ELECTRIFY: AN OPTIMIST'S PLAYBOOK for OUR CLEAN ENERGY FUTURE (audiobook) by Saul Griffith

 

Published by Tantor Audio in November of 2021.

Read by David Marantz.
Duration: 7 hours, 13 minutes.
Unabridged.

Saul Griffith makes a convincing argument in Electrify that the clean energy future to prevent excessive global warming (No carbon) only comes from making everything, and I mean everything, electric (with the exception of air travel) - electric cars, electric boats, electric trains, electric heat pumps to heat homes, electric stoves, electric ovens, electric water heaters, and electric clothes dryers. 

I mostly picked up this book as a reaction to the fact that so many people in my social media feed keep re-posting anti-electric car memes that they did not create. Someone is really pushing back hard against the concept. I saw this book and began to wonder if this concept were even possible.

According to Griffith, it is very possible and with almost no "and then we come up with magic technology" moments baked into his plan. Based on what is already being done in Australia and the United States, this could be 99.5% done with current technology. We just need to divest from Carbon infrastructure (oil, natural gas, coal) and re-route that spending to renewable electricity (hydroelectric, solar, wind) and carbon free energy like nuclear. 

People will argue that solar and especially wind have to be subsidized to keep up with fossil fuels, but Griffith correctly points out that fossil fuel companies receive billions of dollars of subsidies every year so it's kind of a moot point.

He imagines a world where every roof has solar power cells installed on them and can feed directly into the electrical grid. Every farm has windmills. Every parking lot is covered with a car port cover that is covered with solar power cells. The electric company becomes less of a supplier and more of a distributor from all of those homes. The company would manage the flow and would maintain a backup system (nuclear, hyrdo, or solar power brought in from other locations) to keep it all running. 

The biggest problem is financing all of this. For that, Griffith looks back to American history. After World War II, the U.S. government backed home loans to veterans (and later others) through government programs. This could be duplicated to homeowners, new builds and landlords to pay for solar panels and the changes to a home's electrical grid. Not only would the electricity have to be able to flow away from homes, but it would also have to be able to handle a lot more electricity. Electric cars and trucks take a lot of juice to recharge in a short time. 

I walked away convinced but can only rate this book 3 stars out of 5.

Why the low rating for a compelling argument?

1) I listened to the audio version of this book. Griffith includes a lot of charts and relies on them heavily to make his point. Rather than edit the audiobook text and provide summaries of the charts, Griffith has the narrator literally read the charts. I could have sat down and literally transcribed them onto a piece of paper. Do you know how completely boring it is to listen to all of that data when you are not literally transcribing it to a piece of paper?

2) I am going to go with a stereotype. Griffith is an engineer. I think he was taught to write by middle school English teacher who loved the TRIT writing plan and he never deviates from it (it is tried and true after all). This leads to an easy to follow format - but very boring. Griffith tries to liven it up with some dad joke humor here and there. The result - it reads like a government report presented by a likable guy. Too bad - he has an important message.

3) The audiobook reader is very clear and easy to understand. However, he sounds so detached that I thought he was a computer-generated voice (he sounds similar to a popular synthesized voice you find online).  With the processed writing format it just got tedious at times. 

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  ELECTRIFY: AN OPTIMIST'S PLAYBOOK for OUR CLEAN ENERGY FUTURE (audiobook) by Saul Griffith.

IF GOD IS LOVE, DON'T BE a JERK: FINDING a FAITH THAT MAKES US BETTER (audiobook) by John Pavlovitz

 

Published by eChristian in November of 2021.

Read by the author, John Pavlovitz
Duration: 6 hours, 19 minutes
Unabridged.

John Pavlovitz is a minister who has done a lot of thinking about how Jesus told us to act and how formal "name brand" Christianity often acts to those that it deems as "less". We all know that thinking of people as "less" is not really a thing Christ endorses, but it is still an all too often sad reality.

Who are the less that have been in the news lately? Immigrants, LGTBQ people, Muslims...and more. 

Pavlovitz asks:

"If God is love and if you're emulating that God, then you should be loving. If you claim a religious worldview or have spiritual aspirations, those should yield more compassion, not less; more decency, not less; more generosity, not less. If not, what's the point of having them?"

Great question. What's the point?

I've had these thoughts more than once in the last 6 years, coinciding with the candidacy and presidency of the 45th President. If nothing else, he shook a lot of things loose. 

The author, John Pavlovitz

Pavlovitz doesn't really follow a mainstream religious tradition any longer. He boils it all down very simply - God calls us to love each other. He gave us a great example in the person of Jesus. Aspire to that. If your theology is in the way of you doing that, ditch the theology.

I don't agree with everything Pavlovitz talks about, but I found some parts extremely compelling. Specifically, I found myself in serious agreement with his chapter on prayer. 

I listened to this as an audiobook from my library so I was not able to take notes as well as I could have on paper. I have added this book to my wish list to get as a paper copy so I can mark it up and think about it harder later on.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: IF GOD IS LOVE, DON'T BE a JERK:  FINDING a FAITH THAT MAKES US BETTER by John Pavlovitz.

