THE RUNAWAY (Peter Ash #7)(audiobook) by Nick Petrie

Published by Penguin Audio in 2022.
Read by Stephen Mendel.
Duration: 11 hours, 35 minutes.
Unabridged.

The Runaway is the seventh book in the Peter Ash series. Ash is a retired Marine with PTSD issues and an intense desire to help people in need. Sometimes he settles down, sometimes he wanders.

In this book, Ash is crossing the country and is near the border of South Dakota and Nebraska. He comes across a broken down car and a very pregnant young lady. She is desperate to get going down the road so he takes her. 

They get a few miles down the road when they come across a truck blocking the road. They turn around and find another truck blocking the road and leaving them nowhere to go. The hitchhiker tells Ash that he is in very grave danger and he should flee...

My review:

For a book full of action, thrills, and mayhem, this book was often tedious. 

********Spoilers********

The pregnant young lady is a victim of gaslighting and, eventually, kidnapping. The process was long and very detailed. I think that there was simply too much emphasis on this part of the book. 

I don't know if it was intentional, but it is worth noting that literally every male character was a criminal, a murderer, a misogynist, or simply incompetent except for Peter and his friend Lewis. I doubt it was intentional, but it just seemed like the entire Great Plains countryside was full of literal bad guys.

*********End Spoilers*********

Sadly, this series has gotten weaker for me. I rated the first five books 4 or 5 stars, but I have rated the last two books as 2 stars. I will move on to the next book and hope for the best. 

One last thought. Despite what you will read in this book, healthy, well-fed coyotes do not hunt humans. 

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Runaway by Nick Petrie.

YOU'LL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED to LACEY: CRAZY STORIES ABOUT RACISM by Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar

 

Published in 2021 by Grand Central Publishing.
Read by the authors, Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar

Duration: 5 hours, 21 minutes.

Unabridged.

Amber Ruffin is a writer for Seth Meyers' late night show and she has a show on the Peacock streaming service. I have never watched her show (nothing against her - I just can't keep up with all of the platforms out there) but I have run across video clips on social media. Ruffin's style is very quick and very clever. In this book, she doesn't get into sexual topics or anything that a lot of people would find objectionable.

Except for the racism. There is a lot of racism. Just tons of it.

Amber Ruffin (left) and Lacey Lamar (right)

Lamar and Ruffin are sisters. They grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. And, they are African Americans. Ruffin moved away to New York City and has made a living in comedy. Lamar stayed in Omaha and has worked in health care.  The premise of the book comes from Lacey Lamar's habit of texting Ruffin when she runs across a racist comment, racist act, racist note or just plain old racists. Usually the stories start with, "You'll never believe what happened..."

Ruffin would read these to her friends and everyone said that she needed to collect this seemingly non-stop stream of texts and put into a book. So, they did.

There's not a lot of stories of extremely overt racism, like someone screaming, "N*****!" at people in the middle of the street in some old Civil Rights Era black and white video. Sadly, there are some things like that, though - like the guy that insisted multiple times that he didn't have to install air conditioning in his commercial kitchen because all of the employees were "Africans" and were built to take the heat.

Instead, there's a lot of what might be called microagressions. Lots of people assuming and commenting on their beliefs that Lamar didn't have a father growing up, people assuming Lamar grew up in poverty, can't afford nice things, has never been to nice resturant, etc. 

Ruffin and Lamar point out how ridiculous the comments are, why they are racist and the reality of things with a lot of charm and grace. It is an entertaining, upbeat book, despite the topic. If you think about it, it is quite the accomplishment to keep up that tone in the book and in life. 

Sadly, the people that read the book are not the ones that really need to read it, but we've all got some tightening up to do. Life's tough enough without going out of our way to make it tougher on each other. It's also tough enough that we should thing twice before making certain assumptions and comments.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: YOU'LL  NEVER BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED to LACY: CRAZY STORIES ABOUT RACISM by Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar.

TRESPASSING ACROSS AMERICA: ONE MAN'S EPIC, NEVER-DONE-BEFORE (and SORT of ILLEGAL) HIKE ACROSS the HEARTLAND (audiobook) by Ken Ilgunas

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2016.
Read by Andrew Elden.
Duration: 7 hours, 44 minutes.
Unabridged.

In 2012, Ken Ilgunas embarked on a 1,900 mile hike from the beginning of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline in Alberta, Canada to its terminus on the Gulf Coast of Texas.  He did this because he is opposed to the pipeline and is very concerned about the expanded use of fossil fuels, the environmental damage caused by the mining of oil sands and the potential for spillage from the pipeline. Along the way, he blogs about his experiences with his iPad in the hopes of creating a little buzz about the topic.

