THE HIDDEN LIFE of TREES: WHAT THEY FEEL, HOW THEY COMMUNICATE - DISCOVERIES from a SECRET WORLD by Peter Wohlleben

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Limited in 2016.

Read by Mike Grady.
Duration: 7 hours, 33 minutes.

Unabridged.

Peter Wohlleben is a forester in Germany, meaning that he manages a commercial forest in Germany. Even though he manages a commercial forest, he is a real fan of true "old growth" forests. Over the years he has gone out of his way to really study the way forests work as a complete unit. 

In The Hidden Life of Trees, his observations and research combine to tell an active, but very slow story of trees. Compared to people, many trees live a much slower life (centuries vs. decades), but a forest of trees is more than just an accidental accumulation of trees whose seeds all landed in the same place. 

In many ways, a healthy forest is a lot like a giant organism - it shores up its weak parts, it sustains itself, it is extraordinarily complicated and if one part is out of whack, the whole thing can suffer. Wohlleben explores these themes in some detail with a lot of surprising details.

But, a forest is also a place of deadly competition. Different species of trees struggle to block each other's sunlight, fungus tries to grow in and on trees, some animals kill or eat young trees and some animals can actually fatally damage larger trees (it can take decades, but when a tree lives centuries . Eventually, though, Wohlleben  brings it all around to demonstrate that all of this deadly competition is actually part of a healthy forest.

It is kind of tough for me to rate this audiobook. The reader was great and so much of the information was interesting - but it was often delivered in a repetitive, slow-paced manner. Many times the book was both boring and interesting - at the same time!

But, the quality and the wealth of the information makes me rate it 4 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here:  THE HIDDEN LIFE of TREES: WHAT THEY FEEL, HOW THEY COMMUNICATE - DISCOVERIES from a SECRET WORLD by Peter Wohlleben.

FINDING GOBI: A LITTLE DOG with a VERY BIG HEART by Dion Leonard

 

Published by Thomas Nelson in 2017.
Read by Simon Bubb.
Duration: 6 hours, 36 minutes.

Unabridged.

Dion Leonard is an ultramarathon runner. Ultramarathons are technically marathons that are longer than a traditional 26.2 mile marathon, but Dion Leonard likes to run extended multi-day ultramarathons.

He was running a multi-day race in the Gobi Desert in China when he met a scruffy little dog as he was lining up to start day two of the race. To be accurate, the little dog was attracted to him - it wouldn't leave him alone!

Gobi with Dion Leonard

When the race started, Leonard assumed that the dog would follow for a while and then return home, wherever that was. But, the dog followed him every step of the way - 23 miles. That night, the dog stayed with Leonard in his tent and went with him again on the 3rd stage of the race. As they headed into the desert, Leonard worried that the dog could be hurt by the higher temperature more brutal landscape. So, he arranged for the dog to be carried on to the end of the next stage and eventually to the end of the race.

Turns out that he was right, the next stage was dangerous and the desert nearly killed Leonard and many other runners. 

By this time, Leonard had named the dog (Gobi) and had decided to bring the dog back to his home in the UK. 

And that's where things got complicated...

This is a pretty good story, but a little slow-paced. Really, the story has three focuses: 

a) The life of Dion Leonard and how he ended up running that race in the desert.

b) Ultramarathoning, especially the race where Leonard met Gobi.

c) The extraordinarily complicated story of how Gobi left China. 

Sometimes, the book seems like it is trying to stretch things out to actually fill a book. When you get down to it, it is the story of a guy who finds a dog when he's out on a run and brings it home. Personally, I found the story of the race and how Leonard first met Gobi the best part of the book.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: FINDING GOBI: A LITTLE DOG with a VERY BIG HEART by Dion Leonard.

DOWN ALONG with THAT DEVIL'S BONES: A RECKONING with MONUMENTS, MEMORY, and the LEGACY of WHITE SUPREMACY (audiobook) by Connor Towne O'Neill

 

Published in 2020 by Workman Publishing.

Read by Geoffrey Cantor.

Duration: 7 hours, 25 minutes.

Unabridged.

Connor Towne O'Neill was attending the 50th anniversary recognition of the Selma to Montgomery March when he discovered something unexpected. The Selma to Montgomery march ended when Alabama State Troopers joined local deputies at the Edmund Pettus bridge and beat them until they retreated. The bridge is named for a Confederate General and a Grand Dragon of the Alabama KKK.

O'Neill was looking for a place to park and drove into a graveyard. In the graveyard, he discovered a group prepping a part of the graveyard for the re-installation of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest (the original had been stolen) in the graveyard. It was on a piece of property owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the middle of the graveyard.

O'Neill sensed that this was the more powerful story, no matter how dramatic that moment on the bridge had been 50 years earlier. He decided to investigate the power that the memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest has over so many Confederate apologists. 