BETRAYAL: THE FINAL ACT of the TRUMP SHOW (audiobook) by Jonathan Karl

 

Published in November of 2021 by Penguin Audio.
Read by the author, Jonathan Karl.
Duration: 10 hours, 32 minutes.
Unabridged.

In 2020, ABC White House reporter Jonathan Karl wrote a book about his experiences covering Donald Trump's run for President in 2016 and the first three years of his Presidency. It is called Front Row at the Trump Show. Karl follows up with this book of the last year of the Trump Administration and the first few months of his post-Presidency. 

Karl meticulously names his sources and plays actual audio tracks as he tells this sordid story of misinformation, deceit, outright lies and a botched attack on the Capitol building in an attempt to thwart the results of an election.

If the previous paragraph upsets you and you think it is full of lies then you do not want to read this book unless you enjoy being upset. 

If that paragraph sounds about right to you, I highly recommend this book as a primer to what you are likely to hear from the January 6 Commission. I've found it to be enormously instructive. 

The audiobook was read by the author, Jonathan Karl. It includes multiple interviews with President Trump himself. His post-Presidency interview with Karl was so full of self-inflicted leaks that it makes me wonder about President Trump's competency. He should have known that he would come off poorly - Karl had already written an entire book about Trump's time as President and it was not complimentary. 

Karl points out that President Trump always ran with a thin group of advisors and by the time the 2020 election his A Team advisors and his B Team advisors and a number of his C Team advisors had already come and gone. Perhaps these people didn't advise him that Karl had already written a critical book. Perhaps President Trump just wanted the publicity. Perhaps you can't tell President Trump anything.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  BETRAYAL: THE FINAL ACT of the TRUMP SHOW by Jonathan Karl.

THE 1619 PROJECT: A NEW ORIGIN STORY by Nikole Hannah-Jones and others.

 

Published in November of 2021 by Random House Audio.
Multicast Performance
Duration: 18 hours, 57 minutes.
Unabridged.

I have developed a new hobby as of late - I read books that politicians tell people they should not read. The former governor of Indiana (and later the President of Purdue University) tried to prohibit Indiana University (or anyone else) to use a well-known history book to teach anyone anywhere. I read it. The Lt. Governor of Texas cancelled a book reading about the Alamo because it was not a hero worship book. There's a politician in Texas that posted a list of 850 books that he wants to ban across the state that has provided a lot of potential reading. 

But, in the last couple of years nothing, absolutely nothing, has compared to the 1619 Project and the controversy it has generated.

If you have not heard of the original 1619 Project, you have not been paying attention to America's culture wars. President Trump hated it so much he created a commission to counter its assertions. Local school boards are assailed with parents that demand it not be used in classrooms and several state legislatures have literally outlawed its use in classrooms by name.

The 1619 Project started out as a 100 page edition of The New York Times Magazine with a theme of looking at United States history through the lens of the African American experience. This book is an expanded version of the original magazine. 

All of that controversy and I can almost 100% guarantee that no more than a handful of the people who complain and pass laws have actually read the original magazine articles.

To be fair, I didn't read the original magazine articles, either. But, I jumped at the chance to hear this audiobook.

As I stated before, it is a history of the United States told through the perspective of typical African Americans. It is not a parade of famous African Americans, like you might see during Black History Month. 

One of the complaints that many politicians make is that it is critical of America. This is a ridiculous complaint. How much of American history has been a real positive time for African Americans? I am going to address that in a ridiculous way:

1619. First Africans arrive in Virginia. They are sold as slaves.
1620. Still enslaved.

1621. Still enslaved.

1622. Still enslaved.

1623. Still enslaved.

1624. First child born to the enslaved Africans. He is the first African American. He is born enslaved.

1702. African Americans are still enslaved.

1776. Thomas Jefferson wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." But, not African Americans, almost all of whom are still enslaved.

1892. African Americans are no longer enslaved. But, they have few civil rights in most states. They cannot vote in most states, they cannot sit on juries in most states. They can't even own guns in some states. Most live in a state of peonage to white landowners.

You get the idea.

This was never going to be an upbeat book. Let's face it - African Americans have gotten the short end of the stick in just about every way there has been to get the short end of the stick in American history right up to and including now. Is it better than it was in 1619? Certainly. Has America delivered on its declaration that all men are created equal? Not yet. That enduring fact is worth of comment. After all, if we don't recognize our shortcomings as a country, how can they be addressed?

My review:

The history in here is very solid. There are political complaints that it is riddled with errors and slanted. 

Here's a little secret from a history geek - all histories are slanted and riddled with errors because all historians interpret history. You can't write a complete history of, let's say, the Civil War because you can't literally include everything. You can't tell about every general, every division, every squad, every soldier and every bullet fired in every battle. There were 10,500 military engagements. You can't cover all of those in a book. Who would read a book that big? There were 50 major battles, but most histories don't even cover all of them.

