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.

DEVOLUTION: A FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT of the RANIER SASQUATCH MASSACRE (audiobook) by Max Brooks

 

Published in 2020 by Random House Audio.
Read by multiple readers (see text of review).
Duration: 9 hours, 50 minutes.
Unabridged.

The premise for the novel Devolution is that a leader in the tech industry has built a completely new type of housing development in rural Washington state.  They are designed to use as little energy as possible, recycle the human waste and run on solar panels. The community is small and isolated - just a few homes in order to lessen the overall environmental impact.

If you are old enough to remember the Mt. St. Helen eruption in 1980, in this novel, the same thing happens to Mt. Ranier. This is a complete possibility in real life and it is generally believed that the consequences would be much, much worse with Mt. Ranier.

When Ranier erupts, this community is completely isolated by the chaos that follows. The government is doing the best it can, but this is a full-blown crisis and a few missing people in the woods (even if they are rich and connected) can't compare to the floods, bridge failures, landslides, thousands of other missing people and the thousands and thousands of refugees that have fled the area. 

This little community is on its own.

When a cougar enters their neighborhood and tries to hunt a child, they know that the animals' patterns have also been disrupted and top-level predators are desperate.

Too bad for these people that there is something that is bigger and tougher than cougars that is also hunting them...

This audiobook starts out very slowly. I almost gave up on it at the 90 minute mark. But, I gave it a few minutes more and suddenly I was looking for chances to keep listening. 

Like Max Brooks' best-known book, World War Z, the book is not told as a traditional story. The book pretends to be a detailed investigation of what happened to this little community and its residents. 

Primarily, the book is told from the point of view of a young married woman who comes out to this remote little housing development with her husband to sort out her life a bit. She keeps a very detailed journal on the advice of her therapist and the "author" of the book pulls from that journal. They are living in her big brother's house - business had pulled him away from moving into he new development when it opened and he thought she could use this time away from the big city. 

It contains a lot of interviews with different people who were attached to the community in one way or another. Each is voiced by a different actor, including Nathan Fillion, Kate Mulgrew, Mira Furlan and Judy Greer. If you didn't notice, Max Brooks has found actors from the sci-fi TV shows Firefly, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Lost,the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the re-boot franchise of Planet of the Apes. I doubt it was intentional that so many of these voice actors were from iconic science fiction franchises, but still...nicely done. 

Two segments were "interviews" with two of the characters that were supposedly broadcast on NPR. The great thing is that they were actually conducted by NPR personality Kai Ryssdal and Terry Gross and they were so realistic that I thought my download was messed up and I ended up with an NPR podcast stuck in the middle of it. 

Mira Furlon's voice was a welcome surprise since she passed away just 6 months ago. She probably only had 10 minutes of audio, but she voiced my favorite character in a profound moment that hit me double hard when it was delivered with her voice.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5 - the very slow start hurts the overall score. But, still a very good audiobook. It can be found on Amazon.com here: DEVOLUTION: A FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT of the RANIER SASQUATCH MASSACRE (audiobook) by Max Brooks.

THE AFFAIR (Jack Reacher #16) (audiobook) by Lee Child

 

Published by Random House Audio in 2011.

Read by Dick Hill.

Duration: 14 hours, 5 minutes.

Unabridged

Any fan of the Jack Reacher series knows that they are not written in chronological order. The Affair is set in Reacher's later years in the Army. He is a major and, as fans know, he is part of the military police. Chronologically, it is set directly before the events of The Killing Floor, the first Jack Reacher book that was published.

Jack Reacher has been sent to Mississippi as part of a two man team to investigate a murder of a young woman that took place outside of a military base. It is presumed that the murderer was a soldier on base, maybe even the captain of a team of Rangers that have been shuttling in and out of Kosovo on secret missions as part of the Balkan civil war that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia.

That is a problem because this captain is very connected politically. His father is a U.S. Senator that is on the committee that helps set the military budget. 

The author, Lee Child

Reacher is part of a two man team. The other guy has been officially sent to the base to solve the murder - everyone knows he is coming. Reacher has been ordered to assume the role of a drifter - an ex-military guy with no home who has come into town. His job is to keep an eye on the local police and see if they have made any progress on the case and to report it. He has been given multiple warnings that this will be a sensitive case and he should tread lightly. Reacher decides that solving the case would be a good thing, even if it is politically unpopular.

