LOOKING for ALASKA (audiobook) by John Green

 

Originally published in 2005.
Audible audiobook edition published in 2019.
Read by Wil Wheaton
Duration: 6 hours, 40 minutes.
Unabridged.

Set in a boarding school in rural Alabama, this book features a diverse group of friends who are trying to figure out the big things in life - where to get cigarettes, where to get booze, where to get fireworks, the meaning of life, where to find a girl or a boy, how to hide your violations from the adults at the school and what is going to be the next big prank.

Miles Halter is the new kid at school and he is desperately in love (like a lot of young men) with the lively and enigmatic Alaska Young. Alaska is as unique as her name. She is a fervent defender of women's rights, she smokes and drinks whenever possible, she is an A student and yet she insists on carving her own way.

The book follows this group as they go through Miles' first year at the school, all the while counting down to something as indicated by the chapter titles...

Wil Wheaton did a good job reading this novel (as always.) 

I rate this novel 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: LOOKING for ALASKA  by John Green.

The author, John Green

***Blogger commentary:

This is a multiple award-winning book and it is also listed on several school book ban lists, including the infamous 850 book list from a legislator in Texas. It was also the most banned book in 2015. I am a fan of John Green, but a relatively new one, having only read three of his books before this one. At first I thought it was because of all of the drinking, smoking and general sense of irreverence towards authority that is exhibited throughout the book.

But, there is a hilariously uncomfortable sex scene that this veteran teacher would hate to teach in a classroom. As an adult, I found it laugh out loud funny, but I would hate to discuss it with 30 kids in a classroom. John Green makes an interesting comment in this article about how this sex scene fits in thematically and the point it does make. He's right, but I'd still hate to discuss a sex scene with a bunch of high school students.

That being said, if it were up to me, the book would be welcome in a classroom library or a school library. 

SHADOWS HAVE OFFENDED (Star Trek: TNG) (audiobook) by Cassandra Rose Clarke

 

Published in 2021 by Simon and Schuster Audio.
Read by Robert Petkoff.
Duration: 8 hours, 45 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

This story of Shadows Have Offended is set in season 7 of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The command team of the Enterprise is split. Data, Riker and the doctor are helping scout out a planet for a group of refugees. They are planning to resettle there, but there has been a glitch in the last round of data. 

The Enterprise is in orbit around Betazed. The ship delivered several ambassadors to the planet to participate in a planet-wide ceremony. Counselor Troi and Captain Picard are participating as well. 

But, things go awry on Betazed when three iconic relics are stolen and taken off world in the middle of the ceremony.

Meanwhile, the away team scouting the new planet is having its own issues...

My Review:

I liked the idea of a story where the command team is split into two parts when there are multiple crises and having them work in areas that they were not necessarily comfortable. But, both of these stories were slow-moving and the Betazed story line just never didn't have enough going for it to make it a stand-alone story for me.

There is another problem as well. The Enterprise is part of a space-based navy and rank means something in navies. Lieutenant Commander Data kept on being referred to as Lieutenant Data. Titles mean something and a Lt. Commander is a lot different than a Lieutenant. 

At one point in his story, Lt. Worf takes command of the Enterprise. No big deal in and of itself because Worf could use some command experience and there is no better time than while the ship is orbiting a friendly planet doing nothing but waiting for a boring ceremony to end.

But, it is a big deal when it involves taking command during the equivalent of an international incident. Both Geordi La Forge and Counselor Troi have previous command experience. They also outrank Worf and should have been in charge since Picard was stuck planetside at the request of Ambassador Troi. If you are a La Forge fan, sorry, I don't even think he makes an appearance in the book. It would have made some sense to put a Betaz

oid in charge considering the politics of the incident.

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:

SHADOWS HAVE OFFENDED (Star Trek: TNG) (audiobook) by Cassandra Rose Clarke.

MARY BAKER EDDY: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (Biographies of Christians series)(kindle) by Hourly History

 

Published in 2019 by Hourly History

Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) is the founder of the controversial Christian sect knows as Christian Science or The Church of Christ, Scientist in the late 1800s. I picked this short biography because I know something of the teachings of Christian Science, I knew next to nothing about its founder.

Mary Baker Eddy grew up in small town New Hampshire and was often sickly as a child and young adult. It is unclear whether her illnesses were due to physical or nervous problems. As was typical for the time, life was hard and there were many tragic deaths in the early part of her life, including an older brother who served as a mentor, her husband while she was pregnant, a fiance and her mother. Her family took over raising her son and did not let her see him for years. Her son's caretakers moved away and let him believe that Mary Baker Eddy was dead. They did not speak to one another again until he was 34 years old.

