BASS REEVES: TALES of the TALENTED TENTH, no. 1 by Joel Christian Gill

 Published by Fulcrum Publishing in 2014.

Artist and author Joel Christian Gill is writing and illustrating a series of graphic novels that look into the lives of lesser known, exceptional African Americans. His inspiration is this quote from W.E.B. DuBois: "The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth saving up to their vantage ground." In other words, some will rise up and inspire/lead the rest. This is Gill's way of providing inspiration.

Bass Reeves was a legendary lawman in the Old West. He was a Deputy U.S. Marshal that chased down bad guys who would flee into Indian Territory (Oklahoma and Kansas) to hide from law enforcement in the neighboring states. If you've seen either of the two versions of the movie True Grit, that is the exact situation. The character Rooster Cogburn would have been real-life Bass Reeves' co-worker if Cogburn were a real person.

The graphic novel tells about Reeves' childhood as a slave in Arkansas, how he escaped during the Civil War (he was brought along to work as a body servant for a Confederate officer) and eventually lived for a while with Indians in the Oklahoma and Kansas Territories. He was hired to help deal Marshals deal with Indians and eventually he was deemed to be so helpful and so good at his job that the local federal judge went against all of the normal conventions and made Bass Reeves a marshal.

It turns out that Marshal Bass Reeves was very, very good at his job - maybe the best.

The book addresses racial issues in a couple of clever ways. Whenever the word n***** is used, a stylized caricature of a man in "blackface" is inserted. Secondly, whenever Reeves is confronted by racists, they are partially or completely illustrated as crows with angry red eyes. There are crows fleeing the law, crows in court, etc.

The problem with this story is that although Reeves lived an interesting and amazing life, the book is kind of flat. 

I rate this graphic novel 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: BASS REEVES: TALES of the TALENTED TENTH, no. 1 by Joel Christian Gill.

See my review for a different book in this series HERE.

THE MAGA DIARIES: MY SURREAL ADVENTURES INSIDE THE RIGHT-WING (and HOW I GOT OUT) (audiobook) by Tina Nguyen

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in January of 2024.
Read by the author, Tina Nguyen.
Duration: 7 hours, 23 minutes.
Unabridged.

Tina Nguyen is a mainstream reporter now, but she started out in the world of conservative media. How conservative? How about working for Tucker Carlson before he joined Fox News?

Nguyen had a boyfriend that connected her to the feeder system of conservative politics and media. Go through these high school programs and you get invited to college programs like the Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom at Claremont McKenna College and then on to think tanks, conservative media, or a staff position with a politician.

Nguyen broke up with the boyfriend and went into conservative media...until she realized it was all very small, very inter-related and, in the end, unsatisfying and unable to pay the bills. Also, she discovered that one of her mentors was a racist creep and so was the boyfriend that brought her into the movement. 

The author, Tina Nguyen

What this book does very well is show how the right wing side of American politics is pretty interconnected, and according to Nguyen, much more so than the left wing.

The pacing of this book is kind of hit and miss. Sometimes it drags, sometimes it skips ahead quickly. Mostly, I was bothered by the timing of the book. She calls the book MAGA Diaries, but really she was part of the Tea Party Movement. I consider the Tea Party to be the precursor of the MAGA Movement, but they are not the same.

Anyway, it's a mixed bag. Not without value, but not great. I rate it 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE MAGA DIARIES: MY SURREAL ADVENTURES INSIDE THE RIGHT-WING (and HOW I GOT OUT) by Tina Nguyen.

TIRED of WINNING: DONALD TRUMP and the END of the GRAND OLD PARTY (audiobook) by Jonathan Karl

 

Published in November of 2023 by Penguin Audio.
Read by the author, Jonathan Karl.
Duration: 8 hours, 32 minutes.
Unabridged.

ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl brings us his third book about Donald Trump as President and as former President.

His first book covered candidate Trump and the first 3 years of the Trump Administration. The second book covered the last year of the Trump Administration with a special focus on all of the "stop the steal" claims. It was called Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show. Too bad it was not in fact Trump's "final act." 

Karl has a long relationship with the former President. He interviewed 5 times before he even decided to officially run for President in the 2016 election. He's interviewed him multiple times since, including for all three of his books. Karl includes actual audio clips from those interviews (questions and answers) for the benefit of those that doubt.

If you think Donald Trump is awesome, this is not the book for you. I'm not going to go into the details because, at this point - after so many years of Trump's shenanigans, those details won't change any minds.

I thought this was an engrossing listen because I am very, very skeptical of anything that the 45th President is involved in. 

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  TIRED of WINNING: DONALD TRUMP and the END of the GRAND OLD PARTY by Jonathan Karl.

THE KINGDOM, the POWER, and THE GLORY: AMERICAN EVANGELICALS in an AGE of EXTREMISM (audiobook) by Tim Alberta

Published by HarperAudio in December of 2023.
Read by the author, Tim Alberta.
Duration: 18 hours, 16 minutes.
Unabridged.

Tim Alberta is a writer for The Atlantic and also an Evangelical. He grew up in the faith, but is very troubled by the tendency towards Christian Nationalism. He was inspired to write this book after an incident at his father's funeral at the church he grew up in. 

Alberta embarked on a cross-country exploration of the intersection of Evangelicals and politics at Christian Nationalism - and how this combination is changing Evangelicals and they way they are perceived.

Alberta does not come at this as an outsider. As I already noted, he grew up in the church - and still belongs to a church. To me, this is important. I read another book with a similar theme (The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism) that just didn't hit the right tone and answer the right questions because the author was coming from the outside. She didn't know the ins and outs and didn't truly understand the people she was writing about.