He was inspired to do this by a series of conversations he and a friend had during a stint in the kitchen at a Prudhoe Bay oil drilling site. They were going to hike the entire length together, but his friend begged off and fell into a support role, occasionally mailing him food and replacement pieces of equipment and boots (he went through 3 pairs of boots on this hike).

Ilgunas got off to a late start and began hiking as Canada was going into winter, meaning that he faced cold weather and snow almost all of the way through his hike. He tried to follow the path of the pipeline as much as possible in order to save time and to cut back on the amount of miles he would have to walk. The pipeline starts out with a south-east direction and he often walked along its proposed path through pastures and empty fields for miles. The new pipeline will follow a smaller pipeline route that currently exists in many places so it was pretty easy to follow. Other times, he stuck to the roads, especially when the pipeline takes a more due south path in the United States. That is because most roads in Plains states run north-south or east-west, like a giant checkerboard.

He meets a lot of animal life, including moose, coyotes, lots of dogs and cows. Lots and lots and lots of cows. He almost gets killed in a cattle stampede at one point.

Different states have different personalities, it seems. In Canada (yes, I know Canada is not an American state, but just go with it), no one seems to care where he walks. Montana and South Dakota have lots of no trespassing signs, but no one really seems to care much. Ilgunas becomes a mini-celebrity in Nebraska, despite a rough start where he is escorted out of the county (well, almost all of the way) by a deputy on the orders of the sheriff. Those few miles are the only part he didn't walk. He attends an anti-pipeline rally, gets a few local media interviews and for the rest of his hike in Nebraska he is welcomed as the "guy who is hiking the pipeline".

In Kansas, however, his celebrity status evaporates and he gets consistently hassled by the police. He is asked for his ID in Kansas more than he is on the rest of his trip combined.  Oklahoma depresses Ilgunas. It has a massive pipeline junction -  a place that should be well off since everyone says pipelines bring jobs. In his mind, the town where all of the pipelnes meets is the saddest town on his whole hike. 

Keystone Pipeline construction in South Dakota

Along the hike he usually avoids discussions of the topic of global warming since this is a very conservative area that doesn't buy into that theory. As he hikes, he is consistently told that the pipeline will create lots and lots of jobs, but he literally doesn't meet a single employee except at the very end and at the very beginning. But, people across Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas swear that it will create jobs all along the way.

Ilgunas doesn't really have an answer to the problem of petroleum's ubiquitous role in our society. His tent, his hiking poles, his shoes, and his iPad all have plastic made from petroleum in them. Nor does he address how radically more expensive energy will affect the poor. He talks about how the Ogallala Aquifer is being depleted by its use to make farming on the Great Plains possible. But, he doesn't talk about how that food would be replaced if we didn't farm on the Great Plains.

It's not that I necessarily disagree with any of his points, but the lack of answers, or even suggestions, by Ilgunas is frustrating.

The area he hikes through is certainly part of the Bible belt and Ilgunas finds his anti-Christian bias challenged by the number of people who offer to help him. He points out that only one person evangelized him (a creepy minister in Oklahoma), but the other people of faith shared their food, their homes, their electricity to charge his devices, their wi-fi and their time because they genuinely loved helping others. Ilgunas would arrive in town and search up the local pastor for help in finding a place to pitch his tent. Often, they offered spare rooms, floor space in the church and even once in a loft area in the sanctuary. This made a much more profound impact than the perfunctory hardball Christian sales pitch he received from the minister in Oklahoma.

Andrew Elden read this book and did quite a good job.

When I started listening to this book, I quickly tired of Ilgunas' writing style, which really should be described as an over-writing style. He over-described everything and really tried too hard to create a mood for every scene. Either I got used to it, or he cut back on it. It's not a perfect book, but I do give this book 4 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: TRESPASSING ACROSS AMERICA: ONE MAN'S EPIC, NEVER-DONE-BEFORE (and SORT of ILLEGAL) HIKE ACROSS the HEARTLAND  by Ken Ilgunas.

 

ZOO NEBRASKA: THE DISMANTLING of an AMERICAN DREAM (kindle) by Carson Vaughan

Published in April of 2019

Royal, Nebraska is a town of 81 people and an abandoned zoo. In 1987, Dick Haskin brought a chimpanzee named Reuben to his hometown in Nebraska in hopes of starting the Midwest Primate Center to continue the research of his slain hero, Dian Fossey.