Once you start cutting out parts from a history, you are interpreting it. When you decide that something is important enough to keep and other things are going to be cut from a history, you are slanting it and you are committing an error because the history is not complete. For example, everyone knows about Gettysburg - the only battle to be fought on non-slave state soil in the Civil War, right? It is in every history of the Civil War and rightly so. But, there was another battle fought on non-slave state soil 5 days after Gettysburg in Corydon, Indiana. The Confederate general was a famous one - John Hunt Morgan of Morgan's raiders. I have never read a Civil War history (I've reviewed 138 books that I've tagged "Civil War") that mentions this battle by name, even though the raid is often mentioned.  Are those histories slanted against the brave civilian militia from Indiana that tried to stop Morgan's men? No, of course not.

The 1619 Project is a history of African Americans. The traditional American heroes are not going to be heroes in this book. How can George Washington be a hero in this book when he owned African Americans and forced them to work for him under the threat of violence? How can Thomas Jefferson be a hero when he says that "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence (1776) and then complains in the same document that the British were arming escaped slaves and using them as soldiers (starting in 1775) and this made the other slaves hard to control - "He has excited domestic insurrections among us...". If all men were created equal in Jefferson's eyes, he should have been freeing and arming his own slaves. 

A frequent complaint is that The 1619 Project makes too big a deal of a British court decision that essentially outlawed slavery in the British Isles right before the tensions that created the Revolutionary War. I am sure that the colonists were aware of this case, but considering that so many of the colonists' complaints were about how the colonies were treated differently than their fellow citizens back in Britain, they must have assumed that the case simply did not and would not apply to them. It would have been a minor concern at best. But, after 1775 (see previous paragraph), it is certainly correct to say that slave owners could be worried about their slaves being taken away by British soldiers and to say that slaveowners would have been motivated to fight the British to keep their slaves.

My question is not why the court case in Britain was included in this history. It is  why haven't I heard of this case before. I have 51 books that I tagged "Revolutionary War" and this is the first I am hearing of it? It does point towards the beginnings a general trend that eventually resulted in Great Britain outlawing slavery, though.

Each chapter of the book is separated by a short work of fiction that accentuates the themes that are being explored. I literally have no problem with using fiction to accentuate history. When I taught history, I used to have my students pick out  a piece of historical fiction to read. Historical fiction can be so immersive that it makes the history seemingly come to life. But, I did not enjoy many of these interludes. There was a lot of poetry and I rarely enjoy poetry. Nothing wrong with the idea itself, but It fell very flat with me. If I had been reading a physical book, I would have skipped those sections entirely. But, I was listening to an audiobook and I had to keep listening.

I am still going to give this work a 5 star rating, though. Highly recommended, especially for those that are immediately against it because a politician or a talking head on a news channel told you it was wrong. Go to your library and read it for yourself if you are concerned about financially supporting the authors. It's okay to see history through the eyes of another culture.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: THE 1619 PROJECT:  A NEW ORIGIN STORY by Nikole Hannah-Jones and others.

THE BRIDGE of SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder

 

Originally published in 1927.
Winner of the 1928 Pulitzer Prize.

This book has been on my To-Be-Read list since I was in high school. One of my English teachers back in high school used to talk about The Bridge of San Luis Rey quite a lot and I finally got around to reading it.

Synopsis:

The setting is Peru, back when Spain held it as a colony. Outside of Lima in the Andes Mountains there is a magnificent rope bridge for pedestrians. Baggage and animals take a long trail they take down to the river below and they cross a traditional bridge that takes a lot longer. One day the rope bridge breaks and several people fall to their deaths. 

A monk is approaching the rope bridge and sees it break and everyone fall to their deaths. He decides to investigate the lives of each person who fell. He wants to see if there is something in common - perhaps they were all adulterers or thieves or the like?

What follows are elaborate character sketches for each of the victims all ending with them walking across the bridge.

My review:

These character sketches are tedious to read. This is not a long book (123 pages), but I felt like about half of it could've been edited away and it would have only made the book better. I know that is a sign of age - the book is 93 years old and I am not the generation the book was written for. I nearly didn't finish it.  I hate to break it to my English teacher but I didn't find the book very memorable.

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE BRIDGE of SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder.

WEST from APPOMATTOX: THE RECONSTRUCTION of AMERICA after the CIVIL WAR (kindle) by Heather Cox Richardson

 

Published in 2007.

Heather Cox Richardson is a historian I have only recently discovered because of her prolific social media presence that she developed while under Covid lockdown. She writes a daily news summary of a few paragraphs with a view towards how these events match up with historical events or trends. Plus, she takes questions from people and develops a one hour daily online lecture. They are interesting, sometimes rambling little presentations and this book shares a lot of the same features. 

In West from Appomattox, Richardson is looking at the time right after the Civil War in American History.  In the history books, Reconstruction, the Old West, the Gilded Age and the Spanish-American War are all treated a separate things. Combining all of these typical divisions of American history into one book makes for a more comprehensive study of the time period. 

Teddy Roosevelt (center with glasses) and
the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War

Traditionally, they are studied separately - in a typical history book they are literally different chapters. Mostly, Richardson does this, too. Mostly - but she is very willing to cross over to the other areas of study. 

