GOLDA MEIR: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (Part of their series on the Palestine Israeli Conflict) (kindle) by Hourly History

Published by Hourly History in March of 2026.

Hourly History specializes in short biographies and histories that a reader can read in about an hour. They offer free samples every week (whole books!) so I now have several of their e-books on my phone so that I am never without something to read. 

To be honest, I didn't pick Golda Meir: A Life from Beginning to End on purpose. It was in my collection and when I was picking a new book to download my fat finger clicked on this book instead of a a different one. 

I decided to roll with it - I knew precious little about her except that she was an early example of a woman rising to political leadership of a country in the 20th century and she was one of the founders of modern Israel. Clearly I had plenty left to learn, even if I didn't become an expert on Golda Meir (1898-1978.)

I had assumed that Meir had emigrated to Israel/Palestine from Europe. Indeed, she was born in what is now Ukraine and later lived in what is now Belarus (both were then part of the Russian Empire.) I was surprised to learn that she moved to the United States and lived in New York City, Colorado, and mostly Milwaukee. In Milwaukee, she became an American citizen. Who knew Milwaukee public schools produced a Prime Minister of Israel?

Even when she was in elementary school, Meir was an activist and an organizer. She continued that on her entire life - she joined political discussion groups, became an ardent supporter of the Zionest movement, raised funds through speeches and debates, and eventually moved to British Palestine to start a kibbutz.

Meir (center) with President Nixon 
and his wife in 1973.

She was successful there - no one was more driven, but she was often sent back to the U.S. to raise funds. She became intimately connected with people on the ground in what would become Israel and the people that were supporting the Zionest movement around the world. She literally knew everyone that was imporatant to know in what would become the country of Israel in 1948 so she naturally was involved in its national political scene. 

This book creates a picture of a woman who sacrificed a lot of her family life in order to participate in politics, but that is subject to interpretation. I doubt anyone would nominate her for Wife or Mother of the Year, but it was obvious even in her elementary school days that was very much a woman dedicated to public issues and not so much into home life. She and her husband lived most of their married lives as in a state of separation. Most of the men in politics in Israel at the time probably had similar personal lives. 

In sum, this was not the most riveting read, but I learned a lot. I rate this short e-book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Golda Meir: A Life from Beginning to End.

VALLEY of the SUN (audiobook) by Louis L'Amour

Published in 2009 by Random House Audio.
Dramatized performance by a multicast.
Duration: 57 minutes.
Unabridged.

Legendary Western writer Louis L'Amour's (1908-1988) work has been packaged and repackaged in so many ways over the years. There is just so much of his writing to work with - short stories, novels, series of novels, and more. 

In the 1980s and 1990s it was pretty common to edit what would have been a 6 or 8 hour audiobook down to fit onto a cassette or two or three. The assumption was that people would not listen to long audiobooks, but these highly edited audiobooks were often difficult to enjoy - so much was taken out!

Someone at Random House Audio decided that this was a great way to take advantage of the multitide of Louis L'Amour short stories during those days to create a ton of Louis L'Amour one cassette audiobooks. You could tell the whole story without ahving to make confusing edits and you could make some money on the individual short story rather than a collection of stories. They used to sell a lot of these cassettes at truck stops.

L'Amour was all for it, but he insisted that the stories be performed like an old-fashioned radio play so that they would offer more value for the listener. At one point there was even a syndicated radio show featuring these stories.

Synopsis

In Valley of the Sun, the ranch foreman has set off to sell the first cows that have come from the fledgling ranch that he has struggled to get up and running. He was hired by a married couple, but he stayed on when the husband died. Secretly, he is planning to ask her to marry him when he returns.

But, he is ambushed by three men and left for dead in the middle of a desert...

My Review

This is a simple Louis L'Amour story and I mean that in the best way. There is a widow that needs help and a talented cowpuncher who was wronged and left for dead. The reader/listener is just waiting to see how the justice gets delivered. All in all, a good story. 

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Valley of the Sun.

THE BAT-MAN: FIRST KNIGHT by Dan Jurgens (Author), Mike Perkins (Artist)

Published in 2024 by DC Comics.

Synopsis.

The Bat-Man: First Knight is an alternative Batman story set in 1939. Gotham City is struggling - a lot of people are on the street due to The Great Depression, Nazi sympathizers are on the move, a crime wave is sweeping over the city, and someone is mudering the top city officials. 

