TRIDENT'S FIRST GLEAMING: A SPECIAL OPERATIONS GROUP THRILLER (audiobook) by Stephen Templin

Published by ListenUp Audiobooks in September of 2014.
Read by Brian Troxell.
Duration: 9 hours, 14 minutes.
Unabridged

In many ways Trident's First Gleaming is a pretty typical special forces book. You've got a terrorist threat from somewhere in the Middle East, you have an elite group of American operatives who are scrambled to eliminate it, they discover it is worse than anyone has imagined and only they can somehow overcome these newer incredibly long odds and save America and the world.

But, in other ways it is different. The main character, Chris Paladin, is more than just a really talented (but retired) operative - he is also an associate pastor of a church in Dallas, Texas. But, when a former colleague reaches out to him and requests his help he returns to his former life, with restrictions.

His former colleague has been assigned to recover a downed Switchblade Whisper, a new type of military drone that can be launched from a submarine. Its wings swing out and lock open when fired out of the submarine, much like a switchblade's blade swings out and locks open.

Unfortunately, it has crashed in Syria and by all indications it was taken down by a genius with an astounding grasp of technology. Also, he is a madman with real issues about his sister and a taste for eating people.

Photo by Niels Nordhoek

Stephen Templin has a talent for writing military thrillers. This book could have been over-the-top in so many ways. The pastor angle could have been overdone with preachy sermons and the like, but it was not. The weapons angle could have been overdone with discussions of guns to the level of a fetish. The bad guy was certainly creepy but he was not the focus because this is not a Hannibal Lechter novel. 

Instead, once this book gets going it becomes part thriller, part "buddy" book, part romance and injected with a real sense of humanity and, from time-to-time, a great gag to relieve the tension.

Don't get me wrong, this is not a "change-your-life" novel and it's not perfect, but for a military thriller this is about as good as it gets.

Narrator Brian Troxell has a great voice for reading these types of books. He makes everything he reads seem very dramatic, very edgy and very macho. I look forward to hearing more of his work.

Note: I received a copy of this audiobook from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Trident's First Gleaming: A Special Operations Group Thriller. 

Reviewed on November 25, 2014.

The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible (audiobook) by Matti Friedman

This story comes to life in the audiobook.

Published by Highbridge in 2012.
Performed by Simon Vance.
Duration: 7 hours, 27 minutes.

"The story of this book...should come as no surprise to any who have read it."

I'm going to be brutally honest here. I picked up The Aleppo Codex on a lark. I thought it sounded like it was going to be interesting but I have a little pile of audiobooks and this one was quickly heading to the bottom of the pile because I was having a serious case of buyer's remorse. It looked like a tedious bit of history and I was imagining a dry, boring lecture about an old book. I literally decided to listen to it just to get it out of the pile so I wouldn't have to dread listening to it any longer.

Happily, I was very wrong about this book.

In its roughest outline this is indeed a book about a very old book but it is much more than that. The story of the Aleppo Codex is told by Matti Friedman, an Israeli journalist through a variety of angles. Sometimes it is a mystery. Sometimes it is told as oral history. Sometimes the Codex itself is the prism used to look at Jewish history under colonial European rule or under Muslim rule in Medieval times or to look at the centrality of the Hebrew Bible, especially the Torah (the first five books) to the Jewish people throughout history.

A page from the Aleppo Codex

The Aleppo Codex is the most perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible that was written by hand. It is not fancy, but it is precise and neat and it was created a thousand years ago. Over the centuries it has traveled here and there, surviving  the sack of Jerusalem in one of the Crusades, re-surfacing in Egypt to be consulted by the famed Jewish scholar Maimonides and eventually working its way to the Jewish community in Aleppo, Syria.  The Aleppo Jews treasured it and locked it away until an anti-Israeli riot broke out in Aleppo in 1947 and the Codex was scattered around the ruins of the synagogue in which it was stored. By the late 1950s the Codex was working its way to Israel and eventually to the Shrine of the Book where it sits on display.

Except, of course, for the fact that is not really there - at least not all of it.  Somehow, about 40% of this ancient manuscript is missing. Friedman starts investigating and finds a lot more questions than answers. People refuse to answer his questions and even threaten him with legal action. Some who have also investigated the mystery have quit in frustration. One may have been murdered to keep the secret.

