HOW CIVIL WARS START: AND HOW TO STOP THEM (audiobook) by Barbara F. Walter

 

Published in January of 2022 by Random House Audio.
Read by Beth Hicks.
Duration: 7 hours, 17 minutes.
Unabridged.

The author of How Civil Wars Start has an extensive background in studying exactly why some countries collapse into Civil War and other countries don't, even when everyone thinks they will, like South Africa after Apartheid.

The first half of the book is a look at countries that slid into Civil War and specific characteristics that tend to make Civil War more likely. Her team has come up with a scale and they get concerned when societies move quickly on that scale. It doesn't matter if they move quickly away from democracy or towards it - generally speaking moving quickly means that groups in power lose power and they don't like it and they lash out. A classic example of this is Iraq. The Sunni had almost all of the power under the dictatorship Sadam Hussein, but once he was overthrown the Shia majority took power and decided that it was time to get even - democratization brought on a civil war because one group feared losing power and another group couldn't wait to abuse their newfound power.

The author explains how her team studies modern examples of civil wars and starts listing out the warning signs. A careful reader will start to compare those clues to the current political climate in The United States

and start to notice uncomfortable similarities. 

This is intentional.

This book is meant as a warning. The author lays out a scenario in which militias start a terror campaign against state governments across the country. By the way, the very existence of group-based militias is a sign of major trouble. The Proud Boys were clearly heavily involved in the January 6 riot (as I am writing this, several are on trial and at least one has made a plea deal) and a group called Patriot Front had 31 members arrested for planning attack on a LGBTQ event in a city park in Idaho.

We are standing on a precipice. Do we fall in, like the former Yugoslavia and Iraq did, or do we somehow decide to go back to working together like South Africa did?

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: HOW CIVIL WARS START: AND HOW TO STOP THEM by Barbar F. Walter.

SEA HORSE: THE SHYEST FISH in the SEA by Chris Butterworth

 

Published in 2009 by Candlewick.
Illustrated by John Lawrence

Sea Horse: The Shyest Fish in the Sea is an early reader picture book aimed at children aged 4-8. It tells the story of a male sea horse named Sea Horse. It describes his daily routine and introduces his mate. Along the way, they have babies. The entire book is read on this 8 minute long YouTube video.

Link to this Tweet on Twitter
Yes, they misspelled Santa Claus.
Perhaps they should read more...😉

I normally don't review books aimed at small children but this summer I have been reading a lot of books that have been included on various book ban lists. This one was on a list in Tennessee because of a group called Moms for Liberty. They thought that the sea horses in the book were too sexy. Also, they argued that this book was a sneaky argument in favor of transgenderism (see attached picture - yes, it's a real Tweet - see the link underneath it to go to the actual Tweet). 

Here are more links to stories about the books they wanted to ban: Link here and here.

How does the subject of transgenderism come into a story about sea horses? Turns out that sea horses have a fairly unique way of breeding. They female deposits her eggs into the male to be fertilized and the male carries them until they hatch and then they leave his body. So, it looks like the male is giving birth. 

As a teacher (30+ years of grades 6-12) and as a dad, I didn't see any problem with this book. My experience tell me that kids love 5 kinds of "fishes" at aquariums, in no particular order:

1) Sharks;
2) Clown Fish (because of Finding Nemo);
3) Tang Fish (because of Finding Nemo);
4) Sea horses;

5) Electric eels.

Sea Horses have a cool factor all their own and kids love to learn things like the fact that they mate for life and the male "gives birth". This is exactly the kind of things that kindergartners learn and tell everyone they meet for the next 3 days.

I encourage you to watch the video I linked above and see if you think that this book is too sexy and encourages children to change genders. I don't think so. Moms for Liberty does. It's not the first time that I disagree with Moms for Liberty. I am certain it won't be the last time, either. 

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: SEA HORSE: THE SHYEST FISH in the SEA by Chris Butterworth.

PRONTO (Raylan Givens #1)(audiobook) by Elmore Leonard

 

Originally published in 1993.
Published by HarperAudio in 2010.
Read by Alexander Adams.
Duration: 5 hours, 54 minutes.
Unabridged.