Rumors of a crime-fighting vigilante are spreading across the city. He hides in the shadows and wears a costume that looks like a bat. Of course, it's our old friend - The Bat-Man with a slightly different take.

My Review

I really enjoyed this graphic novel. I found it at the library and checked it out on a whim. I almost didn't read it because I had just read Spider-Man Noir and I did not enjoy it. I figured if a Spider-Man comic can be too dark to enjoy, a Batman comic is naturally going to go darker and be even less enjoyable.

But, I gave it a chance and it turns out that it was a great read all the way around. The art is easy to follow, the story is coherent and it doesn't require any sort of special Batman knowledge.

There is one scene that's way over the top, but just that one scene. The rest of it makes sense, in a Batman sort of way. It's a good story and I was pleased to see that they released a second book in this series last year. 

I rate this graphic novel 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Bat-Man: First Knight.
 

BATMAN: SECOND CHANCES by Jim Starlin (Author, Artist), Max Allan Collins (Author), Dave Cockrum (Illustrator, Artist), Jim Aparo (Artist), Denys Cowan (Artist)

Published in 2015 by DC Comics.

Over the years, Batman has had multiple Robins. But there was a first replacement to the original Robin (Dick Grayson) and that was Jason Todd. He was first introduced in 1983, but was completely revamped as a part of the 1985-1986 Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline. 

Batman: Second Chances is a collected reprint of the original comics of the revamped post-Crisis on Infinite Earths version of Jason Todd. The collection includes how Todd and Batman met (the way they meet is literally on the cover.)

The first half of the collection is properly told as one big story, although DC kind of released the story in an odd way - they show Jason Todd in action before they tell how he becomes the new Robin.

Batman meets an orphaned street urchin named Jason Todd who literally was stealing wheels off of cars in order to sell them, including the Batmobile. In order to keep Todd out of trouble, Batman places him in a boarding school in Todd's neighborhood that is headed up by a sweet old lady who is known to be the only real advocate for the unfortunate people that live in the neighborhood.

Turns out that her boarding school was an advanced training academy for young criminals, including training in weapons, hand to hand fighting, and more.

Jason Todd runs away to avoid being bullied and having to commit major felonies, but tells Batman all about it when he is tracked down. Batman decides its time to start taking in youthful wards again and teaching them the family business.

Later, Todd finds out why he was orphaned and the fact that Batman had the truth. This should be a major trauma point, but Batman resolves it with two or three sentences. Batman should have been a therapist, even though he's been unsuccessfully dealing with unresolved trauma for almost all of his life. The whole thing was written in a very stilted way that just got wrapped up too easily. Plus, Two-Face seems much more like a goofy villain from the Adam West TV show rather than a supervillain of substance. 

Even weirder - the Batmobile keeps changing. Sometimes it looks like a Lotus Esprit (see the cover at the top) and sometimes it looks like a Corvette (see the panel just above.) To me, this just shows that the whole thing was put together in a clumsy way. That explains the unsatisying conclusion to Todd's trauma.

In a different comic, Jason Todd keeps making puns about a series of thefts. Batman and Commissioner Gordon are not amused. To me, it hearkened back to Adam West's Robin with his "Holy This" and "Holy That, Batman!" comments. Don't get me wrong, I love the Adam West series, but it's hard to take this character seriously when he does that.

The best story is issue number 414 "Victims!" In this story Batman gets to be an actual detective but he always ends up one step behind because of crime-fighting interruptions and his own presuppositions. For once, the World's Greatest Detective does not get his man.

The collection is up and down and ends up with a collected score of "meh." I rate this graphic novel 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Batman: Second Chances.

SPIDER-MAN NOIR: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION by David Hine (Author), Fabrice Sapolsky (Author), Roger Stern (Author), Carmine Di Giandomenico (Illustrator, Artist), Richard Isanove (Illustrator, Artist), Bob McLeod (Illustrator, Artist), Paco Diaz (Illustrator, Artist), Patch Zircher (Cover Art)

Published in 2019 by Marvel.

When people watched Sony's fantastic Spiderverse cartoon they were treated to the vision of multiple versions of Spider-Man teaming up to save the the world of Miles Morales. One of the most talked about versions of Spider-Man was Spider-Noir, a hard-bitten detective version of Spidey that was voiced by Nicholas Cage. Spider-Noir came with a trench coat and a fedora and lives in a black and white universe with dramatice lighting, much like a character in a Sam Spade movie. 

