THE GIRL from the SEA (graphic novel) (kindle) by Molly Knox Ostertag

 

Illustrated by the author.
Published in 2021 by Graphix.
Winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Comic/Graphic Novel (2022)

Synopsis:

Morgan Kwon's parents have recently divorced. 15 year old Morgan, her annoying little brother and her mom have moved away from the city to an island just off of mainland Canada.

Morgan seems to be doing pretty well. After all, she has a great group of friends. But, there are struggles. Her little brother has become extra annoying, she misses her dad and she can't wait to get off of this island and go to college and be her true self. 

You see, Morgan has a secret that she is afraid to share with anyone - she's gay and she's afraid her friends and family will reject her if they find out.

It all comes to a head when she meets a very cute girl while swimming one day. There is a more than a spark of romance, but it turns out that this new girl has a secret that dwarfs Morgan's secret!

My review:

This is an absolutely enjoyable coming-of-age story. The publisher recommends grade 7 and higher and I agree with that recommendation. The book has two main plots - Morgan's secret and the new girl's even bigger secret. But, it also has an environmental subplot, a strong family message and a tiny sweet subplot that is sort of hidden throughout. This book contains no nudity and nothing sexual beyond a few kisses.

I rate this graphic novel 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE GIRL from the SEA (graphic novel) (kindle) by Molly Knox Ostertag.

NOTE: I only heard of this book because it was listed in an article about a MAGA parent who is challenging 3,600 books in a county school district in Florida in an effort to, as he describes it, "overwhelm" their challenge procedures. The parent was particularly unhappy about The Girl from the Sea and is quite vocal about it.

THE FLAG, the CROSS, and the STATION WAGON: A GRAYING AMERICAN LOOKS BACK at HIS SUBURBAN BOYHOOD and WONDERS WHAT the HELL HAPPENED (audiobook) by Bill McKibben

 

Published in 2022 by Macmillan Audio.
Read by Eric Jason Martin.
Duration: 6 hours, 39 minutes.
Unabridged.

McKibben looks back at his life in the suburbs in the 1960s and the 1970s and modern America and compares the two.

In certain circles this is an invitation to complain about the modern world with comments like, "When I was a kid, we didn't have all of this blah, blah, blah foolishness."

This is not that sort of book.

McKibben looks at three general areas:

1) The way that history was taught and the ways that he perceived that his country acted ("The Flag"). He grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts and was a tour guide as a young man for tourists who came to celebrate the bicentennial in 1976. The more he has learned, the more he knows that he was taught a simplistic, feel-good version of American history in school;

2) The things that his church taught him and how churches have fared over the intervening years ("The Cross"). He grew up and was very active in his church. He is really quite complimentary of his church upbringing. But, all denominations of churches have been shedding members. He even describes how one of the churches he attended had to consolidate with another congregation.

His thesis is not that the church in America was doing bad things, necessarily. His thesis is that the church gave up its best role - the role of speaking truth to power (for example, of the Old Testament story of when the prophet Nathan went to King David to tell him that he was wrong for sleeping with Bathsheba, the wife of one his trusted soldiers and then having that soldier killed so he could keep her).

Instead, the church became a part of the power structure. It worked with the government with the best of intentions. It seemed like a good idea to put these two institutions to work on social issues, but it neutered the church when it came to calling out the government on areas where it fell/falls short because the church owes certain things to the government or it is just too tied in to see the problems. McKibben uses the example of an attempt to build low income apartments in Lexington that was nixed because "those people" would come out of Boston and live with them in the suburbs. 

Bill McKibben in 2016
(photo by Gage Skidmore)

3) The situation of the American family and how it has changed over the years, including the wealth gap, how it relates generational wealth and policies that have exacerbated the wealth gap, especially among minority groups. He also throws in a healthy serving of environmental concerns - an area that he was worked in for a long time ("The Station Wagon"). This ties in well with the low income apartments in the previous paragraph.

