MAGNA CARTA: THE BIRTH of LIBERTY (audiobook) by Dan Jones

 

Published in 2015 by Penguin Audio.
Read by the author, Dan Jones.
Duration: 7 hours, 12 minutes.
Unabridged.

The Magna Carta is commonly considered to be the founding document of Western Democracy. Many believe that there is a direct line goes from the Magna Carta to the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries) to the Declaration of Independence (1776) to the Bill of Rights in the American Constitution (1791)  to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1791) to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).

Jones believes that there is a whole lot of truth to this. but he spends a lot time explaining why the "direct line" is not as straight as many think.

King John (1166-1216) signing the Magna 
Carta in 1215. 

Jones does an excellent job of explaining the political situation in England that led to the Magna Carta in 1215 in reasonable, layman terms. Once the reader understands how the system was supposed to work, Jones demonstrates that King John abused the system to raise gobs and gobs of money to fund unpopular wars and, more importantly, to punish political enemies. In some cases, he completely bankrupted well-connected families - and that's when the noble families united to confront the king.

Jones also explains the provisions of the Magna Carta in modern English and how King John started successfully pushing back against its restrictions almost immediately. 

Jones is a believer that the Magna Carta is a predecessor to the documents like the Declaration of Independence and does spend time explaining the Magna Carta's influences on the modern world.

The author read this audiobook and did a good job with it. This was an enjoyable and educational audiobook. I rate it 5 stars out of 5. 

It can be found on Amazon.com here: MAGNA CARTA: THE BIRTH of LIBERTY (audiobook) by Dan Jones.

CHE: A REVOLUTIONARY LIFE (graphic novel) by Jon Lee Anderson (author) and Jose Hernandez (illustrator)

Originally published in 2016.

English translation published

in 2018 by Penguin Press.

Before reading this massive 421 page graphic novel, I knew relatively little about Che Guevara (1928-1967.) I knew that he was from South America, he was famous for his part in the Cuban Revolution and that he died trying to lead a revolution in Bolivia. And, of course, I knew him from the famous picture.

This graphic novel filled in a lot of blanks for me. It is a friendly biography of Che but doesn't glorify him. When I got to the end I was struck by how much of a failure Che actually was after he left Cuba. He tried to replicate the success of the Cuban Revolution but he could not. It's hard to tell if counter-revolutionary measures from the governments he was trying to overthrow (and the U.S.) were simply more successful than Batista had been in Cuba or if they were missing an additional spark like the Castro brothers had provided.

The graphic novel was put together well. It had no confusing arrangements of comic panels (this is more common of a problem than one might think) and the story was told in a straightforward linear manner. 

Well done.

I rate this graphic novel 5 stars out of 5. 

This can be found on Amazon.com here: CHE: A REVOLUTIONARY LIFE (graphic novel) by Jon Lee Anderson (author) and Jose Hernandez (illustrator).

LIGHT IT UP (Peter Ash #3) (audiobook) by Nick Petrie

 

Published in 2018 by Penguin Audio.
Read by Stephen Mendel

Duration: 10 hours, 44 minutes.
Unabridged

Synopsis:

The third entry in the Peter Ash series begins with Peter Ash working on a team rebuilding hiking trails in Oregon and writing long heartfelt letters back to his love interest from the second book.

He makes friends with an older man named Henry (a Vietnam vet, as opposed to Ash being a vet of Iran and Afghanistan.) Henry gets a call from his daughter in Colorado and asks for Henry's help with her business that provides security for some of the legal marijuana businesses.

Turns out that these businesses have to operate completely in cash because marijuana is still illegal so far as the federal government is concerned so banks cannot take credit cards, debit cards or even deposits because it would be considered helping to traffic drugs. This means that there are shipments of pot and shipments of cash coming and going and that can attract bad guys.

An entire security crew has disappeared with the money. Some assume that the security team was attacked and killed or maybe even captured. Others think they ran off with the money. 

Peter and Henry's crew take the next big run and they find out soon enough what happened to the other crew...

