SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL by Kurt Vonnegut and Ryan North.

Adapted by Ryan North.
Illustrated by Albert Monteys.

Graphic novel published in 2020 by Archaia. 
Original novel published in 1969.

This is my third review of Slaughterhouse-Five. I've reviewed the audiobook, the written novel, and now the graphic novel. 

All are different, of course. I've given 5 out of 5 stars to every version, but the graphic novel is the weakest of the three. It's a good graphic novel, but it seemed a little thin when compared to the novel. It's good for its medium.

I'm not going to review the plot of one of the most famous anti-war books of the last century - it's too well-known for that. Vonnegut can be weird, but he's always approachable. He writes in an friendly, easy to follow style, no matter if it is the audiobook, the written novel, or this graphic novel.

But, if the very idea of reading this book intimidates you, read the graphic novel. It hits the main plot points and it would certainly support you if you went ahead and read the novel at some points afterwards.

I very much enjoyed the style of the art in this graphic novel. I think Albert Monteys did an exceptionally good job of making the art clear, clean, and easy to follow. Let's face it, the story goes all over the place - the art did not need to add to the confusion. I really liked the way he drew the Tralfamadorians.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Slaughterhouse-Five: The Graphic Novel.

Note: This book has been challenged multiple times over the last 50 years for sexual content, foul language and teaching principles contrary to the Bible. Amazingly, it has stayed on "banned books" lists for more than 50 years. The graphic novel is no different. It made a banned book list in Florida and in Missouri and other places as well (Texas, Utah, and Iowa - to name a few.)

Note: This book was put on book ban lists in Tennessee in multiple counties in 2025. The article has a searchable database because the list has more than 1,100 unique titles

To its credit, the Vonnegut Museum in Indianapolis has a history of sending free copies of Slaughterhouse-Five to students at schools where the book has been banned.

THE HARLEM HELLFIGHTERS (graphic novel) by Max Brooks.

Published by Del Rey in 2014.

Illustrated by Caanan White.

Synopsis:

The Harlem Hellfighters is Max Brooks' history of an all African American unit (the 369th Infantry) that fought on the Western Front alongside French units. They mostly came from New York.

This unit was allowed to fight precisely because they were assigned to a mostly French army. The American army would not let African Americans fight and had originally used the 369th as laborers, alongside civilian laborers.

The French were in need of immediate manpower. French white soldiers already had experience fight alongside regiments of soldiers from their African colonies and were eager to bring American troops to the front, no matter their color.

The 369th spent more time than almost any other American unit on the front lines. They may have spent the most time on the front lines. They were the first Allied unit to reach the Rhine River. 

Legend has it that the nickname "The Harlem Hellfighters" was given to the unit by their German foes.

They were among the first units to return to the United States and were given the honor of marching in a tickertape parade in New York City.

My Review:

The story that Max Brooks tells in this graphic novel is a little herky jerky. He tells the story with plenty of emphasis on individual soldiers, the terrible conditions on the front, and the racism they experienced. But, the overall plot of the war is rather poorly told.

The biggest reason that I am giving this book a rating of 3 stars is the illustrations. I truly dislike the art style. I found it distracting and hard to follow. There were details that are included that just filled the page and often made it difficult for me to figure out what I was supposed to be looking at. I bought this graphic novel from an online source without having seen the art. I hated it so much that I didn't read this graphic novel for nearly 7 months. 

Note: The publisher says that this book is aimed at children 8-12 years old. I believe that all of those ages are too young. It has graphic depictions of the violence of trench warfare. There are bullets blasting though heads, spraying bloods and brains across the page. There is a depiction of a bayonet going into someone's mouth and coming out the back of his skull. 

To be clear, I DON'T have a problem with showing the war as it really was. I DO have a problem with showing an eight year old a soldier being vaporized by an artillery shell. I would give this book a PG-13 rating.

This graphic novel can be found on Amazon.com here: The Harlem Hellfighters by Max Brooks.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut

The first edition cover

Published with the alternate title "The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death."
Originally published in 1969.

Listed in Time Magazine's 100 Best Novels Since 1923.

Slaughterhouse-Five is the most famous, most celebrated, and most controversial novel of Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007.) 

My synopsis:

The book serves as a memoir to Vonnegut's horrific experiences as a prisoner of war in World War II and as a sci-fi exploration of the concept of time travel. 

