HISTORY MATTERS (audiobook) by David McCullough. Edited by Dorie McCullough Lawson and Michael Hill.

Published in 2025 by Simon and Schuster Audio.
Read by John Bedford Lloyd, Dorie McCullough Lawson, and David McCullough.
Duration: 5 hours, 59 minutes.
Unabridged.

David McCullough (1933-2022) was a prolific historian, a two time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a winner of the National Book Award. He was proud to be known as a writer that wrote smart, well-documented histories that were aimed at general audiences. 

McCullough was also known as well-respected narrator. You may know him as the narrator of Ken Burns' Civil War documentary miniseries. 

McCullough's daughter and his researcher put together this book as a collection of speeches, letters, and essays that were previously unpublished or only published in small publications. For example, he wrote a nice little essay for a local public library about his family's tradition of giving books at Christmas. 

Dorie McCullough Lawson introduces every entry in the collection, often including some context about her father's interest in the topic or why he gave a speech to this or that particular group. Sometimes, they are just annotated lists of books that McCullugh really liked (he was a man that liked to make lists) or speeches about authors that he admired.

Most of the readings were by narrator John Bedford Lloyd, but there are a couple of instances where there was a recording made of McCullough himself giving the speech.

There are a variety of topics, including Harry Truman, George Washington, and the time that a young McCullough really wanted to make a suggestion to then-candidate John Kennedy about a topic to include in his campaign stump speech. I was pleased to note that he mentioned three authors that I really like as authors to emulate - Bruce Catton, Michael Shaara, and Dr. Suess. 

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: History Matters by David McCullough.

Robert F. Kennedy: A Life from Beginning to End (kindle) by Hourly History

 

Published in 2024 by Hourly History.

Robert F. Kennedy is remembered largely as a tragic lost opportunity due to his assassination as he was running for President in June of 1968 at the age of 43.

Hourly History specializes in short biographies and histories that a reader can read in about an hour. 

In this case, Hourly History has provided a lively, balanced biography that does not hide Kennedy's warts, but also lets the reader know why so many people had high hopes for him as he was mounting a late campaign for the Democratic nomination for President in 1968.

I rate this short bio 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Robert F. Kennedy: A Life from Beginning to End (kindle) by Hourly History.

MATA HARI: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

 

Published in 2019 by Hourly History.

When I was a kid, people would mention Mata Hari whenever a woman in the news or in a story was supposed to have seduced men in order to obtain secret information. I didn't know anything about her besides that. I wasn't even sure she was a real person. If she was real, I didn't even know if she had actually done any spying or stealing of secrets until I ran across this short biography.

Mata Hari was indeed a real woman. She has a reputation of being a seductive woman from the Far East, but she was actually born in the Netherlands. She started out in a prosperous family, but they came upon hard times and she married an older military officer who was stationed in the Far East. 

When she returned to Europe she divorced her husband (he was abusive) and took on the character of a seductive dancer from the Far East and performed in shows. The shows started out small, but soon moved into larger and larger venues. She became famous, if not infamous, for her sexually charged dances (remember this is the early 1900s, so they were wild stuff for the day, not necessarily nowadays.)

Her story was always one of finding a rich man to take care of her and falling back on the exotic shows when the relationship with her patron went sour. Over time, her shows had smaller audiences because she was aging and other women were doing similar shows. 

When World War I broke out, she mostly ignored it. She crossed borders at will and sought favors from officers on both sides. It was rumored that she had contracted with a German officer to seek information from a French officer. She was captured and executed by the Allied powers despite scant evidence. 

Was she a spy? Maybe. Was she just trying to make a little money and not really serious about being a spy. In my opinion, probably. 

I rate this short e-book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Mata Hari: A Life from Beginning to End. 

NO COUNTRY for OLD MEN by Cormac McCarthy

 

Originally published in 2005.

Most people know this No Country for Old Men only as the 2007 movie from the Coen Brothers that won Academy Award for Best Picture. 

My father handed this book to me before he went off on his annual snowbird pilgrimage to Arizona and I finished it this morning.

Synopsis

In 1980, near the Texas-Mexico border scrublands, a hunter named Llewelyn Moss comes across a murder scene. There has been a shoot out and a fortune of drugs and money is left among the dead and dying Mexican drug dealers. Moss takes the immense amount cash, inexplicably returns for the drugs and the drug dealers begin to track him down, looking for the money.

The cartel sends out Anton Chigurh to retrieve the money. Chigurh is a true psychopath who relentlessly tracks down the money and kills almost everyone who can identify him to law enforcement. A second bounty hunter is dispatched to retrieve the money and possibly kill Chigurh who is leaving bodies all over the place and has a shoot out with acual members of the cartel as they close in on Moss.

An older sheriff tracks them all down and ponders the true meaning of his life and career as he sees his massive county become a war zone.

My Review

This book has a fantastic reputation, and I am not sure why. To me, this book has all of the hallmarks of a book that is popular because it should be. There is a Pulitzer Prize winner. The book is written in an intentionally odd stream of consciousness style, perhaps as an homage to William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. 

There is not a single quotation mark to be found in this book. Not one. I found this style to be annoying and difficult to follow because I couldn't tell if the character was thinking or talking to another person.

The chapters are sometimes numbered, sometimes not. I couldn't perceive any rhyme or reason to it.

Some chapters are printed in italics, some are not. I couldn't perceive any rhyme or reason to that, either.

I often found it hard to determine which character the chapter was about - the sheriff?, Moss?, Chigurh?, the bounty hunter?, Moss's wife? - until I was two or three paragraphs into the chapter. 

Maybe it was on purpose, designed to make the reader uncomfortable. Maybe not. Maybe it was a simple case of laziness as McCarthy had originally written the book as a movie screenplay and later adapted it into a novel.