My Review:

The action and the adventure were good in this book, but there was a deeper theme in the book about the kind of men that serve in the military. I thought it added a bit of literary dimension that is, frankly, almost never present in these sort of "shoot 'em up" books.

Ash is a traditional principled good guy - a Clark Kent/Luke Skywalker type. A man who joined the military because he saw a need and wanted to help. He meets up with his opposite in this book - a man who joined the military because he could take advantage of the trust given to him to hurt people and satisfy his urges. In the middle, there is a man who served honorably until an arbitrary rule forced him to sell his honor in order to save his family from shame.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: LIGHT IT UP (Peter Ash #3) (audiobook) by Nick Petrie.

HAYDEN'S WORLD: VOLUME 1 (audiobook) by S.D. Falchetti

 

Book published in 2018.
Audiobook published in 2023 by S.D. Falchetti.
Read by Shamaan Casey.
Duration: 7 hours, 59 minutes.
Unabridged.

Hayden's World: Volume 1 is a collection of 5 short stories in a single "universe" centering around a corporation that is in the forefront in the exploration of our solar system. 

Roughly the first half of the book is about top executives of the company and their new drive system that will push a ship to nearly light speed. There are a lot of high-minded speeches about mankind and the need to keep pushing boundaries. When I say speeches, I mean literal speeches lifted from testimony to some sort of U.N. body. 

Speeches are not the best way to introduce a book, in my opinion. The first part is just slow. I nearly quit listening to the audiobook multiple times in the first hour or so. The first story has an exciting, game-changing twist at the end that is simply dropped.

The last two stories are great examples of hard science fiction involving a pirate and a little bit of romance in orbit around Uranus and Saturn. I liked the fact that rather than having true space warships, war is waged with tools and work equipment because space is a place for resource extraction, not a place for interstellar fleets to duke it out.

When you listen to an audiobook, sometimes you notice the overuse of a word or a phrase that you might not notice reading. In this case, the author really likes the word "scintillating" when combined with lasers. Turns out that there was a lot of laser shooting in one story and they all seemed to be "scintillating," not brilliant, shimmering, gleaming, dazzling or any other word that means shiny.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: HAYDEN'S WORLD: VOLUME 1 by S.D. Falchetti.

THE ENIGMA AFFAIR: A NOVEL (audiobook) by Charlie Lovett

 

Published by Blackstone Publishing in September of 2022.

Read by Nicole Zanzerella.
Duration: 12 hours, 6 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

An Enigma Machine from World
War II.

Patton Harcourt is a very small town librarian in North Carolina. One morning, while cooking in the kitchen, a sniper round comes through her window and nearly hits her. She reacts well (thanks to her previous career in the military) and finds a stranger at her door. 

He is not the sniper, but he is an assassin that was hired to kill another person in town. Against her better judgment, she joins with the assassin to elude the sniper team.

All of that happens in the first 10 minutes or so of this audiobook.

From there, they discover a handmade copy of World War II Enigma machine (the British machine that broke the German secret codes) and are off to confront modern-day Neo-Nazis...

My Review:

This book was certainly action-packed, extremely fast-paced ,and had some good moments. But, it also had some practical issues that just didn't jive with reality. For example, one of the main plot points is that they cannot access the internet because they will be detected and tracked down. This completely ignores the existence of proxy servers. A professional assassin should have been familiar with this technology as a way to hide his location when communicating with clients.

Later, the characters are speaking German and passing off as native speakers (this is a vitally important point more than once). Granted, it is not complicated German, but very few untrained people can pass themselves off as native speakers in a second language. I've been speaking Spanish as a second language for years and I would never be confused for a native speaker.

This is not a bad book. The quick pace was fun, the bad guys are truly bad, and the flashbacks to World War II were well-done. But, the end result was 3 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: THE ENIGMA AFFAIR: A NOVEL by Charlie Lovett.

THE GREAT GATSBY (audiobook) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

Originally published in 1925.
This audiobook version was published by HarperAudio in 2004.

Read by Tim Robbins.
Duration: 5 hours, 3 minutes.
Unabridged.
 
