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. 

OUT of SEASON (Posadas County Mysteries #7) (audiobook) by Steven F. Havill

 

Published in 2008 by Books In Motion.

Originally published in 1999.
Read by Rusty Nelson.
Duration: 8 hours, 56 minutes.
Unabridged.

In Out of Season things are not going well for Undersheriff Bill Gastner, the second in command of the Posadas County Sheriff Department in southern New Mexico. He is planning to retire in a few months and the person he had hoped he would take over for him is moving out of state. He found out another officer has applied to a much larger department where there are more opportunities. 

Things get even worse, though. A woman that most would consider more than a little mentally off balance calls the department and says that she has seen a struggling small plane disappear behind a mesa near her home. She says that it must have crashed. When a deputy checks it out, he spots wreckage. When they finally get close they find two bodies - and one of them is the Sheriff, a man who notoriously hates to ride in planes.

When Gastner and the department start to dig into what happened, they find more than they ever bargained for...

Rusty Nelson has read most if not all of the audiobooks in this series. I have read or listened to most of them. His folksy tone of voice goes well with Bill Gastner. Since the book is told from Gastner's point of view, that works out well.

Gastner continues to be a lovable grump. His age-related physical limitations encourage him use his head rather than charge blindly into a situation. He continues his insomniac ways while he guzzles coffee and takes any chance to sit down at the Don Juan Restaurant and eat a plateful of spicy burritos.

My only problem with the book is the character of Estelle Reyes-Guzman. She is always perfect. She is pretty, married to a fantastic guy, has a great family, figures out the case before anyone else, drives better than anyone else and is unfailingly polite. Don't get me wrong - I'd love it if she were a cop in my town, but she is a boring character.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: OUT of SEASON (Posadas County Mysteries #7) (audiobook) by Steven F. Havill.

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A VOYAGE LONG and STRANGE: REDISCOVERING the NEW WORLD (audiobook) by Tony Horwitz

 

Published in 2008 by Random House Audio.
Read by John H. Mayer.
Duration: 17 hours, 16 minutes.
Unabridged.

In A Voyage Long and Strange Tony Horwitz set out to fill in a big gap in his understanding of American history. He vaguely knew that the Vikings arrived in the New World and did something or other and he knew about Columbus' voyage in 1492 and he knew about the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock and the First Thanksgiving in 1621, but what happened in between? Also, what about the people that were already here?

Horwitz decided to find out what he didn't know and this book is a combined travelogue and history lesson. He starts with the small failed Viking settlement in Newfoundland, Canada, moves on to the Dominican Republic to learn about Columbus and comes to the United States to look at the first Spanish explorers and settlements in New Mexico and Florida. He also looks at the epic and eventually tragic expeditions of exploration that the Spanish sent out. Finally, he turns toward the early English attempts to explore and build colonies. 

A reconstruction of what a Viking longhouse in
Newfoundland may have looked like.

Typically, Horwitz starts out a section of his book by looking at the geographical area he is visiting as it is nowadays. He finds a variety of different locals to interview and lets them supplement the history he presents. Many times those local experts get very philosophical about how the past has influenced their homes.

Horwitz's roundabout way of discussing the history is almost always interesting - usually extremely interesting. However, the section on the Dominican Republic and a museum he visited there was too long and too repetitive. But, he bounces back from that and does a splendid job from that point forward.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: 

A VOYAGE LONG and STRANGE: REDISCOVERING the NEW WORLD by Tony Horwitz.

UNOFFENDABLE: HOW JUST ONE CHANGE CAN MAKE ALL of LIFE BETTER (audiobook) by Brant Hansen

Published in August of 2015 by Tantor Audio.
Read by the author, Brant Hansen.
Duration: 4 hours, 21 minutes.
Unabridged.

Brant Hansen came to a realization that righteous anger, an emotion that a lot of my fellow Christians seem to adore should not actually be a tool in the Christian toolbox. It's on display all over social media and at public events like the current spate of contentious school board meetings. For example, recently a former member of 2 Contemporary Christian bands was seen at the forefront of a mob that was menacing people in the parking lot after a school board meeting. He yelling, "You can live freely, but we will find you!" at medical personnel who testified in favor of masks. He became the story and all Christians got a black eye as Taliban-type extremists. 

