AMERICA'S PROPHET: MOSES and the AMERICAN STORY by Bruce Feiler

Published in 2009 by William Morrow (HarperCollins)

I love the premise of America's Prophet - that America has a special connection with the story of Moses beginning with the Puritans and going right up through Martin Luther King, Jr. He lays out the correlations with some skill but, in the end it just started to drag.

This review (and the book, to a lesser extent) is helped by a basic knowledge of the story of Moses. Feiler provides the necessary background on Moses and then proceeds to make comparisons. For example, the Puritans saw themselves as fleeing a domineering power (England) and taking refuge in the wilderness (New England) like the Children of Israel fled the Pharaoh and went into the Sinai. The Puritans took comfort in the story of Moses because they believed that they would also be led by God.

Martin Luther King, Jr. during the
"March on Washington"

A slight change in interpretation and Moses becomes an inspiring symbol for the Americans in the Revolutionary War, the Abolitionist movement, the Underground Railroad, both sides in the Civil War, immigrants, the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement (with the oddly prophetic "mountaintop" speech given by King right before he was murdered). Of course, there is a long discussion about Charlton Heston's portrayal of Moses in the movie The Ten Commandments. Oddly, there is only a very brief mention of Brigham Young leading the Mormons to Salt Lake City, fleeing from the United States in search of religious freedom. I am not a Mormon, but that story has every bit as much correlation to the original story as any of the others do.

Sadly, the story drags in in the later parts of the book with the discussions of post-Civil War immigrants and Charlton Heston. Feiler's attempt to wrap it all up with a discussion of his family's Passover celebrations is well-intentioned but really slow, capping off a solid book with an ending that never seems to end.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: AMERICA'S PROPHET: MOSES and the AMERICAN STORY by Bruce Feiler.


Reviewed on November 12, 2013.

WHO OWNS THE FUTURE (audiobook) by Jaron Lanier

Published by Simon and Schuster in 2013.
Read by Pete Simonelli
Duration: 12 hours, 2 minutes

Unabridged.

Computer expert (to say the least, the man was a pioneer in the field of virtual reality and was at the ground floor in multiple Silicon Valley projects and companies) Jaron Lanier discusses possible futures of the economy and the online community in this rambling, interesting audiobook.

Lanier spends quite a bit of time in Who Owns the Future? discussing what he calls Siren Servers. Siren Servers are massive collectors of data such as search engine sites, credit bureaus, the NSA, and some very large retail sites. These servers collect "free" data from you that is provided by tracking your searches, purchases, phone calls or GPS location on your cell phones and sell it to advertisers. Facebook is a sterling example.

Lanier believes that you should be reimbursed for this information through a series of hundreds or even thousands of micropayments which would be used to support a middle class that will be increasingly squeezed by technological improvements that will destroy traditional middle class jobs. He calls this an Advanced Humanistic Information Economy.

Lanier's rambling style eventually gets to the details of this point about 10 hours or so into a 12 hour audiobook. It's not that he wasn't interesting as he was building up to his point, it's just that he has a hard time getting to the point. Along the way he tells about his favorite musician as a child and how he got to visit him, why the Laffer curve in economics is wrong (but why it is hopeful that so many people have a grasp of the concepts behind it), how Steve Jobs used guru techniques to motivate his people, including outright bullying some of his employees. He also talks about e-books vs. paper books and Singularity University and motivational speakers and why he is not on Facebook and on and on and on. He even has truly off topic chapters called "interludes."

The author, Jaron Lanier

Note: this meandering conversation was usually interesting but was also a serious case of thesis drift. I listened in the car over the week and decided to listen as if the experience as a giant one-sided conversation with an especially talkative and intelligent companion. This impression was helped by the style of the reader, Pete Simonelli, who kept everything very approachable and friendly - like a conversation between friends.

Did I agree with everything presented? No. Did I find it interesting? Absolutely.

Note: I received a copy of this audiobook from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: WHO OWNS THE FUTURE (audiobook) by Jaron Lanier.

Reviewed on November 9, 2013.

A FATE WORSE THAN DRAGONS by John Moore

Fair to Middling 

Published by Ace Fantasy in 2007

There is a market out there for parodies of the traditional King Arthur/Lord of the Rings fantasy stories. Some are quite excellent, such as the The Princess Bride and the Xanth novels. Some are just so-so, like A Fate Worse Than Dragons.

The book is about Terry, a knight trying to win the hand of Princess Gloria. He actually kills a dragon, but it took place in the wrong kingdom. When he returns home he discovers Gloria is now engaged to the son of one of richest men in the kingdom (his family invented sliced bread). Terry and Gloria decide to fake the kidnapping of Princess Gloria so that Terry can "rescue" her. Of course, none of it works out the way that it is supposed to...

