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Showing posts with the label Indiana

PALM SUNDAY: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COLLAGE by Kurt Vonnegut

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  Published in 1981 by Delacorte Press. Kurt Vonnegut offers this collection (he calls is a "collage") of fiction, non-fiction, interviews, and even a musical based on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  As is the case with all collections, some parts of the collection are excellent and some parts are not very good. I believe that he first half of the collection is the best, mostly because of the inclusion of a history of the Vonnegut family in Indianapolis. Ironically, it was not written by Vonnegut, but by a family member who had married into the Vonnegut family.  Indianapolis is my adopted hometown and this Vonnegut family history reads like a history of the city from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. I found it fascinating reading, especially the story of the subscription brothel gentlemen's club that was frequented by the city's elite in an area that still has political "clubs" with fancy dining and smoking rooms more than 100 years later. It would be tacky to pay

YOU SHOULD SEE ME in a CROWN (audiobook) by Leah Johnson

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  Published in 2020 by Scholastic Audio. Read by Alaska Jackson. Duration: 7 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: High School senior Liz Lighty is depending on a $10,000 music scholarship to be able to afford to attend the college she has always wanted to go to.  When she discovers that she doesn't get the scholarship, she's afraid her grandparents will sell their house to pay for her college. Her high school offers a $10,000 scholarship for the winner of the Prom Queen competition. Enthusiastic band member Liz, supported by her outsider group of friends, joins the competition against all cheerleaders, legacies, and the beautiful people... My Review: In a lot of ways, this is a typical high school ugly duckling story - the underdog great kid goes up against the popular clique. But, there are some additional nuances that make this more interesting.  The book is set in the Indianapolis area (Indianapolis is my adopted hometown) and the high school in the book (Campbell) is a

FIGHTER PILOT: THE WORLD WAR II CAREER of ALEX VRACIU by Roy E. Boomhower

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  Published in 2010 by Indiana Historical Society Press. Alex Vraciu (1918-2015) was a World War II flying ace, ranking fourth in the U.S. Navy in World War II. He destroyed 19 Japanese planes in the air and 21 on the ground.  This short book is very approachable and tells the story of Vraciu's childhood during the Great Depression in Northwest Indiana (now commonly known as "The Region") and his college years at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.  Vraciu took advantage of a U.S. government program that trained civilians to be pilots with the understanding that if the U.S. went to war those pilots would become military pilots. He trained in Muncie, Indiana and immediately joined the U.S. Navy after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Vraciu had a remarkable military career over the next 23 years. Besides destroying 40 Japanese planes, he lost multiple planes, including being shot down over the Philippines and leading a group of guerrilla figh

THE FREE FALL of WEBSTER CUMMINGS (audiobook) by Tom Bodett

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  Originally published in 1995 by Brilliance Audio. Read by the author, Tom Bodett. Duration: 15 hours, 43 minutes. Unabridged. The author and narrator. I think Tom Bodett's End of the Road series of short stories is just one of the best audiobook experiences out there. Technically, this book is part of that series even though almost none of it takes places in that oddball community of End of the Road, Alaska (it earned its name by being, well, the place where the road ends.) Bodett is well-known as a frequent panelist on the NPR show Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!   but he is most well-known for his voiceovers for Motel 6 in which he promised in his folksy way, " We'll leave the light on for you ." I say all of this just to say that this book was a major disappointment.  Everything about this book seems like it should work. It has a grounding in his Alaska stories. It consists of a series of short stories - his area of expertise. But, there is just way too much goi

UNDERGROUND AIRLINES (audiobook) by Ben H. Winters

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  Published in 2016 by Hachette Audio. Read by William DeMerritt. Duration: 9 hours, 28 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Underground Airlines is set in the year 2015 in an alternate historical timeline. This is a world where the American Civil War almost happened but did not. In the real historical timeline, an amendment to the Constitution called the Crittenden Compromise was proposed in December of 1860 as the first Confederate states were seceding. It preserved slavery, limited its spread and clarified the role of the federal government in returning runaway slaves. The Crittenden Compromise was not taken seriously by most people and it failed. In this alternate history, it was taking seriously because President-elect Lincoln was assassinated in Indianapolis as he was traveling to his inauguration in Washington, D.C. The shock of the assassination brought all of the states back together to negotiate and a version of the Crittenden Compromise passed. There was no Civil War and American