The author, Brant Hansen

Instead, Hansen is trying his best to take the words of God seriously when he says  to avoid anger. Here are 20 verses that give that counsel. He describes the change in mindset that is required - a move away from selfishness towards others. 

He does not claim to have perfected it or even to have come close to perfecting it, but the change in perspective has made a tremendous difference in his faith walk. He gives examples of others being unoffendable, including people reacting to things he did to offend them. The difference is that Christians are not perceived as the world's judges - a big point since God has made it clear that he is the world's judge.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. I liked the points it had to make, but it felt like the book was repetitive in an attempt to make it bigger. 

This book can be found on Amazon.com here:  UNOFFENDABLE:  HOW JUST ONE CHANGE CAN MAKE ALL of LIFE BETTER by Brant Hansen.

10 DAYS (Dee Rommel Mystery #1) by Jule Selbo

 

Published by Pandamoon Publishing in August of 2021.

Waterfront in Portland, Maine

Synopsis:

Dee Rommel is at a crossroads of her life. She is on leave from the police department of Portland, Maine because she lost half of one of her legs on duty. After months of diligent physical therapy (and less then diligent psychiatric therapy) she is being pushed to decide if she is coming back to work or not.

She has been helping her godfather Gordy, her deceased father's best friend. He is a private detective and she feels very comfortable with the paperwork and the billing. When Gordy takes some time off to donate a kidney in Florida, a situation arises. One of Gordy's lifelong friends urgently needs help now and Dee is asked to step in and do some investigating while Gordy is down and out from the surgery.

The friend is a famous billionaire named Claren - Maine's version of Bill Gates. A local boy who made it big in the tech business. Claren's twenty-something daughter is also a tech whiz and a genius who graduated early from college and runs her own independent division of Claren's company.  She has gone missing.

Dee takes the job but there are other things demanding her attention as well. A local bully has been released from prison and is menacing all of the people who testified against him. Also, Dee continues to look into the case that cost her her leg. Plus, the new guy in the town is surprisingly sophisticated and intriguing considering that he cultivates a biker persona...

My thoughts:

The first book of any series is always tough to gauge because so much world-building has to be done. This book builds a pretty credible world with a lot of potential characters to use in future books. For me, that slowed the book down quite a bit - there were so many characters to process. I am assuming that future books won't go out of there way to include everybody like this one did.

The main mystery with the missing heiress was simply okay for me. I was much more intrigued by the secondary mystery with the local bully.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: 10 Days (Dee Rommel Mystery #1) by Jule Selbo.

Note: I received an ARC copy of this book in exchange for a unfiltered review. 

DOOKU: JEDI LOST (audiobook) by Cavan Scott

 

Published in 2019 by Random House Audio.

Performed by multiple readers.
Duration: 6 hours, 21 minutes.
Unabridged.

Part of the new Disney "canon" books, Dooku: Jedi Lost is a look at the origins of one of the characters of the Star Wars prequels - Count Dooku. It is part of a series of "stand alone" books. For me, Dooku just shows up in the movies with a minimum of explanation - not nearly enough.  We learn a lot more about him in the Star Wars: Clone Wars cartoon show but not enough for me. Dooku is interesting as the original model for Anakin Skywalker - the talented Jedi who often argues with the Jedi Council and eventually falls to the Dark Side.

This book tells little about Dooku's activities during the Clone Wars. Even though it is set in the first half of the Clone Wars cartoon series, that is mostly a frame that is used to lead the reader through a series of flashbacks that tell about Dooku's early life. The use of all of the flashbacks was annoying in my mind, though. I think it would have been better to have just told the story of young Dooku without all of the flashbacks.

The audiobook was performed like an old fashioned radio play with different actors playing each of the characters. That part was well done, but I was irritated that a book called "Jedi Lost" really didn't give much detail about how Dooku became a lost Jedi. 

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  DOOKU: JEDI LOST by Cavan Scott.

NOTHING to LOSE (Jack Reacher #12) (audiobook) by Lee Child

 

Published by Random House Audio in 2008.

Read by Dick Hill.
Duration: 14 hours, 25 minutes.
Unabridged.

I think that I have worked my way through all of the Jack Reacher novels and short stories over the last 5 years. Nothing to Lose is the last one (I think). I read them all out of order, but fans know that that is okay since they were never written in order in the first place.

Sadly, this was one of the weakest of the entire very large collection. 