I found this book to be a well-written and surprisingly tight set of arguments, considering that this book could have meandered all over the place with the topics of American history, the church in America and the American family. At the end, McKibben tosses in too much environmental discussion. It is the only part of the story that is not very tight, very focused and very integrated with the rest of the book. I'm not saying he didn't have a point, I am saying that it may not have been the best place to insert that point.

Still, I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE FLAG, the CROSS, and the STATION WAGON: A GRAYING AMERICAN LOOKS BACK at HIS SUBURBAN BOYHOOD and WONDERS WHAT the HELL HAPPENED (audiobook) by Bill McKibben.

THE HIDDEN LIFE of TREES: WHAT THEY FEEL, HOW THEY COMMUNICATE - DISCOVERIES from a SECRET WORLD by Peter Wohlleben

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Limited in 2016.

Read by Mike Grady.
Duration: 7 hours, 33 minutes.

Unabridged.

Peter Wohlleben is a forester in Germany, meaning that he manages a commercial forest in Germany. Even though he manages a commercial forest, he is a real fan of true "old growth" forests. Over the years he has gone out of his way to really study the way forests work as a complete unit. 

In The Hidden Life of Trees, his observations and research combine to tell an active, but very slow story of trees. Compared to people, many trees live a much slower life (centuries vs. decades), but a forest of trees is more than just an accidental accumulation of trees whose seeds all landed in the same place. 

In many ways, a healthy forest is a lot like a giant organism - it shores up its weak parts, it sustains itself, it is extraordinarily complicated and if one part is out of whack, the whole thing can suffer. Wohlleben explores these themes in some detail with a lot of surprising details.

But, a forest is also a place of deadly competition. Different species of trees struggle to block each other's sunlight, fungus tries to grow in and on trees, some animals kill or eat young trees and some animals can actually fatally damage larger trees (it can take decades, but when a tree lives centuries . Eventually, though, Wohlleben  brings it all around to demonstrate that all of this deadly competition is actually part of a healthy forest.

It is kind of tough for me to rate this audiobook. The reader was great and so much of the information was interesting - but it was often delivered in a repetitive, slow-paced manner. Many times the book was both boring and interesting - at the same time!

But, the quality and the wealth of the information makes me rate it 4 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here:  THE HIDDEN LIFE of TREES: WHAT THEY FEEL, HOW THEY COMMUNICATE - DISCOVERIES from a SECRET WORLD by Peter Wohlleben.

SAVAGE RUN (Joe Pickett #2) (audiobook) by C.J. Box

 

Originally published in 2002.

Published in 2010 by Recorded Books.
Read by David Chandler.
Duration: 8 hours, 48 minutes.
Unabridged.

I have been reading the Joe Pickett series for the last 10 years and I have been reading them all out of order. I started with book number one, went on to number thirteen and so on...

So, here I am ten years later with a review of Savage Run (book number two.)

The book starts out from the perspective of a radical environmentalist who leads a national organization. However, he is tired of using lawsuits to fight for the environment. He likes to get his hands dirty by spiking trees and cutting fences. While he is out doing that he gets blown up by a bomb that was strapped to a cow. 

Photo by DWD

Joe Pickett gets called out to the explosion site because there may have been wildlife injured or killed. He finds a horrible mess and soon enough gets sucked into another, much larger situation...

This is Box's sophomore effort and there is evidence of a sophomore slump here. It's not a bad book, it's just not as good as the rest of the series usually is. It has some very compelling parts, but the tension of what should have been the biggest moment of the chase scene is deflated by from comments that appear in the first part of the book.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: SAVAGE RUN (Joe Pickett #2) by C.J. Box.

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.

 

WHAT WOULD SHE DO? 25 TRUE STORIES of TRAILBLAZING REBEL WOMEN by Kay Woodward

Published by Scholastic in 2018

What Would She Do? is collection of very readable short biographies of women - which, after being factually correct, is the most important thing. As David McCullough said, "No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read." 

Woodward writes in an informal, approachable style that I enjoyed quite a bit. Each biography is accompanied by a full page illustration of the woman and a little chart with basic biographical information. There is also a large pullout quote from or about her. For example, for Emma Watson there is this quote: "The saddest thing for a girl to do is to dumb herself down for a guy."

