BATMAN: THE LONG HALLOWEEN written by Jeph Loeb and illustrated by Tim Sale

Published in 2011 by DC Comics.

Batman: The Long Halloween is a collection of 13 comics compiled into a single book that tells about the mystery of a serial murderer called Holiday. Holiday always strikes on a major holiday and is particularly fond of killing figures in Gotham City's network of crime families.

Batman, Gordon, and Harvey Dent decide to work together to solve the mystery but this triumvirate of crime-solvers has its own internal troubles as both Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent become suspects.

Calendar Man is an immediate suspect since this sounds like his kind of crime spree. But, he is locked up in Arkham Asylum. But, lots of other super-criminals are sprung free and pretty soon Gotham is awash in their machinations on top of a serial killer. Plus, Catwoman is also on the prowl...

This was a great mystery - I thought I had it figured out and then I found out that I was entirely wrong - twice! Powerful story and Batman nearly gets taken out. Loeb and Sale are a powerful team.

I rate this graphic novel 5 stars out of 5.

This graphic novel can be found on Amazon.com here: Batman: The Long Halloween.

BIG HERO 6: THE JUNIOR NOVELIZATION by Irene Trimble

Published by Disney and Blackstone Audio in October of 2014
Read by MacLeod Andrews
Duration: 2 hours, 18 minutes
Unabridged

Big Hero 6 is, in my mind, one of the best superhero movies that has been made in this time of the renaissance of the superhero movie. It is fun and colorful, but it also has loss and shows the power of friendship and love. It also demonstrates how love can be twisted into something evil.

Hiro Hamada is a teenaged robot-building prodigy who competes in robot fighting contests. His brother attends the local university in the future city of San Fransokyo and also builds robots in a high-tech lab in the school with several other talented young engineers. When his brother dies in a horrible explosion at the lab, Hiro is thrown into a profound depression.

He re-discovers Baymax, a health care robot built by his brother, and he and Baymax discover clues that his brother wasn't killed in an accident, but was murdered instead. Baymax, Hiro and his brother's friends from the laboratory use their skills to create the tools they need to confront the villain.

This book closely follows the movie. It does add a few lines and take away a few lines here and there to make the book format work smoothly but it is very faithful to the movie. It perfectly captures the relationship between Baymax and Hiro and the narrator. MacLeod Andrews, absolutely nails the voice of Baymax, which I think was essential to the success of the audiobook.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

You can buy this audiobook on Amazon.com here: BIG HERO 6: THE JUNIOR NOVELIZATION.

A DISEASE in the PUBLIC MIND: A NEW UNDERSTANDING of WHY WE FOUGHT the CIVIL WAR (audiobook) by Thomas Fleming

Published in 2013 by Blackstone Audio.
Read by William Hughes
Duration: 11 hours, 42 minutes.
Unabridged

Thomas Fleming readily admits that he mostly writes about the era of the American Revolution (such as his excellent book Liberty! The American Revolution) but he felt compelled to make a long commentary on the origins of the Civil War by writing A Disease in the Public Mind.

Fleming's take on the causes of the war are based on a comment from James Buchanan's that the furor over slavery was a "disease in the public mind."

Fleming is quite confident that this disease was mostly caused by the North. Shelby Foote alludes to this, in a way, in the Ken Burns Civil War documentary when he notes that there was a war "because we failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise...our whole government's founded on it and it failed."

An exhibit at the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois.
Photo by DWD

Foote meant that both sides had to give in to make an agreement. Fleming clearly identifies the North as the side that refuses to compromise and causes the crisis. He compares the North to the Puritans that prosecuted the Salem Witch Trials and Joseph McCarthy. The difference between the Salem Witch Trials and the Abolitionist attacks on slavery is that witchcraft and magic are not real so there were no witches but slavery, slaves and slave masters were all very, very real. 

