War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865 (audiobook) by James M. McPherson

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2012.
Read by Joe Barrett
Duration: 8 hours, 55 minutes.

Unabridged

James McPherson is undoubtedly the most popular living Civil War historian. He writes in a common, easy-to-understand style that flows nicely and does not dumb down the facts. His latest book, War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865 continues that tradition.

Union Admiral David D. Porter -
Leader of the Naval forces in the
Vicksburg campaign.

If you read a typical Civil War history you get a just a little bit of the information, usually in passing, about the war on the open sea, in the bays, harbors, up and down the rivers and even in the swamps. McPherson reverses that arrangement in this book and focuses on the strategies, personalities and challenges that faced both navies and mentions the land campaigns in passing. If you are a frequent reader of Civil War books, little of this material will be new. But, the special focus does make the story of the naval forces more cohesive than is usually found in histories.

Starting with Fort Sumter and the formation of the Anaconda Plan, McPherson hits all of the typical highlights, including the Mason and Slidell Affair, privateers, the taking of New Orleans, the repeated tries to take Charleston, the Merrimack (Virginia) vs . the Monitor fight, the river campaigns in the West, including the long struggle for Vicksburg, the taking of Mobile ("Damn the Torpedoes! Full speed ahead!") and more. Typical of McPherson, he includes smaller stories that make the war more real and interesting, such as the time a Union gunboat captured a Confederate train and the cattle rustling gunboats.

Joe Barrett narrated the audiobook. He has sort of a "folksy" reading voice which is pleasant enough. His real strength, however, was the way he gave individual voices to direct quotes, including a soft southern accent for Union Admiral Farragut who was born in and lived in the south but went for the Union and a high-pitched accent for Lincoln. Movie directors love to give Lincoln a baritone voice but all accounts talk about his high-pitched Midwestern accent.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. A must-read for all serious students of the Civil War and/or the Navy.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865 (The Littlefield History of the Civil War Era) 

 Reviewed on October 25, 2012.

The Time Keeper: A Novel (audiobook) by Mitch Albom

Published in 2012 by Hyperion Audio
Performed by Dan Stevens
Duration: 4 hours, 42 minutes.

Unabridged.

I am torn by this book. I liked the message (just live your life, enjoy the time you have, don't be a clock-watcher) but this short book felt like it was jammed full of padding.

The Time Keeper features a man named Dor who lives at the beginning of civilization. He is happily married to his childhood sweetheart, has kids and is also the first man to measure time. He creates sundials, water clocks, measures the cycles of the moon and notices the days get longer and shorter as the year progresses. His childhood friend is the king and the creator of the Tower of Babel. His friend wants to harness this ability to measure time in some way to build his tower but Dor refuses. They are banished and eventually his wife dies from a disease. Dor returns to the tower and storms up the stairs just as God punishes the builders of the tower (sort of like it is described in Genesis). Dor is not killed. Instead he is placed in a cave and is forced to listen to the prayers and laments of everyone who wants more time, less time, to stop time, to reverse time, or whatever. Dor does not age even though time continues to move forward. He becomes the mythical figure  known as Father Time.

Mitch Albom (photo by Vincent Wagner)

Meanwhile, in the modern world, two people have their own issues with time. An elderly businessman who is dying from cancer wants more time. A high school girl is dealing with issues of bullying and divorced parents needs to slow things down so she can process them.

Dor is finally released from his prison and told that he can finally die if he can help these two people from a future world that he can barely comprehend. He gets to use the tools of Father Time (controlling the speed of time) to help him accomplish this goal. Will he do it? Albom telegraphs that early on - of course. How will he do it? That's the question.

Dan Stevens reads this book with a great deal of skill. His multiple female characters are well done. I teach high school and he catches the cadence and rhythm of high school-speak very well. Even better, he catches the pain and frustration of the elderly businessman's voice wonderfully. As he dies from kidney failure his voice gets weaker and more slurred in scene after scene.

I give this book 3 stars. It is very slowly paced and is only saved by the tear-jerker moments at the end that felt intentionally manipulative.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Time Keeper.

Reviewed on October 25, 2012.

Chimera (The Subterrene War, Book 3) (audiobook) by T.C. McCarthy

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2012.
Duration: 10 hours, 57 minutes
Read by John Pruden.

Unabridged.

Chimera is the third installment of new author T.C. McCarthy's remarkable Subterrene War trilogy. This is not an easy trilogy. It has brutal battle scenes, shows the reader an uncomfortable vision of technology pushed too far and asks important questions about what it is to be human. And, on top of that these three books are well-told, hair-raising trips through three different war zones in a truly dysfunctional world.

In Chimera McCarthy introduces a new set of characters, as he does in every book in the series. Stan Resnick is an assassin. He seeks out and executes germline clones created by the American military to be frontline shock troops in Kazakhstan. They are all female (the males cannot be controlled), start fighting at age 16 and are pre-programmed to die at age 18. But, some have fled the war zone and have escaped to countries all over the world, surviving in a pathetic half-rotted state but still astonishingly dangerous. Resnick's job is to find them and execute them discreetly, if possible.

T.C. McCarthy

After a tough mission in which his long-time partner is killed, Resnick is sent home to decompress. Suddenly, he is called back to duty and is offered a mission that is in all probability a suicide mission. He is teamed with a fully human rookie soldier with a genius level knowledge of tactics and strategy because has been trained with new artificial techniques gleaned from the methods used to train the clone soldiers.

