Monday, October 30, 2006

American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

This book by Jon Meacham covered a subject that is very near and dear to my heart: the role of religion in politics. I thoroughly enjoyed this, and came away feeling a little bit vindicated, a little bit chastened, and a lot enlightened. That is to say that there is something here to offend everyone who is hardened in his or her position on the separation of church and state.

This book goes a long way toward defining, in the words of our founders and everyone who built thereupon, what is meant by "the public religion". The public record is replete with discourses on the place of religion in the making of public policy, but it is seldom brought to light. Jon Meacham unearths these treasures with all their contexts and the personalities of the people involved. It is broadly philosophical that way. It reveals how extremes on both ends of the church-state-separation spectrum have proof-texted their ways to their different conclusions. In the larger view of the Founders' thoughts is the historically accepted middle way.

I got this as an audiobook, but I encourage everyone to get this book in print, and buy a hi-lighter with it. You should also take notes. The audio was narrated by Nelson Runger. He did a great job, and this book gets 4 stars.

DM

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Whiteout, by Ken Follet

I will have to make this quick because I don't know how long I will have internet today. I am in the midst of firing Cox high-speed internet and getting the dreaded Bellsouth DSL back. At least with Bellsouth I had service all day instead of my current half-the-time experience.

Ken Follett is one of the best of the old spy novel genre. His first, The Eye of the Needle, published back in the late 70s, was the beginning of a long list of espionage/romance thrillers that had you glued to the story from beginning to end.

After the cold war ended, Follett groped for the right villains, but it just wasn't the same. He went after eco-terrorists in The Hammer of Eden, but it was a sub-par effort. He also tried reclaiming the past with Code to Red and The Hornet's Nest, but the old magic seemed to be missing. Then we suddenly had terrorist organizations after weapons of mass destruction, and Mr. Follett found his footing again.

Bravo! This has the right mix of dangerous, psychopathic killers and family intrigues to have you on the edge of your seat.

An upper class English family has everything we need: a widower scientist who owns a virus research firm, his proper daughter who has married a milquetoast professor, a bossy daughter who has married a lothario, a son who has gambled his way into debt to an organized crime boss, and a couple of randy teenaged cousins and other assorted small ones, all trapped in a house during a blizzard over the Christmas holiday. And this holiday is the perfect time for the black-sheep son to pay off his debt by helping the crime boss burgle the research firm.

The son used to do the computer work for his dad's firm, until he got busted by the company's security chief, a former cop named Toni who has the hots for the widower. It's the umpteenth time the thirty-something failure has let down his dad, and he is sinking deeper and deeper into debt when an opportunity to pay off the debt comes in the form of a heist. As an inside man, he can get them past security to get something for a third party with deep pockets. The son thinks it's just simple greed that drives this enterprise, until the night of the theft, when the people he gets into the lab start taking all the samples of a rare, incurable virus that could wipe out whole populations.

This book is rated R for sexual content, and gets 5 stars for being a terrific story that leaves you wanting another. Welcome back, Mr. Follett!

Friday, October 20, 2006

Velocity, by Dean Koontz

Deann Koontz is one of my favorite writers, so I don't know how I missed this 2005 release while reading "Life Expectancy", "Odd Thomas", "The Face", "The Husband", and the first 2 installments of his "Frankenstein" saga.

As in most Koontz novels, he straddles the line between horror and crime thriller. The difference is that he relies entirely on man's capacity for evil as opposed to outsourcing it to the spirit world.

In this tale, Billy Wiles is a local bartender who inexplicably receives a note telling him that his response will determine whether a young mother of two or a single man who will not be missed will die. It is his choice. He makes the choice by going to the police or not. To the cops, and one gets it; to the police, and the other dies. The letters get creepier and the deaths grislier as Billy tries to figure out who is doing this, and why he has been chosen to participate.

Koontz's gothic mindscapes and quirky characters make for an engrossing read. Some of his books are a bit repetitive, and this is a bit like "The Husband". This was a 3 star effort, which will tide me over until the 3rd "Frankenstein" book comes out.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe


I was a bit put off by the title, but it was written by Tom Wolfe, so I bit.

The forward tells about a research project in which cats are a part of some neurological experiment that turns them into sex crazed beasts that will copulate with anything in sight. There is a control group of cats that has not been altered, and it is discovered that they behave the same way after merely sharing the same laboritory where they could watch the others in action. I thought this was an ominous way to begin a novel about a studious girl from a small mountain community going to a top flight University on full academic scholarship.

Charlotte Simmons is not just smart. She is square, old-fashioned, and economically challenged in a sea of affluent, spoiled party animals. She is endlessly disappointed in the revelation that people who needed a 1400 SAT to get in cast off all semblance of intelligence after coming to college. And the college lets her down by failing to tag her French Lit class as one for athletes only. The players on the Dupont University NCAA Championship basketball team meet their language requirement by taking a class in which no French is actually spoken. Before she drops the class she meets one of the players, JoJo Johanson, who really wants to be an actual student instead of a "student athlete". Her offhand assessment of the players goads him into taking a harder class, which puts him at odds with his coach.

Other sub-plots include a Frat-boy with no real future, living entierely for his college years, trying to parlay his knowledge of a politician's on-campus indiscretion into a meal ticket; and a senior nerd-journalist who has written a paper for an athlete, and is not trying to save his academic future after its discovery. These are all related, and even resolved by the end, although not to everyone's satisfaction.