Way back in the 1980s, I read The Great Gatsby. I remembered very little about it except that a rich guy was pining over a woman throughout the book. I also misremembered a few plot points. For example, I remembered Gatsby's car being dumped in a swimming pool or maybe in the bay.

I have been reminded of the book on a regular basis because I teach in a high school and the book is read yearly by some English class or another. I usually ask a student if they like the book and tell them that I read it in high school. If they ask them if I liked it, I usually respond that I barely remember the plot except for "rich man - sad."

When my daughter read it in her high school English class, I decided that it was time to re-visit the book. 

Synopsis:

Nick Carraway is newly arrived in New York City. He is a World War I veteran and is trying a career as a bond seller. He is renting a small place on Long Island nestled in among mansions of the rich and trendy set.

His neighbor is Jay Gatsby, a mysterious young single millionaire. Everyone knows of him, but no one seems to know much about him. He hosts massive blow-out parties but always hangs out on the edge. He is polite, but does not participate. 

Gatsby takes an interest in Nick and Nick ends up with a front row seat to a deadly drama...

My review:

The book is a lot better than I remembered. Class is a major theme and readers who are high school aged or older can clearly see that one.

Older readers know from experience that timing is as important as anything in relationships and the Gatsby/Daisy relationship is a victim of bad timing as it is a victim of class prejudice. We've all met people that we know we could be good friends with - but events and prior commitments pull us apart. The timing is just bad.

The audiobook was read by Tim Robbins. I am not a big Tim Robbins fan, but I am a big audiobook listener and I have never heard of Tim Robbins read any audiobook. I figured that if he is reading this audiobook, he must have some sort of special affinity for it and he will pull out all of the stops. 

Turns out, I was right. After a slow monotone start, Robbins lets loose with a variety of voices that are so good that you can listen to the conversations without paying attention to all of the "he saids" and "she saids."

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Note: The Great Gatsby was part of a group of 56 books that a school board in Alaska wanted to ban in 2023. They listed Great Gatsby as a problem due to sexual content. A group of parents and the ACLU went to court to fight it and the school board lost - story here.

PLAYER PIANO by Kurt Vonnegut

Originally published in 1952.

Synopsis:

Paul Proteus is the director of the Ilium Works in New York State in an alternate timeline to our current one. It is roughly the 1950's after yet another World War. 

That war taught the engineers to trust mechanization and the government to continue the central planning model that won the war (a more extreme model of the system the real United States used during World War II.)

In the Ilium works there are multiple factory buildings full of machines, but there are no people because the whole thing is automated. Proteus and the other engineers replaced all of the people with machines in the name of efficiency. Even the best human workers make mistakes or get an illness and miss work or, eventually, die. 

The machines don't have that problem. They work and work and work until the day they are replaced with even faster machines.

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)
in 1952

This is the source of the title, Player Piano. A player piano plays itself thanks to a roll that is inserted. In the town across the river from Ilium Works, there is a player piano in the bar where all of the unemployed factory workers drink their days away.

The major theme of the book is that it is not good for humans to have no work, no skills to master and no sense that they have put in a good day's work, even if it is more efficient for machines to do it all.

And...Paul Proteus is starting to come around to that way of thinking.

My Review:

This is Vonnegut's first novel. It follows a more normal narrative form than his later, more famous novels. It's too long. It has too many characters. I has too many side plots that don't really go anywhere.

But, it is amazingly prophetic. Vonnegut was working in the public relations department of General Electric when he wrote this novel. He was constantly being exposed to miraculous "labor-saving" devices and his imagination took him to a world where so much labor has been saved with labor-saving devices that there is practically nothing for anyone to do anymore because a person with nothing to do has no reason to be here at all.

Just look at all of the jobs that have been replaced by technology - Line workers in factories, print setters, cashiers, most farm labor and on and on and on. Everyone thinks all of the jobs have gone oversees, but 85% of them have actually been lost to technology. So it goes.

The book gets better as it goes along and has a bittersweet ending.  

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut.