Children of Wrath: A Novel (audiobook) by Paul Grossman

I have rarely been carried into another (horrible) world so thoroughly as I was by this audiobook.

Published by HighBridge Audio in April of 2012.
Read by Kyle Munley.
Duration: 12 hours, 13 minutes.

Unabridged.

Paul Grossman's The Children of Wrath is a dark detective story set in one of the most tragic situations in all of history: The Weimar Republic in the weeks before the rise of the Nazis. A series of murders of boys combined with the impending failure of Germany's experiment with democracy, the collapse of the American stock market and the open street fighting between the Nazis and the Communists makes this tragic piece drip with a sense of the impending descent of Germany into the madness that enveloped it after the Nazis took command.

Willi Kraus is the only Jewish detective in the Berlin police force (and perhaps all of Germany). He is a decorated veteran of World War I but his country treats him with no respect because he is Jewish. His fellow detectives refuse to be his partner. His supervisor gives him insulting jobs. In this story he is re-assigned from a murder case (a burlap bag of bones from a boy with teeth marks on them is found washed up from a sewer line) to investigate an outbreak of Listeria that has killed consumers of pork sausage, with the implied insult of having a Jewish detective investigate a case involving the famously non-Kosher pork product.

But, as Willi digs into his new case he finds hints that the two cases might actually be connected and he starts his own private investigation as more and more boys go missing and more bones are found. While Kraus investigates,  Grossman gives the reader a foreshadowing of the horrors and atrocities that await Germany. The railroad cars that come from Poland filled with hogs and cattle to the butchers in Germany will soon enough come full of people headed for slaughter. Hitler leads small rallies that inflame the passions of many who feel lost. Death camps, human skin used as leather, and science gone wild all make appearances while Goebbels spreads his propaganda in the press.  There are references to "useless mouths" and the incessant prejudice against Jews combine to leave Kraus and his family abandoned by co-workers and neighbors alike.

Grossman notes that this was also a time of a rise of the interest in paganism in Germany and that Hitler built on many of those pagan themes. Christians certainly bear plenty of responsibility for the Nazis, but it was certainly not friendly to traditional Christianity and built on a pagan base as well. At the end of the book Kraus comes across a group of  Hitler Youth who are marching in the street and singing:

"We are the joyous Hitler Youth
Our leader is our savior.
The Pope and rabbit shall be gone
We want to be pagans again."

With that we know that Germany's future is sealed - the young people have bought into what Hitler is selling and the tragedy will continue to unfold.

This is by no means a perfect book. The climactic ending is too cheesy. It is dramatic, but it feels like the end of a Batman movie (and not one of the good ones, either). I don't want to go into specifics, but it does not fit well with the rest of this unique, moody, tragic book.

Nonetheless, I will still rate this book 5 stars out of 5. I have rarely been carried into another world so thoroughly as I was by this audiobook. Between the excellent writing and the dark tones of the reader, Kyle Munley, this book really got into my head. Munley's great character voices, precise pronunciation of German words and phrases, and his ability to carry the story through all of its ups and downs make this an exceptional audiobook experience.

Reviewed on October 20, 2012.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Children of Wrath by Paul Grossman.

Mondays With My Old Pastor: Sometimes All We Need Is a Reminder From Someone Who Has Walked Before Us by Jose Luis Navajo

Published in 2012 by Thomas Nelson

Mondays With My Old Pastor is a fictional parable about a relatively young pastor who is starting to experience symptoms of burnout. He has had rough times with some members of his congregation, his family life has suffered as he commits more and more time to work but is dismayed to find work less rewarding and less success-filled as it was earlier in his career. His calling has become a chore.

So, the young pastor contacts his old pastor, a little old man who is now retired from the active ministry and lives with his wife in a little house surrounded by a beautiful garden. The older pastor recognizes the symptoms of burnout and is eager to speak with this young man and teach him some of his "secrets" as well as constantly re-focusing him on the message of the cross.

Altogether, there are 15 secrets which are explained in a repetitive format that involves the younger pastor coming to the house of the older pastor week after week for more insights. The insights are all powerful and worthy of note, such as:  "Everything begins with loving God. Either we love the One we serve, or our service will become arduous and boring work. Don't work for the church of God; serve the God of the church" and "Watch over and preserve the health of your family. One of the most powerful credentials of your ministry is your family, beginning with you marriage."