But, the funds for the primate center never materialized. He wasn't interested in starting a zoo but, over time, he ended up with an odd collection of animals - tigers, wolves, llamas and more. Eventually, he accepted the fact that he had a zoo and changed the name to Zoo Nebraska. In absolute terms, it wasn't much of a zoo, but it was a heck of a thing for rural Nebraska. Even famed TV talk show host (and Nebraska native) Johnny Carson got in the act and donated a lot of money to upgrade the chimpanzee habitat (he felt that kids in rural Nebraska needed this kind of opportunity, even if it was a limited one).

But, it was not ever financially viable. Taking care of exotic animals in expensive and labor-intensive. The pool of volunteers was limited and there were never enough tickets sold to hire enough help. And, that's where this story takes a long, sad turn for the worse that ends up with 4 chimpanzees escaping and tearing through the zoo and the town in 2005. Three of them were shot and killed and the zoo closed two years later.

This book looks into the small town politics that dogged the zoo its entire life. For me, that was the worst part of the book. It seemed like an endless parade of people with hidden agendas and it made the last 2/3 of the book a real chore to read. 

Because of that, I rate this book 3 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: ZOO NEBRASKA: THE DISMANTLING of an AMERICAN DREAM by Carson Vaughan.

A WANTED MAN (Jack Reacher #17) (audiobook) by Lee Child

Published by Random House Audio in 2012
Read by Dick Hill
Duration: 14 hours, 11 minutes
Unabridged

In A Wanted Man, Jack Reacher is stuck in Nebraska. He is hitchhiking his way across the country to Virginia to physically meet the woman he met over the phone in 61 Hours. He has having a hard time getting a ride, though, because his nose is broken and it is taped over with a shiny piece of silver duct tape and it makes his already-menacing look even more menacing. He finally gets picked up by two men and a woman in a sedan and they are off to Chicago on the lonely interstate in the middle of the night.

But, things don't seem right to Reacher. The woman is uncomfortable, he has caught the most talkative man in two obvious lies and they get stopped by two different roadblocks. Something is up.

Meanwhile, the action flashes back to a old small town Sheriff and a young female FBI agent who are trying to coordinate a search for two men who are suspected of killing a person with ties to the State Department and a missing cocktail waitress. So far, the suspects have slipped through two different sets of roadblocks...

I was torn by this book. The opening drama of Reacher being trapped in the car with the bad guys was actually quite interesting. The interplay between the FBI agent and the sheriff was excellent. But, the way Reacher figures it out the exact situation (or, at least close enough for the early part of the book) is stunningly unbelievable. The locale of the climactic scene, when it come to pass (no spoiler, I promise) is a play off of the situation in another book that it makes me wonder if Lee Child had come up with two possibilities for the other book and decided to recycle his previously discarded choice in this book.

On the other hand, Reacher's funny comments are plentiful and spot-on. 

Dick Hill does a great job reading Jack Reacher. He gets the pacing of Lee Child's writing style and does a great job with accents and even gives Reacher a stuffed up nose sound the entire book because of his broken nose.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5 for too many giant leaps of logic for Reacher and the "recycled" location from an earlier book.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: A Wanted Man by Lee Child.

NPR CLASSIC DRIVEWAY MOMENTS: RADIO STORIES THAT WON'T LET YOU GO (audiobook)

Published in March of 2010 by HighBridge Audio
Multicast Performance
Duration: 2 hours

NPR Classic Driveway Moments is a collection comprised of 13 stories (and one intro track) culled from 31 years of NPR radio stories (1979-2010). Most of these stories have depth but not all are equal. 

I was profoundly moved by a story called "My So-Called Lungs" featuring a young woman starting college while struggling with cystic fibrosis. It was engrossing on multiple levels and my high school-aged daughter and I were captivated by the woman's honesty, grace and humor in the face of inevitable death. 

On the other hand, the story "Death of a Child: Losing Adam", featuring a child who was dying from a terminal illness just felt intrusive and maudlin. 

The interview with George Foreman was interesting and quite enjoyable, although NPR being NPR, they found a way to bring a downer note to it by tying the George Foreman grill into it and interviewing homeless people who used it as a cooking appliance of last resort.

The collection ends with a great story, undoubtedly exaggerated, about 2 friends hitch hiking across Nebraska in the 1970s. "Hitching a Ride with Junior McGee" is a great short story told well and is a good way to finish the collection.

Note: this collection is up and down, but the strong stories are very, very strong and are worth listening to.

I rate this collection 4 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon here: NPR Classic Driveway Moments: Radio Stories That Won't Let You Go