I am a big fan of the TV series Justified which features a character named Raylan Givens. I stumbled across this audiobook and was pleased to see that Elmore Leonard had done more than create a character for a TV show - he had written a whole series of books about that character.

Synopsis:

Pronto starts out in Miami and is mostly about Harry Arno, a man who runs an illegal bookkeeping operation (just to be clear, he takes illegal bets, he does do illegal accounting). Harry is ready to retire but is unclear how he will extract himself from the organized crime syndicate that "protects" his operation and likes their 50% take. Or...maybe it's less than that. Turns out Harry has been cooking the books for years and has been taking a cut out of the mob boss's cut for years, maybe even decades.

A U.S. Attorney has decided to take down the organized crime boss that Harry reports to. The U.S. Attorney assumes that Harry is basically honest with his organized crime boss and decides to pressure Harry by setting him up to look like he's skimming money from the organized crime boss's cut. The idea is to make the crime boss mad and Harry will run to the U.S. Attorney's office for protection in exchange for testifying in court.

U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens thinks that this is a raw deal so he gives Harry a warning. Harry pretends to go along and agrees to go into hiding if Raylan Givens is the one that takes him in. Raylan agrees and Harry ditches him in an airport and flies away to Italy. The U.S. Attorney decides it wasn't much of a loss, but Raylan can't stand the injury to his pride of having someone in his custody escape so he takes time off of work and goes to Italy to find Harry...

My review:

I was hoping for better. I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5, so it's not horrible - but I was hoping for better. 

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

Most of the book is about Harry Arno. The second theme of the book is the American expatriate poet Ezra Pound. Pound had lived in the town that Harry Arno fled to and there are plenty of quotes from his poems and discussions about him throughout the last third of the book. Pound was anti-Semitic and openly supported the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists during World War II. Clearly, Elmore Leonard was interested in Pound and decided to work him into the book.

Unfortunately, this felt more like filler rather than anything that added to the story in any sort of meaningful way and I think it hurt the book quite a bit. I doubt I will be moving on to the second book in the series.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Pronto (Raylan Givens #1) by Elmore Leonard.

THE LAST DAYS of the DINOSAURS: AN ASTEROID, EXTINCTION, and the BEGINNING of OUR WORLD (audiobook) by Riley Black

 

Published in April of 2022 by Macmillan Audio.

Read by Christina Delaine.
Duration: 7 hours, 1 minute.
Unabridged.

As the title says, THE LAST DAYS of the DINOSAURS: AN ASTEROID, EXTINCTION, and the BEGINNING of OUR WORLD is about the asteroid that all but wiped out the dinosaurs and the world they lived in.

Technically, very little of the book is about the asteroid itself but hopefully you get the idea.

Riley Black does an excellent job of describing the presumed daily lives of the creatures that we know about before and after the fateful asteroid impact. The author starts out with the most famous dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops, but also includes less famous dinosaurs, insects, plants and mammals. The primary focus is the American West (Wyoming, Utah, the Dakotas, etc.)  one the most fossil-rich area in the world. But, other areas of the world are looked at as well.

The step-by-step description of what scientists think happened in the seconds, minutes, hours, days and weeks after the asteroid's impact is compelling listening. The ways that some small dinosaurs and other creatures and plants survived in the long term is a testament to Jeff Goldblum's line from Jurassic Park: "Life finds a way." The author does a great job of demonstrating that this does not mean that really clever animals figure it out so much as it means that some animals and plants were simply built to survive the extreme heat and extreme cold that followed the impact. Life found a way because life was so diverse that a part of it lucked into survival.

One could think of of the asteroid strike as a nuclear war without the radiation. Nuclear weapons generate an immense amount of heat, but the aftermath would bring a nuclear winter caused by all of the debris that would be tossed into the atmosphere. The same happened here, but on a larger scale than if all of the nuclear weapons that humans have ever built were fired off at the same time. The impact was so large that there is literally an easily identifiable dark-colored line that shows where all of the debris settled afterwards. You can stand a football field away and see it running along exposed cliff faces in those fossil-rich zones I previously mentioned.

The author goes on to describe how those few survivors of the animal and plant world went on to diversify as the climate settled down.