None of this, of course, make Mary Baker Eddy a national religious figure, although it would be reasonable to suppose that these experiences had an impact on her religious views. 

From 1862 to 1866, Mary Baker Eddy became involved with a mesmerist named Phineas Quimby. Quimby claimed to be able to heal people with his powers and Mary Baker Eddy believed him. She believed that Quimby had stumbled upon an important principle, even though he was not religious. She continued his work after he passed away in 1866.

Mary Baker Eddy in the 1850s

The beauty and the weakness of this series is the brevity of each book. They are designed to be read in about an hour, which means I can explore a whole new area or person with little time commitment. But, I always end up with questions. In this book, I was left wondering how this woman turned a fairly small religious movement into an established church with its own publishing house and tens of thousands of members at a time when women did not even have the right to vote. This book is skewed too much to the early years and covers the last 40+ years of her life with a mere 3 pages of text. Too bad. A bit of judicious editing would have ensured some balance in the telling of the story of her life.

Because of that imbalance, I give this short biography a grade of 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: MARY BAKER EDDY: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END. 

CAR TALK SCIENCE: MIT WANTS ITS DIPLOMAS BACK by Tom Magliozzi and Ray Magliozzi

 

Published in 2016 by HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books.
Hosted by Tom and Ray Magliozzi
Duration: 1 hour, 1 minute.
Unabridged

For years a staple on the weekend schedule of every NPR station was "Car Talk", a call-in show featuring brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi. These guys were experts in practical car maintenance and repair, they could talk all day long and they clearly enjoyed each other's company. The show was entertaining and informative. The last new show was broadcast in 2012.

Neither of these brothers was a professional mechanic, but they operated a "bring your own parts and fix it yourself" car shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts and picked up a thing or two along the way. They also both have degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), also located in Cambridge. 

They used to receive calls that covered all sorts of car-related topics. Most were straight up car questions, but some were different. In this case, these are more science-related. Some are kind of duds, like the rather long conversation about Boy Scout pinewood derby cars. I did enjoy the conversation about creating an aerodynamic spoiler for mattresses being hauled on top of cars. For me the best conversation was a debate about whether it is better to take the shorter route over a big hill in the family car to go visit a nearby relative or if it is better to take a longer route around the hill and stay on flat land.

This was a so-so collection since I can only remember two segments that I liked. The rest were just so-so or best left in the studio archives.

I rate this collection 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:

CAR TALK SCIENCE: MIT WANTS ITS DIPLOMAS BACK by Tom Magliozzi and Ray Magliozzi.

THE BROKEN CONSTITUTION: LINCOLN, SLAVERY, and the REFOUNDING of AMERICA (audiobook) by Noah Feldman

 

Published in 2021 by Macmillan Audio.
Read by the author, Noah Feldman.
Duration: 11 hours, 14 minutes.
Unabridged.

In The Broken Constitution Feldman argues that the Constitution as it was known to Congressman Abraham Lincoln (he served in the Congress from 1847-1849) was already a broken Constitution and maybe had been broken since it had been ratified in 1788. What caused this break? No real surprise - slavery.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

Feldman details the compromises that had been in place to induce the Southern states to join a stronger Federal union and how those compromises were re-hashed in the decades that followed in acts like the Missouri Compromise (1820), the Nullification Crisis (1832-33) and the Compromise of 1850. The Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court in 1857 only heightened tensions between the slave states and the rest of the union. Feldman's point is that if the Constitution were not already broken, these crises wouldn't have been so dramatic and wouldn't have actually have been crises.

When the Confederate states start seceding after Lincoln's 1860 Presidential election, it was really a continuation of the ongoing series of crises. Feldman details all of those crises and also tells how Lincoln's rising political career was affected by them. 

Feldman then details how Lincoln often broke the rules of the Constitution in the name of restoring U.S. Constitutional government to the Confederate states. Lincoln's political evolution during the war paved the way for the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. The 14th Amendment (1868) in particular changed the relationship between the Federal government and the citizens of the United States and made the Federal government the ultimate guarantor of Civil Rights.