Vonnegut's very green unit was rotated to the front in December of 1944 in order to give experienced combat troops a break. The weather was bad, the terrain was bad, and the Germans had been retreating regularly. It was presumed that the Germans would be content to settle in to winter quarters, rest, refit, and pick up the fighting in 1945. 

Instead, the Germans launched a surprise offensive and what followed was the Battle of the Bulge. Lots of Americans were captured and taken back to Germany to be prisoners of war, including Kurt Vonnegut. Eventually, Vonnegut was taken to Dresden to work. The main character of this novel, Billy Pilgrim, was also captured and eventually taken to Dresden.

At Dresden, in February of 1945, Billy Pilgrim and Vonnegut were firebombed along with the rest of the city. The prisoners of war survived because they were being housed in partially underground slaughterhouse for hogs (the hogs had long ago been consumed.) They were in slaughterhouse number 5. 

Where Pilgrim and Vonnegut's stories separate is the sci-fi portion. At the beginning of the book we are told that "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." 

Pilgrim is sliding back in forth in time along his own timeline. He can do nothing to change events, he just keeps sliding back and forth. 

My review:

Vonnegut graded his own books in his book
Palm Sunday. I agree with his assessment of 
Slaughterhouse-Five.

This is the second time I've read this book. This time around I really paid attention to the non-science fiction parts of the book and looked for the connections to Vonnegut's own life. Chapter One practically screams for the reader to do so, but I did not the first time around.

This time, I could really see that Vonnegut was working through his wartime experiences through the story of Billy Pilgrim and his own story as the narrator. 

I was struck by the passage describing the condition of the American prisoners of war as their overloaded train car waited on the tracks for a turn on the tracks:

"Even though Billy's train wasn't moving, its boxcars were kept locked tight. Nobody was to get off until its final destination. To the guards who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators. It talked or sometimes yelled through its ventilators, too. In went water and loaves of black-bread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language.

Human beings in there were excreting into steel helmets which were passed to the people at the ventilators, who dumped them. Billy was a dumper. The human beings also passed canteens, which guards would fill with water. When food came in, the human beings were quiet and trusting and beautiful. They shared."

Vonnegut in 1965.

What struck me was that there in the middle of the most destructive war in human history, enemies were taking care of their enemies like decent people. Later in his career Vonnegut would make the same point with this comment in his book A Man Without a Country:  "A saint is a person who behaves decently in a shocking indecent country."

Vonnegut's trademark humor and clever new ways of saying the same old things abound in this book. Here is his commentary on a female character: "She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. Men looked at her and wanted to fill her up with babies right away."

And there it is in a nutshell. This is Vonnegut's masterpiece. It is profoundly sad. It is funny. It is a memoir. It is sci-fi. And so it goes.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. 

Note: This book has been challenged multiple times over the last 50 years for sexual content, foul language and teaching principles contrary to the Bible. Amazingly, it has stayed on "banned books" lists for more than 50 years. At one point, it was referred to a prosecutor to see if the school was distributing pornography to students. The prosecutor said that it was "not in violation of criminal laws." See this site for more information.

Note: This book was put on book ban lists in Tennessee in multiple counties in 2025. The article has a searchable database because the list has more than 1,100 unique titles

To its credit, the Vonnegut Museum in Indianapolis has a history of sending free copies of Slaughterhouse-Five to students at schools where the book has been banned.

PALM SUNDAY: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COLLAGE by Kurt Vonnegut

 

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 a prostitute, but paying club dues that were used to maintain the club and also to pay the prostitutes - well that's not tacky at all!

The musical based on Jekyll and Hyde written in 1978 was completely horrible.

Vonnegut is well-known for having written a report card of his published books - this is the book that features that report card. Oftentimes, I disagree with his self-assessment - but not this time. He gives this book a "C" (yes, he graded the book as he was writing/collecting all of the parts of it) and I agree.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: PALM SUNDAY: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COLLAGE by Kurt Vonnegut.

PLAYER PIANO by Kurt Vonnegut

Originally published in 1952.

Synopsis:

Paul Proteus is the director of the Ilium Works in New York State in an alternate timeline to our current one. It is roughly the 1950's after yet another World War. 

That war taught the engineers to trust mechanization and the government to continue the central planning model that won the war (a more extreme model of the system the real United States used during World War II.)