For example, it really impossible to understand the Old West without having an understanding of Reconstruction and of the Gilded Age. Reconstruction encouraged a lot of people to move West. The West received attention and governmental support for economic development and the South did not. The economic growth in the Northeast was largely possible because of Federal Government support of resource extraction from the West. Federal support of settlement of the West and Federal support of building a network of privately owned railroads helped spur further economic growth in the Northeast.  

Due to the overlapping nature of the book, there are a lot of overlapping stories and themes. I don't consider it to be a weakness, though. I consider it to be a reminder that the same policies, the same movements and the same rules were affecting the whole country. 

This time period was truly the transition from the old Revolutionary Era politics to our current modern political system because slavery was finally out of the way. Instead of discussing what to do about slavery it became a discussion about when (or even if) government power should be used to intervene in the free market or to help certain people in society. 

In the South, pushing for public schools for poor children was often decried as Socialist because rich people were being taxed to provide a basic education for the children of the poor. It was even more Socialist if it meant funding schools for poor black children. Meanwhile, out in the Western states the government actively intervened in the Free Market by handing out 160 acre parcels of land, providing land grants to fund railroads and breaking treaties with Native Americans and clearing them out of the way to provide access to mineral wealth.

The point about Socialism is interesting. Richardson pointed out something that I have noticed about American political discussions - we throw about the term Socialism and use it with a completely different meaning than the meaning the rest of the world uses. When everyone discusses Socialism, they are talking about the government owning the means of production (factories, farms, mines, etc.). In the United States, it is tossed about when we talk about taxing anyone to pay for community services and we have done that ever since the time period this book covers. I still hear this argument used against the existence of public schools, public libraries and even public roads. In the United States, Socialism is also a term used to describe non-economic things such as Covid mask mandates and gay marriage because the term has consistently been used by the current conservative party (the Dems back in the 1800s and the GOP nowadays) to discredit new concepts. 

I rate this history 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  WEST from APPOMATTOX:  THE RECONSTRUCTION of AMERICA after the CIVIL WAR (kindle) by Heather Cox Richardson.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (Biographies of U.S. Presidents)(kindle) by Hourly History

Published in 2016.

This little biography is part of an extensive series of short histories produced by Hourly History. The idea is to be a history or a biography that you can read in an hour. Amazon says that his particular biography is the equivalent to 48 pages long. 

Some historians have asserted that there are more biographies written about Lincoln than anyone else in history, with the exception of Jesus. This is the 73rd book that I've reviewed that with the #tag of "Abraham Lincoln." What does this book have to offer that literally thousands of biographies and histories haven't already covered?

To be honest - nothing.

But, it is exactly the sort of biography that someone who hates history might pick to read because it is not an intimidating length and it is not written in highfalutin language. 

There is nothing in this biography that is inaccurate, just a matter of what the Hourly History people decided to highlight and emphasize.

I rate this kindle book 3 stars out of 5. Not bad, for what it is. Nowhere near a complete biography, but a solid place to start.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (Biographies of U.S. Presidents)(kindle) by Hourly History.

MESSY GRACE: HOW a PASTOR with GAY PARENTS LEARNED to LOVE OTHERS WITHOUT SACRIFICING CONVICTION (audiobook) by Caleb Kaltenbach

Be Warned - it changes tone quite abruptly

Published in 2015 by ChristianAudio.com

Read by the author, Caleb Kaltenbach.
Duration: 6 hours, 3 minutes.
Unabridged.

I checked out the audiobook version of Messy Grace from my local library using the Overdrive app. I highly recommend this app, but it does have a small failing - it does not include any sort of reviews of the digital ebooks or audiobooks. It only includes the publisher's description and the publisher's description of this audiobook only tells part of the story. 

As the title says, Kaltenbach did indeed grow up with gay parents. They married young and divorced after a few years. His mother lived life as a married couple with another woman (this was pre-gay marriage) and his father lived as a closeted gay man. His mother hated Christians because of Westboro Baptist Church-type protesters, but to be fair to his mother, there are plenty of people that express in private the same thoughts that the Westboro folks publicly proclaim. Kaltenbach does not deny this - in fact he decries it throughout the book.

Kaltenbach spends the first 60% of the book or so telling the story of his life and about his parents. He is very much against the Pharisee-type behavior you see in plenty of churches - the behavior that automatically rejects anyone that doesn't seem church-y enough. Kaltenbach argues you can't reach the "lost" if you don't actually engage with them - something that Jesus said and did over and over again.

As Kaltenbach discusses this point, he begins to sound less like he is making projects out of people rather than reaching out to people because they are friends and family. I didn't have a way to describe this inkling in the back of my mind until Kaltenbach did - he said churches have to be careful of this very thing and he called it "project vs. people". It ends up sounding like, "We're going to save a gay man" instead of "I think my friend Bob would really like to check out my church and my church would really like my friend Bob." 

The problem with turning people into projects is that once the project is done (the project joins the church) you move onto to a new project and drop the old project. But, people aren't projects so you are just dropping this person that you made big investment in because you weren't friends with them - you were busy fixing them.