Reacher is travelling from Maine to San Diego just to see the country. He notes that Colorado has two towns with interesting names very close to one another: Hope and Despair.

The author, Lee Child.

Hope is a pleasant enough place with a hardware store and a hotel and diner. Reacher decides to hike to nearby despair and is immediately arrested for being a vagrant. Technically, he is a vagrant. He has no job, no fixed address and no plans to acquire either. 

Despair locks him up (after a bit of a fight) and runs him through a kangaroo court, finds him guilty and expels him from the town limits, which is about halfway to the town of Hope. Reacher meets up with the police chief of Hope, discusses the weird behavior of Hope's town government. And...he heads back for more.

He also finds a lot more than ever imagined he would...

This book felt disconnected from reality a lot more than the average Jack Reacher book. I don't mean that as an insult to the series, but let's face it - a giant ex-soldier beating the crap out of groups of big men in the middle of the street in every book is just nor normal behavior. 

Anyway, the whole book seemed sort of half-baked all the way through and Reacher's choice on how to end things seemed completely out of character considering the long-term implications (decades, maybe even centuries) of his choice. 

Dick Hill read the audiobook and he is my all-time favorite audiobook reader. He "gets" Jack Reacher.

Despite Dick Hill's reading, I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: NOTHING to LOSE by Lee Child.

FORGET the ALAMO: THE RISE and FALL of an AMERICAN MYTH (audiobook) by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford

 

Published in June of 2021 by Penguin Audio.

Read by Fred Sanders.
Duration: 12 hours, 15 minutes.
Unabridged.

Forget the Alamo is the second book that I have read because a governor took steps to keep people from hearing about the book. The story of the first is detailed here. 

In the case of this book, the Governor and especially the Lt. Governor of Texas had an event featuring a discussion of this book removed from the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, Texas. They acted in early July of 2021 because they were not happy about how it questioned the way the history of the Alamo (in San Antonio, Texas) is traditionally taught at the Alamo itself and in textbooks, classrooms, movies and books. Here is the text of the Lt. Governor's Tweet from July 2, 2021: "As a member of the Preservation Board, I told staff to cancel this event as soon as I found out about it. Like efforts to move the Cenotaph, which I also stopped, this fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place @BullockMuseum"

The Cenotaph the Lt. Governor refers to is an empty tomb for the defenders of the Alamo since their bodies were never recovered (they were burned by the Mexican Army). There was a plan to move the Cenotaph to be more integrated with the rest of the Alamo site while rehabbing it and updating the list of Alamo defenders. This topic is also discussed in the book.

Speaking of the book, I must thank these two gentlemen because without them I never would have listened to this very entertaining and very informative audiobook. 

Roughly the first half of the book is about the settlement of Texas by Spain, Mexico and American who moved in and agreed to become Mexican citizens. They talk about how slavery became a major point of contention after the Mexican War of Independence (1810-1821) because Mexico had every intent to outlaw slavery.

The authors detail how Stephen Austin went to Mexico City for more than a year to lobby for Texas to have special rights. The authors emphasize how he receeived special concessions for Texas and its slaves. This was critical because so many Americans moved into Texas after this point with slaves. The American states neighboring Texas were being filled up with cotton plantations that had to be worked by slaves to be profitable (at least that was the common belief) and Texas showed great promise as a cotton-growing state.

Mexico formally abolished slavery in 1831. 

When the Mexican dictator Santa Anna led an army to Texas to stop the Texas Revolution (1835-1836), he announced that he would stop Texas' attempt to secede and he would also free its slaves.  

The authors linger on the slavery point for a while and I think they give solid historical reasons for doing so. They do not make the point that I will make now - Texas seceded from 2 different countries in 26 years in an attempt to protect slavery (1835 and 1861). 

Their description of the battle itself is very good. By the way, the church that makes up most of the focus of the current Alamo site was not a part of the battle. 

The authors switch gears for the rest of the book and focus on the place of the Alamo in national memory and how it has been honored and taught over the years. Their look at how movies and books have told the story of the Alamo was very interesting.

They are particularly critical of the fact that, over time, the contributions of non-white people to the Texas Revolution and the defense of the Alamo have been dropped out of the story and the whole thing has become a story of only white people fighting back against an army of non-whites. There were "Tejanos" or native Mexicans that fought against Santa Anna for a variety of reasons, but it is rarely taught this way. They quote several book and, even more importantly, textbooks and official state curriculum guides. 