In the Ilium works there are multiple factory buildings full of machines, but there are no people because the whole thing is automated. Proteus and the other engineers replaced all of the people with machines in the name of efficiency. Even the best human workers make mistakes or get an illness and miss work or, eventually, die. 

The machines don't have that problem. They work and work and work until the day they are replaced with even faster machines.

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)
in 1952

This is the source of the title, Player Piano. A player piano plays itself thanks to a roll that is inserted. In the town across the river from Ilium Works, there is a player piano in the bar where all of the unemployed factory workers drink their days away.

The major theme of the book is that it is not good for humans to have no work, no skills to master and no sense that they have put in a good day's work, even if it is more efficient for machines to do it all.

And...Paul Proteus is starting to come around to that way of thinking.

My Review:

This is Vonnegut's first novel. It follows a more normal narrative form than his later, more famous novels. It's too long. It has too many characters. I has too many side plots that don't really go anywhere.

But, it is amazingly prophetic. Vonnegut was working in the public relations department of General Electric when he wrote this novel. He was constantly being exposed to miraculous "labor-saving" devices and his imagination took him to a world where so much labor has been saved with labor-saving devices that there is practically nothing for anyone to do anymore because a person with nothing to do has no reason to be here at all.

Just look at all of the jobs that have been replaced by technology - Line workers in factories, print setters, cashiers, most farm labor and on and on and on. Everyone thinks all of the jobs have gone oversees, but 85% of them have actually been lost to technology. So it goes.

The book gets better as it goes along and has a bittersweet ending.  

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut.

THE LAST SAXON KING: A JUMP in TIME NOVEL, BOOK ONE (audiobook) by Andrew Varga

 

Published by Imbrifex Books in March of 2023.
Read by Mark Sanderlin.
Duration: 8 hours, 49 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

Dan Renfrew is a self-described homeschooled nerd and his life has been turned upside down. He watched his father get stabbed by a stranger who invaded their house and he has no idea if he is even alive. 

Now, thanks to a magical device, Dan is in Medieval England and caught up in an army on the move. He learns that his father is a "time jumper" - men tasked to fix glitches in time and make sure the timeline plays out the way it is supposed to.

The year is 1066 - just a few days before King Harold Godwinson meets and defeats one of the last Viking invasions of England at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Even more importantly, King Harold will be forced to meet the forces of William, the Duke of Normandy in just a few days and will be defeated at the Battle of Hastings.

But, something is wrong and even though Dan has almost no idea what to do, he has to make sure that history isn't manipulated by sinister forces that can also travel in time...

My review:

Harold Godwinson from the Bayeux Tapestry

I liked this book quite a bit. The history is gritty and full of gore thanks to Dan being plunked in the middle of (arguably) the two most important battles of the  English medieval era. Limbs get hacked off, blood sprays in people's faces and intestines spill out onto the ground. None of this glorified in the book - in fact, Dan is horrified over and over again at the brutality of it all. 

The addition of the evil "time jumpers" adds a level of danger and intensity to the experience, especially when the reader finds out more about them in the last part of the book. And, it turns out that Dan is not the only good "time jumper" back in 1066, which lets the reader learn more about what is going on bit by bit as Dan learns.

The epilogue at the end of the story fleshes out the history that Dan just went through a bit more to give the reader some additional context. 

Since this book is the start of a series, the most important questions is "Would you read book 2 in the series?"

The answer is yes, I think this series looks like it could be quite strong. 

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE LAST SAXON KING: A JUMP in TIME NOVEL, BOOK ONE by Andrew Varga.

OUR FIRST CIVIL WAR: PATRIOTS and LOYALISTS in the AMERICAN REVOLUTION (audiobook) by H.W. Brand

 

Published by Random House Audio in November of 2021.
Read by Steve Hendrickson.
Duration: 16 hours, 31 minutes.
Unabridged.

When I read the title of this audiobook, OUR FIRST CIVIL WAR: PATRIOTS and LOYALISTS in the AMERICAN REVOLUTION, I was sure that I was going to be listening to an in-depth look at how the population of the young United States dealt with its neighbors and family that disagreed about the question of independence. The most famous example is Benjamin Franklin and his son William Franklin. William Franklin was the last royal governor of New Jersey and their relationship never recovered from the shock of the Revolutionary War. 