All of the advice is wonderful but the parable format got mighty tiresome for me by somewhere around page 75. The last 129 pages were tedious because of this rather elaborate parable format and I found myself skimming through all of the window dressing just to get to the parts where the old pastor presented his new insight and explained it.

I give 5 stars to the insight but a mere 1 star to the format. This makes for an average of 3 stars.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Mondays With My Old Pastor.

Reviewed on October 19, 2012.

The Wait Album: More of the Best by the cast of Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me

Published by HighBridge Audio in 2012.
Performed by the guests and cast of Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!
Duration: about 2 hours.

If you have not discovered NPR's weekly radio show Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! , then I pity you. This clever show is truly one of the funniest shows on radio or television or just about anywhere and this collection is promoted as a distillation of the best of a very funny crop.


The question is, is it truly "More of the Best"?

Yes. It lives up to its own hype.

They truly are all funny. Even the people who I had never heard of like Neko Case and Tavi Gevinson were funny and interesting. Other, more well known personalities (at least to me), like Henry Winkler, Jane Goodall, Vince Gill and Brian Williams were as funny or funnier than I expected.

This audiobook focuses on a part of the show - the "Not my job" segment. In this segment a celebrity is asked 3 questions about a topic about which they may not have any particular expertise and if they get 2 of the 3 correct they win a prize for a listener. For example, Jane Goodall was asked questions about Nicholas Cage. Henry Winkler was asked questions about Ponzi schemes (Ponzi rhymes with Fonzie).

Truly a fun audiobook and a real joy to listen during my commute - I am going to have to look for others in the collection.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Wait Album: More of the Best.

Reviewed on October 18, 2012.

NPR Driveway Moments: Cat Tales (audiobook)

Published by HighBridge Audio
Duration: about 2 hours.

Every installment of HighBridge Audio's NPR Driveway Moments series is composed of collections of stories that aired on NPR. In this case, the common theme is cats.  The stories aired from 1984 to 2011 and cover everything from lions to mock youtube videos of a cat running for the Senate (Hank the Cat - see the video below) to the origins of the domestic house cat to cats being used in the fight against AIDS.




But, the heart of the collection are the stories about the connection between every day house cats and the people they live with. There are travelling cats, vacationing cats, a cat that lives in a hotel and several stories memorializing cats who have passed on.

All of the stories in the collection have first-rate production values but, as always happens in any collection, some stories are better than others. The cover of the audiobook promises "Radio stories that won't let you go" and some do that, but a couple of the stories were so maudlin (brooding over cats that had recently died) that it was a relief when they ended.

But, if you are a cat person, this is a great collection for you.

I rate this collection 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: NPR Driveway Moments: Cat Tales.

Reviewed on October 17, 2012.

Obama: The Greatest President in the History of Everything (Kindle) by Frank J. Fleming

Published by Broadside e-books on November 15, 2011

Sold by HarperCollins Publishers
Estimated length in pages: 26 pages

Obama: The Greatest President in the History of Everything is political satire from one end to the other. It is not subtle, but it is humorous.

If you are easily offended by political criticism of President Obama, I do not recommend this book for you.

Fleming has written this book as though he is a fawning sycophant of the President - everything is twisted to be something to praise about the president. I imagined the author reading in breathless awe of the man.

Here is a sample:

"When it was time for him to finally enter politics, he headed to the place best known for learning good values in government: Chicago. There he became a community organizer, one of the most important jobs known to man. As a result of his hard work, everyone in his community was alphabetized, placed within the Dewey Decimal, and color-coded. It was the most organized community in the world."

Fleming hits all of the main events of the first two-and-a-half years of the Obama Presidency, including Obamacare, the Stimulus and the death of Osama bin Laden. He also compares the President to literally every other president and explains why Barak Obama is better than every one of them.

Is this sophisticated humor? No way. Was it a fun one-sitting read? Absolutely.

I rate this kindle book 4 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: Obama: The Greatest President in the History of Everything.

Reviewed on October 16, 2012.

