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

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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

GOD BLESS YOU, DR. KEVORKIAN by Kurt Vonnegut

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  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

BIG MOUTH & UGLY GIRL by Joyce Carol Oates

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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

MY LIFE AMONG the UNDERDOGS: A MEMOIR by Tia Torres

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  Published by HarperAudio in 2019. Read by the author, Tia Torres. Duration: 5 hours, 50 minutes. Unabridged. Tia Torres is the director of the Villalobos Rescue Center, a dog rescue center featured on the Animal Planet TV show Pitbulls and Parolees . The rescue center used to be primarily for wolves and wolf hybrids but it morphed into pit bulls when police departments and city animal shelters would ask them to take in pit bulls on the theory that if you could handle a wolf you could handle a pit bull. Turns out, they were right. Now she runs one of the largest pit bull rescue centers in the country. This memoir talks about Torres' early life, her family and her early experiences with animals. But, the primary focus of the book are the special dogs that she and her family have had over the years.  The author and one of her dogs I have to confess to being a fan of the show. My wife started watching it and I was drawn in. Soon enough, we had marathoned through all 18 seasons of the

THIS REPUBLIC of SUFFERING: DEATH and the AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (audiobook) by Drew Gilpin Faust

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Published by Blackstone Audio in 2008. Read by Lorna Raver. Duration: 10 hours, 54 minutes. Unabridged. This unique Civil War history isn't driven by the timeline of the Civil War, the strategies, or the personalities. Instead, it is a look at how the soldiers, the government, the families on the home front and post-war politics were affected by the massive amount of death that the war created as it ground on. In all previous wars, the U.S. government did not worry too much about how to bury the dead because there just weren't that many when compared to the Civil War. Soldiers were properly buried, but there wasn't much thought given to keeping records about where they were buried, marking their graves or even keeping track of who had died. The sheer quantity of death in the Civil War made the government change its approach.  The book starts with a look at how dying a glorious death was all everyone wrote about. But, once the reality of the war was apparent, the talk shifte

WHO CENSORED ROGER RABBIT (audiobook) by Gary K. Wolf

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  Book originally published in 1981. Audiobook edition published in 2019 by Tantor Audio. Read by L.J. Ganser. Duration: 7 hours, 36 minutes. Unabridged. This book is the inspiration for the much-celebrated Disney movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? but readers should know that it is not much like the movie. Three of the main characters are the same - Private Investigator Eddie Valiant, Toon movie star Roger Rabbit and his Toon wife Jessica Rabbit. But, the world they inhabit is different than the world in the movie. In the movie, Toons make cartoon movies. They are filmed like regular movies. In the book, Toons don't make movies, they make comic books and comic strips. Toons in the book have the little voice bubbles that appear over their heads just like you see in comic books and comic strips. The actors pose for the comic strip pictures and photographers take their pictures. A quote from the book. Also, a very true statement. In the book, Roger Rabbit is actually killed and Eddie Va