The author and narrator,
Caleb Kaltenbach

But, the part that really bothered me above all else was the fact that the book pitches itself as a pro-gay inclusion book right up until the moment that it is not. Once it switches gears it hurts every other argument the book made before. It becomes a turn people into projects book. It becomes a "pray the gay away" book of sorts. The celibacy passage was completely horrible. 

My suggestion: read the first half of the book and then stop.

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5. I took away 3 stars because of the contradictory message and the deceptive description from the publisher.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: MESSY GRACE: HOW a PASTOR with GAY PARENTS LEARNED to LOVE OTHERS WITHOUT SACRIFICING CONVICTION by Caleb Kaltenbach.

1914 by Jean Echenoz (translated by LInda Coverdale)

 

Published in 2014 by The New Press

Synopsis:

It is 1914 and World War I is starting. This story is about 5 young men who live in a small town in France leave together to join the fight. 

If you have studied this war, you know that this war was a meat grinder from one end of it to the other, but the beginning of any war is especially rough. The technologies have changed but the techniques have not kept up. Men die and get maimed out of ignorance. This war is no different.

My Review:

I have no problem with the depiction of anything in this book. But, I do have a problem with the book's lack of passion. No one is particularly excited about life before the war, during the war and definitely not after the war. Everything is stated matter of factly. I lnow it's a style thing but it served to push me away from the story rather than draw me in. If the characters can't muster enough interest to care, why should I?

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: 1914 by Jean Echenoz (translated by LInda Coverdale).

WE ARE WHAT WE PRETEND to BE: THE FIRST and LAST WORKS by Kurt Vonnegut

Published in 2012 by Vanguard Press.

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) is from Indianapolis, the city I have lived in since 1998. He was always proud to be FROM Indianapolis but never moved back once he and his family moved away right after World War II. His sense of humor and cynical/sarcastic of view has often been compared to Mark Twain, but I am reminded of the humor of another Indianapolis boy a few years later who also went off to the big city and made it big - David Letterman. 

We Are What We Pretend to Be contains the first real story written by Vonnegut and the beginning of the novel he was working on when he passed away. These are the bookends of his literary career. 

The first story is called Basic Training. It was written when he was about age 30 and was never published. His daughter describes stacks of rejection letters and one can assume that this story helped create that stack.  

The giant mural honoring Vonnegut in
downtown Indianapolis. 

The story is about a recently orphaned teenaged boy who goes to live on a relatives farm. He already has a college scholarship to learn music but it all is at risk because he can't seem to get the hang of how to get along with his relative that runs the farm - an old guy nicknamed "The General".

The second story is called If God Were Alive Today.  This story is actually the beginning of an unfinished book about a George Carlin-type stand-up comic. The comic has several mental issues, including drug, alcohol and sexual problems.

Of the two stories, I think Vonnegut's first one is clearly superior. It doesn't sound like a Vonnegut story and feels much more like a John Steinbeck story but it is pretty good. I would rate it 4 out of 5 stars.

The second story suffers from the fact that it is not a complete story - it is simply the opening pages of a larger work that we'll never be able to read. That being said, I found the main character interesting but very unlikable. Even worse, even though he was a stand-up comic the main character was not funny. He said outrageous things, but not funny things. That struck me as odd because Vonnegut was well-known for his very dark but very real sense of humor. I rate it 2 out of 5 stars.

So, a 2 star story and a 4 star story make a 3 star average.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  WE ARE WHAT WE PRETEND to BE: THE FIRST and LAST WORKS by Kurt Vonnegut.

FALLING FREE (Vorkosigan Saga #4) (audiobook) by Lois McMaster Bujold

Audiobook published in 2009 by Blackstone Audio.. 

Originally published in book form in 1988.
Read by Grover Gardner.
Duration: 8 hours, 44 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

Falling Free is entry #4 in a long series of published books and short stories.

Leo Graf is an engineer. Actually, he's more than an engineer. He's a space engineer - he builds habitats, space stations, space ships and more. And - he's really good at it.

He has been brought by his company to a space station in orbit around an out of the way space colony to teach outer space welding. But, his students are not what he expects.

He finds the station has nearly 1,000 genetically modified residents that are named quaddies. They are designed to work in no gravity environments - they have no legs. Instead of legs there is a second set of arms. They can grip onto something and still have two or three hands to work with - especially welding together new space stations and expansions to current space stations. 

Graf finds out that the quaddies are not considered to be people. Instead, they are company property. They are an experiment and when experiments run their course, they can be trashed. 

So, when Graf finds out that the quaddie experiment has been made outdated by a new technology he has to decide if he lets the company destroy 1,000 genetically modified people or if he intervenes...

What I thought:

I really appreciated the old school sci-fi feel to the book. It just felt like a book from the 1950s or 1960s. 

The premise of the book was compelling, but as the book went along, more and more obstacles had to be surmounted that seemed to be put in place just to make the book longer rather than spur on character growth. There was a long part of the book that reminded me of the scene in the Marvel Cinematic Universe movie The Infinity War where Thor builds his battle axe to fight Thanos. Actually, looking at the publication dates, the scene with Thor is reminiscent of the scene from the book... except that the scene with Thor did not drag on, was not boring (it had very funny parts) and it moved the plot forward with character growth. The scene from the book just drug things out for about an hour. 

