DEMOCRACY in ONE BOOK or LESS: HOW IT WORKS, WHY IT DOESN'T, and WHY FIXING IT IS EASIER THAN YOU THINK (audiobook) by David Litt

Published by HarperAudio in June of 2020.
Read by the author, David Litt.
Duration: 11 hours, 51 minutes.
Unabridged.

David Litt is a former speech writer for President Obama. You need to know that before you read Democracy in One Book or Less, David Litt is unapologetically liberal. If that is a deal breaker for you, don't even bother to pick this book up.

Personally, I am not a liberal, but I do enjoy political discussion and hearing different people's points of view. Litt offers plenty of both.

The book starts off with a weird stunt involving Mitch McConnell's former fraternity house. This almost made me abandon the book, but the book got better pretty quickly.

The primary point of the first half of the book is that state and local governments work very hard to make sure that voting is not particularly easy, especially when compared to other countries. For example, Texas has especially tough voter registration laws that make it hard to organize registration drives. On top of that, it is a crime for a non-Texan to touch a Texas voter registration form.

Florida has a lot of laws that make you a felon, criminalizing behaviors that might not even be worthy of mention in other states. Felons are not allowed to vote (even those that are done serving their time) and more than 10% of the state of Florida's population is not allowed to vote, 23% of the African American population. Just to compare - some states allow felons to vote - even those that are currently serving time in prison!

Gerrymandering is also an issue - personally, it is my biggest area of concern because I have seen some very oddly shaped Congressional districts designed to create safe seats for sitting representatives.

Litt moves on to a weaker section of the book, in my mind. He spends a great deal of time going after the Senate. He is bothered that each state gets two Senators and spends a lot of time detailing how this could be changed. This was interesting, but pointless. There is absolutely no push for this. He also discusses changing the Electoral College - that is a discussion that might possibly go somewhere.

The last third of the book talks about the inner workings of the Congress - both

Mitch McConnell

the House and the Senate - and how those inner workings often favor doing nothing, which can increase the political clout of the GOP. They also affect the choices made for federal judiciary positions, including the Supreme Court. Mitch McConnell (the Senator from Kentucky who heads the Senate) does not come out looking well in this section.

Bottom line: Informative political discussion with a pronounced slant.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: DEMOCRACY in ONE BOOK or LESS: HOW IT WORKS, WHY IT DOESN'T, and WHY FIXING IT IS EASIER THAN YOU THINK by David Litt.

FAIR WARNING (Jack McEvoy #3) (audiobook) by Michael Connelly

Published in May of 2020 by Little, Brown and Company.
Read by Peter Giles and Zach Villa.
Duration: 10 hours, 20 minutes.
Unabridged.

This is the third book in a very slowly unfolding series featuring journalist Jack McEvoy - 25 years in the making so far.

Jack McEvoy started out the series as a reporter in Colorado who discovered a serial killer and stopped him. 15 years later, he is a reporter who is being let go as part of a series of layoffs from the LA Times and he discovers a serial killer and stops him. Now, 10 years later, he is working for a news website called Fair Warning and he once again discovers a serial killer. Interestingly, Fair Warning was an actual real-life news site when this book was written. A controversy in 2021 caused it to disband

The story starts out with McEvoy being questioned because he happened to have gone on one date nearly a year ago with a recent murder victim. They found his name on the contact list on her phone and the lead detective recognized his name from a story about a corrupt cop a few years back and decided to question him.

McEvoy starts to look into the unusual way she died and finds a number of similar deaths across the country and suspects that there is another serial killer involved...

I am not as fond of the McEvoy books as I am of Connelly's Harry Bosch series. I find McEvoy to be a less sympathetic character - to the point of being unlikable. Plus, going back to the serial killer well for a third time was just too much for me.

The audiobook features a 20 minute interview with the real editor of the Fair Warning news site (he is also a character in the book) by Michael Connelly. It was worth listening to.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: FAIR WARNING (Jack McEvoy #3) by Michael Connelly.

FOR LIBERTY and GLORY: WASHINGTON, LAFAYETTE, and THEIR REVOLUTIONS by James R. Gaines

Published in 2007 by W.W. Norton and Company.

First a bit of traditional blogging. I was going through some old receipts because I had plenty of time on my hands thanks to the Coronavirus lockdowns. This pile of receipts was 12 years old. It included some golden oldies like a Blockbuster receipt. I also found a receipt for this book. I had gotten a great deal on For Liberty and Glory - and it sat in my To-Be-Read pile for 12 years.

I had no idea it was in that pile for that long. If you had asked me before I found the receipt, I would guess it had been 4 or 5 years at most. At that moment, this book moved to the top of my To-Be-Read pile. I should have read it long before now - it was an excellent read.