The problem with this book is that it is just so-so funny. Not that it doesn't have its moments. The running joke about people being afraid of sliced bread (because it is unnatural, etc.) was cute, but the long discussions about the rules concerning marrying a princess by winning her hand (and the precedents and how they became precedents) were repetitive and just too long. The scene where the virgin-eating griffin is coming through town has one very funny, very original scene, but for the most part this book just kept telling the same jokes over and over and they weren't all that funny the first time.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: A FATE WORSE THAN DRAGONS by John Moore.

Reviewed on November 4, 2013.

DOCTOR SLEEP: A NOVEL (Sequel to The Shining) (audiobook) by Stephen King

A Tour De Force

Published in 2013 by Simon and Schuster
Read by Will Patton 
Duration: 18 hours, 35 minutes

I am an occasional reader of Stephen King. When I was younger I used to be an enthusiastic fan of all things Stephen King, but I took a break (about 15 years) and have slowly come back to the Stephen King fold, picking through some of what I missed, listening to his short stories as audiobooks and sometimes reading a book as it comes out. In this case, I am very glad that I did not hem and haw over this one. It is a tour de force of how to write horror, human frailty, human resilience and the power of friendship and love. Throw in the amazing performance by reader (and veteran actor - he is the coach in high school football movie Remember the Titans) Will Patton and this audiobook is an experience that must not be missed.

Stephen King

Doctor Sleep is the sequel to the classic novel The Shining. I read it many, many years ago and decided NOT to re-read it before I listened to the audiobook. If you have not read the book in a while or even just saw the movie, King provides enough background material for the reader to piece it together.

The child protagonist of The Shining, Danny Torrance, returns in Doctor Sleep. In his author's notes after the book King notes that he is often asked what he thinks happened to the kid from The Shining and he found himself wondering how he character would react to the horrific events that happened in the book.  He has .psychic powers that his mentor called "the shining." Danny can see certain spirits, he can tell when someone is going to die and he can communicate with only his mind if the other person also has "the shining."

Having this talent takes a tremendous toll on Torrance and, like his father before him, he turns to alcohol to quiet the voices and dull its abilities so that he can sleep. Soon enough, like his father before him, he becomes a violent alcoholic who cannot keep a job and he just rolls from town to town, getting work when he can and moving on when the alcohol gets in the way. He hits a low point when he wakes up in a stranger's apartment after a one night stand and he steals all of the cash from her purse even though he knows she has a little boy in diapers. At least he moves the cocaine out of his reach before he runs off with the rent money!

Dan ends up in New Hampshire and meets a couple of older gentlemen. One offers him a job, the other introduces him to Alcoholics Anonymous and helps Dan get sober. Dan eventually gets a different job at the local hospice and he uses his special talents to help dying guests pass over easier. He earns the nickname Doctor Sleep because word of his talent spreads among the residents and nurses of the hospice. The three scenes in which King describes what Torrance does with these patients as they pass away are quite beautiful.

What Stephen King does best is create characters. Dan Torrance is described in such approachable detail that the reader (listener, in my case) feels like he is real. At his lowest, the reader feels a level of both pity and disgust for Torrance. But, as he begins to pull his life together the reader feels like Danny is redeemed in some sort of way. I felt like I had been to the bottom with Torrance and had now come through the worst of it. This would have been a great story if this is all there were.

But, Stephen King does not leave it there. He makes you love a character (or a bunch of them) and then he makes you worry over them as horrific things come at them from all over the place and try to kill them. 

In Doctor Sleep the monsters are a group of psychic vampires called the True Knot. They travel the highways of America looking for children with "the shining." They capture them and slowly kill them and absorb their life essence as it slowly ebbs from their damaged bodies. They can live for hundreds of years and they look the same as everyone else. They have also targeted a twelve year old girl who lives in a town near Dan Torrance's and when she contacts him he knows that he must confront an evil that he has never imagined.

Will Patton

Will Patton read this book. Saying he read this book is really an insult to what he did with the material. A great audiobook reader can turn so-so material into a good story. A good story can make a so-so reader sound good. In this case, Patton is an amazing reader with an excellent story. Patton performs almost every sentence of an eighteen hour plus audiobook with such skill, such a solid feel for the story that I can honestly say that I have not heard anything better in ten years of listening to audiobooks. I have reviewed almost 250 audiobooks and I can unequivocally say that this was the best performance I have ever heard on an audiobook. The accents, the pacing, the nuances were all perfect. Whether he is voicing an elderly black man from Florida or a crusty old New Englander or an evil woman who likes to torture young people for their souls or a middle school girl or an old Italian grandmother or a panicked small town mom - he nailed it. 

