NEVER CAUGHT: THE WASHINGTONS' RELENTLESS PURSUIT of THEIR RUNAWAY SLAVE, ONA JUDGE (audiobook) by Erica Armstrong Dunbar

Published in 2017 by Simon and Schuster Audio.
Read by Robin Miles.
Duration: 6 hours, 45 minutes.
Unabridged.

Never Caught is the story of Ona Judge. Ona (Oney) Judge was Martha Washington's personal body servant - the person that brushed her hair, sewed her clothing and generally made sure she was taken care of as she went through her day.

The Washingtons were living in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of government for the fledgling United States while Washington, D.C. was being designed and laid out. The problem with Philadelphia (for the Washingtons) is that it was in the middle of a change. Pennsylvania had been a slave state, but it was becoming a free state. In fact, Pennsylvania was taking the first steps towards becoming an abolitionist stronghold. Technically, the Washingtons could keep their slaves, but after six continuous months of residence in Philadelphia they were technically allowed to start the process to become free people.

George Washington and his lawyers worked out a rotation schedule so that none of his slaves would reside in Pennsylvania for no more than six months at a time. But, Ona Judge had learned a lot about freedom in Philadelphia because there were so many free African Americans that she would have interacted with. And, she became aware of the nascent beginnings of an Underground Railroad.

The notice put out just after the escape of Ona Judge. Note that
George Washington kept his name out of the notice for
political reasons. He was well aware of the irony of  the
man who led the fight for America's freedom hunting down
a slave who escaped for her personal freedom.

When Ona learned that she would be given away to Martha Washington's granddaughter as a wedding present, she decided it was time to escape. And, the President of the United States decided that he had to bring her back...

This is a true story, but for most people it is an unknown one.  I know that I just learned about Ona Judge a little more than a year ago. It is ironic to have the first President of the United States searching for a person that just wants to have her freedom.

The book's primary fault is one that would be hard to overcome, no matter the author. There is just not a lot of source material on Ona Judge. To fill in the blanks, the author paints a picture of what her life (and the lives of all so-called "house slaves" of the time) must have been like, including detailed descriptions of the type of work she must have done as a slave and as a free woman. But, too many sentences start with phrases like "probably", "must have", "could have" as the author discusses possible thoughts, feelings and reactions to the events of her life. It is a powerful book, but it is not always authoritative.

Still, I gladly recommend this book. I rate it 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: NEVER CAUGHT: THE WASHINGTONS' RELENTLESS PURSUIT of THEIR RUNAWAY SLAVE, ONA JUDGE.

THE SHORT DROP (Gibson Vaughn #1) (audiobook) by Matthew FitzSimmons

Published by Brilliance Audio in 2015.
Read by James Patrick Cronin.
Duration: 11 hours, 54 minutes.
Unabridged.

Gibson Vaughn is an unemployed computer whiz. This former Marine was a world-class hacker before he went into the Marine Corps. It would be more accurate to say that he was forced into the Marine Corps because he hacked into a Senator's computer and found documents showing that he was stealing his own campaign funds. But, it turns out that he wasn't and Vaughn was giving the choice of prison or the Marines.

The problem is, now that Vaughn is back in the civilian world the former Senator (now Vice President and leading candidate for President) has blacklisted him.

Vaughn gets a job offer that he can't turn down - a chance to use his computer skills to act on a new clue to find a girl who was abducted 10 years ago. But, there is a complication - this girl is the daughter of the Senator that he hacked...

The Short Drop has a complicated plot, but it flows well and the reader (listener in my case) has no problem following it along in all of its intricacies. It has lots of action and lots of twists and turns and I just blew right through it. James Patrick Cronin did a great job of reading this audiobook.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Short Drop by Matthew FitzSimmons. 

WHITE FRAGILITY: WHY IT'S SO HARD for WHITE PEOPLE to TALK ABOUT RACISM (audiobook) by Robin DiAngelo

Published in 2018 by Beacon Press.
Read by Amy Landon.
Duration: 6 hours, 21 minutes.
Unabridged.

Robin DiAngelo is a diversity trainer. She also happens to be white. She has noticed that it is very common for white participants to react very negatively during these training sessions, often acting very defensively and offering a lot of excuses. In this book, she looks at those excuses and lays out the refutations of those excuses.

The good:

White Fragility offers a very useful definition of racism. Hint: it is not just people acting horribly to other groups of people, it is a whole cultural system that we absorb.