The politics of managing the Alamo as a historical site gets a lot of attention in the book as well. There have been a lot of arguments about how to do that and that continues up to this day (see the Tweet quoted above). 

The book ends with a look at the Alamo-related collection of Phil Collins. Yes, Phil Collins the English singer. Collins has an impressive collection of legitimate items from the Alamo and the Texas Revolution. He has an even more impressive collection of items that have been doctored or copies of items that he believes are the real thing. Collins wants to donate all of it to a museum dedicated to his collection - if Texas politicians can get their act together.

Ironically, the controversy caused by the Governor and the Lt. Governor would have fit in perfectly with the theme of this book and I hope that they offer an updated edition in the future with their book included. 

Once again, I seriously want to thank the Governor and the Lt. Governor for leting me know about this book. It was excellent.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  FORGET the ALAMO: THE RISE and FALL of an AMERICAN MYTH by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford.

A LOT of PEOPLE ARE SAYING: THE NEW CONSPIRACISM and the ASSAULT on DEMOCRACY (audiobook) by Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead

 

Published in April of 2019 by Princeton University Press.

Read by Katherine Fenton.

Duration: 6 hours, 49 minutes.

Unabridged

The key to this book is to understand the difference between a conspiracy theory and the new conspiracism. 

Conspiracy theories are the classic hobby of odd people that we all know. They collect reams and reams of information to prove that the lunar landings were faked, that LBJ had JFK killed, or to prove that 9/11 was an inside job. They work very hard to prove their point. They collect video evidence, find paper trails, produce flow charts and maybe have a wall dedicated to showing how all of the data points connect. There is a logic to conspiracy theories, even if most people find them weird.

 The new conspiracism is often incoherent because it demands no logic - it depends on being repeated over and over again and a strong assertion that "people are saying" it is true. There are no documents that back it up. There are no elaborate theories. Just a "harmless" little observation that "people are saying" followed up with more assertions that "people are saying." 

At best, there may be comments along the lines of "Do the research!" When you do you get into an echo chamber of a YouTube video that refers to an article that refers to a podcast that refers back to the original YouTube video - that's the digital version of "People are saying."

The classic example of this is the Pizzagate situation in which people said that the Democratic National Committee was running a child molestation ring out of the basement of a pizza place. A man showed up with a rifle to free the children from the basement - the problem is there is no basement and there were no children.

The authors supply multiple examples, all from President Trump, Trump allies or Trump supporters. Their "People are saying..." accusations can be pointed at anyone or anything.  The purpose of these actions seem to just to conjure up a few very short term political points. That is common enough, but these behaviors do little but sow the seeds of doubt in our political processes. The authors think that this may actually be the point with some groups or politicians.  

While I agree with every example the authors provided, I think the authors have a blind spot towards the Democrats. 

I am what is commonly called a Never-Trump Republican. I concede that a great deal of the Trump-led-what's-left-of-the-GOP is totally into these sorts of conspiracies. But, the Democrats have had their share of that in the past and they should be noted as well. I notice them because I am a metaphorical refugee from my own party.The fringe of both parties is completely willing to wreck the entire system for a temporary bump in the polls and to activate their super-active fringe voters.

The real problem of this book, though, is that it was published in 2019 and it missed all of the craziness of the 2020 election and its aftermath including the multiple failed lawsuits and the January 6th Insurrection and the predictions from the MyPillow guy that Trump will be reinstated at various times in 2021. I have heard that they are going to offer an update. The only problem is can you offer an update in the middle of an ongoing event?

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5, mostly because it identified and gave a name to a disturbing trend in our national politics. It can be found on Amazon.com here: A LOT of PEOPLE ARE SAYING: THE NEW CONSPIRACISM and the ASSAULT on DEMOCRACY by Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead.

CIVIL WAR BLUNDERS by Clint Johnson

 

Published by John F. Blair in 1997.

There are several books like Civil War Blunders on the market. History books are full of interesting, odd stories that add a little spice to the narrative and there is a certain logic to having a book of just the spice. 

This book is organized in a loose chronolgical order, rather than by theme. Sometimes the stories blend into each other, sometimes not.

