Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship (audiobook)by Tom Ryan

A story of a man and his dog and so much more

Read by the author, Tom Ryan
Duration: 9 and 1/2 hours.
Published: 2011 by Harper Audio
Unabridged

At first glance, Following Atticus is a simple book: A man gets a dog and the dog changes his life. This is true, but this book is so much more than that. Tom Ryan has written a deep, thoughtful book about a man and his dog, but also about a man and his work, fathers and sons, the relationship between man and nature and men and women. In short, this book about a little dog and a lot of hikes in the woods is also a book about life itself.



Tom Ryan is the editor of the upstart newspaper the Undertoad in Newburyport, Massachusetts. He has a full life with plenty of friends, a fulfilling job and all of the challenges of a small business. An exceptional elderly dog comes into his life and he realizes he has been missing some things, especially companionship and love. When that dog passes away, Ryan quickly buys another and he and his new dog, Atticus M. Finch, quickly bond. They literally go everywhere together - board meetings, restaurants, nature walks, business meetings.

Those nature walks grow into full blown hikes up to the peaks of New Hampshire's 48 4,000 foot tall peaks. Tom and Atticus become consumed by the desire to climb all 48 of them and they quickly become the least likely pair to ever accomplish this feat: a middle aged overweight man with no experience and his 20 pound miniature schnauzer. Tom and Atticus roam these mountain peaks seeking the solitude of his thoughts and an escape from the pressures of running his newspaper.

Sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes profoundly sad, Tom Ryan's memoir of their adventures is more than just the tale of their adventures - it is also the tale of his difficult relationship with his father, the difficulties of loosing friends to cancer, the joys of nature, and a running commentary on many of New England's most famous authors and their thoughts on the natural world. I literally knew nothing about New Hampshire's 48 peaks (or schnauzers - I am a beagle man myself, although we currently have a Jack Russell terrier/beagle mix) and I really don't have a lot in common with Tom Ryan. But, he took me into a whole new world and made it alive for me as I drove back and forth across my city this week and for that, I have to thank him. It makes for a fascinating book and one that I am pleased to recommend to all readers (or listeners), not just dog lovers.

Tom Ryan narrated the book and I am glad that he choose to read it himself rather than hiring a professional reader. Usually, the author-as-narrator is, at best, a mixed bag. In this case, Ryan's New England accent made the story work all the better (I love regional accents!) and he is quite adept at portraying the emotions of the moment in his voice. I cannot imagine how it could have been performed any better by a professional and I recommend the audiobook version over the printed version because of his performance and what it adds.

Tom Ryan updates the world on his adventures with Atticus on his blog "The Adventures of Tom and Atticus."

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: 
Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship


Reviewed on October 29, 2011.

Tomb of the Ten Thousand Dead (audiobook) by L. Ron Hubbard

Three solid adventure stories

Multicast Performance with music and sound effects

Duration: 2 hours, 2 minutes.

Published by Galaxy Press

Tomb of the Ten Thousand Dead is part of a large series of books and stories that are being re-published by Galaxy Press as part of their Golden Age Stories series. In reality, they are a collection of L. Ron Hubbard's early works that were published in magazines and as pulp fiction books. Hubbard was a prolific writer and he wrote a lot of action stories that translate quite well into the multicast performance audiobook format.



This edition features 3 short stories. The first is Tomb of the Ten Thousand Dead, the story of a team of freelance archaeologists that are searching for a lost treasure of Alexander the Great in what is now southern Pakistan. When a down on his luck pilot and a local guide find the map, well, who knows what they will find?

The second story, Price of a Hat, is the weakest. It is set in Siberia at the end of World War I when the major powers invaded in an attempt to weaken the new Communist government. The story features a distinctive Russian hat that everyone is searching for.

The third story was my favorite. Starch and Stripes is set in the heyday of America's Gunboat Diplomacy period. The U.S. Marines are involved in a pacification campaign against a local warlord. Just when they think they have the perfect trap for him, several Senators and a general are on their way for an inspection tour that threatens the entire operation.

The multicast aspect makes these stories very entertaining - very much like the old-time radio shows that were popular when these stories were written. Makes for very compelling listening.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Tomb of the Ten Thousand Dead.

Reviewed on October 23, 2011.