This is not a book for readers who are not already very aware of the issues that created all of the crises I mentioned above and eventually caused the Civil War. Feldman spends almost no time talking about the fighting in the war. He assumes the reader knows all about them and can follow along without anything more than a reminder.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It was an interesting take.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here:  THE BROKEN CONSTITUTION: LINCOLN, SLAVERY, and the REFOUNDING of AMERICA by Noah Feldman.

WOLF PACK (Joe Pickett #19)(audiobook) by C.J. Box

 

Published in 2019 by Recorded Books.

Read by David Chandler.
Duration: 9 hours, 51 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett is back on the job and glad to be doing the mundane work of a game warden once again.

The game warden in the district next to his reaches out and tells him about a fancy drone she has spotted. The drone is being used to drive winter-weakened deer and elk into groups and then panic them into stampedes, killing and maiming several of them. Of course, this is a violation of Wyoming law.

But, when they go to track down the owner, they find that they are stymied everywhere they look. Once they find the owner, it turns out that they wish they hadn't found what they are looking for...

Review:

This is a pretty engrossing thriller with lots of action.

But...

Huge chunks of this book is told from the perspective of characters that are guests in this series. I don't know exactly what percentage, but it felt like Joe Pickett was mostly a guest in book number 19 in the Joe Pickett series. There was not a lot of game wardens doing game warden things because the series has largely moved away from that and, in my opinion, that is simply a shame.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Joe and his family and his friend Nate very much and I was happy to go along for another ride with them in this book. However, this was a good book, but not a great one because it moves away from Joe Pickett and becomes a thriller that could've have been adapted into any police series without a lot of thought. 

I rate this 4 stars out of 5 because it is a good thriller, but I am disappointed.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: WOLF PACK (Joe Pickett #19) by C.J. Box.

THE MYTH of the LOST CAUSE: WHY the SOUTH FOUGHT the CIVIL WAR and WHY the NORTH WON by Edward Bonekemper III

 

Published in 2105 by Regnery History.

Edward Bonekemper (1942-2017) was a lawyer by day and historian in his spare time. He worked for the federal government in a couple of regulatory departments. Imagine an attorney coming into a conference room and telling you that you have regulatory issues and then proceeding to lay down one document after another after another that proves it until you have a pile of papers covering your table.

Bonekemper brings that tenacity to his history books as well. He often comes with a point to prove and he brings tons of proof.

In this case, he goes after "The Lost Cause". What is The Lost Cause? It was (and still is) an apologist movement for the Confederacy that says that slavery was not a primary cause of the war and, besides that, slavery was not that bad. Robert E. Lee was the best general of the war (maybe American history) and his personal honor was unimpeachable and his only fault was that the trusted men like his subordinate General James Longstreet who betrayed him at the Battle of Gettysburg. Grant was a butcher who simply used brute force, superior numbers and more supplies to complete the task of overwhelming the brave defenders of the Confederacy who were clearly the more superior soldiers. Throw into this mix the myth that literally thousands of African Americans joined the Confederate army, formed units and actively participated in combat in great numbers. 

Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885)
and Robert E. Lee (1807-1870)

Bonekemper is devastatingly thorough in his arguments. He argues quite convincingly that Grant was the most brilliant general of the war. To be fair to Grant's reputation, it should be remembered that there were only 4 complete armies that surrendered during the war and Grant took 3 of them. Bonekemper decides to make his argument about the skill of Grant by re-telling the details of his Vicksburg campaign. Typically, Lee's performance at Chancellorsville is often highlighted as the best performance by a general in a battle, but Grant's 6 month plus long Vicksburg campaign is simply an amazing example of initiative, diversrion and speed. This campaign led to the surrender of an entire army, opened the Mississippi as a save way to ship goods into and out of the Midwestern United States, severed of Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas from the Confederacy, destroyed the capitol of Mississippi and defeated of a second Confederate army. All of this while mostly avoiding direct assaults and being outnumbered by the total number of Confederate troops in the field. 

Bonekemper is very critical of Robert E. Lee's skills as a commander - both strategically and tactically. He makes good points especially on a strategic level (big picture, the entire country view), but I think he is a bit tough on Lee, especially on his performance during the Seven Days Battles in 1862 when Lee took over the Army of Northern Virginia in the middle of a campaign because its original commander was severely wounded (he was sidelined for more than 5 months).

Interestingly, this book is published by Regnery History, a publisher that mostly features Lost Cause Civil War history. 

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. Highly recommended.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: THE MYTH of the LOST CAUSE: WHY the SOUTH FOUGHT the CIVIL WAR and WHY the NORTH WON by Edward Bonekemper III.