There was nothing particularly good or bad about this collection. Some of the stories are more amusing than outright blunders and there is a bit of anti-Union and anti-Lincoln bias that can be detected, especially at the beginning. But, not enough to derail the book.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Civil War Blunders by Clint Johnson.

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.

FINDING GOBI: A LITTLE DOG with a VERY BIG HEART by Dion Leonard

 

Published by Thomas Nelson in 2017.
Read by Simon Bubb.
Duration: 6 hours, 36 minutes.

Unabridged.

Dion Leonard is an ultramarathon runner. Ultramarathons are technically marathons that are longer than a traditional 26.2 mile marathon, but Dion Leonard likes to run extended multi-day ultramarathons.

He was running a multi-day race in the Gobi Desert in China when he met a scruffy little dog as he was lining up to start day two of the race. To be accurate, the little dog was attracted to him - it wouldn't leave him alone!

Gobi with Dion Leonard

When the race started, Leonard assumed that the dog would follow for a while and then return home, wherever that was. But, the dog followed him every step of the way - 23 miles. That night, the dog stayed with Leonard in his tent and went with him again on the 3rd stage of the race. As they headed into the desert, Leonard worried that the dog could be hurt by the higher temperature more brutal landscape. So, he arranged for the dog to be carried on to the end of the next stage and eventually to the end of the race.

Turns out that he was right, the next stage was dangerous and the desert nearly killed Leonard and many other runners. 

By this time, Leonard had named the dog (Gobi) and had decided to bring the dog back to his home in the UK. 

And that's where things got complicated...

This is a pretty good story, but a little slow-paced. Really, the story has three focuses: 

a) The life of Dion Leonard and how he ended up running that race in the desert.

b) Ultramarathoning, especially the race where Leonard met Gobi.

c) The extraordinarily complicated story of how Gobi left China. 

Sometimes, the book seems like it is trying to stretch things out to actually fill a book. When you get down to it, it is the story of a guy who finds a dog when he's out on a run and brings it home. Personally, I found the story of the race and how Leonard first met Gobi the best part of the book.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: FINDING GOBI: A LITTLE DOG with a VERY BIG HEART by Dion Leonard.

DOWN ALONG with THAT DEVIL'S BONES: A RECKONING with MONUMENTS, MEMORY, and the LEGACY of WHITE SUPREMACY (audiobook) by Connor Towne O'Neill

 

Published in 2020 by Workman Publishing.

Read by Geoffrey Cantor.

Duration: 7 hours, 25 minutes.

Unabridged.

Connor Towne O'Neill was attending the 50th anniversary recognition of the Selma to Montgomery March when he discovered something unexpected. The Selma to Montgomery march ended when Alabama State Troopers joined local deputies at the Edmund Pettus bridge and beat them until they retreated. The bridge is named for a Confederate General and a Grand Dragon of the Alabama KKK.

O'Neill was looking for a place to park and drove into a graveyard. In the graveyard, he discovered a group prepping a part of the graveyard for the re-installation of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest (the original had been stolen) in the graveyard. It was on a piece of property owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the middle of the graveyard.

O'Neill sensed that this was the more powerful story, no matter how dramatic that moment on the bridge had been 50 years earlier. He decided to investigate the power that the memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest has over so many Confederate apologists. 

He begins with an interesting mini-biography of Forrest. He began with almost nothing and made himself quite wealthy trading slaves, including slaves straight from Africa (Constitutionally prohibited since 1808). At the beginning of the war, he joined as a private and is the only person on either side to go from private to general. He outfitted a squad of cavalry and became on of the most daring and active Confederate generals of the war. He led from the front and the omnipresent threat of his sudden appearance was a constant source of worry in the Western Theater of the Civil War.

After the war, Forrest was approached to lead a group designed to resist the new rights granted to the ex-slaves with a wave of terrorism - the Ku Klux Klan (also known as America's first terrorist organization). He formally led the group for a while and then may have become a leader in the background after it was formally disbanded (maybe he was still their leader, maybe he wasn't. Maybe they disbanded, maybe they didn't - it is surprisingly unclear).

O'Neill's search for the story of the hold that Forrest has on so many takes him from Selma to Memphis to Nashville to Montgomery and sees how people use Forrest as a symbol to oppose racial integration. 