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe (audiobook) by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

A glimpse behind the veil in Taliban-held Afghanistan

Read by Sarah Zimmerman
Duration: 6 hours, 16 minutes
Publisher: Harper Audio, 2011

Unabridged.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon had an interest in how women survive in male-dominated war zones. In the modern world, the war zone is, all too often, not a distant battlefield, but instead includes cities, small towns and plenty of women and children. She was interested in the types of businesses women might open in order to feed their families and she was given the name of Kamila Sidiqi, a college-educated woman who lived through the Taliban invasion of Kabul.

Kamila Sidiqi (right)

Kamila Sidiqi considered fleeing to Pakistan or Iran but decided that she would stay in Kabul with most of her family. Women were mostly confined to their homes, unless accompanied by a male "minder" to do the shopping. They were certainly not supposed to attend school, have a job or own a business. Kamila Sidiqi does all of these things during the Taliban occupation, and of course her dressmaking business is the true topic of the book. Through a combination of prudence, grit and diplomacy she is able to open a dressmaking business and add employee after employee in her home-based factory. She is the CEO, the head salesman and a quiet spokesperson for women's rights in an environment that treats women more like cattle than equals.

Kamila Sidiqi's story is inspiring, even if Lemmon's telling of it is understated. Sarah Zimmerman's narration adds a surprising depth to the story, invoking a sense of warmth as she reads.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Dressmaker of Khair Khana. 

Reviewed on October 22, 2011

Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls by Rachel Simmons

An Eye-Opening Book - A Must for Parents and Teachers

Published in 2011 by Mariner Books.
This is revised and updated from the 2002 edition.

Rachel Simmons' Odd Girl Out helped open up a mostly hidden world for me, a dad and 22 year teacher. Sure, I have lots of experience dealing with kids, but I was missing some of this subtle meanness because I am a guy and the minds of  most guys just don't work this way.

Since Simmons completed her original work she has become a teacher and she can now add the perspective of an outsider to the tone of her original book which was based on a series of interviews with girls from around the country in a variety of schools.  The basic concept of the book is that girls bully one another in a way that goes under the radar in schools and at home. Unlike the overt taunting and physical violence that often happens in male bullying, girl bullying is more sly and includes such actions as shunning, sharing secrets, building alliances of friends against other girls and more.

Simmons provides personal stories that illustrate her points - these are the product of hours and hours of interviews with groups of girls and individuals and even her own experiences (she was bullied - an experience she vividly remembered and she also participated in a bullying, an experience she had forgotten, but was vividly remembered by her victim). The book is immensely readable and tragically depressing - it is the most profound and the saddest book I have read this year. It has given me  more clarity on the experiences of my daughter and of the girls in my classroom.

While these actions are not nearly as visible as overt classical male-type bullying, they can be just as devastating because the very people that these girls trust the most end up betraying them. Simmons includes a helpful "What to do if..." type guide for parents and for teachers that is organized by topic.

Rachel Simmons

Simmons and I disagree as to the root causes for this style of bullying. She consistently blames American culture's expectations for how "good girls" behave which means that aggression and  disagreement are shunted into less overt channels because good girls do not argue, do not fight and do not bring up unpleasant topics of conversation. That may well be true, but the only way to determine it would be to undertake research like she has done here in other cultures. She thinks she has done this by looking at Hispanic and African American girls in a couple of schools, but as a teacher who has spent half of my career in urban school districts, I think she has missed the mark on that one. I think that it may be more of an innate thing in girls. In some girls, the need to keep a relationship, even a hurtful one, may be more important than the need to live without fear. Of course, my thoughts also would need to be proven in cross-cultural studies.

Regardless, this book is a must-read for parents, teachers and administrators.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Odd Girl Out.

Reviewed on October 22, 2011.

The Most Dangerous Thing (audiobook) by Laura Lippman

A different kind of book

Read by Linda Emond
Duration: 10 hours, 45 minutes
Published by Harper Audio.

Unabridged.

Laura Lippman's The Most Dangerous Thing is a superbly deep character study that looks into the lives of 5 suburban children in the 1970s and follows them into the present. These kids are the best of friends for a couple of summers. They consist of three brothers, a beautiful tomboy and a chubby girl who blossoms. They come from three different families, go to three different schools but all live in the suburban neighborhood of Dickeyville, near Baltimore. They spend hours exploring the woods near their neighborhood and what they find there becomes part of a secret that eventually drives the least stable member of their quintet to commit suicide as an adult decades later.