CAT'S CRADLE by Kurt Vonnegut

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  Originally published in 1963. Synopsis: Cat's Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut's fourth novel. The narrator is a writer who wants to tell the story of the first atomic bombing by telling what various people did that day. One of the people he is interested in is one of the creators of the bomb, a researcher named Felix Hoennikker.  Hoennikker has already passed away so the author reaches out to his three children and finds two of them. They describe a man with no real emotions. He is not a cruel man, he is utterly detached from everything except research.  During his interviews with a colleagues at the laboratory he worked at in Ilium, New York (also the setting for his first novel Player Piano , but these books are clearly not in the same time line) the narrator discovers that Hoennikker may have invented a more dangerous weapon than the atomic bomb - a substance called "ice-nine." Ice-nine was created as a simple thought experiment that came from an offhand comment from a

PONTIAC'S WAR: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

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  Published by Hourly History in 2021. Hourly History  publishes histories and biographies that you can read in about an hour. That can be a tough job for larger topics in history like "The Industrial Revolution" or "The Roman Empire" but it works out about right for this short war (1763-1766.) The war arose directly from unaddressed issues as a consequence of the French and Indian War (1754-1763.) In the French and Indian War, the American frontier became a battlefield. American settlements were wiped out, Native American villages were destroyed. French and English soldiers participated and ultimately agreed to a settlement that ignored the realities of the vast borderlands between the colonies and the Native Americans. The biggest issue was constant push westward from European (American) settlers into areas that were already inhabited by Native Americans. The colonies were all for this westward push, even if the British government was ambivalent or even against t

DEEP SLEEP (Devin Gray Book 1) (audiobook) by Steven Konkoly

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  Published in February of 2022 by Brilliance Audio. Read by Seth Podowitz. Duration: 10 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Devin Gray is a retired military operator working for a high-end private security contractor. He is on assignment that goes a little sideways in the D.C. metro area and he is sent away to let things cool off. While packing up to go, he is contacted about his mother. She is estranged from the rest of the family because she is always off researching a conspiracy theory, which is kind of ironic because she works in a government intelligence agency that looks for conspiracies. She is dead after some short of shoot out in Tennessee and everyone is keeping it quiet. Gray discovers a note from his mother to him with instructions. It turns out to lead to her evidence that proves the conspiracy and he finds it to be plausible enough to reach out to others. Once they start digging, they find more than it is worse than they ever imagined... My review:  I was excited ab

IF THIS ISN'T NICE, WHAT IS? (EVEN MORE) EXPANDED THIRD EDITION: THE GRADUATION SPEECHES and OTHER WORDS to LIVE BY by Kurt Vonnegut

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  Published in 2020 by Seven Stories Press. Edited by Dan Wakefield. Introduction by Dan Wakefield. Many of the well-known quotes from Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) were not actually in his novels - they came from speeches he gave (mostly) in the latter half of his career. Vonnegut became quite a popular deliverer of graduation speeches. And why not? He was witty, irreverent and sometimes came up with a great quote like this one: "Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody want to maintain it." (p. 230) The title of this book comes from a story that Vonnegut has included in other essays. Vonnegut had two uncles who responded very differently to his World War II experiences. His Uncle Dan congratulated Vonnegut for having gone to war as a boy and come back as a man.  His Uncle Alex was a different sort of man. The kind of man who encouraged everyone to notice the good things of life as they happen around us. "...when life was most agreeabl

CORYDON: THE FORGOTTEN BATTLE of the CIVIL WAR by W. Fred Conway

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  Published in 1991 by FBH Publishers. If you have ever traveled across Southern Indiana visiting historical sites like the Falls of the Ohio (a great fossil bed and a Lewis and Clark site), the Lincoln boyhood site and New Harmony then you have certainly seen a history written by W. Fred Conway. I know that the top-rated, best-selling history authors depend a lot on writers like W. Fred Conway in order to get the more popular, wider-audience histories written. Why? Because Conway is a fan of Indiana history and he has done a lot of research that big name historians would never have time to do simply out of a love for his local area. This is one of the many books he has written about Indiana, Kentucky and/or Ohio and life along the Ohio River. Conway knows his stuff. Unfortunately, there's not much of a story in the story of the Battle of Corydon. It was part of John Hunt Morgan's July 1863 into Union territory. The raid started June 11 in Tennessee and after more than 1,000 mi