Generally, I did not like the "What Would _____ Do?" section that was included at the end of each biography. The author was clearly trying to make a connection between the women in the book and the typical American student with typical American student problems. But, trying to connect Cleopatra to a student who is being laughed at for their fashion choices or Rosa Parks to a girl being left out of group texts was just too far of a stretch for me.

Otherwise, though, this is a strong book. I am gladly handing it over to my 6th grade daughter to read and then we are going to pass it on to her teacher for her classroom library.

The publisher recommends this book for ages 8-12. I would say ages 10-15.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5.

This book can be purchased on Amazon.com here: WHAT WOULD SHE DO? 25 TRUE STORIES of TRAILBLAZING REBEL WOMEN by Kay Woodward.

Note: I received a free review copy of this book as part of the Amazon Vine program in exchange for an honest review.

GRAY MOUNTAIN: A NOVEL, (audiobook) by John Grisham

Published in 2014 by Random House Audio
Read by Catherine Taber
Duration: 14 hours, 46 minutes
Unabridged

In Gray Mountain, John Grisham explores Appalachian coal country in this novel through the eyes of a young New York lawyer named Samantha Kofer. Kofer has just lost her job in real estate development law at literally the world's largest law firm in the wake of the financial collapse of 2008. Her firm gives her the chance to work for a non-profit for a year without losing her insurance or her seniority and she ends up in the legal aid office in Brady - a tiny town in southwest Virginia in the heart of coal country.

As Kofer starts to work in the office she discovers the world of day-to-day law and how America's poor get bounced around in a legal system with all sorts of hidden rules. Turns out that she has a knack for it. She picks up a case with a coal miner suing for disability due to black lung and she discovers that Big Coal rules all in this region - and there's nothing anyone can do about it...

Like so many of John Grisham's books, the plot is merely the vehicle for Grisham to discuss an aspect of the law. The plot suffers but that's okay by me - I have learned a lot and been entertained as I went along. 

I learned a lot about modern coal mining (to be more accurate, they don't really mine so much as tear apart mountains in a process called "mountaintop removal") and my natural affinity for the union movement was strengthened. Too often, the rules are written by the companies and the government ends up enforcing things that hurt regular people. Without a union, most of these people have no one on their side.

Catherine Taber did a fantastic job of reading this book. Her accents were great and she did a great job with a variety of voices. 

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Gray Mountain by John Grisham.

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.

TUNNEL VISIONS by Kurt Kamm

Gritty Realism and Eco-Terrorists in This Firefighter Adventure

Published in August of 2014 by MCM Publishing

Over the years I have read a ton of books about police officers of all sorts: cops on the beat, homicide detectives, FBI agents, Secret Service and more. But, Kurt Kamm specializes in writing very detailed, authentic feeling books (as far as this high school teacher can tell, anyway) about an equally visible group of first responders that I have rarely read any books about: firefighters. 

In Tunnel Visions fire captain Nick Carter, an expert in underground search and rescue missions, is called in to a task force that is investigating a possible terror attack on a gigantic underground tunnel that helps supply the water for Los Angeles. His fiancée, an ATF Special Agent, is on the ground looking for the same eco-terrorists.

The book uses a series of flashbacks to go back and forth from the current day story of the terrorists to Nick's childhood and early career. He was inspired by the story of his father, a man who died in a horrible accidental explosion while digging the very same tunnel that the terrorists want to destroy. But, as the story progresses we learn that Nick has been hiding multiple secrets about his father and those secrets could destroy his career and even his relationship with his fiancée. The Sylmar Tunnel explosion was an actual event. It happened in 1971 and killed 17 miners. Click here for more information.

This is a very readable book with lots of danger and suspense (and really bad traffic). The flashbacks sometimes feel like they are getting in the way of the real story but, in the end, the flashbacks pull the whole thing together in an ending that may be a little too nice (but a happy ending is okay every now and then!)

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Tunnel Visions by Kurt Kamm.

 Note: I was sent a review copy of this book at no charge in exchange for an honest review.

I rate this novel 4 stars out of 5.
Reviewed on September 12, 2014.