Originally, I picked up this book because I simply didn't know much about Lafayette. I've read plenty of biographies of Washington and histories of the American Revolution. Lafayette always comes into the story somewhere in the middle. There's always a build up, with the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre, Paul Revere and Patrick Henry and so on and then this kid from France comes over. He and Washington bond, Lafayette makes a good showing and he helps bring the French military in to help fight the English. And, at some point Lafayette goes away and doesn't come back until 1824.

I knew Lafayette was involved with the French Revolution, but my interest in the French Revolution is not strong (to me, it's a story that starts out well and then, all of a sudden, mobs are carrying heads and body parts around screaming for more blood and ends with a dictator that attacks every country in Europe, parts of Africa and even Haiti). So, I simply lost track of him. I asked someone who was a French Revolution buff what happened to Lafayette and the short answer was: "It didn't go well for him" with no elaboration.

So, this book looked like it would answer that question. It is a double biography of Washington and Lafayette as well as a double history of the American Revolution and the French Revolution. It is certainly not the definitive biography of either man or the definitive history of either revolution. But, it is immensely readable. I enjoyed it.

Turns out that I learned a lot about Lafayette. For example, his first name is Gilbert. Yeah, that seems trivial, but I've never heard him referred to as anything but Lafayette or the Marquis de Lafayette (almost like "Marquis" was his first name).

Lafayette was in love with the concept of the American Revolution from the

moment he heard of it. This teenager was so excited by the prospect of assisting in the war that he came here against the orders of the King's advisors - they had ordered all of the potential volunteers to stay in France. But, Lafayette and a few others crossed the border to Spain. Lafayette bought his own ship, sailed to South Carolina and eventually became an American hero - a Founding Father of sorts with more than 400 towns named after him. In my own state (Indiana) we have two cities and one county named after him.

Lafayette returned to France and was caught up in the French Revolution. The phrase "caught up" makes it sound like he was passive. Hardly. He co-wrote the most famous document of the French Revolution - the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. He created the modern French flag by combining the flag of Paris with the flag of the King of France. He helped save Louis XVI's life at one point and ended up languishing in a foreign prison for five years because of his role in the Revolution. He was offered the chance to be dictator at one point, and like his friend and hero George Washington, he turned it down. Bonaparte would not turn it down when he was offered that chance. But, Lafayette had a hand in Bonaparte's political demise in 1815 (after Waterloo). The luster of his name helped to carry the day.

Speaking of Bonaparte, Lafayette knew him personally. He knew so many big names in his life - George Washington, Victor Hugo, Marie Antoinette, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Victor Hugo, Louis XVI, Andrew Jackson, Alexis de Tocqueville, James Monroe, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and more.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. A must read if you are a student of the American Revolution and the early years of America's independence. Gaines has made this very approachable and writes in a lively manner.

It can be found on Amazon.com here: FOR LIBERTY and GLORY: WASHINGTON, LAFAYETTE, and THEIR REVOLUTIONS by James R. Gaines.

GOD IS NOT ONE: THE EIGHT RIVAL RELIGIONS THAT RUN the WORLD - and WHY THEIR DIFFERENCES MATTER (audiobook) by Stephen Prothero

Published in 2010 by HarperAudio.
Read by Paul Boehmer.
Duration: 14 hours, 37 minutes.
Unabridged.

Stephen Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University. The purpose of God Is Not One is to inform the reader of the eight greatest world religions, their philosophies and their way of looking at the world.

Prothero is very aware that choosing just eight religions is fraught with problems. How do you choose? Is it based on influence? Number of adherents? Importance of the countries it is in? He went through all of those questions again once again when he chose the order he would present the religions he picked.

The religions he profiled are: Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Judaism, Yoruba religion, and Daoism. He spends about 90 minutes discussing each religion and includes nearly an hour on Atheism at the end, on the theory that militant Atheism (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens) behaves much like a religion, complete with evangelistic movements and a coherent worldview.

Prothero takes great pains to point out that these religions do not approach the world in the same way. He is pretty irritated at the "all religions are basically the same - they answer the same questions in different ways" view of religion. He thinks it is intellectually lazy. For example, Christianity teaches that the main problem with the world is sin. Daoism doesn't even have that concept - they think the main problem is society polluting people and making them unhappy by making them take on roles that go against their nature. Confucianism thinks the biggest problem is people not knowing their place in society - embrace the role given you and you will be happy. Yoruba religion is all about power, including spiritual power and leveraging it to your advantage. Atheism think religion itself is the problem - but they are usually most vocal against the three monotheistic religions (Islam, Judaism and Christianity). They might be okay with Daoist and Confucian philosophy and some Buddhist sects. Of course, all of those summaries are super-simplistic.

Prothero is not making this point in order to say that the religions of the world can't get along. Rather, he is making this point in order to say that if we are going to get along, we actually have to know what the other religions are saying and where they are coming from.

