A Milestone: 1,000 Reviews



I have suffered with abibliophobia for years (the Kindle App on my smart phone has allowed me to work with this problem quite well). I have successfully passed it on to my children - and I think this is important because of the following thought:


And for those who wonder how I could have ever read so many books...



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

HAILE SELASSIE: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
Published in 2021 by Hourly History. Haile Selassie is one of those men that shows up here and there in a detailed histories of the twentieth century, but I didn't know much about him beyond his determined stand against colonialism before and after World War II. This small e-book filled in a lot of blanks for me. The Hourly History series consists of biographies and histories that take about an hour to read and, to be honest, this book filled in a lot of those gaps for me - enough that I probably won't look into Haile Selassie any further. The biography tells the story of Selassie's privileged, very connected upbringing in a monarchial Ethiopia. Selassie used those connections to push his way to the top, but also to tried to modernize his country in order to protect it from European colonization. Imperial Japan did something similar 50 years earlier (not a connection made in the book - just an observation from a history teacher that took a couple of Japanese history classes...
Read more

A PAPER ORCHESTRA (audiobook) by Michael Jamin

Image
Published in 2024 by 3 Girls Jumping. Read by the author, Michael Jamin. Duration: 9 hours, 39 minutes. Unabridged. Michael Jamin is a professional Hollywood screenplay writer. He works in television, working on comedy shows like King of the Hill, Just Shoot Me, and Tacoma FD . In the afterword he talked about his desire to write something more than TV shows. He wasn't unhappy with writing screenplays, but he wanted to branch out.  The stories in A Paper Orchestra are from Jamin's life. Some are funny, some wistful, some very sad. As a group, they all have the feel of NPR's Moth Radio Hour  - but instead of having a variety of performers, it is all from the same man. Jamin read the audiobook. In the afterword, he and his wife talked about how they worked together so that he could perform these stories live on stage. She is an actress and she helped him with presentation style - and I think she was successful at it. I worked my way through this audiobook rather slowly. At ...
Read more

SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
  Published in 2024 by Hourly History. Hourly History's telling of the events of September 11, 2001 is surprisingly well-told for a history that is supposed to take a person about an hour to read.  Is this a complete history? Hardly. Why not? Read the first paragraph again. But, it gets all of the elements across in broad strokes - the motives of the  hijackers, the reasons for their targets, and the mass casualties - but not as bad as they could have been thanks to the bravery and professionalism of the NYPD and FDNY. The book moves on to discuss the aftermath, including tearing down the remains of the buildings, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, beefed up airport screenings, and the invasion of Afghanistan in order to search for the Osama Bin Laden and other terrorists responsible for the attacks. All of it is tied up neatly in a bite-sized e-book that younger readers (not kids, but younger adults that simply don't remember 9/11) could read to grasp t...
Read more

MEDICAL MYTHS, LIES and HALF-TRUTHS: WHAT WE THING WE KNOW MAY HURT US by Dr. Steven Novella

Image
  Published by The Great Courses in 2013. Presented by the author, Dr. Steven Novella. Duration: 12 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. Dr. Steven Novella addresses common questions and misconceptions that people often have about medicine.  The topics covered range from the very serious (like cancer, for example) to the relatively lightweight (do caffeinated drinks actually do anything to hydrate a person?). Novella explains the science behind each of his discussions in everyday language and his demeanor is more like that of a friend than that of a lecturing authority figure.  As in all books of this sort, there were parts that I was keenly interested in and parts that I didn't care a whole lot about. But, on the whole, this book is well worth your time. I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  MEDICAL MYTHS, LIES and HALF-TRUTHS: WHAT WE THING WE KNOW MAY HURT US by Dr. Steven Novella.
Read more

THE FAITHFUL SPY: DIETRICH BONHOEFFER and the PLOT to KILL HITLER by John Hendrix

Image
Published in 2018 by Amulet Books. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is well-known as one of the few ministers who stood up to the Nazis and kept his ministry completely independent of the totalitarian regime. Eventually, his principled stand led to his death in prison. Along that path there was a point where he closed down his ministry and used his connections to get a position in military intelligence. At first, this sounds like he totally gave in to the Nazis. However, it turns out that the military intelligence and the Nazi intelligence departments were completely separate entities and they did not get along very well. Bonhoeffer used that mistrust and friction to his advantage - he sent intelligence to the Allied powers, he helped with plans to sneak Jews out of Germany. These were easy actions on a moral level - if you believe the regime in charge of your country is evil, you will work against it. But, the more Bonhoeffer thought about it, the more he considered taking more decisive action...
Read more