COLD WIND (Joe Pickett #11) by C. J. Box

Bad news: Your father-in-law has been murdered. Worse news: Your mother-in-law is suspect #1

Published in 2011 by G.P. Putnam's Sons

A 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, you will enjoy Box's descriptions of the local landscape and the people of Wyoming.

Cold Wind features Joe Pickett, a Wyoming game warden. Joe loves the great outdoors, loves being a game warden, loves his wife, loves his family, hates bureaucracy and hates his mother-in-law. His mother-in-law is a real piece of work and is almost universally despised. She has clawed and married her way to a fortune and has no problem using people and tricks of divorce law to take more money. 

Joe Pickett's current father-in-law. Earl Alden, is one of Wyoming's biggest ranchers. He is not really a rancher, but he owns one of the biggest ranches in the state and he is installing a gigantic giant windmill wind farm on it in order to receive federal grants that came with the famed 2009 "stimulus package". Earl is found dead on his own property, hanging from one of the giant windmills and Joe's  mother-in-law is immediately arrested. Joe suspects that she is being framed but he has no idea who is doing it or why.

A Wyoming windmill

One of the things that I like about this series is that C.J. Box is more than willing to demonstrate how misguided federal policies mess with the real world. In this case, the windmills ruin a neighbor's domestic life with their constant whining (at least that it while they are turning), cost much more than the energy they produce, have to be backed up by conventional power plants (for times when they are not turning) and may not have even produced new jobs at all since these particular windmills were used, rehabilitated windmills relocated from Texas.

Nate Romanowski makes an appearance in this book, but it is not integral to the main story. Unfortunately, I am reading the books all out of order so the character of Nate is more of a distraction for me than a real character of interest. His character could have been edited completely out of the story and made it about 70 pages shorter and a much tighter novel overall.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Cold Wind by C.J. Box.

Reviewed on September 7, 2013.

The Force is Middling in this One: And Other Ruminations from the Outskirts of the Empire by Robert Kroese

Published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform in 2010.

Entirely composed of a "best of" compilation of blog posts from the author's blog and tied together with quotes and thoughts from the Star Wars movies, The Force is Middling In This One is a fun bit of reading designed to be read exactly as it was written: in small doses. This book is perfectly constructed for reading while standing in line (which I did with my smart phone and my kindle app) or any other time when you just have about 5 minutes to read.

The topics are all over the place, covering topics such as Star Wars, motorcycle riding on the freeway, the author's brain and its lack of focus, the construction of an addition to his house, his life in the least livable city in the United States (Modesto, CA - and yes, it was named that by a survey), Home Improvement Store employees, why gophers are literally evil and a whole lot more. Nearly every posting is interrupted by a totally different very short thought called "From the Sock Drawer." 

Very few postings are political - he explains early on that he used to have a political blog but he literally alienated almost of his readers to the point that he stopped posting them. An exception to that is a posting called "Burn, Baby Burn!" about the folly of some environmentalists that was so on the point and explains why some programs will never work in a logical economics-based manner that I was ashamed that I hadn't thought of explaining things in this way before - i am a licensed econ teacher, after all.

I rate this collection 4 stars out of 5. 

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: 
The Force is Middling in this One: And Other Ruminations from the Outskirts of the Empire


Reviewed on July 22, 2013. 

Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

The first of a set - "Guns, Germs and Steel" and "Collapse"

Published by  W. W. Norton and Company (April 1, 1999)

Most readers of those two books read Guns, Germs and Steel before Collapse in the order in which they were published. I, however, read them in reverse order of publication. Many were critical of Collapse because it was too close to Guns, Germs and Steel in theme and topics covered. I suppose that I am a bit disappointed as well, but not too much.

Yes, they cover some of the same material, but really they are the twin sides of the same coin - the rise of societies and the fall of societies. With a little bit of editing, Jared Diamond could have merged these two books into one and created one monster-sized tome (800 plus pages) on the rise and fall of societies around the world.

