Posts

COUNTDOWN 1945: THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY of the ATOMIC BOMB and the 116 DAYS THAT CHANGED the WORLD (audiobook) by Chris Wallace and Mitch Weiss

Image
The mushroom clouds from the bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right) Published by Simon and Schuster in June of 2020. Read by one of the authors, Chris Wallace. Duration: 8 hours, 40 minutes. Unabridged. The 116 days referred to in the title is the time between the day that Harry S. Truman became President and the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Chris Wallace quickly catches the reader up on what was going on and then uses a countdown for the chapters to add a sense of drama - will the scientists make it on time? Of course, we know that they do succeed - the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are one of the most well-known historical facts of the 20th century. Wallace's re-telling of the story is full of facts but not particularly told in an interesting way. For example, there is a great deal of information about the Potsdam Conference (July 17 - August 2, 1945) that met in Germany. The Conference was important because it include

DEMOCRACY in ONE BOOK or LESS: HOW IT WORKS, WHY IT DOESN'T, and WHY FIXING IT IS EASIER THAN YOU THINK (audiobook) by David Litt

Image
Published by HarperAudio in June of 2020. Read by the author, David Litt. Duration: 11 hours, 51 minutes. Unabridged. David Litt is a former speech writer for President Obama. You need to know that before you read this book - he is unapologetically liberal. If that is a deal breaker for you, don't even bother to pick this book up. Personally, I am not a liberal, but I do enjoy political discussion and hearing different people's points of view. Litt offers plenty of both. The book starts off with a weird stunt involving Mitch McConnell's former fraternity house. This almost made me abandon the book, but the book got better pretty quickly. The primary point of the first half of the book is that state and local governments work very hard to make sure that voting is not particularly easy, especially when compared to other countries. For example, Texas has especially tough voter registration laws that make it hard to organize registration drives. On top of that, it is a cr

FAIR WARNING (Jack McEvoy #3) (audiobook) by Michael Connelly

Image
Published in May of 2020 by Little, Brown and Company. Read by Peter Giles and Zach Villa. Duration: 10 hours, 20 minutes. Unabridged. This is the third book in a very slowly unfolding series featuring journalist Jack McEvoy - 25 years in the making so far. Jack McEvoy started out the series as a reporter in Colorado who discovered a The author, Michael Connelly. serial killer and stopped him. 15 years later, he is a reporter who is being let go as part of a series of layoffs from the LA Times and he discovers a serial killer and stops him. Now, 10 years later, he is working for a news website called Fair Warning  (a real news site that I linked to) and he once again discovers a serial killer. The story starts out with McEvoy being questioned because he happened to have gone on one date nearly a year ago with a recent murder victim. They found his name on the contact list on her phone and the lead detective recognized his name from a story about a corrupt cop a few years back and d

FOR LIBERTY and GLORY: WASHINGTON, LAFAYETTE, and THEIR REVOLUTIONS by James R. Gaines

Image
Published in 2007 by W.W. Norton and Company. First a bit of traditional blogging. I was going through some old receipts because I had plenty of time on my hands thanks to the Coronavirus lockdowns. This pile of receipts was 12 years old. It included some golden oldies like a Blockbuster receipt. I also found a receipt for this book. I had gotten a great deal on it - and it sat in my To-Be-Read pile for 12 years. I had no idea it was in that pile for that long. If you had asked me before I found the receipt, I would guess it had been 4 or 5 years at most. At that moment, this book moved to the top of my To-Be-Read pile. I should have read it long before now - it was an excellent read. Originally, I picked up this book because I simply didn't know much about Lafayette. I've read plenty of biographies of Washington and histories of the American Revolution. Lafayette always comes into the story somewhere in the middle. There's always a build up, with the Stamp Act, the Bos

GOD IS NOT ONE: THE EIGHT RIVAL RELIGIONS THAT RUN the WORLD - and WHY THEIR DIFFERENCES MATTER (audiobook) by Stephen Prothero

Image
Published in 2010 by HarperAudio. Read by Paul Boehmer. Duration: 14 hours, 37 minutes. Unabridged. Stephen Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University. The purpose of the book is to inform the reader of the eight greatest world religions, their philosophies and their way of looking at the world. Prothero is very aware that choosing just eight religions is fraught with problems. How do you choose? Is it based on influence? Number of adherents? Importance of the countries it is in? He went through all of those questions again once again when he chose the order he would present the religions he picked. The religions he profiled are: Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Judaism, Yoruba religion, and Daoism. He spends about 90 minutes discussing each religion and includes nearly an hour on Atheism at the end, on the theory that militant Atheism (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens) behaves much like a religion, complete with evangelistic movements an

"I LOVE PAUL REVERE, WHETHER HE RODE or NOT" by Richard Shenkman

Image
Originally published by HarperPerennial in 1991. Richard Shenkman has written several books that show that many of the commonly-held beliefs about history are not quite true and some are absolutely false. The title comes from a quote from President Warren G. Harding when he was asked about a popular newspaper article that asserted that Paul Revere did not actually make his famous ride. Ironically, Paul Revere only gets two mentions: once on page 10 and the other on page 192. The mention on page 192 is simply the complete quote from Harding that inspired the title of the book. So, if you were thinking this was going to be a book about Paul Revere, you will be disappointed.  Instead, Shenkman's book is a reminder that there are always multiple views on history. Anybody that tells you that a certain group all believed a certain thing or they all did something for one reason is simplifying things and losing some of the nuance of how it really happened.  The Boston Tea Party

SEMICOLON: THE PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE of a MISUNDERSTOOD MARK by Cecilia Watson

Image
Published by HarperAudio in July of 2019. Read by Pam Ward. Duration: 3 hours, 47 minutes. Unabridged. The author, Cecilia Watson Cecelia Watson is a historian whose research has made her an expert on the semicolon. Why the semicolon? She describes herself as a reformed member of the grammar police and really enjoys looking at how authors use punctuation in their writing. I did learn some interesting (albeit trivial) facts about the origins of the semicolon and I as a world language teacher and I did appreciate Watson's de-emphasis of grammar in favor of meaning. But, sometimes this short book sometimes felt like it was slowing to a crawl as the focus went on to how various grammar books explained semicolons (and other points of grammar) over the years. Personally, I avoid semicolons. My theory is that in most cases it would be better to make two smaller sentences than having one longer unwieldy sentence held together by a semicolon, although Watson does point out a brill