Alpha Girls: Understanding the New American Girl and How She Is Changing the World by Daniel J. Kindlon, PhD

Image
Rings true to this classroom teacher Published in 2006 by Rodale Books. As a classroom teacher that first came into the profession at the height of the Reviving Ophelia type of research done by Mary Pipher. I have participated in classes, seminars and training sessions about how girls are being short-changed in the classroom and in our culture. It was not until I ran across some research I was doing in my Master's Degree program some 15 years later that my eyes were opened to a new possibility: the girls are, on the whole, doing just fine. The boys, on the other hand, are falling by the wayside in heart-cringing numbers. Go to any public school and you can just about guarantee that 7 or more of the top ten will be girls. Look at the special education numbers and 7 out of 10 will be boys. Dan Kindlon 's Alpha Girls: Understanding the New American Girl and How She Is Changing the World does not address what is going on with boys, but it does look at a relatively ...
Read more

The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin, Jr.

Image
Originally published in 1978. Winner of the National Book Award The Book of the Dun Cow is a simple fable of Chauntecleer, a rooster. He is in charge of a small animal kingdom and is confronted by the evil Cockatrice, a half snake/half rooster who is the son of the devil, an evil serpent that is trapped beneath the surface of the earth but is trying to get out to destroy God's creation. The book revolves around the efforts of the animals to come together to confront the evil threat and the costs that such action entails. It also has much deeper themes such as the nature of love and forgiveness. I really was not looking forward to reading this book - in fact, I only picked it out of my pile of books because I thought that I had remembered a friend had read it while we were in high school. Much to my surprise, however, I loved it. It was well-paced and the main characters had depth. I recommend this book enthusiastically. I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. This book can be f...
Read more

ME, the MOB and the MUSIC: ONE HELLUVA RIDE with TOMMY JAMES and the SHONDELLS (audiobook) by Tommy James and Martin Fitzpatrick

Image
Published by Tantor Audio in 2010. Read by David Colacci. Duration: 7 hours, 51 minutes. Unabridged. I heard about this book in a memorable interview with Tommy James on the old Dennis Miller radio show when this book came out nearly 10 years ago. It was one of the best radio interviews I have ever heard and I am not even a giant Tommy James and the Shondells fan. So, when I came across the audiobook I knew I had to listen to it - and I was not disappointed. For those not familiar with Tommy James, he is responsible for the songs "Hanky Panky", "Mony Mony" and "I Think We're Alone Now". He had two #1 hits and 14 Top 40 hits overall. He started his music career as a middle school kid in Niles, Michigan performing in bars and fraternity houses and pretending to be old enough to be in bars and fraternity houses. They did a lot of work in South Bend and Lake County in Indiana and eventually got regular work in Chicago. They even released the song ...
Read more

THE REST I WILL KILL: WILLIAM TILLMAN and the UNFORGETTABLE STORY of HOW a FREE BLACK MAN REFUSED to BECOME a SLAVE (audiobook) by Brian McGinty

Image
  Published by HighBridge in 2016. Read by Sean Crisden. Duration: 4 hours, 19 minutes. Unabridged. At the beginning of the Civil War, the Confederacy authorized ships to be privateers. Privateers are basically pirates with the explicit backing of a government. The idea was to authorize as many ships as possible to attack Union shipping as part of the Confederate war effort.  William Tillman (c. 1834-?) One of the early victims of these attacks was the S.J. Waring , a ship out of New York City bound for South America. On July 4, 1861 the ship was attacked, captured, and most of the crew was taken off the Waring to the privateer ship but they did leave a few people behind, including the ship's cook - a free black man named William Tillman.  The privateers made it very clear that they were going to sell Tillman in the slave market in Charleston and Tillman was not going to let that happen... Unfortunately, there just isn't a lot of information about William Tillman - eithe...
Read more

CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
  Published in 2022 by Hourly History. The short histories produced by Hourly History are designed to read in about an hour. In some cases the size limit makes for a very incomplete history. In this case, I thought that topic and the size limit matched up pretty well. This e-book details from the beginning (spoiler alert: John Sutter of Sutter's Mill fame was clearly not a good guy) and details the good as well as the bad of the Gold Rush. Turns out there was a lot of bad, such as environmental destruction on an unprecedented level (they used mining techniques that were outlawed just a few years later. How obviously bad were they if people who let children into mines said that these techniques are clearly out of bounds?!??)  The white miners also used genocidal techniques to wipe out the local Native American populations, killed Chinese immigrants that came across the Pacific to find gold and, of course, jumped the claims of other white miners and killed them. All of the gold...
Read more