DOOKU: JEDI LOST (audiobook) by Cavan Scott

 

Published in 2019 by Random House Audio.

Performed by multiple readers.
Duration: 6 hours, 21 minutes.
Unabridged.

Part of the new Disney "canon" books, Dooku: Jedi Lost is a look at the origins of one of the characters of the Star Wars prequels - Count Dooku. It is part of a series of "stand alone" books. For me, Dooku just shows up in the movies with a minimum of explanation - not nearly enough.  We learn a lot more about him in the Star Wars: Clone Wars cartoon show but not enough for me. Dooku is interesting as the original model for Anakin Skywalker - the talented Jedi who often argues with the Jedi Council and eventually falls to the Dark Side.

This book tells little about Dooku's activities during the Clone Wars. Even though it is set in the first half of the Clone Wars cartoon series, that is mostly a frame that is used to lead the reader through a series of flashbacks that tell about Dooku's early life. The use of all of the flashbacks was annoying in my mind, though. I think it would have been better to have just told the story of young Dooku without all of the flashbacks.

The audiobook was performed like an old fashioned radio play with different actors playing each of the characters. That part was well done, but I was irritated that a book called "Jedi Lost" really didn't give much detail about how Dooku became a lost Jedi. 

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  DOOKU: JEDI LOST by Cavan Scott.

NOTHING to LOSE (Jack Reacher #12) (audiobook) by Lee Child

 

Published by Random House Audio in 2008.

Read by Dick Hill.
Duration: 14 hours, 25 minutes.
Unabridged.

I think that I have worked my way through all of the Jack Reacher novels and short stories over the last 5 years. Nothing to Lose is the last one (I think). I read them all out of order, but fans know that that is okay since they were never written in order in the first place.

Sadly, this was one of the weakest of the entire very large collection. 

Reacher is travelling from Maine to San Diego just to see the country. He notes that Colorado has two towns with interesting names very close to one another: Hope and Despair.

The author, Lee Child.

Hope is a pleasant enough place with a hardware store and a hotel and diner. Reacher decides to hike to nearby despair and is immediately arrested for being a vagrant. Technically, he is a vagrant. He has no job, no fixed address and no plans to acquire either. 

Despair locks him up (after a bit of a fight) and runs him through a kangaroo court, finds him guilty and expels him from the town limits, which is about halfway to the town of Hope. Reacher meets up with the police chief of Hope, discusses the weird behavior of Hope's town government. And...he heads back for more.

He also finds a lot more than ever imagined he would...

This book felt disconnected from reality a lot more than the average Jack Reacher book. I don't mean that as an insult to the series, but let's face it - a giant ex-soldier beating the crap out of groups of big men in the middle of the street in every book is just nor normal behavior. 

Anyway, the whole book seemed sort of half-baked all the way through and Reacher's choice on how to end things seemed completely out of character considering the long-term implications (decades, maybe even centuries) of his choice. 

Dick Hill read the audiobook and he is my all-time favorite audiobook reader. He "gets" Jack Reacher.

Despite Dick Hill's reading, I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: NOTHING to LOSE by Lee Child.

FORGET the ALAMO: THE RISE and FALL of an AMERICAN MYTH (audiobook) by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford

 

Published in June of 2021 by Penguin Audio.

Read by Fred Sanders.
Duration: 12 hours, 15 minutes.
Unabridged.

Forget the Alamo is the second book that I have read because a governor took steps to keep people from hearing about the book. The story of the first is detailed here. 

In the case of this book, the Governor and especially the Lt. Governor of Texas had an event featuring a discussion of this book removed from the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, Texas. They acted in early July of 2021 because they were not happy about how it questioned the way the history of the Alamo (in San Antonio, Texas) is traditionally taught at the Alamo itself and in textbooks, classrooms, movies and books. Here is the text of the Lt. Governor's Tweet from July 2, 2021: "As a member of the Preservation Board, I told staff to cancel this event as soon as I found out about it. Like efforts to move the Cenotaph, which I also stopped, this fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place @BullockMuseum"

The Cenotaph the Lt. Governor refers to is an empty tomb for the defenders of the Alamo since their bodies were never recovered (they were burned by the Mexican Army). There was a plan to move the Cenotaph to be more integrated with the rest of the Alamo site while rehabbing it and updating the list of Alamo defenders. This topic is also discussed in the book.

Speaking of the book, I must thank these two gentlemen because without them I never would have listened to this very entertaining and very informative audiobook. 

Roughly the first half of the book is about the settlement of Texas by Spain, Mexico and American who moved in and agreed to become Mexican citizens. They talk about how slavery became a major point of contention after the Mexican War of Independence (1810-1821) because Mexico had every intent to outlaw slavery.

The authors detail how Stephen Austin went to Mexico City for more than a year to lobby for Texas to have special rights. The authors emphasize how he receeived special concessions for Texas and its slaves. This was critical because so many Americans moved into Texas after this point with slaves. The American states neighboring Texas were being filled up with cotton plantations that had to be worked by slaves to be profitable (at least that was the common belief) and Texas showed great promise as a cotton-growing state.

Mexico formally abolished slavery in 1831. 

When the Mexican dictator Santa Anna led an army to Texas to stop the Texas Revolution (1835-1836), he announced that he would stop Texas' attempt to secede and he would also free its slaves.  