Diamond's theses are cogent, coherent and clear. Really, it is a wonderful volume for the student of world history who wishes to take some steps into the deeper end of the scholarship pool. Despite the easy writing style (Personally, I've never had much respect for some serious scholars who seem to delight in making their texts as dense and difficult as possible), these are lofty thoughts that are often painstakingly laid out.

The author

On occasion, Mr. Diamond's descriptions were a little too detailed (especially concerning the domestication of grains) and I found myself skimming several pages. But, those moments were rare and normally I found it to be interesting in the least and from time to time I had an "Aha!" moment while reading.

If you enjoy this one, be sure to read Collapse.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Guns, Germs and Steel.

I give this one 5 stars out of 5.

Reviewed on October 3, 2006.

State of Fear by Michael Crichton

A wonderful science debate cradled in a hard-to-swallow action story

Published in 2004 by Harper Collins.

State of Fear is really two books. One is by Crichton the science essayist. Crichton's scientific comments about the environmentalist movement are most interesting and well-put. This is the only work of fiction that I've read with actual footnotes in it! Crichton throws down the gauntlet in this one and wants you to look into it for yourself. If only Dan Brown had done the same with The DaVinci Code!

Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

Crichton the story-teller is not at his best here. The plot is, for all practical purposes, merely a shallow medium to carry forth Crichton's scientific arguments. It does that but it is not, in and of itself, terribly interesting. If the scientific debates were removed from the book, the action could not carry the book on its own merit.

Read it for the different perspective on global warming, not for the plot. I give the scientific debate (with footnotes) 5 stars, the plot just one star. That's an average of 3 stars.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: State of Fear

Reviewed on July 27, 2006.

Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots by Rod Dreher

Neat idea but bad follow through

Published in 2006 by Three Rivers Press.

I grabbed Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots on impulse as I was leaving the local purveyor of books. You see, I am a "Crunchy Con" of sorts, being an avid recycler. But, this book really failed to reach me. In fact, I felt like I was being preached at with certain topics being outright hammered into my skull due to their repetitive re-occurrence.

Pluses:

-The book addresses the fact that the conservative movement is not monolithic and their are a variety of reasons for people to espouse conservatism.

-Embraces a belief in buying local - something I try to do when I go out to eat or shop whenever reasonably possible.

-Points out how silly it is to apply big business agricultural regulations to family farms.

Negatives:

-What the heck is "crunchy"? Search the internet and you may get a reference to "Crunchy granola", which basically means being hippie-like. Or, you may get a reference to this book, or you may get a reference to some sort of street drug.

-Dreher gets too preachy, too mystical about the virtues of organic farming and quaint old neighborhoods that time forgot in the inner city. Plus, he goes on and on for dozens of pages about these topics with multiple interviews that do little but reinforce the points already made.

-Dreher repeats the old worn line that we in the West should be more like the East: "...in the West, economics is built on philosophically materialist assumptions, but in the East, the whole person is taken into account." (p. 49) Really. The East, home to the Khmer Rouge, sex slavery, the caste system and foot binding. Besides, which "Eastern" philosophy are you going to follow? Confucianism? Daoism? Sikhism? Samurai Bushido? There really is no "Eastern" philosophy. Let's admit it - no society, East or West has all of the answers.

-Dreher's answer to the un-competitive nature of organic farming is a decidedly un-conservative one, have the power of the federal government choose in favor of the organic farmers "and encourage through tax incentives the development of small-scale, locally based agriculture." (p. 86) This is especially odd considering his prior exhortation: "We object to the idea that there's nothing wrong with our country that a new tax or a government program can't fix." (p. 10)

-Dreher waxes poetically about homeschooling. For page after page we hear about how his family does it and how others do as well. He drags up quotes from the 1800s and the 1920s about how the philosophical underpinnings of public schools are inherently anti-family. He offers only two choices: A) immoral public schools who are only out to indoctrinate your children (pp. 136-139) or B) perfect family homeschoolers. 

To be fair, you should know that I am a public school teacher that does not believe in the inherent goodness of public schools (or any other human institution, for that matter). I've seen families do homeschooling right (some of our family's best friends do it right), but I've also seen it done so poorly that when their kids finally come to school they are functionally illiterate.