Russell Moore recently wrote a book (Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America) that addresses problems among American Evangelicals from the inside, but it's not really a book about politics. The closest book to Alberta's is the excellent Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. The two books don't really cover the same territory, but they certainly run in parallel lines and they do not present a pretty picture of contemporary Christianity.

The author, Tim Alberta

Alberta looks at the struggles of his home church, Liberty University and its rise to prominence by promoting politics instead of Christianity, Brian Zahnd's church's struggle when he went out of his way to reject Christian Nationalism, the Southern Baptist Convention's struggles with sexual abuse charges and, of course, the ever-present influence of Trump and Trumpism.

I found this book to be a fascinating look into this dangerous mix of Christianity and politics. I blasted through this 18 hour audiobook in just a few days and I wish it was twice as long.

I highly recommend this book.

5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: THE KINGDOM, the POWER, and THE GLORY: AMERICAN EVANGELICALS in an AGE of EXTREMISM by Tim Alberta.

PALM SUNDAY: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COLLAGE by Kurt Vonnegut

 

Published in 1981 by Delacorte Press.

Kurt Vonnegut offers this collection (he calls is a "collage") of fiction, non-fiction, interviews, and even a musical based on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 

As is the case with all collections, some parts of the collection are excellent and some parts are not very good. I believe that he first half of the collection is the best, mostly because of the inclusion of a history of the Vonnegut family in Indianapolis. Ironically, it was not written by Vonnegut, but by a family member who had married into the Vonnegut family. 

Indianapolis is my adopted hometown and this Vonnegut family history reads like a history of the city from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. I found it fascinating reading, especially the story of the subscription brothel gentlemen's club that was frequented by the city's elite in an area that still has political "clubs" with fancy dining and smoking rooms more than 100 years later. It would be tacky to pay a prostitute, but paying club dues that were used to maintain the club and also to pay the prostitutes - well that's not tacky at all!

The musical based on Jekyll and Hyde written in 1978 was completely horrible.

Vonnegut is well-known for having written a report card of his published books - this is the book that features that report card. Oftentimes, I disagree with his self-assessment - but not this time. He gives this book a "C" (yes, he graded the book as he was writing/collecting all of the parts of it) and I agree.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: PALM SUNDAY: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COLLAGE by Kurt Vonnegut.

BATMAN/FORTNITE: ZERO POINT (graphic novel) by Christos Gage and others

Published in 2021
by DC Comics

 

When I first heard of this crossover graphic novel I thought to myself that this could be a horrible mess of a book. I actually flipped through it just to be ready to make fun of it. After all, how could a book based on a videogame that's using Batman as a promotional gimmick be any good? 

Turns out I was wrong. 

The plot makes sense. Even more importantly, it is an interesting and compelling read.

In the story, what Batman suspects is a crack in time and space opens up over Gotham City. People are fleeing. Batman consults with Chief Gordon and learns that some people are actually drawn to this tear in reality. 

As Batman gets closer to investigate he finds Harley Quinn. She is heading directly towards the tear and Batman cannot stop her. However, his efforts have placed him in a vulnerable position and a shadowy figure pushes Batman in.

Batman arrives in the world of Fortnite with no memory and surrounded by violence. The world gets smaller and smaller, making the violence more intense until everyone dies and the world re-sets with no one retaining a memory of what has happened before. 

Of course, Batman is still Batman so he figures out a way...

I rate this graphic novel 5 out of 5 stars. It can be found on Amazon.com here: BATMAN/FORTNITE: ZERO POINT (graphic novel) by Christos Gage and others.

THE GOLEM'S VOICE (graphic novel) by David G. Klein

 

Published in 2015 by
Now What Media, LLC

Synopsis:

Set in Czechoslovakia during World War II, The Golem's Voice is the story of a young Jewish mom and her two sons trying to escape relocation by the Nazis. This was in the time when the Nazis were still telling Jews that they were relocating them to alternate settlements rather than just taking them to work and death camps.

As they are being loaded onto trains, the mom gets a bad feeling and tells her boys (Yoakim and Yakov) to just run. She does not join them because they are much faster than her and she just wants them to escape and live. Her boys run under the trains and, at first, things look good. But, soon enough, Nazi soldiers are in full pursuit and Yoakim is shot providing cover for his little brother.

Yakov continues to run to the only place the knows - the Jewish ghetto neighborhood that he just came from. He hears a voice in his head calling him to the home of a long-dead rabbi named Yudah Loew. Legend has it that Loew was much more than a prolific author, philosopher and academic - he was also the creator of a golem. 

Loew was supposed to have studied so much that he worked out how to create a man in clay and bring it to life. This creature is not truly a man and could not speak for itself because only God can do that. But, it is alive and follows the orders of the one who created it. Medieval legend said that if things got bad enough for the Jews, a golem could be created to defend them.

Yakov is led by the voice to a hidden room in the house and discovers everything one would need to create a golem - and if there were ever a time that the Jewish people could used a golem to defend them, this was it...

My review:

I think this book was well done. The art is moody, as it should be when discussing the dark and dangerous days of the Holocaust. I was curious to see if the book would fall into the temptation of straying into the complete fantasy of having the golem wreak havoc on the Nazis to the point of being able to march to Berlin and take out Adolph Hitler himself (Rest assured, this does not happen.)

There is a very clever angle taken by the author. The idea of a Golem is partially explained by texts found by Yakov and his memory of children's tales. But it is also explained through the Nazi officer who is hunting Yakov. That officer takes the legends seriously even though he hates the Jewish people. He wants to use the knowledge to create Golems to create an army that the Nazis can control. There is a "debate" of sorts between this officer and a spirit (is is Loew or is it God? I think it is God.) that fills in a lot of details.

I rate this graphic novel 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Golem's Voice by David G. Klein.

See a good sample of the book on the publisher's site here.