SO COLD the RIVER (audiobook) by Michael Koryta

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  Published in 2010 by Hachette Audio. Read by Robert Petkoff. Duration: 13 hours, 33 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Eric Shaw is a down on his luck film maker who has moved back to Chicago from Hollywood. His marriage is on the rocks, he feels sorry for himself and he is making ends meet by making little movies out of family photos for funerals. He is good at his job - so good at it that he is offered a special job. A woman asks him to travel to French Lick, Indiana and research the early years of her father-in-law, an eccentric billionaire. The only clue he has is a strange bottle of Pluto brand mineral water, bottled in French decades earlier. The bottle seems to be forever cold and the water inside looks strange. Once Shaw arrives in French Lick the water is not the only strange thing he encounters... ******* My Review: This is good supernatural thriller. I did not realize this when I started listening because I had picked out this book because it was set in the French Lick area. I

INDIANA by Darryl Jones and Jared Carter

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Published in 1984 by Graphic Arts Center Publishing Company. This coffee table book is primarily a showcase of pictures highlighting beauty from all over the state of Indiana. The photographer is Darryl Jones and he has a good eye. Some of his pictures are truly great, most are solid and none are bad. There is not a single picture that could be construed as a negative one. The book is introduced by a rather lengthy essay by Jared Carter. The best part of the essay is his recollections of the days when he sat in the infield to watch the Indy 500. I am interested because I have gone to the Indy 500 for 35+ years. Scaffolding in the infield at the Indy 500. Note: this is NOT a picture from the book. Carter discusses how people would bring trucks to sit on in the infield so they could see the race better. Soon enough, people started sitting on the roofs of box trucks to get a better view. Not long after that, people would bring scaffolding and attach it to the truck and build a platform ab

INDIANA from the AIR by Richard Fields and Hank Huffman

  Published in 1996 by Indiana University Press and Indiana Department of Natural Resources. From 1993 to 1995 the two authors combined to take pictures of Indiana from an Indiana Department of Natural Resources helicopter - one was the pilot and one was the photographer. They chose 100 pictures of the state for this coffee table book. There are 92 counties in Indiana, but there is not a picture of each county. However, these pictures are a good representative sample of the state ranging from the Indiana Dunes on Lake Michigan to the fossil bed at the Falls of the Ohio. The pictures include urban areas, suburbs, small towns, farms and pictures of Indiana's understated beauty. There are no commanding views like the Grand Canyon or the Rockies, but it is beautiful in its own way. Since the book is more than 25 years old, it was interesting to note some of the changes. The Indianapolis skyline has changed with the addition of at least two very large buildings on either side of downtow

BLIND JUSTICE (Blake Justice Series Book 1)(kindle) by Mark Anthony Taylor

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Published by Mount Shasta Publishing (2nd edition) in 2021. Blake Justice is a detective in the Avon Police Department. Avon is a suburb on the west side of Indianapolis.  Blake is a massive physical specimen of muscle and no-nonsense serious intentions. He always wears his bullet-proof vest (even in church) and never goes anywhere without two pistols (once again, even in church).  Detective Justice is hunting down a group of thieves that are robbing local businesses. He is also on the lookout for a big-time drug dealer who is said to be moving operations into Avon. Meanwhile, Detective Justice has a new partner... ********* I bought this book because I saw an ad on Facebook. I live very close to Avon and am in Avon quite often and I am very familiar with the town and when I saw that the book was set in Avon I spent 99 cents and bought it. You can't go wrong at that price, can you? Turns out that you can go wrong with this book no matter the price. Some of the problems: 1) I was mo

JESUS LAND: A MEMOIR (Kindle) by Julia Scheeres

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  Published in 2005. Winner of the 2006 Alex Award from the American Library Association. Winner of the 2006 New Visions Nonfiction Book Award from the Quality Paperback Book Club. Note: I read because it is on a list of books that Republicans have asked to be banned in one way or another. I call it the  GOP Censorship List . More about that down below.  Julia Scheeres grew up in around Lafayette, Indiana. She grew up in a fundamentalist household. When she begins this memoir, she has older brothers and sisters who have moved out of the house and lives with her parents and two adopted brothers out in the country outside of Lafayette. Her family is unique in that her two adopted brothers are black and the rest of the family is white. The first part of the book deals with her horrible home and school life. At home, her father is mostly a distant figure. He returns home from work and dispenses discipline - often with great physical violence. These are not spankings - these are beatings wi