I rate this audibook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE LAST DAYS of the DINOSAURS: AN ASTEROID, EXTINCTION, and the BEGINNING of OUR WORLD by Riley Black.

THE BLUEST EYE (audiobook) by Toni Morrison

The author won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Originally published in 1970.
This audiobook version was published in 2011 by Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group.
Read by the author, Toni Morrison.
Duration: 7 hours, 6 minutes
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

This is a story of a girl named Pecola who lives in Ohio in the 1940's. She is sexually abused by her father and only knows her mother by the name Mrs. Breedlove. Sometimes she lives with other families as her family struggles.

Pecola is universally considered an ugly child. Pecola wants nothing more than to have blue eyes like Shirley Temple because she is convinced that blue eyes would make her pretty.

The narrative goes round and round and moves back and forth in time, often re-telling certain aspects of the story from different perspectives that fill in the gaps as the reader proceeds. 

In the end, it is not a complicated story, but it is told in a complicated manner.

My review:

Undoubtedly, my take on this book is overshadowed by the audiobook that I listened to immediately before this one: The Handmaid's Tale (click to see that review). On the surface, they have nothing in common - one is dystopian sci-fi, one is set in 1940's Ohio. But, they both share a common theme - the overwhelming sense of despair of people living in a society that is misshapen by a set of rules. Jim Crow era life for African-Americans was its own dystopia.

In The Handmaid's Tale, the rules are enforced by religious elite (or, elite that twist religion to serve themselves). In The Bluest Eye, the rules are enforced by a mostly unseen white society (white characters, even the mention of white characters take up only a few minutes of this 7 hour audiobook). 

White culture sets the standard of beauty for black culture (as demonstrated by Shirley Temple and Pecola's envy), it sets the rules about where black people can live, where they go to school, how long they can go to school before they have to leave to work, what types of jobs they can have and more. It determines almost everything.

Morrison shows a variety of families in the novel. Pecola's family is barely a family at all. She has a sexually abusive father named Cholley. Cholley's first sexual intimate moment was interrupted by white hunters who stumble upon Cholley and a girl and humiliate them by making them continue the act under the threat of their guns while they taunt and critique them. Her mother shows more care for the white family that she works for and shows more care for their daughter than her own. 

Claudia and Freida's family struggles, but they are making it - barely. Geraldine and Junior are rich by African American standards, but Junior has to attend a certain school and has to be friends with certain people and Junior takes it out on other African-American kids. Even the rich are limited in this system.

Toni Morrison (1931-2019)

The Bluest Eye was the first novel by the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, Toni Morrison (1931-2019). I was spurred to read it because of a news story out of Idaho about 22 books being banned "forever" and this book was included.

Turns out that The Bluest Eye is one of the most banned books in the country. Here is a story out of Missouri and here is a link specifically for The Bluest Eye from a university that tracks banned books. It also made a list banned in the 2023-2024 school in Florida. Here is a link to that ridiculously long list.

This book is specifically complained about for sexual content. Ironically enough, the people who complain about the sexual content are usually the same folks that complain about Critical Race Theory (CRT). CRT teaches that everything is tinged with race in America and this book embraces that theme wholeheartedly, and I have to say that CRT is more right than it is wrong.

I am a 30+ year high school teacher so I thought I'd read this book and give my opinion on whether or not it belongs in school. I have been teaching grades 7-12 in some form or another for 32 years. I have a 16 year old daughter and a 22 year old daughter. I also have a very high threshold for outright banning a book. There are books I wouldn't want to personally teach in class, but that doesn't mean they don't belong in a school or a classroom library.

I am convinced that a talented high school teacher could teach this book (see this article). This book has some powerful themes.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

THE HANDMAID'S TALE (audiobook) by Margaret Atwood

 

Published in 1988 by Recorded Books.
Paper book originally published in 1985.
Read by Betty Harris.
Duration: 11 hours, 20 minutes.
Unabridged.
Note: A newer audiobook version read by Clair Danes was published in 2012.

I am very late to The Handmaid's Tale - more than 35 years after the original publication date. 