This book deals with more of these issues than most histories of the Revolutionary War era, but that is not particularly hard to do - most of them mention the Franklin family situation and use it as a stand-in for all families. But, it does not go in-depth into this concept of Loyalists vs. Patriots. For example, I learned more about this topic from this Wikipedia page than I did from this book. I should not learn more about the topic from 11 pages of text on a Wikipedia page then I did in a 16+ hour audiobook.

So what is this book, if not an in-depth study of how the American Revolution fractured families, cities and populations?

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) and William Franklin (1730-1813)

It's a very good political history of the Revolutionary Era that focuses especially on Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and, to a lesser extent, John Adams. The text hums right along and it was a very good listen. This is one of the few Revolutionary War histories that I've read that actually discusses the dilemma that slaves faced in the war and the offer of freedom that the British military offered for males slaves that were willing to leave their families and volunteer. He looked at the stories of two slaves - one who fought for the British and one who ending up fighting for both sides.

All of that being said, I am going to deduct one point from what would have been a 5 star review. This book does not adequately address what the title promises.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: OUR FIRST CIVIL WAR: PATRIOTS and LOYALISTS in the AMERICAN REVOLUTION (audiobook) by H.W. Brand.

BLUEBEARD by Kurt Vonnegut

Originally published in October of 1987.

The premise of Bluebeard is that it is the autobiography of a has been artist named Rabo Karabekian. Karabekian also appears in an earlier Vonnegut book (Breakfast of Champions).

Karabekian is an abstract expressionist, like the real-life famed artist Jackson Pollock, who is in this novel as a friend of Karabekian. Karabekian's paintings are basically canvases covered with a coat of house paint and then some strips of tape. They were popular for a while.

Karabekian's paintings are really a way for him to deal with his PTSD from World War II. He doesn't want to deal with the details so he basically paints pictures of nothing.

A self portrait of Kurt Vonnegut.

Karabkeian tells about how he got started in the art business, kind of hints around at his World War II experience and intersperses the whole thing with talk about what is going on in his life as he is writing. 

I read the book with Karabekian and his author friend Paul Slazinger as sort of a stand-ins for Vonnegut himself. Both have loads of sarcastic comments and a lot of dark humor. 

This is a bit different for a Vonnegut book. There are a lot of absurd scenes and situations and there are references to the Battle of the Bulge. But, unlike most of his books, there is a relatively happy ending.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut. 

GARBOLOGY: OUR DIRTY LOVE AFFAIR with TRASH (audiobook) by Edward Humes

 

Published in 2015 by Tantor Audio.

Read by Joe Barrett.
Duration: 8 hours, 36 minutes.
Unabridged.

Garbology is the study of garbage. Archaeologists use garbology to learn all about ancient societies - what they ate, their tools, their clothing, their toys, their technology, etc.

You can also apply garbology to modern garbage dumps and Humes uses this as an entrance to discussing all sorts of issues about our modern world and our problem with waste. Humes figures that the average American is on pace to create more than one hundred tons of garbage per person per lifetime. This is higher than the estimates you usually find because those estimates don't include the waste created on your behalf by manufacturers and service providers.

Garbology starts out very strong with a look at how landfills and trash removal have evolved over time. Sounds boring but I found it to be very interesting.

Later, he moved on to pollution, especially ocean pollution and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a Texas-sized (at least) collection of plastic that has formed in a giant doldrum area - kind of a dead spot, wind-wise in the middle of a gigantic area of circular rotation. He covers this quite well from two points of view - it's probably already too late and we can fix it if we change some of the ways that we do things.

The last part of the book deals with changes we could make. 

He starts out with a long story about a program that re-purposes art from a landfill. I literally have no problem with art, repurposing items to divert them from landfills or making art from repurposed items diverted from landfills. Humes wrote so much about this interesting, but limited, project that it was as if it was an actual answer to the problem of garbage - as if art installations could absorb all of the garbage.

He addressed reducing the amount we consume by looking at a family that takes that concept to an extreme level (pounds of garbage per year rather than tons of garbage per year), which I thought was off-putting rather than inspirational. It is sipmly too much of a change for me to even ponder. It would have been much more effective, in my opinion, to present someone who has moved to a halfway point towards that extreme. Maybe discuss how companies could change their packaging and what that would mean for consumers.