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

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  Published in 2016. This little biography is part of an extensive series of short histories produced by Hourly History. The idea is to be a history or a biography that you can read in an hour. Amazon says that his particular biography is the equivalent to 48 pages long.  Some historians have asserted that there are more biographies written about Lincoln than anyone else in history, with the exception of Jesus. This is the 73rd book that I've reviewed that with the #tag of "Abraham Lincoln." What does this book have to offer that literally thousands of biographies and histories haven't already covered? To be honest - nothing. But, it is exactly the sort of biography that someone who hates history might pick to read because it is not an intimidating length and it is not written in highfalutin language.  There is nothing in this biography that is inaccurate, just a matter of what the Hourly History people decided to highlight and emphasize. I rate this kindle book 3 sta

THE ANTHROPOCENE REVIEWED: ESSAYS on a HUMAN-CENTERED PLANET (audiobook) by John Green

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  Published in 2021 by Penguin Audio. Read by the author, John Green. Duration: 10 hours, 3 minutes. Unabridged. This collection of essays is, from what I understand, mostly a re-working of essays that Green has published on his blog or his YouTube channel. However, they were all new to me because I haven't seen more than a few snippets of his videos that my oldest daughter has shown me.  I know a bit about John Green because I live in Indianapolis, which is my adopted hometown just like it is John Green's adopted hometown. Green doesn't go out of his way to make his presence felt in his adopted hometown, but he is our current well-known author, replacing Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) with a completely different kind of vibe. Vonnegut gives off a whip-smart angry feeling with sarcasm to spare. Very clever. Green gives off a smart, understanding melancholy feeling. Just as smart as Vonnegut, but different. Vonnegut grew up here and moved away. He was always proud to be FROM In

OPIOID, INDIANA by Brian Allen Carr

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  Published in 2019 by SOHO Press. I received a gift card from a book store and I decided to get this book by a local author for several reasons: 1) it is set in my area; 2) it deals with the opioid crisis; 3) I like to encourage local authors.  Riggle is 17 years old and lives in a town in central Indiana and suspended from high school for a week due to a suspension for having a vape pen at school. His week won't be used to lay around in bed or play videogames, though.  Riggle lives with his uncle, his sole guardian after the deaths of his parents and his uncle has gone missing. His uncle's live in girlfriend (not much older than Riggle) has no idea where his uncle is. This is not necessarily an unusual thing - he has been know to abuse substances and go on all night benders, but he's been gone for too long - and the $800 in back rent is due on Friday. If it is not paid, they will be evicted in the middle of winter.  Riggle has been given two tasks by his uncle's girlf

TRUST: AMERICA'S BEST CHANCE (audiobook) by Pete Buttigeig

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  Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in October of 2020. Read by the author, Pete Buttigeig. Duration: 4 hours, 46 minutes. Unabridged.   Pete Buttigeig was, for me, the most interesting Democrat that sought the 2020 nomination. The first I ever heard of was a lengthy interview he gave on NPR when no one on the national level had ever heard of him. I found him to be thoughtful and serious and open to new ideas and discussion.  This book is a short discussion on how politics (and life in general) depends on a certain level of trust to proceed. There is nothing really new here, but it is a worthwhile discussion and it is good to hear it reiterated in a time when trust is so short. To his credit, Pete Buttigeig doesn't feel the need just to stretch out a book just to pad the number of pages. At the end of the audiobook is a recording of Mayor Pete's speech where he announces that he is ending his Presidential campaign. I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on

THE GOOD KILLER (audiobook) by Harry Dolan

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  Published in 2020 by Highbridge, a division of Recorded Books. Read by James Patrick Cronin. Duration: 9 hours, 15 minutes. Unabridged . Sean Tennant and Molly Winter are living under assumed names around Houston, Texas. They are in hiding (the story eventually lets the reader know why) and live off of the grid as much as possible.  Tennant is a retired soldier who served a very rough tour in Iraq. He still has the skills that helped him survive: he is hyper-vigilant and always carries a weapon and tourniquet. On a trip to the mall to buy a new pair of boots a man attracts his attention. When he moves away, Tennant is relieved. When the man opens fire in a clothing store, Tennant leaps into action. He kills the shooter and saves a mother's life with his tourniquet.  And he runs because he knows he will be on the news and the people who desperately want to find Sean and Molly will be coming... I am a big fan of what I call "the chase book." That is a book where the hero