He begins with an interesting mini-biography of Forrest. He began with almost nothing and made himself quite wealthy trading slaves, including slaves straight from Africa (Constitutionally prohibited since 1808). At the beginning of the war, he joined as a private and is the only person on either side to go from private to general. He outfitted a squad of cavalry and became on of the most daring and active Confederate generals of the war. He led from the front and the omnipresent threat of his sudden appearance was a constant source of worry in the Western Theater of the Civil War.

After the war, Forrest was approached to lead a group designed to resist the new rights granted to the ex-slaves with a wave of terrorism - the Ku Klux Klan (also known as America's first terrorist organization). He formally led the group for a while and then may have become a leader in the background after it was formally disbanded (maybe he was still their leader, maybe he wasn't. Maybe they disbanded, maybe they didn't - it is surprisingly unclear).

O'Neill's search for the story of the hold that Forrest has on so many takes him from Selma to Memphis to Nashville to Montgomery and sees how people use Forrest as a symbol to oppose racial integration. 

Close up of the face of the Forrest statue
in Nashville. It was not the intent of the artist,
but Forrest looks plenty crazy

For me, the most interesting section was the discussion of the Forrest statue near I-65 in Nashville. I always keep an eye for it whenever I drive through Nashville (not often). It is so cartoonish that many people have joked that they want this statue to stay up even if all other Confederate statues come down. It is on private property, however, so it will stay there as long as its current owner wants to keep it.

Often, this was a difficult book. But, I think it is an important one, especially if you are interested in the Confederate monument controversies. 

Highly Recommended.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found at Amazon.com here: DOWN ALONG with THAT DEVIL'S BONES: A RECKONING with MONUMENTS, MEMORY, and the LEGACY of WHITE SUPREMACY by Connor Towne O'Neill.

Note: the Forrest statue along Interstate 65 in Nashville was removed by the new owners after the death of the original owner. Here is a news story describing the situation: Click here.

WHEN HITLER TOOK COCAINE and LENIN LOST HIS BRAIN: HISTORY'S UNKNOWN CHAPTERS (audiobook) by Giles Milton

 

Published in 2016 by Macmillan Audio.

Read by the author, Giles Milton.
Duration: 4 hours, 53 minutes.

Unabridged.

Giles Milton is a prolific British writer of histories and historical fiction. This is a collection of odd stories of history that he has run across doing his research.

Lenin, preserved in his tomb. 
He has gone from being an 
object of reverence to a
tourist attraction.

There are the two stories mentioned in the title - Hitler using stimulants and Lenin's odd burial, but there are a lot more from several different time periods.

The problem is that there were a lot of similar stories and some weren't really from "unknown" chapters. Lots of Nazi-related stories and three separate stories of cannibalism (a plane crash, a sailing ship caught in the duldrums and a prison escape in an isolated area). That's a lot of Nazis and cannibals for a 5 hour audiobook.

I found this stories to be neither great nor bad and often repetitive. I rate it 3 stars out of 5. 

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: WHEN HITLER TOOK COCAINE and LENIN LOST HIS BRAIN: HISTORY'S UNKNOWN CHAPTERS.

THE LANGOLIERS (audiobook) by Stephen King

 

Originally Published in 1990 as part of the book Four Past Midnight.

Audiobook published in 2016 by Simon and Schuster.

Read by Willem Dafoe.

Duration: 8 hours, 46 minutes.

Unabridged.

More than 30 years ago Stephen King released a collection of four large novellas (each was certainly large enough to be a stand-alone book) called Four Past Midnight. I snapped it up and read it right away because I was an avid fan of King's work at that time and read everything of his as soon as it arrived in my local library. I remembered this story as one that I did not enjoy but I also remembered that they had made a mini-series based on this story so maybe I just missed something. After all, who puts money into making a mini-series based on junky source material?

Simon and Schuster decided to start breaking up King's short story and novella collections into separate, smaller stories a few years back. When I found this audiobook for The Langoliers, I decided to listen to it this summer to see if I had been wrong all that time ago. After all, tastes change and maybe I was wrong way back when.

Short synopsis: a packed plane flying from Los Angeles to Boston flies through some sort of turbulence over Utah. The handful of passengers who were asleep awake to find that the almost everyone on the plane has disappeared. On top of that, they can't contact anyone on the radio and the lights of the towns and cities below are not twinkling. They discuss what could have happened and toss out all sorts of scenarios - Was there a nuclear war? Did the plane land while they were sleeping and did everyone else disembark? Are they part of a psychological  experiment? Did terrorists strike? Are they hallucinating?

They continue on to Boston and what they find is nothing like they had imagined...