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Doctor Sleep.

Reviewed on November 3, 2013.

Disclosure: I was given a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. 

NOTE: This book was placed on a book banning list for the state of Florida in the 2023-2024 school year. Here is a link to that extensive list.

It was put on a book ban list in Tennessee, too. The article has a searchable database because the list has more than 1,100 unique titles.

Ugh.

TIM RUSSELL: MAN of a THOUSAND VOICES (A Prairie Home Companion) (audiobook)

Published in September of 2013 by HighBridge Audio.
Duration: 1 hour, 15 minutes
Multi-cast Performance

NPR's "A Prairie Home Companion" has an extensive collection of audio CDs based on lots of different themes, including skits that highlight certain regular actors on the show. This CD focuses on Tim Russell, an actor with a real talent for mimicking celebrities and an admirable repertoire of original characters to draw upon. He has been a member of the cast since 1994. 

This CD has 19 different tracks that were broadcast from 1996-2012. Some are laugh-out-loud funny, some are merely amusing, and a couple are just okay (I am not a fan of "Guy Noir" or "The Lives of the Cowboys" - these are two recurring and popular skits that feature Russell). To be fair, Russell figures prominently in the collection of highlights featuring fellow cast member Sue Scott and I think she got the funnier bits on her CD.  Altogether, this is still a very solid hour of listening and a sure thing for any fan of Garrison Keillor.

Disclosure: I was sent a complimentary copy of this CD by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: TIM RUSSELL: MAN of a THOUSAND VOICES.

Reviewed on October 28, 2013.

THE ROBBERY: A SHORT STORY by John Brinling

Published in 2011 as an e-short story in kindle format.
Estimated length: 11 pages

The most interesting thing about this short story is the opening paragraph:

Like Superman, Walter tried to catch the bullet. Unlike Superman, it went through the fleshy part of his palm between the thumb and forefinger.

After that, the story just deteriorates in a hurry.

Walter is stealing a fortune in bearer bonds from his company without his partner's knowledge, but he gets robbed almost as soon as he steps out on the street. From there, things spiral out of control with one betrayal after another and once it got going it was pretty obvious that it was going for full bore ridiculous - and it got there.

I found none of the characters sympathetic and it was very hard to actually care about them in any way. I rate it 1 star out of 5.

This e-book can be found on Amazon.com here: THE ROBBERY: A SHORT STORY.

HIS MAJESTY'S DRAGON (Temeriare #1) by Naomi Novak

Originally published in 2006.

Way back when when I got my Kindle 2 in 2009 His Majestys Dragon was one of the first books that I got - it was part of a free promotion and somehow I never read it. I guess I was afraid that it would be too cheesy.

Boy, was I wrong.

The premise of this book is a mashup of How to Train Your Dragon with Master and Commander. It is the middle of the Napoleonic Wars and Napoleon is planning to invade England. All that stands between England and Napoleon's massive army is their far superior navy and a small contingent of dragons. Yes, dragons. It turns out that in this alternate world dragons occur naturally in the wild and have been trained to fight in war, much like horses and dogs occur naturally in the wild and have been trained to fight in war.

Dragons, however, are smart and are able to talk with people. In fact, dragons bond with a human and they become a team. Dragons come in different sizes and jobs, much like an air force's planes or a navy ships. Some are quick and small, some are like giant air-borne battleships. Some spray acid, some just have nasty claws and teeth and can drop big rocks on fortifications, ships, etc,

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

Captain Will Laurence's ship captures a weaker French ship that puts up a surprisingly tough fight, Once aboard, the English discover why they fought so hard - they have a dragon's egg in their hold! The English immediately move it to their ship, thrilled that their country will get a much-needed dragon (being severely outnumbered by the France's dragons).

But, the egg starts to hatch and when it does the dragon picks Captain Laurence as the person it will bond with. The Captain steps aside as the Captain of his ship and tries to learn as much as he can about dragons, which is not a lot (think about a fighter pilot becoming a tank commander in our modern armed forces and you get the idea). Together, the reader and Laurence learn about dragon behavior and training and even eventually go into battle against Napoleon's forces.

This book is written in period style and pays careful attention to the attitudes and mores of the time period, making it all the more authentic feeling. The bond between the dragon Temeriare and Will Laurence is as natural as that ideal bond between a K-9 officer and his dog - they are different but they are also partners, roommates and loyal friends. If that police dog could talk, the bond would be even stronger. 

This was a fantastic read. I am sorry that I waited more than four years to finally get it off of my to-be-read list.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: HIS MAJESTY'S DRAGON (Temeriare #1) by Naomi Novak.

Reviewed on October 18, 2013.