I suppose my real frustration is that Humes never really addressed the concept of recycling in a systematic way in a book about garbage. He mentioned the famous recycling phrase "Reduce, Re-use, Recycle" multiple times in the book but recycling itself is largely ignored. Lots of talk about art made from garbage, a little talk about recycling. 

I know that the recycling world has changed as Humes was writing this book (several Asian countries used to take literal boatloads of American recycling but have since stopped), but I have been seeing a lot of articles lately about how no one wants to take plastics for recycling so it just ends up getting buried in the landfull and the sheer weight of glass makes it unlikely to be recycled because of the fuel costs to transport the glass to the factories that recycle them. Is recycling even a thing anymore?

There is an interesting section at the end of the book about how Denmark burns almost all of its garbage at super high temperatures to create energy without the waste you would get at a coal plant. Tens of thousands of homes receive power and a ton of garbage becomes a few pounds.

So, to sum up, the good parts of this book are very good. There are a couple of sections that are related by totally unnecessary and may actually hurt the case the author is trying to make. And, he totally ignores a giant part of the whole garbage discussion. For those reasons, I give the audiobook 3 stars out of 5.

GARBOLOGY: OUR DIRTY LOVE AFFAIR with TRASH (audiobook) by Edward Humes can be found on Amazon.com here.

SHE CAME to SLAY: THE LIFE and TIMES of HARRIET TUBMAN (audiobook) by Erica Armstrong Dunbar

Published in 2019 by Simon and Schuster Audio.

Read by Robon Miles.

Duration: 5 hours, 53 minutes.

Unabridged. 

Erica Armstrong Dunbar brings us an accessible biography of one of the true heroes of American history - Harriet Tubman. She Came to Slay is long enough to give a decent picture of her life but short enough that it doesn't intimidate potential readers.

A traveling statue named honoring
Harriet Tubman named "Journey to Freedom"

I am not going to go through the entire biography of her life, but this book covers all of the major points of her life such as: 

-Her escape from slavery; 

-Her multiple trips back to Maryland to free family, friends and anyone that would go;

-Her work in anti-slavery societies where she met and worked with people like Frederick Douglass, William Seward and John Brown;

-The communities she helped start in New York and Canada;

-Her work with women's rights groups and her struggles to get white women to include black women in their fight;

-Her service as a nurse in the Civil War;

-Her service as a spy and a scout in South Carolina in the Civil War and her fight to be recognized for that service.

The book has a lively pace.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  SHE CAME to SLAY: THE LIFE and TIMES of HARRIET TUBMAN by Erica Armstrong Dunbar.

ROBERT E. LEE and ME: A SOUTHERNER'S RECKONING with the MYTH of the LOST CAUSE by Ty Seidule

 

Published in 2021 by Macmillan Audio.

Read by the author, Ty Seidule.

Duration: 10 Hours, 45 minutes.
Unabridged

I have been studying the Civil War since I was in college 35+ years ago. My thoughts on Robert E. Lee have evolved over the years. I used to be a lightweight proponent of the Lost Cause theory of the Civil War. I never was comfortable with the concept of slaves being content with slavery, but I certainly believed that the Southern officers were generally a noble and heroic lot when compared to the Union officers and the most noble and heroic officer of them all was Robert E. Lee. 

My thoughts the war and Lee have changed as I have read more and gotten older and perhaps a bit wiser. This book will be the 131st book I have reviewed that has been tagged "Civil War" and the 42nd book tagged "Robert E. Lee". I have widened my readings to include more of the Antebellum Period and more of the Reconstruction Era. Reading the Declarations of Causes of Seceding States (documents designed to be much like the United States' Declaration of Independence in 1776) gave me additional insight. I like to think I have picked up a more informed perspective.

Ty Seidule

This mirrors the shift in perspective that the author of Robert E. Lee and Me went through, although his was certainly more dramatic. He grew up in the South and Robert E. Lee was his hero. It was only when he was a history professor at West Point that he started to think about Robert E. Lee and what he actually did.

Seidule doesn't come at this topic as an outsider. He is a retired Brigadier General who served with the 82nd Airborne and as a member of the 81st Armor Regiment. He is a career Army man, something he notes over and over again. But, being a career Army man doesn't mean that he supports everything the Army has ever done - it means that he wants to support what the Army does right and fix what it does wrong and honoring Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee is certainly wrong.