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. Not a bad book, not a great book. It can be found on Amazon.com here:   FALLING FREE (audiobook) by Lois McMaster Bujold.

ENGLISH in AMERICA: A LINGUISTIC HISTORY (audiobook) by Natalie Schilling

 

Published in 2016 by The Great Courses.

Read by Natalie Schilling.

Duration: 5 hours, 55 minutes.

Unabridged.

If you are not aware of The Great Courses, they are basically college-level lectures (undergrad) on a topic. Most of them clock in at around 20 hours in length, but this one came in at just under 6 hours. 

When I saw that the subtitle of English in America was "A Linguistic History", I thought the audiobook would be a more formal history. Rather than present it in a typical history format, the book was presented in a scattergun type style. Everything she covered was perfectly fine to put in her presentations and sounded perfectly good to me - I've listened to and read a few books on this topic (not enough to make me any sort of an expert).

She discusses such topics as how English may have sounded when the first English colonies were established, how American English developed new words, influences on American English from immigrants groups, African American dialects, regional dialects and more.

But, the scattered presentation style made for repeated presentation of facts and prevented a smooth flow. 

There is nothing wrong with this presentation, but I think it should have gone deeper and been gone from topic to topic in a more cohesive manner.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: ENGLISH in AMERICA:  A LINGUISTIC HISTORY (audiobook) by Natalie Schilling.

THE LAST BATTLE: WHEN U.S. and GERMAN SOLDIERS JOINED FORCES in the WANING HOURS of WORLD WAR II in EUROPE (audiobook) by Stephen Harding

 

Published in 2013 by Blackstone Audio.
Read by Joe Barrett.
Duration: 7 hours, 11 minutes.
Unabridged.

At the very end of World War II there was an extraordinary pairing of German soldiers and American soldiers to protect French dignitaries and celebrities being held in an Austrian castle prison.

How late was it in the war? Hitler was already dead. The Allies were well into Germany and Americans had pushed all of the way into Austria. 

But, that does not mean that the German military was without power. They had fantastic equipment and there were still plenty of "true believer" SS troops insisting that the war wasn't over - or it it was over, the Allies should pay for every inch of territory until the last German soldier fell.

The unlikely alliance happens when a Austrian-born German officer comes to an agreement with the leaders of the local anti-Nazi resistance movement in Austria. Technically, Austria was a part of Germany but it had only been a part of Germany for 7 years when Germany absorbed independent Austria. It seemed like a popular move at the time, but World War II started about a year and a half later and it had brought disaster and ruin to Austria.

Germany had converted a castle in the Austrian Alps into a prison under the supervision of the Dachau concentration camp. Multiple VIPs from France ended up at Dachau and the German supervisors realized that they couldn't just keep those VIPs in the middle of a death camp. So, they moved them to the castle. 

And, some members of the German military thought that killing off these VIPs would be a fantastic way to deliver one more bit of cruelty in an obviously lost cause. 

****

This audiobook has some issues. 

The production is fine, although I am not a big fan of the reader, Joe Barrett.

The biggest thing is the very slow pacing of the book. The title of the book is "The Last Battle" and the actual fighting is really just a few minutes of a 7 hour audiobook. I did not measure it, but my impression is that the author spent more time describing the history of the castle and various facelifts, upgrades remodels and repurposing that had been done over the years than the time he spent describing the actual fighting.

It felt like he was packing the book with filler to make it longer, like a freshman college student might do to make sure his essay is exactly a certain number of pages in length. My favorite example of this filler is the fact that the author actually took the time to note that handrails were installed on a certain staircase during a remodel in the early 1900s. That struck me as odd when I heard it (because who actually cares?) so I listened carefully for a time when the handrails might become a part of the story. I had imagined that the VIPs might have removed the handrails and used them to barricade a door or something. No luck. It was just filler.

There were long biographies of each of the French VIPs. There was no particular reason to do this. They could have been edited down because they were not important to the story except that they were the people to be rescued. Saying that they were former members of the French government and various other celebrities, including a world famous tennis star would have been enough. I guarantee that the American officers that decided to save them had less information than the author gives and those officers decided to go join forces with a German unit and go out of their way to save them.

So, I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5 because it really should have been nothing more than a very long article in a history magazine or a chapter in a book called "Improbable Stories of World War II". 

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: THE LAST BATTLE: WHEN U.S. and GERMAN SOLDIERS JOINED FORCES in the WANING HOURS of WORLD WAR II in EUROPE (audiobook) by Stephen Harding.

COST of ARROGANCE (Jake Clearwater #1) by H. Mitchell Caldwell

Published in October of 2021 by Nine Innings Press.

Cost of Arrogance features Jake Clearwater who used to be a prosecutor. However, rough and tumble office politics encouraged him to take a job as a law professor. He is happy with his choice, but he decides to take on long shot death penalty appeal after being asked by an organization called Death Penalty Project.

