The Most Dangerous Thing (audiobook) by Laura Lippman

A different kind of book

Read by Linda Emond
Duration: 10 hours, 45 minutes
Published by Harper Audio.

Unabridged.

Laura Lippman's The Most Dangerous Thing is a superbly deep character study that looks into the lives of 5 suburban children in the 1970s and follows them into the present. These kids are the best of friends for a couple of summers. They consist of three brothers, a beautiful tomboy and a chubby girl who blossoms. They come from three different families, go to three different schools but all live in the suburban neighborhood of Dickeyville, near Baltimore. They spend hours exploring the woods near their neighborhood and what they find there becomes part of a secret that eventually drives the least stable member of their quintet to commit suicide as an adult decades later.

Laura Lippman

As the friends gather for the funeral the secret is slowly drawn out for the reader through a series of flashbacks (through the eyes of all five of the friends and their parents) and current time discussions. The characters are developed in extraordinary detail, which can be frustrating because the book seems to go nowhere, but eventually it does pay off - family secrets are exposed and the true faces of some characters finally come to light. Along the way, Lippman delivers some interesting observations about family life, relationships between men and women and careers. Well worth your time.

Narrator Linda Emond did a great job with a variety of different accents, ages and characters, including the same characters decades apart.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: The Most Dangerous Thing by Laura Lippman.

Reviewed on October 20, 2011.

Sherman: The Ruthless Victor by Agostino Von Hassell and Ed Breslin

A troubling biography.

Published in 2011.

Thomas Nelson Publishers has stepped out and published an attractive series of short biographies of American generals - all nicely bound and immensely readable. But, I found Sherman: The Ruthless Victor to be more than a little troubling for what really amounts to just a few sentences in a 163 page book.

Clearly von Hassell and Breslin are not writing this biography as fans of Sherman - they dislike the man as a person and do not respect his accomplishments on the battlefield. That is fine. I can live with a negative biography of an historical figure, but this book has moments that stretch the limits of responsible biography. For example, on page 22 the authors note that Sherman's difficult childhood may have caused strains in his relationships with his wife and his children. Reasonable assumption. But, then they go on to say that his "revulsion from scenes of domestic happiness" caused him to be particularly rough on the South during the Civil War. Why? "The South, unfortunately, presented such scenes in abundance. This prevalent and blissful state of domesticity seems to have ignited in Sherman a gratuitous pyromania, justified within himself as an exigency of war."

Really? The man went insane and burned the South because it was home to lots of happy families?

Sherman near Atlanta in 1864

This is scholarship at its worst - psychoanalysis of a patient 135 years in the past. It calls into question much of the rest of their analysis of Sherman's thoughts and motives. Later in the book they acknowledge that Sherman's use of slash and burn warfare against civilian populations was probably adapted from the Seminole War that he participated in right after he left West Point, not due to pyromania inspired by hatred of familial bliss. But, the damage to his reputation was already done. His style of warfare is a perfectly debatable topic - in fact it was so brutal that it should be discussed, but they set it up so poorly that there cannot be any debate - Sherman did it because he was crazy. End of discussion.

Another problem - on page 81 the authors were discussing pre-Bull Run conditions in D.C. in 1861 and how impatient the men were to fight. They write: "...they were ready to return home and that if an attack was not launched soon, they would simply defect." I looked up defect in several online dictionaries to see if it meant more than what I thought it meant and, like I thought, all indicated that defecting was leaving one side for its opposition (leaving the Democrats to join the Republicans or leaving the old USSR for the USA). Can you imagine that tens of thousands of Union volunteers wanted to fight so badly that they would join the Confederates just for the chance to fight? That is a serious error due to a simple incorrect word choice - I assume they meant to use "desert" rather than defect.

Like I noted, this is not a bad biography except for a few words here and there amounting to less than a paragraph, really. They should have been caught in the editing process but they were not. Too bad - there was a lot of good information here but those few words change the tone and quality of the text so much that I cannot recommend this biography.

I received this copy of the book from Thomas Nelson publishers as part of the BookSneeze program in exchange for an honest review.

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Sherman: The Ruthless Victor.