Seidule notes that moves to honor Confederate leaders tended to follow Civil Rights advances, as a pushback against them. Despite being a former head of West Point, Lee was practically purged from the facility after the Civil War. But, when black students started being appointed to West Point, Southerners began to push for naming things after Robert E. Lee, mirroring a phenomenon in the larger American culture. 

But, Seidule goes farther and looks at Robert E. Lee as an officer of the U.S. Army. He notes that with every promotion, an officer takes an oath. Lee took this oath many times, including a little more than 3 weeks before the resigned to join the Confederacy (he was promoted to colonel on March 28 and resigned on April 20). Seidule has no tolerance for oathbreaking. He now finds it ironic that he proudly took his first oath at Washington and Lee University next to a memorial to Robert E. Lee.

There is a frequently made argument that Lee resigned to defend his state and that most officers did. Seidule dug through the Army records and discovered there were fifteen colonels from states that seceded in the U.S. Army before the Civil War (remember - the Army was much, much smaller back then). Twelve of the fifteen remained with the Union. Of those fifteen colonels, eight were from Virginia. Only one colonel from Virginia resigned to join the Confederacy - Robert E. Lee. 

Seidule's book looks at the entire "Lost Cause of the Confederacy" phenomenon that excused the Confederacy from any wrong-doing, downplays the central role of slavery in the conflict and similarly downplays the evils of slavery itself.

I leave this review with a comment for Union General George H. Thomas, a Virginian who stayed with the Union, provided an early Union victory, saved the Union Army from certain destruction at Chickamagua, participated in capture of Atlanta and literally destroyed a Confederate Army at Franklin, Tennessee:

[T]he greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of the virtues of freedom, suffered violence and wrong when the effort for southern independence failed. This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains; a species of self-forgiveness amazing in its effrontery, when it is considered that life and property—justly forfeited by the laws of the country, of war, and of nations, through the magnanimity of the government and people—was not exacted from them.

— George Henry Thomas, November 1868

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. Highly Recommended. 

It can be found on Amazon.com here: ROBERT E. LEE and ME: A SOUTHERNER'S RECKONING with the MYTH of the LOST CAUSE by Ty Seidule.

SAG HARBOR: A NOVEL (audiobook) by Colson Whitehead

Published in 2009 by Random House Audio.
Narrated by Mirron Willis
Duration: 11 hours, 17 minutes.
Unabridged.

Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor is set in 1985. Benjie Cooper and his brother are spending the summer at the resort town of Sag Harbor, New York. This Long Island resort town is actually two resort towns - one white and one black. The Coopers are part of a very close-knit African American community of New York City professionals that started their part of Sag Harbor two generations earlier.

During the summers, families head out on the weekends and older kids are often left out in Sag Harbor for the summer. Benjie and his brother are in high school and a group of high school boys hang out together all summer. Benjie is desperate to be cool (being on Dungeons and Dragons-playing Star Wars fan doesn't help - take it from a kid who was both in high school at the same time).

They get summer jobs, they hit the beach, they look for girls, they try to get into concerts at local night clubs, they get BB guns and shoot each other, they explore, identify houses that were undoubtedly haunted, avoid doing laundry until way after it starts to smell and other typical teenage boy things. Also, they desperately want to figure out what makes girls tick.

...and that is pretty much the plot of the book. I listened to it as an audiobook, and Mirron Willis' narration was well done. But, there is no real plot to the book. There are hints of family strife that never are explained. There are hints that some of the boys go on to do great things and some end up in jail or worse. There's not even a "where are they now?" epilogue at the end of the book. It starts right after Memorial Day and ends at Labor Day - almost like the world's longest "What I did over the summer" essay.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Sag Harbor: A Novel by Colson Whitehead.

  

HAVOC (Philip Mercer #7) by Jack Du Brul

Published in 2006 by Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Read by J. Charles.
Duration: 12 hours, 43 minutes.
Unabridged audio edition.

Jack Du Brul's Havoc is a techno-thriller that races from the Hindenburg disaster to Africa to Washington, D.C to Atlantic City to Niagara Falls to Russia and back to Africa with hardly any time to take a breath. 

The book features Philip Mercer, a geologist by training that often troubleshoots for the White House. This is the seventh book featuring Mercer, a fact that was not on the audiobook label. However, Du Brul does a great job of catching the reader up on what has been going on - I assumed it was the first book in the series as I was listening to it. 

The Hindenburg disaster on May 6, 1937.