Friedman peppers his story with interesting people including an old spy, a cantankerous collector, smugglers and refugees. We see the peaceful little world of the Aleppo Jews, the difficult opening days of the state of Israel and ride along with anthropologists fast on the heels of Israeli troops in desperate house to house fighting who are looking for Jewish historical treasures in order to rescue them - even in the middle of a battlefield!

The book was brilliantly read by Simon Vance. His voice lends the whole story an air of gravitas and when combined with Friedman's descriptions created the perfect combination to make a book about a very old book come to life and become a book about betrayal, danger, intrigue, greed, justice, cover-ups and the survival of a nation.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Aleppo Codex.

Reviewed on August 24, 2012.

The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations by Brian Fagan

Disappointed

Published in 2008 by Bloomsbury Press.

My mother in law bought me three Brian Fagan books for Christmas last year because they were on my Amazon Wish List. I read the first one The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 right away and enjoyed it. I gave it four stars. .

I was saving this one, hoping to enjoy it just as much. Now, I am worried that I'll never muster enough interest to read the third one.

The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations seems rushed - a poorly edited and a poor man's version of Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed with some global warming hype thrown in for good measure. Many of the cultures covered by Fagan were actually covered in Diamond's more detailed book.

Fagan looks at the time of the Medieval Warming Period, approximately from 800 AD to 1300 AD, and the effects of this slightly warmer time on numerous societies, including Western Europe, the Mongols, the Inuit, the Pueblos, the peoples of California, China, Easter Island and the Khmer of Southeast Asia. This is not a long book so there is just a snapshot of each civilization. Fagan notes that the data suggests that the Medieval Warm Period was a time of frequent droughts for nearly everyone but Central Asia and Europe. He points to research that suggests El Nino events caused or contributed greatly to the Medieval Warming Period.

Fagan theorizes that the Warming Period destroyed multiple civilizations and that we may suffer the same fate (pages 238-242). But, Fagan fails to note what he himself has written throughout the book - we do not understand climate systems. We think that some of these things may (might, probably, the data suggests - you pick the euphemism) be related but in reality we are unsure. Yes, we are warmer now than we were in 1860, at the end of the Little Ice Age but our warming may or may not have a thing to do with the warming of the past. They may be caused by different things. Fagan goes with the theory of man-made global warming which means his dire warnings from the past ("Today, we are experiencing sustained warming of a kind unknown since the Ice Age. And this warming is certain to bring drought..." - p. 239) are probably pointless since they were not caused by man-made global warming. Fagan points out the droughts during the Medieval Warming Period were caused by El Nino events that lasted for years. Were those events caused by the heat or did they create the heat? I suggest Fagan has fallen victim to the old causation/correlation trap. Certainly there is not enough hard data to suggest that the weather patterns of the Medieval Warming Period will be repeated in the 21st Century.

Fagan's thesis of man-made global warming (and the near-constant nagging throughout the book) is weakened by his own charts on pages 17 & 19 which clearly show a cooler period ending about 800 AD, a warmer period from 800-1300, a cooler period from 1350-1860 and a warmer period from 1860 to the present. The pattern is cool-warm-cool-warm. All of the comments about how we don't understand climate and the cool-warm-cool-warm pattern negate a good portion of the book.

There are other niggling details, such as the self-contradictory paragraph on page 123 that notes that NO ONE in the history of the entire world depended on acorns as much as the California Indians. Except, of course, for the Syrians that depended on them for their ENTIRE diet 14,000 years ago that he mentioned earlier in the same paragraph. His explanation of why the Pueblos were abandoned by a Anasazi flies in the face of more recent scholarship. Fagan makes it sound orderly ("Fortunately, the ancient traditions kicked in and people adjusted by moving away, household by household." - page 136) even though there is evidence some Pueblos were burned and were hastily abandoned (their belongings were left behind and scattered about) and there may have been widespread cannibalism (he poo-poos it as a bit of "ritual cannibalism"). To me that sounds like chaos, civil war or possibly invasion, not a gradual decline and walking away from a civilization.

For me, the final straw was the offhand comment on page 153 that maybe the Mayans could have stopped Cortes from invading Central Mexico and defeating the Aztecs if they hadn't have collapsed due to the Warm Period. Cortes landed in Veracruz. Veracruz was not a Mayan area. They were influenced by trade with Mayans but they were not Mayan. 

I am hardly an expert, but if I spot these problems how many more are there?

So, my final assessment in a word: Disappointed.

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations by Brian Fagan.

Reviewed on November 6, 2009.