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UNHOLY NIGHT by Seth Grahame-Smith

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Brilliant! Published in 2012 by Hachette Book Group Seth Grahame-Smith is, perhaps, most famous for his books  Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Pride, Prejudice and Zombies , two books that I have never read and probably never will because I care not one wit for vampire or zombie tales. But, this book intrigued me and I am very glad that I read it. As in the other books I mentioned, Seth Grahame-Smith has a talent to take an existing story and put a twist to it. This book takes the traditional Christmas nativity story and makes this little change : What if the Three Wise Men were actually not three learned scholars but three criminals posing as three learned scholars? That's it - that's the heart of the book. But, what a twist! Here is all anyone really knows about the the Three Wise Men from the Biblical account, from Matthew 2, verses 1-12: In the time of  King Herod , after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking,

THREE CENTS a MILE (audibook) by Mark Mooney

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Published in October of 2016 by Mark Mooney Read by the author, Mark Mooney Duration: 5 hours, 57 minutes Unabridged CNN Money editor Mark Mooney's Three Cents a Mile tells the story of his 2 year trek across the world as a vagabond traveler more than 35 years ago. He left New York City and headed east, visiting Ireland, England, France, North Africa, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India, Thailand and even more destinations with nothing more than a few dollars in his pocket and a typewriter and a notebook to compose travelogue articles that he sold to newspapers back in America. Along the way he met playwrights, authors, poets, star-crossed lovers, thieves, hippies, drug burnouts, farmers, beggars, mystics, and he turned down the chance to meet Mother Theresa. He slept on beaches, in flophouses, on buses, above a bookstore with other aspiring writers, in an apartment building filled with strippers/prostitutes and in a barn. He traveled by plane, by ferry, by bicycle, b

THE GENERALS: PATTON, MACARTHUR, MARSHALL and the WINNING of WORLD WAR II (audiobook) by Winston Groom

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George Patton (1885-1945) Published in November of 2015 by Blackstone Audio, Inc. Read by Robertson Dean Duration: 16 hours, 2 minutes Unabridged George Marshall (1880-1959) Winston Groom, forever associated with his iconic character Forrest Gump, has written an interesting and solid history of three equally iconic World War II generals: George Patton, Douglas MacArthur and George Marshall.  Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) Groom's triple biography format works quite well as all three of these men's life stories were on parallel tracks once they entered World War I and they all knew one another and had worked with one another in one capacity or another through the years (the story of Patton and MacArthur meeting up and working together on the front lines of World War I is a great one). The histories of these men during peacetime only served to reinforce my impression that both of these men were eccentric, sometimes to the point of being bizarre - especiall