Prothero's explanations include Western cultural references to movies and books. If you are a well-read person these can be quite helpful.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: GOD IS NOT ONE: THE EIGHT RIVAL RELIGIONS THAT RUN the WORLD - and WHY THEIR DIFFERENCES MATTER by Stephen Prothero.

"I LOVE PAUL REVERE, WHETHER HE RODE or NOT" by Richard Shenkman

Originally published by HarperPerennial in 1991.

Richard Shenkman has written several books that show that many of the commonly-held beliefs about history are not quite true and some are absolutely false. The title comes from a quote from President Warren G. Harding when he was asked about a popular newspaper article that asserted that Paul Revere did not actually make his famous ride. Ironically, Paul Revere only gets two mentions: once on page 10 and the other on page 192. The mention on page 192 is simply the complete quote from Harding that inspired the title of the book. So, if you were thinking this was going to be a book about Paul Revere, you will be disappointed. 

Instead, Shenkman's I Love Paul Revere, Whether He Rode or Not is a reminder that there are always multiple views on history. Anybody that tells you that a certain group all believed a certain thing or they all did something for one reason is simplifying things and losing some of the nuance of how it really happened. 

The Boston Tea Party

Shenkman explores several different areas in 12 chapters including patriotism, religion, business, alcohol/drugs, and women. Typically, he brings up a "fact" that people commonly believe, such as the Puritans living in a theocracy, and then demonstrates that they the common belief is, at best, an exaggeration (government often told the ministers to mind their own business and ministers told the government to do the same -even early on. He cites an example from 1639 - just 19 years after Plymouth colony was founded).

But, sometimes he takes things too far in order to make a point. For example, on page 66-67 he discusses the common belief that the Civil War laid the foundation for a post-war explosion of growth. He looks at railroad expansion and notes that "Before the war, railroad track increased at a rate of about 200 percent a decade. In the decade afterward, the rate barely reached 75 percent." Comparing rate of growth to actual growth is a game people play with statistics but does not deal in absolute growth.

His discussion of the Boston Tea Party is similar in that it is completely factual, but does not include all of the facts in order to make a point about the men who led it. It's a valid point, but it is certainly not the only point.

This is an extremely readable book that makes the valuable point, as I've already noted, that history is seldom as simple as we tell one another. It's not always as simple as Shenkman makes it out to be, either. I do recommend this book, however. It teaches that the reader needs to do his or her own research and provides plenty of places to get started.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: "I LOVE PAUL REVERE, WHETHER HE RODE or NOT" by Richard Shenkman.

SEMICOLON: THE PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE of a MISUNDERSTOOD MARK by Cecilia Watson

Published by HarperAudio in July of 2019.
Read by Pam Ward.
Duration: 3 hours, 47 minutes.
Unabridged.

Cecelia Watson is a historian whose research has made her an expert on the semicolon. Why the semicolon? She describes herself as a reformed member of the grammar police and really enjoys looking at how authors use punctuation in their writing.

I did learn some interesting (albeit trivial) facts about the origins of the semicolon and I as a world language teacher and I did appreciate Watson's de-emphasis of grammar in favor of meaning. But, sometimes this short book sometimes felt like it was slowing to a crawl as the focus went on to how various grammar books explained semicolons (and other points of grammar) over the years.

The author, Cecilia Watson

Personally, I avoid semicolons. My theory is that in most cases it would be better to make two smaller sentences than having one longer unwieldy sentence held together by a semicolon, although Watson does point out a brilliant sentence from Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail.

If you are a fan of grammar, this may well be your book. I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark by Cecilia Watson. 

FRONT ROW at the TRUMP SHOW (audiobook) by Jonathan Karl

Published by Penguin Audio on March 31, 2020.
Read by the author, Jonathan Karl.
Duration: 10 hours, 16 minutes.
Unabridged.

Jonathan Karl has had a long relationship with Donald Trump. Karl is a reporter

Jonathan Karl and Donald Trump in 1994 and nowadays.

(The New Republic, The New York Post, CNN and ABC) and he first met Donald Trump in 1994. Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley had just gotten married and were staying in Trump Tower for their honeymoon. Karl convinced Trump to do an interview about why celebrities would want to stay in his building. Trump personally led Karl on a tour of the building.

Over the years, Karl interviewed Trump multiple times for multiple reasons. Because of this relationship, Karl was called on to interview Trump when he toyed with the idea of running for president before 2016 (5 times).

Karl moved on to be the White House correspondent for the Obama administration for ABC and stayed when Donald Trump was elected.

This book will not change a single mind about President Trump, for or against him so I am not going to even delve into his stories. I thought Karl made a series of fair points.  He was also critical of other administrations and their dealings with the press. But, he didn't go into detail on those because it is a book about the "Trump Show".

The book is very listenable. Karl reads his own audiobook and does a great job, which is to be expected considering what he does for a living.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: FRONT ROW at the TRUMP SHOW by Jonathan Karl.