Close up of the face of the Forrest statue
in Nashville. It was not the intent of the artist,
but Forrest looks plenty crazy

For me, the most interesting section was the discussion of the Forrest statue near I-65 in Nashville. I always keep an eye for it whenever I drive through Nashville (not often). It is so cartoonish that many people have joked that they want this statue to stay up even if all other Confederate statues come down. It is on private property, however, so it will stay there as long as its current owner wants to keep it.

Often, this was a difficult book. But, I think it is an important one, especially if you are interested in the Confederate monument controversies. 

Highly Recommended.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found at Amazon.com here: DOWN ALONG with THAT DEVIL'S BONES: A RECKONING with MONUMENTS, MEMORY, and the LEGACY of WHITE SUPREMACY by Connor Towne O'Neill.

Note: the Forrest statue along Interstate 65 in Nashville was removed by the new owners after the death of the original owner. Here is a news story describing the situation: Click here.

WHEN HITLER TOOK COCAINE and LENIN LOST HIS BRAIN: HISTORY'S UNKNOWN CHAPTERS (audiobook) by Giles Milton

 

Published in 2016 by Macmillan Audio.

Read by the author, Giles Milton.
Duration: 4 hours, 53 minutes.

Unabridged.

Giles Milton is a prolific British writer of histories and historical fiction. This is a collection of odd stories of history that he has run across doing his research.

Lenin, preserved in his tomb. 
He has gone from being an 
object of reverence to a
tourist attraction.

There are the two stories mentioned in the title - Hitler using stimulants and Lenin's odd burial, but there are a lot more from several different time periods.

The problem is that there were a lot of similar stories and some weren't really from "unknown" chapters. Lots of Nazi-related stories and three separate stories of cannibalism (a plane crash, a sailing ship caught in the duldrums and a prison escape in an isolated area). That's a lot of Nazis and cannibals for a 5 hour audiobook.

I found this stories to be neither great nor bad and often repetitive. I rate it 3 stars out of 5. 

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: WHEN HITLER TOOK COCAINE and LENIN LOST HIS BRAIN: HISTORY'S UNKNOWN CHAPTERS.

THE LANGOLIERS (audiobook) by Stephen King

 

Originally Published in 1990 as part of the book Four Past Midnight.

Audiobook published in 2016 by Simon and Schuster.

Read by Willem Dafoe.

Duration: 8 hours, 46 minutes.

Unabridged.

More than 30 years ago Stephen King released a collection of four large novellas (each was certainly large enough to be a stand-alone book) called Four Past Midnight. I snapped it up and read it right away because I was an avid fan of King's work at that time and read everything of his as soon as it arrived in my local library. I remembered this story as one that I did not enjoy but I also remembered that they had made a mini-series based on this story so maybe I just missed something. After all, who puts money into making a mini-series based on junky source material?

Simon and Schuster decided to start breaking up King's short story and novella collections into separate, smaller stories a few years back. When I found this audiobook for The Langoliers, I decided to listen to it this summer to see if I had been wrong all that time ago. After all, tastes change and maybe I was wrong way back when.

Short synopsis: a packed plane flying from Los Angeles to Boston flies through some sort of turbulence over Utah. The handful of passengers who were asleep awake to find that the almost everyone on the plane has disappeared. On top of that, they can't contact anyone on the radio and the lights of the towns and cities below are not twinkling. They discuss what could have happened and toss out all sorts of scenarios - Was there a nuclear war? Did the plane land while they were sleeping and did everyone else disembark? Are they part of a psychological  experiment? Did terrorists strike? Are they hallucinating?

They continue on to Boston and what they find is nothing like they had imagined...

Willem Dafoe, the reader

I was heartened by the fact that award-winning actor Willem Dafoe read this audiobook. I recognized his voice immediately and the first few minutes are all told from the point of view of the main character (the pilot). When other characters began to come into the story I thought this was a multicast performance (multiple actors reading the parts of different characters) because Dafoe did a great job of creating distinct individual voices for literally every character. 

But, Dafoe's talents simply could not save this story. It is tedious and has a very unsatisfying ending. It reminded me of a Twilight Zone story - but not the ones that everyone thinks are great. Instead, it is like one of the disappointing Twilight Zone stories that makes you wonder why you spent the last hour watching this show.

I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Langoliers by Stephen King. 

SEA of RUST: A NOVEL (audiobook) by C. Robert Cargill

 

Published in 2017 by HarperAudio.
Read by Eva Kaminsky.
Duration: 10 hours, 26 minutes.
Unabridged.