Reviewed on October 20, 2011.

Act of Deceit (Harlan Donnally #1) by Steven Gore

A very busy book that just didn't do it for me.

Published in 2011.

 I enjoyed meeting retired detective Harlan Donnally in Act of Deceit. Donnally was forced to retire due to an injury sustained during a shootout. He goes about his business with a battered body but a world class commitment to following the trail to wherever it leads.

But, the book has so many twists and turns that it felt like the author was whipsawing the story around just build an artificial sense of tension. We start out with an investigation that dates back to the Haight Ashbury Summer of Love movement in San Francisco but the investigation soon veers into other territory: Catholic priest sex abuse and international sex trafficking as well as the dynamics of the dysfunctional relationship between a father and son. The first part was interesting to me, the last part - old and tired territory.

Gore notes at the end of the book that his wife is involved in investigating Catholic priest sex abuse accusations in the San Francisco area, which is the inspiration for involving that angle in this story. However, I for one am tired of having that brought into so many stories. Was every priest a pedophile? Hardly, but you wouldn't know it from the bestseller list.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Act of Deceit by Steven Gore.

Reviewed on October 20, 2011.

Sky Birds Dare! (audiobook) by L. Ron Hubbard

Lots of Fun!

Duration: 1 hour, 50 minutes
Multicast Performance
Published by Galaxy Press

First published in 1936, Sky Birds Dare! is part of a large series of books and stories that are being re-published by Galaxy Press as part of their Golden Age Stories series. In reality, they are a collection of L. Ron Hubbard's early works that were published in magazines and as pulp fiction books. Hubbard was a prolific writer and he wrote a lot of action stories that translate quite well into the multicast performance audiobook format.



Sky Birds Dare! is the story of Breeze Callahan, a young glider pilot who is convinced that the U.S. military's pilots could learn a lot from learning how to pilot gliders before they fly motorized aircraft. A glider is like a small plane that has no engine and is towed into the air by a motorized plane or by a car with a rope (much like a person running with a kite trailing behind). Callahan and his mentor Pop Donegon are thwarted over and over again by Badger O'Dowell, a rival that wants to sell the military his conventional motorized training planes.

This is not a subtle story - there are no shades of grey. But, it is a fun story and there is plenty of adventure, danger and brawling - all of which was surprisingly entertaining for me, a listener with absolutely no experience with flying a plane. Hubbard's extensive experience as a glider pilot shines through as he explains it all while telling the story. I was particularly intrigued by his suggestion that gliders could be used to insert soldiers behind enemy lines. We did that 8 years after he published this story during the D-Day invasion in June of 1944.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Sky Birds Dare! by L. Ron Hubbard.

Reviewed on October 19, 2011.

Germline (The Subterrene War, Book 1) (audiobook) by T.C. McCarthy.

Wow!

Read by Donald Corren

Duration: Approximately 9 hours.

Published by Blackstone Audio, 2011.

Unabridged.

T.C. McCarthy’s Germline is a non-stop military techno-adventure set in the middle of a war in Central Asia in the 22^nd century. Russia and the United States are fighting over the resources of Kazakhstan. It turns out that Kazakhstan is rich in rare metals that are needed for the 22^nd century’s technological devices. They have to be mined deep in the mountains of Kazakhstan and the mines, countryside, little villages and cities of Central Asia become battlefields.

Oscar Wendell is a washed-up, drug-addicted reporter for Stars and Stripes. He is the only reporter in the entire theater of war and he is not quite sure how he was picked over better-known reporters. But, he is determined to make the best of his opportunity, already envisioning the Pulitzer Prize as the world’s biggest story unfolds in his lap. He is given some very basic training sent to the front, attached to a unit and outfitted with the latest gear – a self-contained mechanized body suit that provides heat or cooling and even has a rather gruesome system of self-contained waste disposal.