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5. I know this isn't anywhere near what a vast majority of people would rate this book, but I just cannot see what they find so appealing about this book.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.

RACING the LIGHT (Elvis Cole / Joe Pike 19) (audiobook) by Robert Crais

 

Published in 2022 by Brilliance Audio.
Read by Luke Daniels.
Duration: 7 hours, 55 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis

In Racing the Light, private investigator Elvis Cole is hired by a worried mother to find a missing podcaster that often deals in conspiracy theories. His mother is obviously very rich, since she comes to the office with a chaufer, two bodyguards (or "helpers" as she calls them) and a second car to serve as a "chase car" (extra protection hidden among the traffic of Los Angeles.) She suspects he was kidnapped because like her son, she is also extremely paranoid and prone to conspiracy theory thinking.

Everyone else thinks her son has run off to Las Vegas with a porn star he recently interviewed, but they are worried that he could get into a different kind of mischief and just needs to come home as soon as possible.

Elvis Cole starts digging and finds a lot of unexpected danger.

My Review

Over the last year I have gone out of my way to go back and systematically read all of the books from this series that I had missed. I thought I had read almost all of the Elvis Cole / Joe Pike novels, but it turned out that I missed almost half of them.

I went back and got the missing ones in order from earliest to latest and this one was the last one. It was also the weakest one due to all sorts of extra plot details that don't really go anywhere and maybe were intended to allow the opportunity for an extended commentary on the dangers of modern surveillance technology such as drones, hidden listening devices, and cameras.

All of this tech is impressive, but it gets outdone by nosy neighbors, tailing people in cars, random witnesses, and a doofus writing his pass codes on a piece of paper in an obvious place. Maybe we shouldn't be worried. Maybe we should - we can't depend on luck and the skills of someone like Joe Pike all of the time.

Parts of this book were excellent - such as top notch Elvis Cole wisecracks followed by Elvis Cole being a top notch human being when people just need someone to be there and say nothing. But, there was just as much stuff that seemed to be nothing but filler. 

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. One of the weaker books in this overall excellent series.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Racing the Light by Robert Crais.

Reflections on the Civil War by Bruce Catton. Edited by John Leekley.

Would Serve as an Excellent Introduction to the Civil War

Originally published in 1981.

Bruce Catton (1899-1978) was the top Civil War historian throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. His particular skill was not uncovering new research or having particularly keen new insights, although he did help move the Lost Cause narrative out of the mainstream. He was, first and foremost, a historian with a real gift for writing for the regular reader. He broke down the complex things and made them understandable and interesting.

Reflections on the Civil War was published after Catton passed away. It was pulled largely from tapes of Catton discussing various aspects of the Civil War and then edited by John Leekley. Leekley co-created the Civil War mini-series The Bue and the Gray with Catton.

Catton starts out with the standard discussion of what caused the war and then moves into other topics like why men joined up, daily life for the soldiers in the war, the  was like for the men, how the two armies geared up for the war (mostly as it was already being fought), and more before he gives a short summary of the war. 

Union General Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885)

The last section concerns some drawings that had recently been uncovered. A young man joined the army in the first rush of enthusiasm after Fort Sumter and had decided to draw everyday pictures of camp life. He was hoping to sell them to newspapers or magazines as part of their war coverage. It turns out that he could not sell any because they were simply too mundane - not enough action and too much regular camp life. Of course, that makes them solid gold for historians.

Catton took the extra step - he researched the soldier and told about his experiences in the war based on the young soldier's writings and regimental histories. I thought this was going to be tedious, but it turned out to be the best part of the book.

This book is very well done. Like I noted before, the book was edited from audio recordings of Catton's lectures and question and answer sessions. He knew his topic so well and the book just flows wonderfully. 

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Reflections on the Civil War by Bruce Catton. Edited by John Leekley.

ZACHARY TAYLOR: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (Biographies of U.S. Presidents)(kindle) by Hourly History

Published by Hourly History in 2025.

Hourly History specializes in histories and biographies that take a reader about an hour to read. It seems appropriate length for Zachary Taylor, the President with the third shortest time in office (just 16 months).

Taylor had a short and rather vague political career, but his military career was rather lengthy. He fought against the Shawnee under future President William Hentry Harrison on the frontier in the War of 1812 in Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. 

He fought in the Black Hawk War and served in what would later become Minnesota and Wisconsin establishing and upgrading a series of forts. Later, he fought the Seminoles in Florida and served as the overall commander of American troops in the War. 

He is most famous for his service as one of the two main generals that led the invasion of Mexico in the Mexican War. Taylor crossed from Texas into Northern Mexico, fighting a series of battles, eventually winning the Battle of Buena Vista in February of 1847. That battle cemented his reputation in the American mind and catapulted him to the Presidency in 1848, despite never having voted before and not really having political opinions that alligned strongly with any political party at the time.

On a personal note - one thing Taylor did have going for him was a working knowledge of the what was the American frontier at the time, having served or lived in Texas, Arkansas, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Taylor was a slave holder but was against the expansion of slavery into the territories taken from Mexico. he knew from personal experience that the climate of those areas were completely incompatible with the plantation style of slavery he practiced at his plantation in Mississippi. 

As I already noted, Taylor took ill in the summer of 1850 and died, probably due to some sort of food poisoning or a form of cholera. This book doesn't look much into the "what ifs" of a longer Presidency for Taylor who was pro-slavery, strongly anti-seccession, and against the spread of slavery. Could he have been the political figure that worked out a great compromise that would have prevented the Civil War?

I rate this short e-book 4 stars out of 5. It's pretty good, considering how short it is. It can be found on Amazon.com here: ZACHARY TAYLOR: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END by Hourly History.