Posts

Showing posts from September, 2021

UNOFFENDABLE: HOW JUST ONE CHANGE CAN MAKE ALL of LIFE BETTER (audiobook) by Brant Hansen

Image
Published in August of 2015 by Tantor Audio. Read by the author, Brant Hansen. Duration: 4 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged. Brant Hansen came to a realization that righteous anger, an emotion that a lot of my fellow Christians seem to adore should not actually be a tool in the Christian toolbox. It's on display all over social media and at public events like the current spate of contentious school board meetings. For example, recently a former member of 2 Contemporary Christian bands was seen at the forefront of a mob that was menacing people in the parking lot after a school board meeting. He yelling, "You can live freely, but we will find you!" at medical personnel who testified in favor of masks. He became the story and all Christians got a black eye as Taliban-type extremists.  The author, Brant Hansen Instead, Hansen is trying his best to take the words of God seriously when he says  to avoid anger. Here are 20 verses that give that counsel. He describes the change

10 DAYS (Dee Rommel Mystery #1) by Jule Selbo

Image
  Published by Pandamoon Publishing in August of 2021. Synopsis: Waterfront in Portland, Maine Dee Rommel is at a crossroads of her life. She is on leave from the police department of Portland, Maine because she lost half of one of her legs on duty. After months of diligent physical therapy (and less then diligent psychiatric therapy) she is being pushed to decide if she is coming back to work or not. She has been helping her godfather Gordy, her deceased father's best friend. He is a private detective and she feels very comfortable with the paperwork and the billing. When Gordy takes some time off to donate a kidney in Florida, a situation arises. One of Gordy's lifelong friends urgently needs help now and Dee is asked to step in and do some investigating while Gordy is down and out from the surgery. The friend is a famous billionaire named Claren - Maine's version of Bill Gates. A local boy who made it big in the tech business. Claren's twenty-something daughter is al

DOOKU: JEDI LOST (audiobook) by Cavan Scott

Image
  Published in 2019 by Random House Audio. Performed by multiple readers. Duration: 6 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged . Part of the new Disney "canon" books, Dooku: Jedi Lost is a look at the origins of one of the characters of the Star Wars prequels - Count Dooku. It is part of a series of "stand alone" books. For me, Dooku just shows up in the movies with a minimum of explanation - not nearly enough.  We learn a lot more about him in the Star Wars: Clone Wars cartoon show but not enough for me. Dooku is interesting as the original model for Anakin Skywalker - the talented Jedi who often argues with the Jedi Council and eventually falls to the Dark Side. This book tells little about Dooku's activities during the Clone Wars. Even though it is set in the first half of the Clone Wars cartoon series, that is mostly a frame that is used to lead the reader through a series of flashbacks that tell about Dooku's early life. The use of all of the flashbacks was anno

NOTHING to LOSE (Jack Reacher #12) (audiobook) by Lee Child

Image
  Published by Random House Audio in 2008. Read by Dick Hill. Duration: 14 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. I think that I have worked my way through all of the Jack Reacher novels and short stories over the last 5 years. This is the last one (I think). I read them all out of order, but fans know that that is okay since they were never written in order in the first place. Sadly, this was one of the weakest of the entire very large collection.  Reacher is travelling from Maine to San Diego just to see the country. He notes that Colorado has two towns with interesting names very close to one another: Hope and Despair. The author, Lee Child. Hope is a pleasent enough place with a hardware store and a hotel and diner. Reacher decides to hike to nearby despair and is immediately arrested for being a vagrant. Technically, he is a vagrant. He has no job, no fixed address and no plans to acquire either.  Despair locks him up (after a bit of a fight) and runs him through a kangaroo court, finds h

FORGET the ALAMO: THE RISE and FALL of an AMERICAN MYTH (audiobook) by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford

Image
    Published in June of 2021 by Penguin Audio. Read by Fred Sanders. Duration: 12 hours, 15 minutes. Unabridged. This is the second book that I have read because a governor took steps to keep people from hearing about the book. The story of the first is detailed here .  In the case of this book, the Governor and especially the Lt. Governor of Texas had an event featuring a discussion of this book removed from the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, Texas. They acted in early July of 2021 because they were not happy about how it questioned the way the history of the Alamo (in San Antonio, Texas) is traditionally taught at the Alamo itself and in textbooks, classrooms, movies and books. Here is the text of the Lt. Governor's Tweet from July 2, 2021: " As a member of the Preservation Board, I told staff to cancel this event as soon as I found out about it. Like efforts to move the Cenotaph, which I also stopped, this fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place @Bull

A LOT of PEOPLE ARE SAYING: THE NEW CONSPIRACISM and the ASSAULT on DEMOCRACY (audiobook) by Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead

Image
  Published in April of 2019 by Princeton University Press. Read by Katherine Fenton. Duration: 6 hours, 49 minutes. Unabridged The key to this book is to understand the difference between a conspiracy theory and the new conspiracism.  Conspiracy theories are the classic hobby of odd people that we all know. They collect reams and reams of information to prove that the lunar landings were faked, that LBJ had JFK killed, or to prove that 9/11 was an inside job. They work very hard to prove their point. They collect video evidence, find paper trails, produce flow charts and maybe have a wall dedicated to showing how all of the data points connect. There is a logic to conspiracy theories, even if most people find them weird.  The new conspiracism is often incoherent because it demands no logic - it depends on being repeated over and over again and a strong assertion that "people are saying" it is true. There are no documents that back it up. There are no elaborate theories. Just