Part of the book deals with Resnick's inner demons. He is unhappy with the state of the world, the state of his personal life, the type of man he has become and his new mission. He is prone to drinking binges because he thinks too much and that is the only way he can stop thinking. The tension between the grizzled veteran and the talented rookie is a common theme in books and movies, but McCarthy manages to put his own twist on it and make it work to the story's advantage.

Resnick and his partner are sent to Thailand to find the leader of a colony of clone soldiers that have turned off the genetic programming that makes them die. Their mission is to recruit her to fight against a Chinese army that is invading Southeast Asia. Or, maybe it is to kill her.

Their mission brought to mind Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness as Resnick is escorted along a difficult trail deep into the jungle to complete his mission. The rules change in the jungle and everything boils down to a struggle to survive as they discover the awful new genetic manipulations that pilot new war machines that have been developed by the Chinese military and plans for even worse. At this point the reader realizes that there are two meanings for the title, Chimera. From mythology, you know that a chimera is a mythical animal made of parts of several different animals, a reference to all of these genetic permutations. But, is also a reference to the saying, "Chasing a chimera," or going on a fool's errand because Resnick's mission is unclear and unlikely to succeed.

In the jungle the story becomes a high tech war story with some very powerful questions about what it  means to be human. Is Resnick still human, even though his heart is so hardened that he is really not very different than the clones he hunts? Is his partner human, even though his brain has been tampered with? Are the germline clones human? How about the new genetically modified creatures from China? How about Resnick's "semi-aware" computer that he carries on his back and is his only real friend for most of the book?

And what is McCarthy's answer to this question? It is certainly worth the ride through all three books to find out. This is an amazing first series of books and well worth a read (or a listen).

Interestingly, McCarthy's each book of the Subterrene War trilogy has a different reader, reflecting the three different characters telling their stories. John Pruden read this book and captured the world-weary and grizzled voice of Resnick perfectly. Even better, he has a talent for accents and female characters, helping to make this trilogy an exceptional experience.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Chimera (The Subterrene War)

Reviewed on October 24, 2012

Wear a Fast Gun (audiobook) by John Jakes

Published in 1995 by Sunset Productions
Performed by John Dhyani
Running time: about 3 hours.

Note: I assume that this book was abridged. It's original length in paperback was 182 pages and 3 hours would not normally cover that many pages.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s John Jakes ruled the paperback historical fiction market with series like North and South trilogy and his Kent Family Chronicles. 

Wear a Fast Gun is not one of those sweeping historical epics. It was written in 1956 and is a pretty typical western. A new sheriff named Reb Fallon has come to the town of Longhorn. Longhorn is a dangerous place and Reb Fallon is a hard man so it seem to be a perfect fit.

Fallon sets out right away to confront the random violence associated with the saloons and also with a gang of cattle rustlers that hide behind hoods. Along the way he makes a lot of enemies, a few friends and encounters a possible love interest.

The story itself is neither bad nor good - like I said before, it is a pretty typical western. But, the reader is another story altogether. Almost all of his voices sound like they are stereotypes of characters who should appear in a Western. The voice work sounds like it would be better suited for a humorous car dealer radio ad or a cartoon than for an audiobook. Every character is over the top. There is the old miner guy, the rich swaggering rancher, the little guy who is game for anything and then there's the matter of the bad falsetto for every female character. Throw in Western style transition music that was not matched to the scenes they were transitioning to and from (imagine a dramatic death scene followed by upbeat hoe down fiddle playing and you get the idea) and it was so bad it was almost funny.

Anyway, the so-so story and the bad reading make for a rating for 2 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Wear a Fast Gun by John Jakes.

Booty for a Badman (audiobook) by Louis L'Amour

Published by Bantam Audio Publishing in 1991.
Multicast performance. 
Duration: 1 hour, 4 minutes.

 Louis L'Amour's famed Sackett family adventures continue with this full cast dramatization of of a short story about William Tell Sackett. Tell Sackett appears in seven L'Amour novels and two of his short stories.

In Booty for a Badman, Tell Sackett is prospecting for gold and not finding anything. He is close to giving up completely when he is approached by one of his successful gold-mining neighbors with a proposal. The successful miners are piling up quite a stash of gold (50 pounds among the group) but they fear their claims will be jumped if they leave for town to deposit it in the bank for safekeeping. Even worse, they could be robbed and killed along the way - a fate that has struck other miners So, they want Tell Sackett to sneak their gold to the bank in exchange for a small cut of the gold. This way, their gold gets deposited, Sackett can make his money back on his own failed gold mine claim and the miners can defend their successful claims.

Louis L'Amour (1908-1988)

 Sackett agrees to this plan and quietly heads off. Along the way he meets the injured runaway bride of an army lieutenant who knows nothing about the West and he is pretty sure he is being followed. Can he help this young woman? On top of that, is he being followed and if he is, is he being followed by frieds or foes? Will his father's advice that "Women are trouble" prove to be true?

 This audiobook was well-performed by the cast members and was an enjoyable break from what I normally listen to in audiobooks.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

Reviewed on October 20, 2012

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Booty for a Badman by Louis L'Amour.

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.