T.C. McCarthy

I mention that system because this book excels at putting the reader (in my case, listener) at the ground level – what famed World War II reporter Ernie Pyle called the “worm’s eye view.” McCarthy’s characters are vivid, earthy and exposed to one insane situation after another – which they can only respond to by going crazy themselves. Some decide to drug themselves, some decide to retreat into themselves, some decide die in battle and others kill themselves. The wide-ranging battlefield leads Wendell from one complicated scenario to another as he drops all pretense of being a reporter and simply fights alongside the men he was supposed to be covering – not because he believes in the cause but because he is so tied to these men that he can that he cannot leave them.

An added dimension is America’s introduction of genetically modified soldiers – all identical and all grown from a test tube and all 16 to 18 year old females (the males were too aggressive) who have been raised in an environment that worships death and sacrifice. Their bodies are programmed to begin to die at the beginning of their 18^th year. The title of the book, Germline, comes from a slang term for the military program that developed these super soldiers. Soon, the Russians have their own genetically modified soldiers (all males) and the war takes on a whole new face. Wendell decides to get close to an American “genetic” and soon finds himself falling for her despite the overt prejudice against them.

Donald Corren reads Germline and he does a great job of covering an amazing number of accents. His voice characterization of Oscar Wendell is perfect – he is loose and jaded and wound too tight all at the same time. The only problem was his inexplicable mispronunciation of the word “corpsmen” – he pronounced it “corzman” when it is pronounced "coreman".

This is a roller coaster of a read. The technology is advanced, but this is not a gizmo-based story. Instead, it is character-driven story and it is well worth the read. It is the first in a trilogy about the war that is supposed to follow the separate experiences of three different characters that interact briefly in all of the books but have their own stories.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Germline (The Subterrene War, Book 1)

Reviewed on September 26, 2011.

Click here to see the review of the second book in the series, Exogene.

Fyodor Dostoevsky by Peter Leithart

A tepid introduction to Dostoevsky

Published in 2011 by Thomas Nelson.

I freely admit to knowing only the barest of details about Fyodor Dostoevsky before starting this book. I was aware of the arguments of some of his works and am familiar with the broad strokes Tsarist Russian politics before the Revolution.

I picked up this book after becoming intrigued with some of Dostoevsky's ideas while reading a book by A Point in Time by David Horowitz. Horowitz quotes extensively from Dostoevsky and talks about his thoughts about evil in the world, God's place in the world, if there is one. Sadly, I learned more about Dostoevsky's philosophy from Horowitz than I did from this slender biography dedicated to the man.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(1821-1881)

Don't get me wrong, this is a solid little book to learn about the details of his personal life, but it suffers from the lack of in-depth discussion about his ideas and the use of reconstructed conversations throughout that really makes it much more like a piece of well-researched historical fiction than like a true biography.

Note: I received a copy of this book at no cost from Thomas Nelson publishers in exchange for an honest review of the work.

I rate this biography 3 stars out of 5. This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Fyodor Dostoevsky by Peter Leithart.

Reviewed on October 8, 2011.

After the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn

An entertaining superhero story with a twist

Published 2011 by Tor.

Imagine if your parents were both legendary superheroes and you have no super powers at all. In fact, the closest you have come to being physically heroic is winning a silver medal at a high school swim meet.They have been "outed" and everyone knows them by their regular identities and as superheroes and you are a frequent target of various super criminals who kidnap you to try to influence your parents. It happens so often that it would be funny if it wasn't interrupting your attempt to blend in, be normal and succeed in your career as an accountant.

Carrie Vaughn

That's the premise of After the Golden Age, a book that promises a superhero story with a twist and delivers. Celia West is a promising young accountant whose parents are the larger-than-life superhero duo of Captain Olympus and Spark. He's a Superman knock off with the nasty attitude and wealth of Batman. She creates fire at will. They have founded Commerce City's version of the Justice League. They are legends. They are beloved. They are just so-so parents and Celia has major issues with her parents.

Celia has tried to distance herself from her parents but the trial of a super criminal has demanded her skills as a forensic accountant. As she digs and digs in the records of the case she may have discovered information that no one wants disclosed about the origins of both the superheroes and the super criminals as her love life heats up, a new type of crime wave is sweeping the city and the mayor begins a crackdown on the vigilante actions of the superheroes.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

Reviewed on October 4, 2011.