Fleming excuses the fact that slave families were broken apart on a regular basis through estate sales by pointing out that Washington did not do this sort of thing. He goes on to use Washington as an archetype of what could have been if the Abolitionists had not started pressing the South. If you had to be a slave, being George Washington's slave was about as good as you could hope for. Washington refused to break up families or dump older slaves who couldn't really work. He also freed his slaves when he died.  Fleming writes at length about how Washington was pressed by his own personal abolitionist - his Revolutionary War comrade the Marquis de Lafayette. Lafayette's efforts were worthy and good but, somehow, the efforts of American abolitionists were the equivalent of the Salem Witch Trial.

Fleming tries to defend slave owners against the charge of taking sexual advantage of their female slaves, saying it was very rare. But, as his narrative continues he points out any number of slaves and former slaves who were mixed race. If it was so rare, how did these people exist? He also completely ignores the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. This "look at this Founding Father as a great example, but not at that one because he doesn't make my argument" type of cherry-picking is pretty typical throughout the book. 

What Fleming does best is point out that there was a genuine paranoia among Southern Whites about the possibility of a race war like Haiti experienced when its African slaves overthrew the French government. When you look at the political cartoons of the era, like this one that decries the evils of the Emancipation Proclamation, you see evil influences upon Lincoln: multiple representations of the devil, a picture of a sainted John Brown and a large painting glorifying the violence in Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Clearly, this was a worry and not without some justification. There were slave revolts from time to time and this was the stated goal of John Brown's raid on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry.

But, Fleming uses this fear to justify every action the South made to defend slavery, such as refusing to let people petition the Congress concerning slavery - a right established in the First Amendment of the Constitution. The First Amendment! Not one of those pesky rights with the bigger numbers that get lost in the jumble. Plus, the governments of the South searched the mail for newspapers that they did not like and destroyed them. Clearly, another violation of the First Amendment. But, he excuses it because the White Southerners were scared of the power of the Abolitionist press on its slave population.

Fleming never really formulates a thesis beyond that the Abolitionists were pushing the Southerners too hard. Many historians try to argue that slavery was on the way out in the South and that slave owners were searching for a way to safely end slavery. Fleming does not even make this argument. He acknowledges that there was an attempt to expand slavery to the territories and to new states, but he denies it was organized. He completely ignores the fact that Southern politicians (and even John Quincy Adams, for a while) openly proposed conquering Cuba for the express reason of making it a slave state to keep the balance of free state/slave state power in the Congress. James Buchanan himself authored a proposal to take over Cuba before he became President and had it as a goal when he became President in 1857. There were also proposals to take parts of Mexico and Central America and make them slave states. William Walker invaded both Mexico and Nicaragua with that goal. The pre-Civil War pro-slavery group Knights of the Golden Circle advocated making more than 25 slave states out of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean islands.

There is more, but this is enough to demonstrate that this is a deeply flawed book, albeit an interesting one. Fleming's reminder of the deep-seated fear of a race war like the one in Haiti is an important one. Fleming's argument ends up leaving the American slave population in the untenable position of being involved in a never-ending, ever-expanding slave economy that was, as Fleming himself points out, evolving from a plantation-based system to a factory-based system in some areas and showed little sign of ending. But, if you protested this system from the outside you were in the wrong and most certainly caused the Civil War. These are the reasons that I rate this book 2 stars out of 5.

This audiobook was read by William Hughes. He did a great job of reading at a brisk, easy-to-understand pace. 

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: A Disease in the Public Mind.

MARVEL'S GUARDIANS of the GALAXY: THE JUNIOR NOVEL by Chris Wyatt

Published in 2014 by Disney.
Read by Chris Patton.
Duration: 1 hour, 39 minutes.
Unabridged (sort of).

Guardians of the Galaxy: The Junior Novel is the sanitized, unabridged version of the abridged book of the movie. That means that not all the movie is in this book, but the audiobook version that I listened to does have everything that the abridged book has in it.

We picked this up to listen to on a short family trip. We are all fans of the movie but we were interested in a version with no cursing and less sexual references when we were listening in the car. Some scenes are edited and lots of great dialogue has been added that was not in the movie. It makes me wonder if the author was working from an early script.