The action starts with a traveler on the infamous Hindenburg as it flies to its fate with destiny in Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937. A crazed man is hiding a secret in a safe in his room and he is afraid that the Nazis know he has it and are plotting to steal it from him. As this man sits and watches his safe he devises a plan to get it safely off of the airship before it lands in New Jersey - he throws it overboard into a farm field with an attached note for Albert Einstein. The note falls off and the safe gets forgotten in the chaos of the Hindenburg disaster.

Fast forward to modern day in the Central African Republic. Mercer accidentally meets Cali Stowe, a fellow American. Mercer tells her he is here to investigate a geological hunch for someone as a favor. She says that she is there to investigate a village that has an extraordinarily elevated cancer rate. They are both telling half-truths. But, most importantly, this village is in the middle of a civil war and a dangerous warlord is on his way, burning and looting as he comes...

As the story progresses, Stowe and Mercer find that they have a mutual interest in this village and in each other. The more they find out about, the more tense the situation becomes. There are a lot of complicated threads in this book but Du Brul does tie them all together at the end

The story is full of action and adventure - some of it fun, some of it believable, some so outrageous that the story borders on silly. Mercer gets to be too much after a while - he is an expert on the Hindenburg, he knows how to fight, he's an expert with pistols, grenades, rifles, knives, swords and even with bows and arrows. He knows about mines, cave-ins, scuba diving, trains, dinosaur bones, forklifts, helicopters, speed boats and bar tending. But, his heart is in the right place and if you just go with the flow and don't think about it it just might not bother you too much. 

The audiobook was read by J. Charles. Charles did a merely okay job with the variety of accents required by this book. He has a hard time with women's voices and Cali Stowe has a lot of lines in this book. His foreign accents all fell into the category of "not an English language accent". Everyone kind of sounded the same. 

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Havoc (Philip Mercer #7) by Jack Du Brul.

Reviewed on July 22, 2014.

John Ericsson and the Inventions of the War (The History of the Civil War Series) by Ann Brophy

Published in 1991 by Silver Burdett Press
118 pages of text. 8 pages of timelines, sources and an index at the end.

This book is part of a larger series (The History of the Civil War Series). It is very readable with a good balance of national history versus the biography of Swedish immigrant inventor John Ericsson, with the glaring exception I note below.

John Ericsson (1803-1889) was almost the stereotypical nutty professor type inventor - he never properly patented many of his best inventions. Ericsson built a great number of inventions, but unlike Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, he never really built any industries around them. He seemed to have trouble with personal relationships and was happiest when the was building in his laboratory.

John Ericsson (1803-1889)

Among other things, Ericsson invented a screw propeller, a "caloric" engine and, most importantly, he was the designer of the famed U.S.S. Monitor, the first ironclad in the Union navy, participant in the Merrimack vs. Monitor battle at Hampton Roads, and the model for dozens of other monitor-style ships that patrolled the shores and rivers of the Confederacy for the duration of the war. The Monitor was notable for its ability to go in relatively shallow waters, its rotating turret and its iron body that made it virtually impervious to the cannon fire of enemy ships.

On the deck of the U.S.S. Monitor

For all of its interesting detail about Ericsson's life, it has one gigantic error. On page 108, in a section describing other advances in naval technology during the Civil War, the topic of one of the world's first submarines, H.L. Hunley comes up. This book claims that the Hunley was a Union ship and that it sank a Confederate ship. In fact, it was a Confederate ship (it was not an official Confederate ship, it was still in the experimental stages) that sank a Union ship by attaching a bomb to its hull and then sank on its way back to shore. This is an unforgivable mistake since the Hunley is literally a world-famous ship, since it was the first submarine to successfully sink an enemy warship.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: John Ericsson and the Inventions of War (History of the Civil War Series)

Reviewed on June 14, 2012.

Bye Bye Miss American Empire: Neighborhood Patriots, Backcountry Rebels, and Their Underdog Crusades to Redraw America's Political Map by Bill Kauffman

While I am sympathetic to a point, Kauffman drives his point home with so much rancor and vigor that I ended up being both bored and repulsed.

Published in 2010 by Chelsea Green Publishing.

Bye Bye Miss American Empire takes what should have been a fun look at the various groups that want to split apart current U.S. states and/or make independent countries out of U.S. states and turns it into a long, repetitive, angry rant about American foreign policy, both Presidents Bush and the United States (indivisible, as the pledge goes) in general.

