM and the WEST (audiobook) by Roger Crowley

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EXCELLENT! Unabridged Audio Edition Published in 2016 by Hachette Audio and Blackstone Audio Read by Simon Prebble Duration: 10 Hours, 56 Minutes When Rome was at its height, it split itself in half and created a second capital for the eastern half in Constantinople (modern day Istanbul). The eastern half survived the official "Fall of Rome" in 476 AD and continued on for nearly 1,000 more years until it succumbed to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. It was the seat of the Orthodox Christian Church and oftentimes stood as the bulwark against Muslim military advances into Eastern Europe. From the time of the first formal attack against Constantinople in 674 AD until it finally fell in 1453, the capture of this city was, at the least, on every Muslim leader in this region's "to do" list, if not an active goal. Once the Ottoman Turks arrive on the scene the Byzantine Empire is clearly on its last legs. The city is still defended by one of the most elaborate set

A LITTLE HISTORY of the WORLD (audiobook) by E.H. Gombrich

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Published by Blackstone Audio in 2006 Translated by Caroline Mustill and E.H. Gombrich Narrated by Ralph Cosham Duration: 9 hours, 14 minutes Unabridged E.H. Gombrich (1909-2001) As the title states A Little History of the World is a small history of, well, everything. Sort of. This history was originally written in 1935. The author was an unemployed art historian and was asked to write a history of the world for children for an Austrian publisher. The first edition was written in six weeks and it sold well and has sold consistently ever since. Gombrich retained the rights and after World War II set out to keep it updated and translated it into multiple languages. He was working on translating it into English when he died in 2001 at the age of 92. The work was finished by others and no one is quite sure how exactly he was planning on ending it. The chapter on early man is quite memorable in that it gives early men and women a lot of credit for figuring out a lot of importa

YOU'VE GONE TOO FAR THIS TIME, SIR! (kindle) by Danny Bent

Published in August of 2014 by Danny bent, Ltd. It took me a long time to read this book. I read it over the course of several months on my Kindle and on my phone's Kindle app.  The book details the trip of a teacher from the UK who rides his bike from the UK to India in an effort to raise money for charity and to teach his kids something. I really struggled with the first part of the book because the author seemed so self-absorbed and I never really understood how he was going to raise money for a charity by riding and as a fellow teacher I seriously did not get how this trip was going to do anything for his students besides do show everyone that he could do this outrageous thing.  So, I struggled through the first half of the book because I kept on coming back to the premise behind his trip and wondering about it (how is he raising this money? Is it by the kilometer? Is it a lump sum and will be donated so long as he makes a solid effort? These are the types of question

CHINESE TURKESTAN: A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY THROUGH an ANCIENT CIVILIZATION by Ryan Pyle

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Published by Ryan Pyle Productions in 2014 Photographer Ryan Pyle has traveled extensively throughout China and India, Luckily, he brings his camera along and takes plenty of pictures.  This book focuses on the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the most trackless part of the old Silk Road that has connected Europe and China off and on for well more than 2,000 years. The Uyghur are Muslim and their large but sparsely populated homeland lie at the crossroads of Islam and secular Communist China. Their territory touches Tibet, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Mongolia. What Pyle calls Chinese Turkestan is often at odds with the rest of China. The Uyghur are Muslim while China actively promotes secularism. China seems bent on modernizing as quickly as possible but the Uyghur sometimes seemed locked in the past. As Pyle notes in his introduction, "There were many occasions when I stood in a crowded marketplace, enveloped in the early morning haze of coal smoke a

LION of BABYLON (Marc Royce #1) (audiobook) by Davis Bunn

   Published in August of 2011 by Christian Audio Read by Paul Boehmer Duration: 10 hours, 40 minutes Unabridged Veteran writer Davis Bunn (also known as T. Davis Bunn) is known for writing Christian historical fiction and Christian thrillers. Lion of Babylon  is a Christian thriller centered on an intelligence operative named Marc Royce.  Royce is one of the best of the best but he has recently been forced to retire due to the petty whims of his boss, a well-connected adviser to presidents of both parties. But, one Sunday after church Royce is picked up and offered the chance to return to his job in order to investigate the disappearance of one of his closest friends who was on assignment in Iraq. Even though Royce knows almost nothing about the Middle East he is sent to Iraq to solve this mystery. Once there, Royce is immersed into a world of intrigue and double-dealing. Royce discovers that his friend is involved in a lot more than anyone ever suspected and all sorts of