The argument in the appeal is that the man on death row is there because of an incompetent defense lawyer in the original trial. The trial was for the murder of a married couple.  The client knew that his lawyer was not doing a good job so he made a spectacle of himself - cursing, yelling and more in front of the jury. Considering that he had already served serious prison time in the past, the jury was only too happy to put this angry felon on death row - after all, if he's this crazy during the trail, it's not hard to imagine that he killed two people. 

Clearwater successfully argues that the defense was incompetent and is assigned as the attorney in the re-trial. In the re-trial he will go against the people in the prosecutor's office where he used to work. The prosecutor in the re-trial will be the man who basically drove him out. 

And that's when things start to get really interesting - and not always in a good way...

The first novel in what is intended to be a series of novels can suffer from too much world-building - establishing all of the intended characters and all of the intended locations that the series could possibly include in its run. Happily, Caldwell does not give in to that temptation.

The courtroom scenes are well done - with the exception of just having too many dramatic moments to interrupt the trial. I can't discuss them without revealing the plot, so just let me say that the author went to the same plot device well one too many times.

That being said, I would be more than happy to read another installment of this series.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  COST of ARROGANCE (Jake Clearwater #1) by H. Mitchell Caldwell.

Note: I received a free Advanced Readers Copy of this book from the publisher so that I could make an honest review. 

EMPIRE of BLUE WATER: CAPTAIN MORGAN'S GREAT PIRATE ARMY, the EPIC BATTLE for the AMERICAS, and the CATASTROPHE that ENDED the OUTLAWS' BLOODY REIGN (audiobook) by Stephan Talty

 

Published in 2007 by Random House Audio
Read by John H. Mayer
Duration: 13 hours, 26 minutes.
Unabridged.

Stephan Talty writes a lot about pirates in Empire of Blue Water. Not modern pirates, but the swashbuckling pirates that most Americans imagine when they hear the word "pirate". The modern personification of that word is Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow. In the late 1600s, the personification of that word was a Welshman named Henry Morgan.

Morgan was technically not a pirate. He was a privateer. If you were in the Spanish government, there was not much of a difference between a privateer and a pirate, except that privateers came with an extra level of annoyance. 

17th century England did not have the money to expand the Royal Navy enough to confront Spain. Spain was more than 200 years into looting the Americas and had a very, very large navy to protect that loot as it came across the Atlantic to the home country. 

England did have something that Spain did not have - a lot of entrepreneurs that owned their own ships. England decided to license any interested ships to attack Spanish ships for their cargoes. The crown got a cut and basically a navy for hire. 

Privateer ships were staffed by a diverse group of men (women were almost never allowed on one of their ships). They were very democratic - everyone got to vote on targets and everyone got an equal share of the booty afterwards. Bonus shares were given to men who performed bravely or completed certain acts in battle. Once a target was chosen, the officers had command and their orders were to be followed - or else. Officers got bonus shares. If you were injured, you were compensated from the loot. If you died, your heirs were compensated. 

Pirate ships worked a lot like privateer ships, except they did not have to report back to any government and share any of their treasure. But, they had no safe havens to return to. If a Spanish ship chased a privateer, it could, theoretically, flee towards any English port and find safety. 

Jamaica served that purpose in the Caribbean, particularly the city of Port Royal. Port Royal was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1690s. It was never rebuilt, but at one point it was the largest and wildest city in any English colony in the New World. You could easily make an argument that it was the wildest port in the entire English empire.

The danger with privateers, of course, is that once unleashed, they are hard to rein in. The English came to an agreement with the Spanish that was dependent on the privateers stopping and then had a very hard time bringing them under control - until someone had the bright idea (not being sarcastic) of bringing Henry Morgan into the government of Jamaica and letting the ultimate privateer bring the privateers under control.

Talty talks about A LOT of things in this book. It is a thorough examination of the entire privateer phenomenon - from the instability of the Spanish royal family to the ossification of the Spanish bureaucracy to the craziness of Port Royal, Talty tells the story well. 

Where he falls short is the description on just about any military campaign. It becomes an unending list of what happened in the order they happened - like a series of bullet points on a boring history professor's PowerPoint. As an audiobook listener, I frequently found my attention wandering at the points that should have been the most interesting parts of the book simply because of the way it was presented. 

Because of that, I am going to give this audiobook a score of 3 stars out of 5. I was irritated at the number of times I had to go over parts of the audiobook because of the way it was told.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: EMPIRE of BLUE WATER: CAPTAIN MORGAN'S GREAT PIRATE ARMY, the EPIC BATTLE for the AMERICAS, and the CATASTROPHE that ENDED the OUTLAWS' BLOODY REIGN by Stephan Talty.

WILDLAND: THE MAKING of AMERICA'S FURY (audiobook) by Evan Osnos

Published in September of 2021 by Macmillan Audio.

Read by the author, Evan Osnos.

Duration: 17 hours, 7 minutes.

Unabridged.