It also offers some practical advice about how to deal with your own prejudices.

The bad:

White Fragility is a repetitive book. It could have easily been edited down by one-third without a loss of any new material.

Another weakness is that it doesn't really offer a list of common racist behaviors that people complain about. For example, I have heard African-Americans complain about white people just reaching out and touching their hair, even petting it. I am sure it is out of harmless curiosity, but it's simply creepy behavior.

*****

In the end, this is a solid place to start discussion.

I listened to this book as an audiobook. It was well-read by Amy Landon. I have no real complaints about her, but I actually recommend that you read it as a paper book so you can highlight areas important or more relevant to you and skip over some of the more repetitive areas.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: WHITE FRAGILITY: WHY IT'S SO HARD for WHITE PEOPLE to TALK ABOUT RACISM.

MURDER at GETTYSBURG (Miranda Lewis #2) by Leslie Wheeler

Published in 2007 by Worldwide Library (Worldwide Mystery).
Originally Published in 2005.

Historian Miranda Lewis has been invited to a Gettysburg re-enactment on the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3) by her old college roommate, Ginny. She accepts for two reasons - she wants to see her old friend and she has a serious crush on her friend's father, a retired judge and amateur historian who will also be there. She has been nursing this crush since she was 19 years old and he took her on a tour of the battlefield and taught her all about the battle.

Things get complicated, though, when Ginny's estranged husband Wiley shows up. He is a hardcore Civil War Confederate reenactor, the sort of man who starves himself to the point of being ill just to look more authentic. The sort of man who decorates his personal vehicle (called the "Battlemobile") with little plastic Civil War army men. Wiley has been gone on the reenactor circuit for a while, traveling from place to place and never checking back in with his family.

Even worse, Ginny's old college boyfriend comes to the reenactment looking for her. And, Wiley's friend Dred Davis is lingering around, with his menacing attitude.

But, when Wiley gets shot during the reenactment of Pickett's Charge and then dies of a heart attack things are just starting to get complicated...

Worldwide Mystery  is a big publishing house you have probably never heard of. They are in imprint of Harlequin (yes, the folks that sell the romance novels). When I used to work at a used book store we used to get a lot of these books in because they come in the mail - 2 per month. I have read more than my share of these books - some were really horrible, some were pretty good. But, they sure crank them out.

So, this mystery was not very good. It wasn't horrible, but it suffered from an amazing amount of characters. Every 20 pages or so, a new character was introduced with another subplot. So many subplots and so many characters that it was hard to keep track of them all. You have the historian with the daddy issue crush on a patronizing man at least 20 years older than her that she has maintained for all of these years without ever seeing the man in between, (*****Spoiler alerts for the rest of this paragraph*****) a gun-running operation, a guilt-ridden woman, 2 plots to recover lost love, a plot to foil lost love, multiple weird reenactors, nice guy that fixes cars (and his wife and his sun-bathing niece), a creepy guy that the protagonist sort of likes who likes to flash his EMT patch like he is a cop, a creepy cop and a cop that somehow doesn't arrest the confessed murderer because he wants to comfort the widow of the man he killed (yes, that is right) and somehow lets him take enough pills to kill himself instead. Explain that one back at the station.

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: MURDER at GETTYSBURG (Miranda Lewis #2)
by Leslie Wheeler.

MILTON HERSHEY: MORE than CHOCOLATE: HEROES of HISTORY (audiobook) by Janet Benge and Geoff Benge

Published in 2015 by YWAM Publishing.
Read by Tim Gregory.
Duration: 4 hours, 55 minutes.
Unabridged.


YWAM Publishing offers a series of biographies of Christian "heroes of history" aimed at home school students. The fact that this was part of series about "Christian" heroes was a surprise to me since this book didn't mention Hershey's faith at all. Nevertheless, this is an interesting and enjoyable biography of one of America's most successful businessmen, Milton Hershey (1857-1945).

Milton Hershey: More than Chocolate is a book showcasing the value of persistence. Starting with a failed attempt by his father in the oilfields of Pennsylvania in the late 1850's, the first half of this book is a series of business failures from Milton Hershey and his father, Henry.

Henry Hershey was more of a dreamer sort of entrepreneur - prone to rash decisions, excited by new technology and not very good on doing the follow up work to make sure that the venture succeeds. They traveled from Pennsylvania to Colorado to Louisiana, chasing the next big thing. Turns out that the next big thing was something that Milton Hershey learned from a baker in Colorado about how to make caramel that tastes better and stays fresh longer - milk.