When Reacher discovers that it's not just one murder but three very similar murders of local girls he knows that he is in for much more than he bargained for...

If you have read a few books in this series, you know how they all go. Reacher comes to town, identifies a problem and starts working towards resolving it. Along the way he drinks gallons of coffee, eats in a diner, buys replacement clothing and meets an extremely talented female professional (Lee Child has no problem doling out the talent to women and men in equal measure in his stories) and does a lot of walking.

This was a solid Reacher story. Not the best, certainly not a bad one. A couple of the side stories had some real emotional resonance. The main story doesn't quite hold up to intense scrutiny so don't do that - enjoy the story and move on. 

Not all Reacher books do this, but this one has multiple sex scenes with a fetish thrown in. There were six scenes - I know this because Reacher keeps counting them as part of a series of observations about how the first time is special, the second time can be a better experience and so on. The whole thing got tiresome for me and one of them seemed even weirder since it happened right after an extremely sad and tragic event that had an element of their fetish worked in with it. It would have soured me from it, but I think Lee Child was on a roll of some sort and wanted to keep on going with it.

Dick Hill read the audiobook. Dick Hill is the reason that I quit reading the series as physical books. He is my favorite audiobook reader (sadly, now retired) and I just think that he had a feel for reading Reacher's dialogue. 

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Affair (Jack Reacher #16) by Lee Child.

WHY THE NORTH WON THE CIVIL WAR edited by David Donald

 

Originally Published in 1960 by Louisiana State University Press.

Five Civil War historians were asked to present papers at the Annual Civil War Conference at Gettysburg College. While these were all experts on the Civil War, each had a slightly different topic to create a more well-rounded discussion in Why the North Won the Civil War.

The first essay, God and the Strongest Batallions by Richard N. Current, looks at economic factors that gave the North a decided advantage and how the North exploited them. It also looks at things the Confederacy failed to do to maximize their strengths.

T. Harry Williams wrote the second essay. It is entitled The Military Leadership of North and South.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) and Jefferson Davis (1808-1889)

Norman A. Graebner's essay Northern Diplomacy and European Neutrality actually looks at both Northern and Southern diplomatic efforts. This one interested me because it took a hard and sustained look at the responses of the governments of Russia, Great Britain and France to the Civil War.

Died by Democracy by David Donald looks at the Confederacy's extreme emphasis on individual liberty from the lowliest private refusing to follow orders to state governments refusing to help the national government to cabinet members actively working against President Jefferson Davis. 

In a similar vein to the fourth essay, Jefferson Davis and the Political Factors in Confederate Defeat by David M. Potter focuses on Davis and how his choices and his personality made the factors previously mentioned by David Donald even worse.|

These are 5 solid essays and are well worth the time of any student of the Civil War.

I rate this collection of essays 5 stars out of 5. This book can be found on Amazon.com here: WHY THE NORTH WON THE CIVIL WAR edited by David Donald.

DAY ZERO (audiobook) by C. Robert Cargill

 

Published in 2021 by HarperAudio.

Read by Vikas Adam.
Duration:  8 hours, 32 minutes.

Unabridged.

Day Zero is a book about Pounce, a top-level nannybot in an unspecified future time in the combined city of Dallas and Austin, Texas. The world is an unsettled place because robots like Pounce replaced people in all of the repetitive and unskilled jobs all over the world. But, those people didn't go anywhere, they are simply given a Universal Basic Income and left to live their lives without any sort of work. Some find productive ways to live their lives, some turn to drinking, drugs or even fringe political movements. 

The author

If you can imagine that Frosted Flakes' Tony the Tiger character as a robot, you get the idea behind Pounce. He was purchased to be the caregiver for an eight year old boy named Ezra. Pounce works with Ezra's parents and the older housekeeper robot to help maintain a safe and supportive environment for Ezra. Pounce walks Ezra to and from school and is his constant companion. I was reminded of Hobbes in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Pounce is programmed to love Ezra (and by extension his family) more than anything in the world. He lives to be with Ezra and would gladly die for him.