While sympathetic to many of his points, the most I can say about this book is "disappointed."

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots.

Reviewed on October 13, 2008.

Note: Rod Dreher has gone off the deep end politically since I have read this book. My 2/5 star review isn't much of an endorsement to begin with, but I wanted to make it clear that I do not agree with his embrace of Viktor Orban of Hungary.

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 Roar by Emma Clayton

There's a lot of meat to this "tween" novel. Quite enjoyable and discussion-provoking

Published in 2009.

The Roar is a more "kiddie" book than I normally read. This one is aimed at the tween crowd (the book says down to grade 3 but I can't really imagine anyone under the age of 10 getting into it) and I found it to be quite compelling despite being aimed at the younger set and the occasional clunky simile and/or phrase. The Roar has a sequel called The Whisper.

The book is set in a dismal future in which religion is gone (not really mentioned but people say, "My odd!" rather than "My God!") and the environment has been destroyed by mankind in order to kill of the animals. 45 years before the story an animal "plague" caused all of the animals to attack people in a crazed frenzy. So, people retreated to just a few countries (UK, Canada and a few others), became part of a highly stratified society with lots of urban poor forced to live in nasty, poisonous slums and the government wiped out all of the animals by laying waste to the environment and making it a giant desert.

Emma Clayton

Well, that's the official story anyway.

Potential spoiler alert****************************

What we have here is an excellent book for a classroom discussion of the need to investigate for oneself, the dangers of totalitarian government and the dangers of oligarchy.

You also get some Adam and Eve religious themes and a few jabs at the modern environmental movement. Some may read it otherwise but I couldn't help but notice that the main bad guy is a government minister named Mal Goreman (Al Gore?) who helps to manipulate the media to convince everyone that the animals were dangerous and uses the TV and schools to push his agenda. 

Everyone lives in slums in poverty rather than touch nature, which has to be protected for the enjoyment and use of the enlightened elite.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon here: The Roar

Reviewed on March 22, 2009.

Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies That Have Obscured Our Nation's Greatness by Daniel J. Flynn

A quick and thought-provoking read

Originally published in 2002 by Prima Lifestyles.

The thesis of Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies That Have Obscured Our Nation's Greatness, an exceedingly-well footnoted book, is that some on the ultra-left of the American political scene have pet theories that they espouse and that they hate it when facts do not bear out their theories. Among these are what Flynn calls "The Five Big Lies".

The Five Big Lies are:

1. American women live under a patriarchy.

2. America is the World's leading threat to the environment.

3. America is a racist nation.

4. The US is an imperial power.

5. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

Daniel J. Flynn

Flynn quotes his opponents extensively and then rebuts their arguments with his own extensive research from a wide variety of sources (he has over 500 end-notes, often with commentary - not a small task).

Flynn does not claim that the US is perfect in any of the above 5 areas. Far from it. He just submits that some on the left have given themselves over to hyperbole and unfairly characterized America and Americans.

Who is the Left that he is disputing? Not any of the normal run-of-the-mill politicians in the Democratic Party (the one that is the "left" in normal political terms for those political novices out there), but rather the ultra-left, such as Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, Ted Turner, Stokely Carmichael, Cornel West, Patricia Ireland to name a few. I was put in mind of an ultra-feminist  that taught my English 101 class at Indiana University. The poetry and essays and short story assignments were all about sexism and racism. I was told to write what I thought, but the only time I got above a "C" was when I wrote what she thought.

Anyway, this is a quick and thought-provoking read that has the added bonus of being very enjoyable to read.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies That Have Obscured Our Nation's Greatness

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

Reviewed in February of 2005.

5-28-2025: UPDATE. I removed Flynn's now defunct website from the review. I looked for a new site and I could not find one. He is a regular contributor to standard conservative publications like National Review and The American Spectator - his works are easy to find there.

It's been 20 years since this review was written. Donald J. Trump arrived on the political scene 10 years ago and changed the Conservative Movement. Those changes were too much for me. I doubt I would care much for this book now, but I am not going to take down my review. Flynn seems to be strident, but not nuts.