So, Milton Hershey headed home to Pennsylvania and sets up his kitchen and everything just falls into place - except that it doesn't, at least not right away...

The stories of Hershey's struggles are by far more interesting than the story of his success. That being said, Hershey's commitment to charity once he became a success is extraordinary and worthy of note.

I did have one quibble. When it comes to the Hershey strike in 1937, the book doesn't really tell why some of the employees wanted to organize. Now, compared to most other places in the United States during the Great Depression, the workers in Hershey, Pennsylvania had it pretty well. Still, they had lost 1/3 of their hours per week and the worker learders that tried to organize a union were laid off in what looked like retaliation.

The story is well told and well-read by the narrator, Tim Gregory. We listened to this book as a family on a vacation and found it interesting and were eager to start listening again as soon as we hit the highway.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: MILTON HERSHEY: MORE than CHOCOLATE: HEROES of HISTORY.

UNTHINKABLE: AN EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEY THROUGH the WORLD'S STRANGEST BRAINS (audiobook) by Helen Thomson

Published in 2018 by HarperAudio.
Read by the author, Helen Thomson.
Duration: 7 hours, 19 minutes.
Unabridged.

Helen Thomson is a science writer with a background in neurology. She was inspired by the story of the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine to set out to meet and interview ten people who literally experience the world differently than the rest of us.

In Unthinkable, Thomson does a solid job of explaining possible scientific explanations for each of these people's conditions and how those conditions may simply be extreme versions of a phenomenon that we all experience.

As in all collections (in this case, a collection of people), some are more interesting than others. For example, I found the story of the man who believed he was dead to be interesting but the story of the man who believed that he was a were-tiger was pretty lame all of the way around.

The author and narrator

She also looks at a person who doesn't forget anything, a woman who gets lost everywhere, including in her own home and a man who had a radical personality shift after a head injury. The collection, on the whole, is worth exploring.

The audiobook was read by the author. She is a solid reader, but I would have chosen a professional reader instead.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: UNTHINKABLE: AN EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEY THROUGH the WORLD'S STRANGEST BRAINS.

THERE I GREW UP: REMEMBERING ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S INDIANA YOUTH by William E. Bartelt

Published in 2008 by Indiana Historical Society Press.

Most know that Abraham Lincoln came from Springfield, Illinois. But, a lot of people are not aware that at age 7, Lincoln and his family moved to Indiana from Kentucky. Lincoln and his family stayed in Indiana until just after his 21st birthday.

In a four paragraph autobiographical sketch written in 1859, Lincoln devoted a little more than a paragraph to these years in Indiana, including this nice little sentence: "There I grew up."

All of the stories of Lincoln's childhood (reading by firelight, the legend of the rail splitter, his aversion to shedding blood of any sort, his kindness to animals and more) took place in Indiana. Hoosiers are happy to claim him.

The author, William E. Bartelt, worked for fifteen summers at the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial as a ranger and historian and was the vice chair of the Indiana Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. There I Grew Up: Remembering Abraham Lincoln's Indiana Youth is the product of a lot of research and familiarity with the source material.

The first part of this biography goes through the autobiographical sketch mentioned in the second paragraph line-by-line and elaborates on them. It is by far the most interesting part of the book.

Most of the rest of the book is going through the notes of

Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial -
replica of his boyhood farm.
Photo by DWD.

William Herndon (1818-1891), Lincoln's law partner when he was elected President. Very soon after Lincoln's assassination, Herndon decided to write a biography of his friend and set off to Indiana to find people that he grew up with.

Herndon's interview notes are published in this book. They are not particularly interesting reading. Here is a typical sample from page 128: "The Country is a heavy timbered one - farms are cleared and cut out of the forests. The woods - the timber is hickory - white oak, called buck-eye and and buck lands. The old farm now belongs to Jas Gentry - Son of Jas Gentry for whom, the old man the brother of Allen - Lincoln went to N. Orleans in 1828 or 29. John Heaven or Heavener now lives as tenant on the land: it an orchard on it, part of Which Abm Lincoln planted with his own hands..." 

I got to the point where I skimmed Herndon's notes and read Bartelt's summary that followed. So many of Herndon's interviews recycled the same information. I assume that he was asking the same questions of each person he interviewed and got a lot of the same answers over and over again.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. Solid work, but dry. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THERE I GREW UP: REMEMBERING ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S INDIANA YOUTH by William E. Bartelt.