Laura Lippman

As the friends gather for the funeral the secret is slowly drawn out for the reader through a series of flashbacks (through the eyes of all five of the friends and their parents) and current time discussions. The characters are developed in extraordinary detail, which can be frustrating because the book seems to go nowhere, but eventually it does pay off - family secrets are exposed and the true faces of some characters finally come to light. Along the way, Lippman delivers some interesting observations about family life, relationships between men and women and careers. Well worth your time.

Narrator Linda Emond did a great job with a variety of different accents, ages and characters, including the same characters decades apart.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: The Most Dangerous Thing by Laura Lippman.

Reviewed on October 20, 2011.

Sherman: The Ruthless Victor by Agostino Von Hassell and Ed Breslin

A troubling biography.

Published in 2011.

Thomas Nelson Publishers has stepped out and published an attractive series of short biographies of American generals - all nicely bound and immensely readable. But, I found Sherman: The Ruthless Victor to be more than a little troubling for what really amounts to just a few sentences in a 163 page book.

Clearly von Hassell and Breslin are not writing this biography as fans of Sherman - they dislike the man as a person and do not respect his accomplishments on the battlefield. That is fine. I can live with a negative biography of an historical figure, but this book has moments that stretch the limits of responsible biography. For example, on page 22 the authors note that Sherman's difficult childhood may have caused strains in his relationships with his wife and his children. Reasonable assumption. But, then they go on to say that his "revulsion from scenes of domestic happiness" caused him to be particularly rough on the South during the Civil War. Why? "The South, unfortunately, presented such scenes in abundance. This prevalent and blissful state of domesticity seems to have ignited in Sherman a gratuitous pyromania, justified within himself as an exigency of war."

Really? The man went insane and burned the South because it was home to lots of happy families?

Sherman near Atlanta in 1864

This is scholarship at its worst - psychoanalysis of a patient 135 years in the past. It calls into question much of the rest of their analysis of Sherman's thoughts and motives. Later in the book they acknowledge that Sherman's use of slash and burn warfare against civilian populations was probably adapted from the Seminole War that he participated in right after he left West Point, not due to pyromania inspired by hatred of familial bliss. But, the damage to his reputation was already done. His style of warfare is a perfectly debatable topic - in fact it was so brutal that it should be discussed, but they set it up so poorly that there cannot be any debate - Sherman did it because he was crazy. End of discussion.

Another problem - on page 81 the authors were discussing pre-Bull Run conditions in D.C. in 1861 and how impatient the men were to fight. They write: "...they were ready to return home and that if an attack was not launched soon, they would simply defect." I looked up defect in several online dictionaries to see if it meant more than what I thought it meant and, like I thought, all indicated that defecting was leaving one side for its opposition (leaving the Democrats to join the Republicans or leaving the old USSR for the USA). Can you imagine that tens of thousands of Union volunteers wanted to fight so badly that they would join the Confederates just for the chance to fight? That is a serious error due to a simple incorrect word choice - I assume they meant to use "desert" rather than defect.

Like I noted, this is not a bad biography except for a few words here and there amounting to less than a paragraph, really. They should have been caught in the editing process but they were not. Too bad - there was a lot of good information here but those few words change the tone and quality of the text so much that I cannot recommend this biography.

I received this copy of the book from Thomas Nelson publishers as part of the BookSneeze program in exchange for an honest review.

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Sherman: The Ruthless Victor.

Reviewed on October 20, 2011.

Act of Deceit (Harlan Donnally #1) by Steven Gore

A very busy book that just didn't do it for me.

Published in 2011.

 I enjoyed meeting retired detective Harlan Donnally in Act of Deceit. Donnally was forced to retire due to an injury sustained during a shootout. He goes about his business with a battered body but a world class commitment to following the trail to wherever it leads.

But, the book has so many twists and turns that it felt like the author was whipsawing the story around just build an artificial sense of tension. We start out with an investigation that dates back to the Haight Ashbury Summer of Love movement in San Francisco but the investigation soon veers into other territory: Catholic priest sex abuse and international sex trafficking as well as the dynamics of the dysfunctional relationship between a father and son. The first part was interesting to me, the last part - old and tired territory.

Gore notes at the end of the book that his wife is involved in investigating Catholic priest sex abuse accusations in the San Francisco area, which is the inspiration for involving that angle in this story. However, I for one am tired of having that brought into so many stories. Was every priest a pedophile? Hardly, but you wouldn't know it from the bestseller list.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Act of Deceit by Steven Gore.

Reviewed on October 20, 2011.