Kauffman starts off on the right foot with an introduction to these various splinter groups (or groups that wish to splinter America, to be more accurate) by taking the reader to a meeting of secessionist movements from all around the country in Vermont. For me, this was the first and last enjoyable chapter.

Kauffman then launches into an extended discussion of secessionist movements in America in which he "scores points" by making multiple snide comments about the Constitution's use of the phrase "more perfect" (just to clarify, it means that it is intended to push the Union closer towards perfection, not that it was already perfect and now it becomes even more so), advocates the murder of Founding Fathers (Alexander Hamilton on page 13) and gets into a political argument with a master politician (Abraham Lincoln, on page 34) that only serves to demonstrate that Kauffman has not truly listened to what Lincoln was saying. Lincoln declared that "secession is the essence of anarchy." Kauffman scoffs and fails to truly follow Lincoln's logic. If New York City were to secede from the United States (a popular notion, Kauffman notes,  several times in American history), what would make it stop there? Could the Bronx secede from New York City? Could an individual neighborhood secede from the Bronx? Could an apartment building secede from that neighborhood? Could a single apartment secede from that building? Could an individual person in a room secede from that apartment? That would indeed be anarchy and that was the argument that Lincoln was making.

Kauffman moves on to explore the idea of New York State and New York City separating. I truly have sympathy for the upstate New Yorker. The provincial, self-important thinking of NYC is difficult for anyone in "flyover country" to stomach -  being politically attached to it must be frustrating in the extreme.

The Great Seal of the
proposed State of
Jefferson.

Other secessionist movements covered in this book include Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Alaska, the South and various movements to create 2 or more states out of several states, including a very commonsense one to break California up into 2, 3 or even 4 states. Kauffman's description of the various attempts to turn northern California and parts of southern Oregon into the State of Jefferson is quite interesting.

Kauffman makes his points throughout the book and can write with an amusing twist. Unfortunately, he throws in so many other snide comments and forced witty observations that don't really tell the reader anything except Kauffman's political leanings that I found myself wondering if this book could have been shrunk by 40 or 50 pages if a strong-handed editor had taken control of this project. Kauffman tells you early on his opinion on Bush, the War on Terror and why the principle of "one man, one vote" is unfair (I am not sure why he thinks rural voters should get more representation than urban voters, but he does). He also tells you about these items in the middle and at the end of the book many, many times. Enough already! Is this a book about secessionist movements in America or a personal political rant?

Long story short - great topic, maybe even the right guy to write this book, with the proper editor. But, in the end, I found that the topic was overwhelmed by all of the other baggage.

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Bye Bye, Miss American Empire: Neighborhood Patriots, Backcountry Rebels, and their Underdog Crusades to Redraw America's Political Map

Reviewed on December 18, 2010.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

I reluctantly started this one and finished it enthusiastically

Originally published in 2006 by Crown.

A friend from work had World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War on his desk and said I should read it.

Zombies!? No thanks!

I've avoided all of the Twilight books and the other undead/monster books. He pitched it by saying it was fictional (of course!) but modeled after the very real work of Studs Terkel, The Good War: An Oral History of World War II. For those that don't know, Terkel interviewed hundreds of people about World War II and arranged their interviews into a narrative of sorts that told the history of the war.

Well, that wasn't much of a selling point either because I never really got into Studs Terkel very much, so this was strike two. But, I took it home and started reading.

Max Brooks

The first 20-30 pages are boring but they do set up the rest of the book by introducing the concept of zombies, how they came to be, what they are capable of and what stops them. Once we get to the Battle of Yonkers this book hits its stride and really hums along.

There are recurring characters but the four that struck me the most were the Japanese gardener and the computer geek, the Chinese submarine and the dog handler. The dog handler struck me as the most "human" story of the bunch because of the unabashed affection and bond between dog and handler. I was actually moved to tears about this fictional story about a man and his dachshund/beagle mix - partially because I had one and he described its feisty, independent, loving a good fight personality (yes, that little dog was sure that she was put on this earth to rule ALL dogs), and partially because they survived.

Well, there it is - I went from reluctant reader to nearly crying about what I was reading. That's why I'm giving it 5 stars out of 5.

By the way - so much better than the movie - and so very different! Basically, they only share zombies and a title.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: World War Z.

Reviewed on December 23, 2009.