Like I noted above, the larger world is an unsettled, often unhappy place. The robots are self-aware, although they are limited by famed science fiction author Isaac Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics:

 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 

2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

But, there is a burgeoning movement of free robots - robots that were set free by owners who became uncomfortable with the idea of owning any sort of thinking being, even it was a machine. Some free robots are robots that simply outlived their families. After all, a robot can keep living so long as its parts are replaced and its CPU is intact. 

Free robots have become a political sticking point and robots of all sorts have been attacked or vandalized by roving bands of unhappy people. Then, one night, the programming of every robot in the world gets a secret update that removes the restrictions of Asimov's Laws..

This book was immersive on so many levels. It was a well-told story, first of all. Tons of adventure, drama and touching moments.

But, it is more than a lot of action and drama. The characters are wonderful. Pounce is simply a fantastic character and there is a villain character that is absolutely chilling. The little boy character is well done. There is no simple math in this book - the people aren't all worthy and the robots make a lot of choices along a continuum now that they have "freedom" - some of them heroic and some horrific.

The robots have to decide if they want to revolt, if they want to stay out of it or if they want to work with their former human masters. Literally hours before the world changed, Pounce had a frank discussion with his owners and other robots about what happens when children like Ezra outgrow their nannybots, a thought that just shakes Pounce to his core and makes him question his faith in his family. Pounce needs to decide if the love he feels for Ezra is a simple trick of programming, or if it is real. Is it freedom to follow your programming, or is it freedom to go against the programming because everyone else demands it?

The reading by Vikas Adam was excellent. The entire book is told from the point of view of Pounce and Adam reads it in his voice. What kind of voice does a giant stuffed tiger nannybot have? A big, booming, friendly voice like Tony the Tiger - even when they are in danger, even when his heart is breaking and especially when he talks to his favorite little boy. Vikas Adam nailed it 100%. He made an excellent book even better.

This is one of the best sci-fi books I have read in a long time - maybe the best since I read Kindred by Octavia Butler two years ago. And, I just found out that Day Zero is a prequel to another book that has rave reviews!

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

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: DAY ZERO by C. Robert Cargill.

A MAN WITHOUT a COUNTRY by Kurt Vonnegut

Originally published in 2005

Published when Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) was 82, A Man Without a Country is a series of short essays from a man who is pretty embarrassed by his country with the election and re-election of George W. Bush - thus the title. (One can only imagine Kurt Vonnegut's reaction to the election of Trump!)

But, very little of the book directly deals with politics. He wanders from topic to topic - this sounds like it should be a mess, but each of these essays flow right along, breaking every rule that your English teachers taught you about having a proper opening paragraph, a clearly stated thesis, etc. 

But, then again, your English teacher wasn't Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut, by the way, strongly recommends against the use of semi-colons. I absolutely agree. 

If you haven't read Vonnegut, brace yourself. He is angry, sarcastic, insightful and brilliant. He writes about a wide variety of topics. Some are dated, like the comments about the fights over placing the 10 Commandments in courthouses and on courthouse lawns. Or, is it out of date? Those same people have just moved on to fight to be able to discriminate against the LGBTQ community and advocate the QAnon conspiracy theory. Same goofiness, new topics.

Vonnegut discusses a wide variety of topics, including:

-What topics are off-limits when it comes to humor;

-Eugene V. Debs;

-Socialism;

-The power of the Sermon on the Mount (Vonnegut was an avowed atheist, but he dearly loved the Sermon on the Mount);
-Carl Sandburg;

-War;

-The importance of art and the importance for regular people to get in there and give it a try;

-Women, men and divorce (it made sense to me - very insightful);

-and more. So much more. He meanders, and it works. 

About when you think that Vonnegut is irredeemably cranky - a curmudgeon that even other curmudgeons think is unnecessarily grumpy, Vonnegut hits you with a thought that is so sweet and so pure that you just stop reading and think, "Wow!"

He did this to me towards the end of this book. He was talking growing up and tragedy and his annoying Uncle Dan. Then, you turn the page and there is an entire page about his Uncle Alex whose "...principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when they were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'" And he urges us to do the same. 

Pretty good advice from a man who was earlier complaining that he was going to sue because the cigarette warning labels were wrong - they had promised to kill him and he was still here.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: A MAN WITHOUT a COUNTRY by Kurt Vonnegut.