A CALL to ACTION: WOMEN, RELIGION, VIOLENCE, and POWER (audiobook) by Jimmy Carter

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Published in 2014 by Simon and Schuster (AUDIOWORKS) Read by the author, Jimmy Carter Duration: 6 hours, 33 minutes Jimmy Carter and I have a strange relationship. Don't get me wrong, the 39th President and I have never met and are not likely to. I think that his presidency was, on balance, a well-intentioned mess and his post-Presidential career has been a mix of amazing achievements (Habitat for Humanity, for example) combined with annoying commentary and self-intervention into areas where he was not invited (ask Bill Clinton what he thinks of Carter's self-appointed mission to North Korea during the Clinton Administration). This book only re-affirms my impressions of Jimmy Carter. I admire his religious faith and his intimate knowledge of the scriptures. I also admire his willingness to learn about other faiths and the fact that he teaches in his church's Sunday school. His work through the Carter Center has also been a mixed bag of amazing work against poverty

SNIPER ELITE: ONE WAY TRIP (audiobook) by Scott McEwen with Thomas Kolonair

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Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2013. Read by Brian Hutchinson. Duration: 10 hours, 8 minutes. Unabridged. Author Scott McEwen co-wrote American Sniper , the auto-biography of famed SEAL Chris Kyle and from those contacts and the stories he heard he was inspired to write this fictional story of American special forces in Iran and Afghanistan. The insignia of the Navy SEALs This is really three separate operations deftly told as three separate stories with overlapping characters and a little overlap when they get back to base. The first operation is the insertion of a lone operative into Iran to kill a weapons designer. McEwen uses this fairly straightforward story to introduce the weapons and other equipment that will be used throughout the book. The second and third operations deal with a captured American female helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. She is part of a unit that inserts and extracts special forces all of the time so the men feel a real connection to

THE SECRET SOLDIER (John Wells #5) (audiobook) by Alex Berenson

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Published by Recorded Books in 2011. Read by George Guidall Duration: 11 hours, 23 minutes Unabridged This is my first John Wells book. For those not in the know, John Wells is a former CIA agent who is also a Muslim (if not a particularly devout one when it comes to all of the formalities). He now freelances, sometimes working with the CIA, sometimes not. The first part of The Secret Soldier deals with John Wells tracking down a former operative in Jamaica and bringing him back to the United States. I am unsure as to why this was included in the book - it had nothing to do with the rest of the story except to establish that John Wells is burned out and is unsure about the life of violence that he has led.  The heart of the story involves a plot against the royal family of Saudi Arabia. Wells is hired by the King  of Saudi Arabia himself to investigate a series of terrorist attacks within Saudi Arabia. As Wells investigates he discovers that the source of these attacks may

Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians by Raymond Ibrahim

Published in 2013 by Regnery Publishing, Inc. Raymond Ibrahim's Crucified Again is at once alarming, shocking and tedious. The book documents attacks by Muslims on Christians, Christian churches and Christian organizations throughout the world, especially in predominately Muslim countries. Ibrahim uses newspaper articles and TV news programs that are printed and broadcast in Arabic and, thus, largely ignored by Western media as a source. He also uses regional Christian newspapers and  magazines and newspapers from organizations that document human rights abuses. He then proceeds to methodically list instance after instance of anti-Christian attacks from Nigeria, to Egypt to Indonesia. Ibrahim starts with a short overview of the history of Muslim/Christian relations in majority Muslim countries.  He lists the Koranic verses that are used to justify persecution of Christians (and all other faiths) and then demonstrates how it is done again and again and again. This is where

