THE MARROW THIEVES (audiobook) by Cherie Dimaline

Published by Kobo Originals in 2018.
Read by Meegwun Fairweather.
Duration: 7 hours, 11 minutes.
Unabridged.

In The Marrow Thieves, it is the latter half of the 21st century and the world has had a series of literal upheavals. Earthquakes sheared off California, global warming has changed the weather. Droughts occur in former wet spaces and dry places have become swamps. Sea levels have risen and drowned out many cities. Many animal species have died off and others are in severe decline. On top of that, the nations of the world have gone to war and most cities were destroyed, people have fled to the remaining cities. The entire world map has been re-drawn.

In the future there is also another problem. Almost everyone in the world has

The author, Cherie Dimaline.

lost the ability to dream. Everybody except the indigenous population of the Americas - Native Americans. However, their bone marrow can be harvested for a substance that lets other people dream. The government and the Catholic Church have joined together to "recruit" people for this project. That sounds harmless enough in theory, but in practice it means hunting them down, capturing them and taking them off to concentration camps.

Frenchie is a teenager. He and his family fled the city to go north to their people's original homelands. On the way, Frenchie lost everyone in one way or another. Alone, he stumbled into the camp of survivors who were also pushing north. An old woman, a middle-aged man, a smattering of young men and women and a little girl. This is their story.

I liked this book quite a bit. The characters were great and the ups and downs are truly roller coasters for the listener. Meegwun Fairweather did a great job with the reading.

The only problem I had with the book was the reason why the Native American populations were being hunted in the first place. There is no reason giving for almost everyone losing the ability to dream and no explanation for how the government is able to distill a substance from Native Americans, but somehow not able to chemically replicate this substance. This could have been a fatal flaw, but the strength of the characters carried it past this problem.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE MARROW THIEVES (audiobook) by Cherie Dimaline.

This book was placed on a massive book ban list in Florida, a place well-known for banning books. Ugh.

FRACTURED STATE: A POST-APOCALYPTIC THRILLER (Rogue State Series #1) (audiobook) by Steven Konkoly

Published by Brilliance Audio in 2016
Read by Timothy Andres Pabon
Duration: 10 hours, 9 minutes
Unabridged

In the year 2035 America is almost unrecognizable. Environmental collapse due the abuse of aquifers and mountain run-off in the West has caused the governments of many Western states to practically collapse. The highway systems have become "No Man's Land" and the Arizona border has practically been overrun by drug cartels who often act as a brutal de facto government in some areas.

California has escaped this fate due to a strict resource protection regimen that limits travel, and strictly watches how much water and electricity each household consumes. The relationship between the strict (yet successful) government of California and the often ineffectual federal government is strained to the point that there is an open and active movement that is pushing for California to secede.

Political assassinations and the sabotaging of a critical power plant make the political situation all the more tense. This is where the main character, Nathan Fisher, stumbles into the story. He is on a public beach loading sea water into big water bottles. He does this frequently because he owns a personal desalinization unit so he is able to augment his family's official water allotment.

But, while he is loading up his water bottles he sees something he shouldn't see - he sees the military unit that attacked the power plant and he realizes that the official story is not the truth. And, he realizes that they know that he saw them and they are coming for him and his family in order to shut him up...

The author, Konkoly, slowly gives out the bits and pieces that make up the political backdrop of this story. But, he quickly gets into the exciting cat and mouse chase as Nathan Fisher and his family try to figure out who they can trust and where they can go.

The audio version of this book was read by Timothy Andres Pabon, a veteran actor and prolific readers of audiobooks. It was quite good except for an occasional mispronounced word. The author uses the word chassis several times and the Pabon mispronounced it every time (he pronounced it like it is spelled so it sounded like "chassus" rather than "chassee"). It struck me as weird every time.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Fractured State.

See my review of Book 2 in this series here: Rogue State.

BELOW ZERO (Joe Pickett #9) by C.J. Box

Published in 2009 by G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Years ago, person who left a comment on one of my Amazon reviews told me about C.J. Box and gave me the title to his first book featuring Joe Pickett. I found it at the library and I was hooked. If you like Michael Connelly or Robert Crais, you will love C.J. Box. If you like Tony Hillerman's Navajo Tribal Police books than I am sure that you will enjoy Box's descriptions of the local landscape and the people of Wyoming.