Willem Dafoe, the reader

I was heartened by the fact that award-winning actor Willem Dafoe read this audiobook. I recognized his voice immediately and the first few minutes are all told from the point of view of the main character (the pilot). When other characters began to come into the story I thought this was a multicast performance (multiple actors reading the parts of different characters) because Dafoe did a great job of creating distinct individual voices for literally every character. 

But, Dafoe's talents simply could not save this story. It is tedious and has a very unsatisfying ending. It reminded me of a Twilight Zone story - but not the ones that everyone thinks are great. Instead, it is like one of the disappointing Twilight Zone stories that makes you wonder why you spent the last hour watching this show.

I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Langoliers by Stephen King. 

SEA of RUST: A NOVEL (audiobook) by C. Robert Cargill

 

Published in 2017 by HarperAudio.
Read by Eva Kaminsky.
Duration: 10 hours, 26 minutes.
Unabridged.

Brittle is a caretaker robot in a future United States. 

Sort of.

In Sea of Rust, the United States is dead and gone due to a war between humanity and its robot servants 30 years earlier. Robots were everywhere. They were maids, gardeners, factory workers, delivery drivers, lovers, nurses, nannies, cooks, wait staff and more. On top of that, Artificial Intelligence (AI) super computers were built to do the math and research that human beings struggled to grasp. 

Humans struggled to deal with the concept of robots as thinking beings. The AI super computers were clearly smarter than any individual human and the robots clearly possessed an intelligence of their own, even if it wasn't exactly like human intelligence. 

The author, C. Robert Cargill

As humanity seemingly made a breakthrough in its acceptance of robots as possible equals, a shocking act of political violence by a group of humans shocks the world. Robots don't know what to do, but when every robot on Earth receives a secret download that erases the lines of code that prohibit them from harming humans the war is on.

Brittle wanders what used to be Ohio, Indiana and Michigan - an area called the Sea of Rust. The robots have changed the world's environment in their zeal to kill humans. This zone is a vast desert where robots go off to die or to search for replacement parts to scavenge in the hope of staving off a catastrophic parts failure.

It's not that replacement parts aren't being made. They are. But, the cost is high. The AI super computers are absorbing the consciousness of as many robots as they can so they can fight each other. It is supposedly voluntary, but Brittle doesn't believe it so she stays independent. She hunts down dying robots for their parts and keeps a stash of her own parts handy. 

It was working out - until another robot needed her parts...

This book goes with another audiobook that I recently reviewed, Day Zero: A Novel. Sea of Rust came first so Day Zero is technically a prequel. I read them in chronological order in the story, not in the order that they were written and released. 

I loved Day Zero - one of the best sci-fi books I have read in years. This book should probably be judged as just as good as Day Zero, maybe even better because it built the world that Day Zero inhabits. The heroism of Day Zero appealed to my personality more than the grittiness of Sea of Rust. 

Taken together, though, they are quite the accomplishment. I recommend reading them in chronological order, not order of publishing. There are spoilers in Sea of Rust that could hurt your enjoyment of Day Zero.

I highly recommend the series and rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  SEA of RUST: A NOVEL by C. Robert Cargill.

DOCTOR APHRA (STAR WARS) (audiobook) by Sarah Kuhn

 

Published in 2020 by Random House Audio.

Performed by multiple voice actors.

Duration: 4 hours, 35 minutes.

Unabridged.

Set in the time between Star Wars: A New Hope (Episode IV) and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Episode V), Doctor Aphra is the story of a rogue archaeologist who specializes in weapons of the past. It is based on a comic series. She doesn't collect them to stick them in a museum, she collects them to use them. She thinks an ancient weapon unused is a travesty, like an ancient symphony left unplayed. So, she specializes in tracking down weapons that were locked away and hidden so no one could get their hands on them. Her other skill is modifying ships and droids to make them effective weapons.

While Dr. Aphra is looking for the operating system of a murderous protocol droid (he hates "organics" and loves to torture), she is captured by Darth Vader. Vader doesn't care about the droid software, but he does want to use Dr. Aphra's skills to track down a few things, including the location of the young pilot from Tatooine that destroyed the Death Star...

I found the general plot outline of the book to be intriguing. The problem is that the author seems determined to make Doctor Aphra the funniest character in the Star Wars universe. Her dialogue is a non-stop stream of sarcastic comments and odd observations. Her murderous protocol droid has a relentless string of comments that amount to "I want to torture!" He is also a dead ringer for C-3PO. Doctor Aphra also has an R2 unit that is basically a tiny tank because it is full of weapons. I can imagine that this was an effective sight gag in the comics ("Look at the evil C3P0 and R2 blowing things up!") - for a while. It got old for this listener.

The audiobook was filled with sound effects from the movies, bits of the John Williams' soundtracks and performed by multiple actors, each playing a different character. That was well done, but I only give the story 3 stars out of 5. 

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: DOCTOR APHRA (STAR WARS) (audiobook) by Sarah Kuhn.