Blowback: A Thriller (Scot Horvath #4) by Brad Thor

Based on some dubious assumptions Published by Pocket Books in 2006. Brad Thor's thriller Blowback delivers as far as the international thrills and chills go. Main character Scot Harvath is a counter-terrorism expert on the tail of an Al-Qaeda operative who catches wind of something new - a plague that is being resurrected from the ancient past to be used against all non-Muslims. Harvath pursues his leads across Europe and the Middle East - that part is lots of fun. I have issues with Thor's treatment of Muslims and his main thesis. **SPOILER ALERT** Every Muslim in the book, with the exception of two, is either a brazen hypocrite or a crazed religious fanatic. One of the good Muslim is killed by the virus being spread the fanatics and the other is shot by the hypocrites. There are literally dozens of Muslims in the book - and only two are decent people? Thor's book rests on the premise that the Ottoman Empire is trying to resurrect itself by usin

What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East by Bernard Lewis

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Not the best of Bernard Lewis Published January 24th 2002 by Oxford University Press, USA Hardcover, 192 pages I've read two other books by Lewis and found both of them to be much more comprehensive and satisfying than this one. My dissatisfaction stems from the title. The title What Went Wrong? implies a discussion of how the Islam world went from being the most advanced culture on the planet to one of the most insular and, in many ways, most backwards cultures on the planet. While such a discussion is implied, it is barely touched upon in the body of the book. Lewis finally gets to this general topic in his conclusion. He notes, "By all standards that matter in the modern world-economic development and job creation, literacy and educational and scientific achievement, political freedom and respect for human rights - what was once a mighty civilization has indeed fallen low." (p. 152) Bernard Lewis

Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me by Geert Wilders

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Published in May of 2012 by Regnery Publishing Geert Wilders is a member of the Dutch Parliament and the the leader of the third largest political party in the Netherlands, but he is forced to live his life under protection. Since 2004 he has to have armed protection every day, everywhere he goes because of multiple death threats from extremist Muslims. His crime? He dared to take the threats to Western freedom seriously when, in 2004, Muslims killed Theo Van Gogh (a filmmaker whose film Submission criticized the treatment of Muslim women. Van Gogh was stabbed multiple times and a note was stuck to his body with a knife explaining why Van Gogh was murdered) Muslims rioted over the famed Muhammad cartoons in 2005, when they threatened to kill politicians who question why there are "no-go" zones that have basically been ceded to Muslims. Wilders believes that Islam is more than a religion, it is a totalitarian political ideology that has no tolerance of dissent and is m

How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too) by David P. Goldman

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An interesting, disorganized read Published 2011 by Regnery Publishing David P. Goldman's Why Civilizations Die is an ambitious study in demographics, history and cultural legacy that attempts to predict the future of Western Europe, the Middle East and the United States. In a way it is a less humorous  version of Mark Steyn's After America , except that Goldman takes in the same data and comes up with radically different conclusions. Goldman is writes a monthly column under the pseudonym of Spengler at Asia Times Online , a fact that Goldman assumes his readers know before they open the book and a fact I did not know (it's on the dust cover, but I had set aside the dust cover). I kept wondering who Spengler was and why Goldman was quoting him so liberally and did not get the joke until the second-to-last page of the book. Throw in a chaotically arranged beginning to the book with lots of wonderful points arranged in an apparently random fashion and this reader was

After America: Get Ready for Armeggedon by Mark Steyn

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"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop" The above quote is from the economist Herbert Stein. Besides being a clever little bit of the obvious, a Yogi Berra-type quote, it is also part of a scary thought about America itself that Mark Steyn points out in After America - America cannot keep doing what it is doing forever and hope to lead the world - it will stop. It cannot keep  borrow 40% of its budget forever and hope to keep its economy afloat or offer its children a decent future. America cannot hope that a post-America world will be pleasant - as Steyn notes on page 14 "...it's not hard to figure out how it's going to end." After America: Get Ready for Armageddon is really the sequel to America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It a book that details how low birth rates, a general cultural malaise and a nanny state stupor threatens to overwhelm the same countries that once led the world in political, military and cultural might. N