A Beautiful Friendship (Stephanie Harrington #1) by David Weber

Perhaps the Beginning of a Beautiful Series?

Published in 2011 by Baen

So, David Weber decided to make a Young Adult (YA) series.

Yes, a sci-fi author known best for his highly-descriptive military sci-fi works characterized by very long conversations is entering a field where too much violence and too much conversation are both problematic. Well, I thought, this should be interesting.

Weber expanded a short story that first appeared in an short story collection More Than Honor from 1998 as part of the extensive Honor Harrington series. Eleven year old Stephanie Harrington is the main character in A Beautiful Friendship and she is an ancestor of Honor Harrington.

Stephanie lives on the planet Sphinx, a fairly new colony that is part of a star kingdom called Manticore. Stephanie's family has moved to the planet because their skills are needed but Stephanie is bored by frontier life. However, she is intrigued by a mystery that is being reported across the planet - celery is disappearing from gardens and greenhouses across the frontier.

David Weber

Stephanie decides that some native animal must be taking the celery so she sets an alarm to tell her when their greenhouse has been broken into and one dark and stormy night the alarm goes off. Off she goes with her camera and meets a treecat, the previously unknown native sentient species on the planet. Treecats are sort of a mix of cats, racoons and monkeys with nasty teeth and claws.

The treecats live a low-tech lifestyle consisting of hunting, gathering and light agriculture. They do not have a spoken language because they are telepathic. They have an rich culture and are able to communicate over relatively long distances with their minds. It turns out that treecats find celery to be irresistible. When Stephanie and the treecat named Climbs Quickly meet they form an intense psychic bond, stronger than most mated treecats would experience. Despite Stephanie's utter lack of telepathic skills she is still able to "feel" Climbs Quickly and she knows where he is even if they are separated by miles.

The balance of the book involves the exploration of this bond, their difficulties in communicating (he has no spoken language and she is not telepathic), the dangers facing the treecats by human encroachment (no, this is not a mindless environmental book - it recognizes that human society needs natural resources) and a plot that endangers a band of treecats.

So, how does it work as a YA book? My 12 year old daughter loved it. I liked it. I would think that it is too talkative for most teens and pre-teens, but then again my daughter loved it. What do I know? There is action and to Weber's credit he treats his young readers like intelligent people and does not sugarcoat the tendencies of advanced cultures to overwhelm lower-tech cultures. His treecats are a believable society. I just ordered the second book in the series and I will be sure to read it after my daughter reads it.

I rate this novel 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: A Beautiful Friendship (Stephanie Harrington #1) by David Weber.

The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing (audiobook) by John Perry

Published by HighBridge Audio in 2012
Read by Brian Holsopple
Duration: 1 hour, 48 minutes

Unabridged.

Are you the kind of person who has the best of intentions but continually puts important projects aside to do other things? Is your work environment organized horizontally (stuff spread all over the desk, open chairs and any other flat surface) rather than vertically (in a filing cabinet)? Do you find that even though you put things off you still get a whole lot of stuff done - just not the stuff that you were supposed to get done? If any of these descriptions sound like you than you should check out this audiobook.

I have to admit, all of those descriptions describe me. Right now I am writing a review of a fun audiobook rather than writing one of a book I read three weeks ago that was not a particularly well done book. But, I am writing and that means one more book review will be checked off of my "to-do" list.

John Perry is a philosophy professor at Stanford. What started out as a fun little essay he wrote when he was supposed to be doing something else has blossomed into a movement (see the essay by clicking here) which goes to prove what Perry has purported for years - Procrastination is not as bad as it is cracked up to be. 

In this audiobook Perry discusses "structured procrastination" ("All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this negative trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastination does not mean doing absolutely nothing."), the value of "To-Do" lists and how to make them work for the structured procrastinator, fringe benefits of procrastination and how to work with non-procrastinators among other topics.

This is a fun audiobook - guaranteed to make fellow procrastinators chuckle and laugh throughout it relatively short run time. By the way, it took John Perry 16 years to turn his essay into a book and it may well have been worth the wait.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging, and Postponing, or, Getting Things Done by Putting Them Off

Reviewed on October 5, 2012.