THE DRIFTER (Peter Ash #1)(audiobook) by Nick Petrie

 

Published in 2016 by Penguin Audio.
Read by Stephen Mendel.
Duration: 9 hours, 10 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

Peter Ash is a veteran that has seen multiple tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan serving as a Lieutenant in the Marines. He is struggling with what he has seen and what he has done and is having a hard time integrating himself into the civilian world. It doesn't help that he has claustrophobia so intense that he has a hard time even walking into a building.

Peter gets word that his best friend, the sergeant that served with him every step of the way, has killed himself. Ash is torn up over his death and sees his failure to keep up with his best friend as a betrayal on his part. He decides to try to make amends by approaching his friend's widow and his two young sons by offering his services as a carpenter to try to fix things up a bit. He knows that she won't take any charity so he tells her he is from a (fake) government program that sends out retired Marines to work on the homes of widowed Marines.

While he is dismantling their decrepit front porch he discovers two things:

a) the biggest, smelliest dog he has ever seen;

b) a beat up old suitcase containing $400,000 in cash and 4 bricks of plastic explosive.

His friend's widow has no idea why the money is there and wants nothing to do with it - but there is a man with a disfigured face and a big SUV spying on the house...

My review:

I stumbled upon this book series and I couldn't be more pleased. I have read all of the Jack Reacher books written by the original author and it fills that niche pretty well. 

I very much appreciated the portrayal of PTSD and how the Great Recession really hurt a lot of regular people and seemed to benefit the "to big to fail" financial institutions that helped cause it because of their foolishness.

The audiobook reader, Stephen Mendel, did a fantastic job. 

I am looking forward to continuing on with this series!

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE DRIFTER by Nick Petrie.

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

 

Published by Hourly History in 2020.

Geronimo (1829-1909) is the Apache leader that is famous for having fought just about everybody that encroached on his people's land. Later on, when he had surrendered he was shipped all over the place to different reservations.

That was pretty much the facts that I knew about Geronimo and I thought that I really needed to add more to that. After all, he is one of the few Native Americans that everyone has heard of. 

Hourly History publishes histories and biographies that you can read in about an hour. That can be a tough job for big topics in history like "The Industrial Revolution" or "The Roman Empire" but it is just about right for a short biography. 

Geronimo may have fought with the United States and was eventually captured by the U.S. Army (many, many times) but he was really angry with Mexicans. Mexico was his primary enemy because Mexican soldiers killed his family and friends while he was on a trip to a Mexican town to get supplies. 

From that point on, as the United States and Mexico encroached on traditional Apache territories, Geronimo fought both groups - but he focused on Mexico whenever he could.

The book comes up short with his years in captivity, except to note that, depending on the time period, the security went from severe to very, very lax.

I rate this e-book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  GERONIMO: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History.

TALKING BACK, TALKING BLACK: TRUTHS ABOUT AMERICA'S LINGUA FRANCA (audiobook) by John McWhorter

 

Published in 2019 by HighBridge.
Read by the author, John McWhorter.
Duration: 4 hours, 19 minutes.
Unabridged.

John McWhorter is, perhaps, the best known linguist in America (after Noam Chomsky). He has written about general rules of how languages over long periods of time, the evolution of English, the history behind English's biggest and baddest curse words, and more. Although he speaks in a formal tone, he has a knack for explaining fairly complicated things with everyday English and with lots of easy to follow examples.

The author and reader, John McWhorter

In this book, the topic is what is commonly known as Black English. 

Many people think of Black English as simply "bad" or "slang" English - English with less verb conjugations, double negatives and the endings left off of lots of words.

McWhorter demonstrates that Black English isn't just random mispronunciations and made up words. Instead, it is a coherent system that has its own distinct grammar and vocabulary. Some of it is based on the Southern dialect (most obviously is "y'all") but it would be a mistake to think it is a Southern dialect variation. 

He also shows that phenomena like Black English is a normal thing with several examples from around the world.

McWhorter reads the audiobook version of his book himself. This is appropriate since he is a rather gifted lecturer and has done several of his own audiobooks in the past (see ones that I have reviewed here.) 

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: TALKING BACK, TALKING BLACK: TRUTHS ABOUT AMERICA'S LINGUA FRANCA by John McWhorter.

THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

 

E-book published in 2019 by Hourly History.

Hourly History is a series of histories and biographies that a reader can read in about an hour. Sometimes, that works out quite well. Sometimes, the topic is just too big to cover in an hour.

I think the Hundred Years War is one of those topics. 

Before I read this book I knew a few facts about the war: It was over dynastic struggles over the throne of France, the Battle of Agincourt, Joan of Arc.

Nothing in this book is incorrect, but I didn't really learn a lot more than I knew before. There is a parade of kings, royal family members and advisors - but there's rarely any detail that makes it interesting. For example, the book mentions an insane French king, but it does not mention that he believed that he was made out of glass and believed that he had to be careful that he would get bumped over and would smash to pieces. 

If you know literally nothing of the war, this is an adequate place to start.

I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History.

NO COMMON GROUND: CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS and the ONGOING FIGHT for RACIAL JUSTICE (audiobook) by Karen L. Cox

Published in 2021 by Tantor Audio.