In Below Zero Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett is working on two cases. The first case (and the minor one in the story) concern's Joe's pursuit of the Mad Archer, a poacher that likes to shoot his arrows at just about anything. Besides out of season game, the Mad Archer has shot a bald eagle and Tube, the ultra-friendly Corgi-Labrador mix that Pickett has adopted. Joe arrests him and he promptly skips town while out on bail and Joe goes back on the hunt for him.

The main story concerns a dying Chicago mobster enforcer named Stenko and his ultra-environmentalist son who wants Stenko to make amends for the gigantic carbon footprint that he has accrued over a lifetime of high roller living. Stenko and his son are roaming through South Dakota, Wyoming and Colorado looking for opportunities to stop people from contributing to America's overall carbon footprint. Typically, this involves Stenko using skills with a pistol to kill heavy polluters or try to shake them down to pay for carbon offsets.

At first I was thrown off by the heavy-handed tactics of Stenko and son, thinking that it was over-the-top nonsense. But, I started doing some more thinking and I remembered some quotes from ultra-environmentalists like these:

"I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems." -- John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

"Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental." -- Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!

and

"To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem" -- Lamont Cole

So, take these comments and add action to them and Stenko and son don't seem quite so unrealistic. 

Normally, Joe Pickett wouldn't be too worried about this mobster since it is not really a game warden issue. But, when Joe's daughter gets a phone call from April Keeley (their foster daughter that was presumed to be dead from a federal raid in an earlier book) he cannot help but be curious - even more so when it looks like April is being forced to ride along with Stenko and son...

Nate Romanowski plays a large role in this story. Normally, I am not a fan of Nate, but I liked him quite a bit in this one. In fact, I liked this book quite a bit. I tore right through it.

Great quote from the book: "...there is no sound in nature that makes men move along faster than the pumping of a shotgun." (p. 39)

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: BELOW ZERO (Joe Pickett #9) by C.J. Box.

The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 by Brian M. Fagan

Published in 2000 by Basic Books

Brian Fagan's The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 is, by definition, an introduction to the climate phenomenon of the same name. Actually, it is quite similar to a History Channel documentary of the same name. On page xix Fagan notes that historians are either "parachutists" (big picture) or "truffle hunters" (love all of the details of one particular era or topic). Fagan warns that this is a parachutist book - an overview.

So, what of this overview? Fagan starts with the Vikings and covers an area that is better covered by Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. However, his stories of how the fishing industry was affected by the shift to a colder climate was surprisingly interesting.

A lengthy discussion of how the colder climate change brought more disease, famine and general mayhem is punctuated by the single best one page description of the changes in farming methods that came about in the 1600-1700s that I have ever read (page 107).

An interesting (and too short) section on glaciers proved quite fascinating and should be required reading for those that point to the melting of those "ancient" glaciers in our day as a cause for worry. If 200 years old is ancient, well...

Frequent maps are a big positive but some of them are unnecessary. However, too many maps is much better than the normal too few that are in most books.

The end of the book gets bogged down in the Irish Potato Famine. We go from being a parachutist to a truffle hunter in this section.

The last chapter is a commentary on something out of the scope of the book's stated thesis. We leave the Little Ice Age and receive a lecture on Global Warming that is at variance with some of the things we've just read. Early on in the book he tells us the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than we are now (p. 17) and spent the better part of 200 pages telling us that cooling brings famine, death and disease. Why is global warming so bad then? On page 206 he mentions cattle herding as a source of methane over the last 150 years. In the United States at least, cattle herding was only possible by clearing out the deer and buffalo east of the Mississippi and by killing off millions of buffalo out west (imagine herds from one horizon to the other in the Great Plains) to make room for millions of head of cattle. To me, that seems to be a methane trade-off.

Regardless, this is really a nice little book. You'll undoubtedly learn something new. Skip the last chapter.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850.

Reviewed on December 31, 2008.

Note: there is a revised edition of this book that was published in 2019.

The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization by Brian Fagan

Disappointing.

Published in 2004 by Basic Books.

I really enjoyed The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 (I gave it 4 stars). I was not thrilled with The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations (I gave it 2 stars) and I have to say that I do not care much for The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization either.