The reader, Chris Patton, does a good job of voicing each of the Guardians, especially Rocket and Drax.

But....despite all of these good things the book ends at just past the halfway point - the point where the Guardians just lost the Infinity Stone to Rona the Accuser. The story just ends at the low point of the movie and there is an epilogue that says something like this" "...and they go on to have lots of amazing adventures and save the day when they confront Ronan." It was longer than that but you get the idea.

So, I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5. What was there was good but it was not the complete story. It is my understanding that there is a longer audiobook version written by a different author. I have no idea if it has been rendered more "kid friendly" or not.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy.

NEVER GO BACK (Jack Reacher #18) by Lee Child

Published in 2013 by Random House Audio.
Read by Dick Hill.
Duration: 13 hours, 43 minutes.
Unabridged.

Admittedly, I bounce around as a I read the Jack Reacher (so far I have read #8, #11, #14 and #18) but I was very pleased to note that #14 and #18 are tied together so that I had sort of a seamless experience while still skipping around.

In #14 Jack Reacher meets, via telephone, Susan Turner. Susan Turner has Reacher's old job in the military police and they make a connection. In Never Go Back, Reacher decides to hitchhike across the country to meet her only to find out that she has been arrested and he is not allowed to see her. To top it off, he has been recalled into the army so they can file charges against him - a person he investigated for selling stolen military weaponry in Los Angeles more than 15 years before has passed away from injuries that he claims Reacher inflicted during an interrogation.

Of course, Reacher won't stand for this kind of silliness and he starts his own investigation. Of course, he needs help and Susan Turner is just sitting there in the lockup...

This was a great "buddy" book. Lots of action, a lot of fun comments and it was well read by Dick Hill who perfectly catches the sardonic commentary placed in the narrative by Lee Child. This was an enjoyable whirlwind of a book.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Never Go Back (Jack Reacher #18).

OFF the GRID (Joe Pickett #16) by C. J. Box

Published in 2016 by G.P. Putnam's Sons

This installment in the saga of Joe Pickett starts out with a bear encounter in the mountains and ends up in a violent confrontation in Wyoming's Red Desert.

Joe Pickett's special relationship with the Governor is coming to an end in Off the Grid because the Governor's term is coming to an end. But, that doesn't stop him from going on one last special mission to the Red Desert area of Wyoming.

Meanwhile, Nate Romanowski has been approached by men from a secret group of government agents who are worried about national security issues. They know all about Nate and his delicate legal situation and promise to clear all of that up if he goes on a special assignment for them in the Red Desert area of Wyoming.

Also, Joe's daughter Sheridan goes for a weekend camping trip to volunteer to help an unknown activist group in (you guessed it) the Red Desert area of Wyoming.

As you know, if you follow this series, when Nate and Joe and Joe's family get involved in some sort of nefarious activity, there's bound to be plenty of action and drama.

Despite the obvious forced coincidence of having all of these characters show up in the same corner of Wyoming at the same time, the action and spending more time with these characters makes up for it.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Off the Grid by C.J. Box.

GOOD TALK, DAD: THE BIRDS and the BEES and OTHER CONVERSATIONS WE FORGOT to HAVE by Bill Geist and Willie Geist

Published in 2014 by Grand Central Publishing.

Bill Geist has been a favorite of mine for years on CBS's Sunday morning show. His son, Willie is a relative unknown to me because I don't have cable or satellite television. They team up in this book to talk about the topics they, perhaps, should have spoken about while Willie was younger with a lot of humorous insights and commentary. 

They talk about "the birds and the bees" as the title suggests and they also discuss such topics as "what really happened at summer camp", how Willie lost a lawn mower while working on a mowing crew, Bill's love of Elvis, weird extended family, Bill's experiences in Vietnam, teenagers and alcohol and Bill's announcement that he has Parkinson's.

Full of cute stories, this book is fun if not particularly profound. 

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Good Talk, Dad: The Birds and the Bees and Other Conversations We Forgot to Have.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5.