Evan Osnos is a reporter for The New Yorker. He was inspired to write about the phenomenon of Donald Trump and the 2016 and 2020 elections when he returned from an multi-year assignment in China and noted that politics, journalism and even economics in the United States had changed. He didn't use this analogy, but I will: Parents don't notice their kids changing and growing because they see them every day. But, the aunts and uncles who only see them at the holidays can easily detect the changes.

For Wildland Osnos went to three places that he used to live to investigate: Greenwich, Connecticut; Chicago, Illinois; and Clarksburg, West Virginia. 

In West Virginia, he primarily looks at the changes in journalism such as the loss of local news and small town newspapers. He also looks at government pulling back environmental regulations and business avoiding responsibilities such as living up to pension obligations and cleaning up their messes. The shenanigans from Peabody Energy to avoid pension obligations were especially egregious.

In Connecticut he follows up on the business theme by looking at Greenwich - a town seemingly full of hedge fund managers. Really, it's not, but their wealth and their change of mindset is changing the town. The mindset embraces famed economist Milton Friedman's maxim that the purpose of a corporation is to maximize returns for its shareholders. I grew up in a town with one very large corporation with multiple factories. It provided scholarships, paid for public art and architecture and provided benevolent leadership through boards, committees and generally being engaged with the community that its leadership lived in and provided its labor force. 

In Chicago, he looks at the near-collapse of some communities - the ones that make the news all of the time for the murders. He discusses how the manufacturing base of Chicago left and how that helped lead to the decline of some neighborhoods. which ties into the Greenwich part of the book.

On top of all of this, throw in the Supreme Court case generally known Citizens United. It opened up the flood gates for money in politics. Now millions of dollars could be spent on primary campaigns. In 2020, my state was not really a player in Presidential politics, but we saw almost non-stop ads over 1 race for the House of Representatives. One ad after another from both sides. Those kinds of ad campaigns are the result of the Citizens United decision in 2010.  The Supreme Court held that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, including non-profit corporations, labor unions, and other associations. With that decision, politics changed.     

Outsiders with a lot of money now had a chance to come in and be effective without having the strong organization and the political contacts of a political party.    

The book takes a long time to develop and I nearly quit several times in the first couple of hours. There was so much talk of hedge fund managers and the new prevailing mercenary quality in big business. Notice that I said "prevailing" - the mercenary quality has always been there but it was restrained by other cultural norms. But, once it moves on to West Virginia and Chicago the book got more interesting to me. I guess it's simply because I don't know ultra-rich hedge fund managers and I don't identify with that lifestyle, but I do know poor black people in a big city and I grew up in a rural area. 

At the halfway point, he starts to tie all of this stuff together and then the book gets good. About 3/4 of the way through the book he starts to tie in the rise of Trumpism. To be honest, I had forgotten that this was the point of the book in the frist place. Osnos ties it together. It's not some big nefarious plot, but rather the result of a lot of forces converging - the Citizens United decision, the change in the philosophy of big business, the loss of local news reporting, the loss of good jobs in rural areas and the big cities all come together.

Toss in a great deal of frustration, Osnos makes it seem that the arrival of a person like Donald Trump was inevitable. I contend that it also explains Bernie Sanders. Like Trump, Sanders is truly a political outsider. Sanders isn't even a member of the Democrat party and has not put in a lot of work building the party organization. Still, he almost won their nomination in 2016 and ran very strong in 2020 because this decision lets money make up for not being part of a party and having access to all of the connections and organization that political parties can provide. 

This book doesn't have a lot of answers, but it points out a lot of problems and you have to know what the problems are before solutions can be found.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: WILDLAND: THE MAKING of AMERICA'S FURY by Evan Osnos.

SANITY: IN a TIME of CONSPIRACY, UPHEAVAL, and PANDEMIC by Gary John Bishop

Published in July of 2021 by HarperAudio.

Read by the author, Gary John Bishop.
Duration: 1 hour, 34 minutes.

Unabridged.

Gary John Bishop is a life coach/motivational speaker from Scotland. He calls himself a Personal Development expert. 

His topics in Sanity: In a Time of Conspiracy, Upheaval, and Pandemic include how to deal with the pandemic, conspiracy theories that we may believe in and how to deal with conspiracy theories that loved ones may hold dear. He talks about mask mandates and the wildly varied response to them, especially in the United States. He also talks about how we hate the changes to our lives that were brought on by the pandemic, even if we weren't happy with our pre-pandemic lives because the human mind both craves change and loves stability and those are not compatible goals. 

The author, Gary John Bishop

He gives practical advice. For example, don't argue with advocates of conspiracy theories and welcome them back if they come back to reality because you've had your crazy moments yourself. He also advises people to keep up with the news but to be consumed by it and use it as an entertainment source (translation: don't watch Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow - they get paid to make you indignant and they're good at it)

There is nothing new about what Bishop talks about in his talk, but his presentation makes it really effective. It's direct, peppered with curse words and comes off just like you are sitting in a bar listening to your Scottish uncle give you some solid advice.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: SANITY: IN a TIME of CONSPIRACY, UPHEAVAL, and PANDEMIC by Gary John Bishop.