In fact, to be short and sweet let me just say that if you see my review about The Great Warming and add in an extended discussion about mankind in the Ice Age you will pretty much have the substance of The Long Summer. The two books could have easily have been made into one slightly larger book.

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization.

Reviewed on December 18, 2010.

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance (audiobook) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Better than the first book.

Published by HarperAudio in 2009.

Duration: 7 hours, 28 minutes.

Read by: Stephen J. Dubner, one of the authors

Unabridged.

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance is the sequel to the wildly popular book by the same authors, Freakonomics the movie and a newspaper column. One author is the economics talent - the man with all of the questions who knows where to find the answers. The other is the writing talent (who is learning a good bits of economics along the way, no doubt) who takes these interesting topics and puts them on paper in an interesting way.



The goal of these books and the newspaper column is to get people to look at the world in a different way - an economic way of thinking. I find these works to be fascinating, eye-opening and always entertaining, even if I don't always agree with their conclusions (sometimes I think they are asking the wrong questions or have not gathered in enough information).

Their main premise is that people generally respond rationally to incentives, sometimes you just have to figure out what the incentives are. Ironically, if not for me responding to the incentive of nearly free classes offered by the Indiana Council for Economics Education I would not have had the pleasure of having my mind blown by professor Mohammad Kaviani, who introduced me to the thoughts behind books like Freakonomics before the book was even published by teaching me and other teachers how to incorporate economics into every school discipline. I was so inspired that I went back to school and added economics to my teaching license.


Levitt and Dubner

Levitt and Dubner explore any number of items, including:

-Why horse manure nearly destroyed the great cities of the world and the car saved us from being buried in it.

-How prostitutes set their prices and why it would be a good idea for prostitutes to have a pimp

-How to figure out who is the best doctor in the E.R.  Like figuring out who is the best teacher, it is not as easy as it would seem - the very best doctors tend to get the sickest patients or they may avoid the sickest patients in order to get the accolades and compensation (if it is offered). Turns out, the best doctor tends to come from a top medical school, went to a top hospital for her residency, has more than 10 years of experience and is a woman. Peer rankings have no basis in reality.

-The relationship between terrorism and banking and why terrorists should buy life insurance.

-Why homo economicus is still a good symbol for people - a person that responds to incentives and is not, by nature, horribly altruistic.

-Car seats? Certainly they are better than letting the kids run wild through the car but are they better than seat belts?

-There is an extended discussion on global warming, including a potential cheap fix. The discussion should have been a little longer and looked into the incentives of people like Al Gore - why would he be against even discussing the cheap fix? He has remarkable incentives to keep his climate change panic machine running - fixing it puts him out of a job and cuts him off from the seat of power he has created for himself.


-and, last but not least, there is an entertaining story about teaching capuchin monkeys about money. As a result, we get monkey bank robbery and monkey prostitution. Amazing.

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

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Superfreakonomics.

Reviewed on October 22, 2010.

Larry Bond's Red Dragon Rising: Shadows of War (Book 1) by Larry Bond & Jim DeFelice

A change of pace for Larry Bond

Published in 2009 by Forge Books.

Don't get worried, Larry Bond is still cranking out the war thrillers, but Larry Bond's Red Dragon Rising: Shadows of War is not the grand sweep of a worldwide battlefield that his previous books have featured. Instead, we focus in on four people swept up in the beginnings of World War III. Those four people are a climate scientist studying in northern Vietnam who happens to have video that proves that China is instigating World War III in his cell phone, a female CIA agent who is trying to rescue him, a military wargamer (and former special forces) who is helping map out America's strategy to combat China's aggression and a Chinese lieutenant in an elite commando squad who is trying to catch the climatologist.

I'll admit, it starts out slow but it builds and is a rollicking adventure by the end. This is the first of a four part series and I see it as the prologue to a much more sweeping war series that is sure to come. The stage is set for a worldwide war for food, water and other resources in a world beset by one environmental catastrophe after another. The weakest part of the book in my opinion is the lightning-fast climate changes that cause all of the troubles in the first place. In my mind, it would have been better to have terrorists choke off the oil supplies and cause a different kind of crisis but...

Still, it's a good start. The momentum built throughout the book and I look forward to more from this series.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Larry Bond's Red Dragon Rising: Shadows of War

Reviewed on October 20, 2009.

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.