In the summer of 2026, Nicholas Cage played a live action version of that character in a popular streaming series and I was thrilled to discover that Spider-Noir wasn't just a character made up for the Spiderverse cartoons, but was actually part of an existing series of comics that reimagined multiple popular Marvel characters in the 1930s.

I got hold of Spider-Man Noir: The Complete Collection and eagerly jumped in - only to be disappointed.

I was not disappointed that the comic differs significantly from the streaming series - that kind of stuff is to be expected. For example, in the streaming series, there is no Peter Parker and everyone's superpowers are the result of a lab experiment gone awry. Marvel simply loves to imbue superpowers via bad science experiments.

The way Peter Parker receives his powers in the comic is much closer to how Madame Web receives her powers in the Madame Web movie. That was fine by me - it doesn't always have to be a lab accident.

What was not fine by me was the art in the original series was often unclear and extremely hard to follow. It is often too busy (see above.) Quite simply, it did not work in too many panels throughout the comic. The art was much better in the smaller follow up comics at the end of this collection.

Even worse, Peter Parker is not Peter Parker in this series. He isn't even like the Nicholas Cage version from Spiderverse movies and the streaming series. He is a humorless, angry character without much of a personality except that he wants to get the guys that killed his Uncle Ben and he wants the poor people of New York to get an even break during the Great Depression.

Those are both admirable goals, but one of the key features of Spider-Man in every comic, every movie series, and every TV show is that Peter Parker is funny and annoyingly enthusiastic. He runs his mouth non-stop and it irritates his opponents. If you remember in the Avengers: Civil War movie, Falcon even tells Spidey that he's talking too much while they're fighting each other.

In this comic, Spider-Man is dour, brooding, and definitely not funny. They're trying to really get into the "noir" vibe, but it would have been much more traditionally character appropriate to have everyone else be super serious while Spidey just runs his mouth and makes smart-aleck comments the whole time (this worked very well in Cage's streaming series adaptation.)

I rate this graphic novel 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Spider-Man Noir: The Complete Collection. 

FAULT LINES: A HISTORY of the UNITED STATES SINCE 1974 (audiobook) by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer

Published in 2019 by Audible Studios.

Read by Fajer Al-Kaisi

Duration: 14 hours, 47 minutes.

Unabridged. 

Kruse and Zelizer take a quick look at how we got to our current state of divided and disfunctional politics in Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974.

1974 was picked as a starting point because it was the end of the Vietnam War and the middle of the Watergate scandal - both highly divisive events of epic proportions.

The authors track multiple fault lines, including LGBTQ+ rights, the Equal Rights Ammendment, the Cold War, Monica Lewinsky, the fights over the Supreme Court nominees, 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Tea Party Movement, the Rise of MAGA, and more.

This is a tour through one politically charged moment after another, but it does offer a glimpse at the formation of the ever-widening fault lines in our country's political landscape.

Note: Since this is a political book, I would rate the perspective of this book to be center-left.

Note 2: the narrator of the audiobook mispronounced several names in this 14 hour audiobook. I never consider mispronunciations of names and places to be solely the fault of the narrator, Instead, I view that as the fault of the entire production team. They should be looking out for their narrators and double-checking pronunciations before they come to them during the reading of the book.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974.

BATMAN: UNIVERSE by Brian Michael Bendis (Author), Nick Derington (Illustrator)

Published in 2020 by DC Comics.

Synopsis

Riddler has stolen a Faberge Egg from the local museum. It looks like it's a throwback caper - the kind of thing Batman has been dealing with since the Adam West TV show days.

But, something is off about the case from the beginning. Riddler's riddle is just basic. Alfred calls it "so disappointing." Batman determines that Riddler was "being used" to pull of this crime and now he's got two mysteries to solve - find the egg and find out what's going on with The Riddler...

My Review

I really enjoyed this graphic novel. It literally went all over the place in both space and time. Batman interacts with a number of fellow supers - both heroes and villains. Their interactions are often funny and show good insight to their characters. It's a good story and a lot of fun. Plus, the art is very clear and easy to follow.

I rate this graphic novel 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Batman: Universe.