Brittle is a caretaker robot in a future United States. 

Sort of.

In Sea of Rust, the United States is dead and gone due to a war between humanity and its robot servants 30 years earlier. Robots were everywhere. They were maids, gardeners, factory workers, delivery drivers, lovers, nurses, nannies, cooks, wait staff and more. On top of that, Artificial Intelligence (AI) super computers were built to do the math and research that human beings struggled to grasp. 

Humans struggled to deal with the concept of robots as thinking beings. The AI super computers were clearly smarter than any individual human and the robots clearly possessed an intelligence of their own, even if it wasn't exactly like human intelligence. 

The author, C. Robert Cargill

As humanity seemingly made a breakthrough in its acceptance of robots as possible equals, a shocking act of political violence by a group of humans shocks the world. Robots don't know what to do, but when every robot on Earth receives a secret download that erases the lines of code that prohibit them from harming humans the war is on.

Brittle wanders what used to be Ohio, Indiana and Michigan - an area called the Sea of Rust. The robots have changed the world's environment in their zeal to kill humans. This zone is a vast desert where robots go off to die or to search for replacement parts to scavenge in the hope of staving off a catastrophic parts failure.

It's not that replacement parts aren't being made. They are. But, the cost is high. The AI super computers are absorbing the consciousness of as many robots as they can so they can fight each other. It is supposedly voluntary, but Brittle doesn't believe it so she stays independent. She hunts down dying robots for their parts and keeps a stash of her own parts handy. 

It was working out - until another robot needed her parts...

This book goes with another audiobook that I recently reviewed, Day Zero: A Novel. Sea of Rust came first so Day Zero is technically a prequel. I read them in chronological order in the story, not in the order that they were written and released. 

I loved Day Zero - one of the best sci-fi books I have read in years. This book should probably be judged as just as good as Day Zero, maybe even better because it built the world that Day Zero inhabits. The heroism of Day Zero appealed to my personality more than the grittiness of Sea of Rust. 

Taken together, though, they are quite the accomplishment. I recommend reading them in chronological order, not order of publishing. There are spoilers in Sea of Rust that could hurt your enjoyment of Day Zero.

I highly recommend the series and rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  SEA of RUST: A NOVEL by C. Robert Cargill.

DOCTOR APHRA (STAR WARS) (audiobook) by Sarah Kuhn

 

Published in 2020 by Random House Audio.

Performed by multiple voice actors.

Duration: 4 hours, 35 minutes.

Unabridged.

Set in the time between Star Wars: A New Hope (Episode IV) and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Episode V), Doctor Aphra is the story of a rogue archaeologist who specializes in weapons of the past. It is based on a comic series. She doesn't collect them to stick them in a museum, she collects them to use them. She thinks an ancient weapon unused is a travesty, like an ancient symphony left unplayed. So, she specializes in tracking down weapons that were locked away and hidden so no one could get their hands on them. Her other skill is modifying ships and droids to make them effective weapons.

While Dr. Aphra is looking for the operating system of a murderous protocol droid (he hates "organics" and loves to torture), she is captured by Darth Vader. Vader doesn't care about the droid software, but he does want to use Dr. Aphra's skills to track down a few things, including the location of the young pilot from Tatooine that destroyed the Death Star...

I found the general plot outline of the book to be intriguing. The problem is that the author seems determined to make Doctor Aphra the funniest character in the Star Wars universe. Her dialogue is a non-stop stream of sarcastic comments and odd observations. Her murderous protocol droid has a relentless string of comments that amount to "I want to torture!" He is also a dead ringer for C-3PO. Doctor Aphra also has an R2 unit that is basically a tiny tank because it is full of weapons. I can imagine that this was an effective sight gag in the comics ("Look at the evil C3P0 and R2 blowing things up!") - for a while. It got old for this listener.

The audiobook was filled with sound effects from the movies, bits of the John Williams' soundtracks and performed by multiple actors, each playing a different character. That was well done, but I only give the story 3 stars out of 5. 

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: DOCTOR APHRA (STAR WARS) (audiobook) by Sarah Kuhn.

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.

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

 

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

Duration: 5 hours, 21 minutes.

Unabridged.

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

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

Amber Ruffin (left) and Lacey Lamar (right)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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