The plot is fairly well known so I am not going to go into extreme details. The story is set in a dystopian future America after a violent coup took out the Congress and the Executive Branch. Pollution and constant warfare have lowered the birth rate to an alarmingly low rate and the upper classes have instituted a religion-based system of surrogate motherhood. The upper classes were inspired by the Biblical story of Jacob and Rachel from the book of Genesis and how Rachel resolved the fact that she was unable to have children by having her handmaid sleep with Jacob and Rachel would keep any children as her own. The red robes and the white headpiece are the outfit that the handmaids wear and this book is a sort of diary of one of these handmaids as she tells of her desire to break out of this system.

What finally motivated me to read the book was the fact that it kept on coming up on school censorship lists that MAGA groups like Moms for Liberty keep putting out (here is a link, including a Google doc with detailed reasons why). The graphic novel version shows up on the 850 books that a GOP Texas legislator wants to ban from schools. This notice from Idaho that finally prompted me to stop reading about this book and actually download this audiobook.

Before I give you my take on all of the book banning, let me give you a little bit of information about me. I have been teaching grades 7-12 in some form or another for 32 years. I have a 16 year old daughter and a 22 year old daughter. I also have a very high threshold for outright banning a book. There are books I wouldn't want to teach in class, but that doesn't mean they don't belong in a school or a classroom library.

Here is my take on this book and all of the banning. Generally, it is because of the sex in the book, but also a perceived insult to Christianity. I don't worry about perceived insults to any religion. Not because I am an atheist - I am far from it. I attend church every week and have volunteered regularly with a number of programs. I know that God is above anyone's ability to hurt or insult. Besides, the religion they are criticizing isn't any sort of Christianity that I recognize.

While there is sex in this book, it is never "sexy" and I think that this book would have no intrinsic interest to most high school students except that everyone wants to ban it. Why not? Take the Mad Max movies which are also set in a dystopian future ruined by war and pollution - they are almost all over the top action, almost no discussion. Kids like those movies because there are explosions and yelling and car crashes. The Handmaid's Tale simply has no action. 

That is not to say that it is a bad book. To the contrary, it is a 5 star book in my mind. But, there is no action that would appeal to young readers. It is the description on one woman's situation in this dystopian world. It is all about setting an oppressive, depressing, hopeless mood and it succeeds on all levels. But, it has none of the action or friendships that teen-friendly series like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson have.

The tone of the book reminded me of how I imagined the Soviet Union must have felt during the Cold War - an all-consuming gray oppressiveness consuming everything. It is brilliant and depressing.

For me, the brilliance of the book comes from me seeing that literally everyone in this system is a victim. The handmaids are forced to breed with upper class men. The upper class wives are forced to go along with it and be personally involved at every step. It sounds like the upper class men get nothing but positives out of this deal - after all, they get to sleep with two women, right? This arrangement all but destroys their marriages and sexual relations with the handmaids is...uncomfortable, to say the least. There are no normal relationships exist anywhere. If you can't procreate, the system sends you off to clear toxic waste or makes you a virtual slave. So many children are born deformed to the pollution...

No one is a winner, it's just that some are bigger losers than others.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

Note: As I was finishing this review, I came upon a new story about this book on NPR. It was about how this book is almost always on the banned books list and the author was offering a literally fireproof copy of the book in an auction to raise funds to fight book banning. This is a book that will never be burned.

GRIGORI RASPUTIN: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Published in 2017 by Hourly History.

I am an avid reader of history, but I have areas of weakness that I am perfectly willing to shore up a bit, but I don't want to invest a ton of time. I want to know a bit more, not become an expert. The Russian Revolution one of those areas for me. I know a lot more than most people, but I can clearly see the that there is a lot that I don't know.

Rasputin is, of course, an iconic, almost mythical personality of the Russian Revolution. This series specializes in short biographies and histories that will take the average reader about an hour to read. There are plenty of people and historic events that I would like to know a little more about, but not necessarily commit to reading a 500 page biography or history. 

Rasputin is one of those people for me - interesting but not really worth that much of an investment of my time.

I've read a few biographies from Hourly History and, without a doubt, this was the best of the lot so far. Rasputin was an immensely interesting personality and this short biography did a very solid job of balancing the early part of his life with his more famous later years. 

I rate this short e-book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: GRIGORI RASPUTIN: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END by Hourly History.