Read by David Sadzin.
Duration: 6 hours, 44 minutes.
Unabridged.

At it's core, this book is a history of Confederate monuments and what they mean(t) to all of the people who live and work around them.

These monuments are tied in with the "Lost Cause" view of history that teaches that the Confederate cause was a just one, that the war had nothing to do with slavery and that the Confederate cause is only suppressed, but not dead.

These monuments are a vivid reminder about the "not dead" part. When the first big waves of monuments were out up (late 1800's) the Jim Crow laws were becoming standardized. During this time period, the Supreme Court decided in favor of racial segregation in the case Plessy v Ferguson (1896) and that project continued in earnest throughout the South. 

The monuments did honor the Confederate veterans, but they were also placed in symbolic areas like courthouses and town squares told African-Americans that they were not in charge and would never be in charge. The statue of the guy that fought to keep them enslaved in front of the halls of justice is a constant reminder. The author found multiple references to African Americans who stated they never entered the court house on the side where the statue was as a way of refusing to be intimidated. 

The book details some more current struggles over Confederate monuments, including monuments that some people are still trying to put up even today(!) The arguments for them are pretty much the same as they were 100 years ago and they were pretty weak and tone deaf arguments back then.  How were they tone deaf? People argue that the monument is to honor the region's culture and it is really just to honor a bunch of white guys from the region who fought to keep the region's black people in slavery. If you cannot imagine why the region's black people don't want to honor those soldiers...well, you are more than a little slow on the uptake (or racist - take your pick). 

I rate this audiobook 4 stars. It can be found on Amazon.com here: NO COMMON GROUND: CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS and the ONGOING FIGHT for RACIAL JUSTICE (audiobook) by Karen L. Cox.

This book is good, but not quite as good as a book that covered the same topic that I read about 18 months ago: DOWN ALONG with THAT DEVIL'S BONES: A RECKONING with MONUMENTS, MEMORY, and the LEGACY of WHITE SUPREMACY (audiobook) by Connor Towne O'Neill.

GOD BLESS YOU, DR. KEVORKIAN by Kurt Vonnegut

 

Originally published in 1999.
Version with Neil Gaiman foreword published in 2010 by Seven Stories Press.

Synopsis:

In the late 1990's Kurt Vonnegut made a series of 90 second recordings for WNYC, the local NPR station for New York City. The premise of each spot was simple enough - Vonnegut travels to the afterlife to conduct a very short interview with someone (some famous, some not) and then he brings word back to the land of the living to tell us the wisdom he has learned.

How does he get to afterlife? Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the creator of the assisted suicide machine works with Vonnegut to render him about 3/4 dead in the very room and on the very bed where the state of Texas administers the death penalty via lethal injection. One of the people he interviews is a murderer who had just been executed - Karla Faye Tucker, although Vonnegut misspells her first name as Carla.

The Vonnegut mural in his hometown
of Indianapolis. Photo by DWD.

Since he is 3/4 dead, Vonnegut is able to travel to the afterlife and is called back away when he is revived. Eventually, St. Peter gets tired of Vonnegut going back and forth and he is told he must wait just outside of the Pearly Gates. 

All of this going back and forth is cut short by the real life arrest of Kevorkian in Michigan in 1998, an event that Vonnegut refers to at the end of the book.

My review:

This short book is not Vonnegut's best work, but it is certainly packed with Vonnegut's famous biting sarcasm. It is an up and down book and it was clearly printed with an eye to making it seem to be a bigger book than it actually is - with extra wide margins, blank pages between chapters and the like. 

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: GOD BLESS YOU, DR. KEVORKIAN by Kurt Vonnegut.

BIG MOUTH & UGLY GIRL by Joyce Carol Oates

Published in 2003 by HarperTempest.

Synopsis:

This book features two high school juniors - Matt Donaghy (Big Mouth) and Ursula Riggs (Ugly Girl.)

Matt Donaghy's a popular guy, but not the most popular guy in school. He's got a reputation as a funny guy and his mouth gets the best of him sometimes. His world gets turned upside down when he makes a joke that is wrongheadedly "misinterpreted" as a serious threat. The police are called and Donaghy is taken into custody and suspended. His name is kept out of the papers, but schools are like small towns - everybody knows all of the details (or thinks they do) soon enough.

Ursula Riggs is a star athlete. Her mom clearly prefers her little sister who is a ballerina and her dad is always away on business. Ursula is big for a girl and feels like she is out of place. She adopts the persona of "Ugly Girl" as a way of coping. "Ugly Girl" is a heartless warrior on the basketball court and acts the same way in the hallways of the school (even though she really does care.)

The author, Joyce Carol Oates

Riggs overheard Donaghy's comments and knows that they were intentionally taken in the wrong way and she ignores everyone's advice and tells the principal that a horrible mistake has been made.

And that is when things change for Big Mouth and Ugly Girl.

My review:

I teach high school and these characters felt pretty real to me. After a slow start with Ursula Riggs, I found myself totally buying into this book. 

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: BIG MOUTH & UGLY GIRL by Joyce Carol Oates.