The authors linger on the slavery point for a while and I think they give solid historical reasons for doing so. They do not make the point that I will make now - Texas seceded from 2 different countries in 26 years in an attempt to protect slavery (1835 and 1861). 

Their description of the battle itself is very good. By the way, the church that makes up most of the focus of the current Alamo site was not a part of the battle. 

The authors switch gears for the rest of the book and focus on the place of the Alamo in national memory and how it has been honored and taught over the years. Their look at how movies and books have told the story of the Alamo was very interesting.

They are particularly critical of the fact that, over time, the contributions of non-white people to the Texas Revolution and the defense of the Alamo have been dropped out of the story and the whole thing has become a story of only white people fighting back against an army of non-whites. There were "Tejanos" or native Mexicans that fought against Santa Anna for a variety of reasons, but it is rarely taught this way. They quote several book and, even more importantly, textbooks and official state curriculum guides. 

The politics of managing the Alamo as a historical site gets a lot of attention in the book as well. There have been a lot of arguments about how to do that and that continues up to this day (see the Tweet quoted above). 

The book ends with a look at the Alamo-related collection of Phil Collins. Yes, Phil Collins the English singer. Collins has an impressive collection of legitimate items from the Alamo and the Texas Revolution. He has an even more impressive collection of items that have been doctored or copies of items that he believes are the real thing. Collins wants to donate all of it to a museum dedicated to his collection - if Texas politicians can get their act together.

Ironically, the controversy caused by the Governor and the Lt. Governor would have fit in perfectly with the theme of this book and I hope that they offer an updated edition in the future with their book included. 

Once again, I seriously want to thank the Governor and the Lt. Governor for leting me know about this book. It was excellent.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  FORGET the ALAMO: THE RISE and FALL of an AMERICAN MYTH by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford.

A LOT of PEOPLE ARE SAYING: THE NEW CONSPIRACISM and the ASSAULT on DEMOCRACY (audiobook) by Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead

 

Published in April of 2019 by Princeton University Press.

Read by Katherine Fenton.

Duration: 6 hours, 49 minutes.

Unabridged

The key to this book is to understand the difference between a conspiracy theory and the new conspiracism. 

Conspiracy theories are the classic hobby of odd people that we all know. They collect reams and reams of information to prove that the lunar landings were faked, that LBJ had JFK killed, or to prove that 9/11 was an inside job. They work very hard to prove their point. They collect video evidence, find paper trails, produce flow charts and maybe have a wall dedicated to showing how all of the data points connect. There is a logic to conspiracy theories, even if most people find them weird.

 The new conspiracism is often incoherent because it demands no logic - it depends on being repeated over and over again and a strong assertion that "people are saying" it is true. There are no documents that back it up. There are no elaborate theories. Just a "harmless" little observation that "people are saying" followed up with more assertions that "people are saying." 

At best, there may be comments along the lines of "Do the research!" When you do you get into an echo chamber of a YouTube video that refers to an article that refers to a podcast that refers back to the original YouTube video - that's the digital version of "People are saying."

The classic example of this is the Pizzagate situation in which people said that the Democratic National Committee was running a child molestation ring out of the basement of a pizza place. A man showed up with a rifle to free the children from the basement - the problem is there is no basement and there were no children.

The authors supply multiple examples, all from President Trump, Trump allies or Trump supporters. Their "People are saying..." accusations can be pointed at anyone or anything.  The purpose of these actions seem to just to conjure up a few very short term political points. That is common enough, but these behaviors do little but sow the seeds of doubt in our political processes. The authors think that this may actually be the point with some groups or politicians.  

While I agree with every example the authors provided, I think the authors have a blind spot towards the Democrats. 

I am what is commonly called a Never-Trump Republican. I concede that a great deal of the Trump-led-what's-left-of-the-GOP is totally into these sorts of conspiracies. But, the Democrats have had their share of that in the past and they should be noted as well. I notice them because I am a metaphorical refugee from my own party.The fringe of both parties is completely willing to wreck the entire system for a temporary bump in the polls and to activate their super-active fringe voters.

The real problem of this book, though, is that it was published in 2019 and it missed all of the craziness of the 2020 election and its aftermath including the multiple failed lawsuits and the January 6th Insurrection and the predictions from the MyPillow guy that Trump will be reinstated at various times in 2021. I have heard that they are going to offer an update. The only problem is can you offer an update in the middle of an ongoing event?

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5, mostly because it identified and gave a name to a disturbing trend in our national politics. It can be found on Amazon.com here: A LOT of PEOPLE ARE SAYING: THE NEW CONSPIRACISM and the ASSAULT on DEMOCRACY by Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead.

CIVIL WAR BLUNDERS by Clint Johnson

 

Published by John F. Blair in 1997.

There are several books like Civil War Blunders on the market. History books are full of interesting, odd stories that add a little spice to the narrative and there is a certain logic to having a book of just the spice. 

This book is organized in a loose chronolgical order, rather than by theme. Sometimes the stories blend into each other, sometimes not.

There was nothing particularly good or bad about this collection. Some of the stories are more amusing than outright blunders and there is a bit of anti-Union and anti-Lincoln bias that can be detected, especially at the beginning. But, not enough to derail the book.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Civil War Blunders by Clint Johnson.

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.