The language is raw and real. The sex is rather pedestrian except for the seduction scene of a virgin that is downright instructive. If you already have an intact, mature worldview, you will find this a disgusting expose of campus life. There wasn't near as much sex on campus when I was in school, and girls almost never used the F-word. But I know they do now, so the sex is probably just as ramped up.

Tom Wolfe is interviewed on the 25th disc of this set, and he went to many campuses around the country, including our own dear UF. Ours is the only town he mentions by name in the interview.

This story was entertaining, alarming, funny, erotic, but ultimately deflating. Charlotte ends up finding her significance in rather shallow satisfactions. I think JoJo was the most elevated character in the book, and I found myself pulling for him early. Maybe it's because I still pine away for the way I wasted my own short time in college on trivial things.

Parents who read this may think twice about sending their kids away to college.

Friday, October 13, 2006

Darker Than Night, by John Lutz


What a dud. I have listened to a lot of John Lutz, and I know he hits a klunker once in awhile, so I know he was due. This was one to miss.

The bright spot is that it was read by Scott Brick, who is second only to Frank Muller as a voice talent. But as good as Brick is, he cannot make up for a forced plot and weak characters. Then there is the lurid attention to body eviceration that is gross enough to be a distraction. It's enough to take you right out of the story and wonder if anyone is keeping an eye on Mr. Lutz.

The ending is absolutely farcical, and I was relieved that it was finally over. I'm glad I only had to listen to this one, as opposed to actually having to waste my aging eyeballs reading it. If it comes out in film, forget about it.

I am still pining away for my mp3 player. I am on an audiobook bender right now because I cannot feed my podcast addiction. Sure, I listen to a few on my computer, but it's not the same as listening while cleaning windows. Window cleaning does not interfere with concentration very much.

Right now I am listening to a very long Tom Wolf novel on CD. It's on 25 discs. I will get that review out to you next week.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

You're Wearing That? by Deborah Tannen

I actually heard an interview with the author on an NPR podcast, so I did a double take when I saw this in the library. I got it on cassette tape, and it was read by Cassandra Campbell. Ms. Campbell does a good job with the reading, and does not have a distracting accent or odd inflection like other book readers: Davina Porter and Jonathan Marosz respectively.

I have a wife and a daughter and my mother at home, so I thought this would help me to be a better referee. What I learned was that it will be difficult for me to be a referee, since the other players on the field each try to recruit me for one of the sides. And referees are not supposed to block for one of the players. We are just supposed to keep the game civil.

This book is the result of a great deal of research by Deborah Tannen, a professor at Georgetown University. She interviewed a lot of mothers and daughters, studied a lot of recorded conversations, and now presents a pretty thorough treatment on how mothers and daughters interact verbally and why that so often goes wrong. She also takes pains to present solutions to these problems.

Dr. Tannen has a Ph.D. in linguistics, which makes this a fairly authoritative work for the layperson. And she also draws on her own experiences as a daughter who has lost her mother not long ago. Her thoughtfulness keeps this from being neither an endless river of data nor an epidose of Jerry Springer. I had mostly feared the latter.

I have to admit, there are parts of this that had me thinking, "I would never give this to my wife or daughter," on the grounds that it could be inflamatory. But as I got toward the end, I was relieved that there were solutions presented. It was more than just, "Try to understand how the other person is feeling."

Tannen begins by helping us to understand that there are messages and meta-messages (the context and baggage that come with the words), and that it is the meta-messages that are the loudest. That is why you can say something as innocent sounding as, "What time are you going to be here?" and it can start a conflict. If the mother has a long history of criticizing her daughter for being late, and the daughter has a history of over-promising in when she can get there, things can spiral down quickly.

Dr. Tannen has found that email and text messaging have been helpful in some mother-daughter relationships. They provide some breathing room and give each party a chance to be more thoughtful, at least in the case of email. In my own experience, my daughter may not want to answer her cell phone sometimes, but a text message will be burning a hole in her pocket until she can steal a glance at it. And if you do it right, it can make her call home.

I gave this 4 stars.

Don

Monday, October 09, 2006

Fear the Night, by John Lutz


If you follow my reading list, you will discover that I have a weakness for crime fiction. Perhaps it is because I am a member of that over-stimulated generation that was the first to grow up with the television as an older sibling that I believe that, if you don't have conflict, you don't have a story. But perhaps it's because characters are best revealed in crisis, and I just love good characters.

John Lutz isn't my favorite writer, but he's pretty dependable. This is a pretty standard police drama in which a man is terrorizing New York City with his seemingly random sniper attacks. He's someone the police have dealt with before, and he misses his nemesis, retired detective Vincent Repetto, and he wants to draw him into the investigation. Repetto doesn't want to respond to the call. He's ready to take his life back and give more time to his family, but the Night Sniper draws him out by making it personal.

John Lutz is a good writer, but he's no John Sanford, who has actually succeeded in bringing tears to my eyes with a shocking ending. But I don't remember the title. Sorry...

Don

My MP3 player is broken...

Fortunately, I bought a replacement warrantee from Best Buy last year, when I got the iRiver Player. I just love my little toy. It has a Gigabyte of memory, plays mp3 and wma files, and FM tuner, and a surprisingly good voice recorder. Well, the tuner stopped working a few months ago, but that wasn't enough to make me replace it.

The only thing I regretted was that it would not play the wma files that had DRM: Digital Rights Management. This is the encryption software that keeps you from moving copyrighted material from your computer to another device or burning it onto a CD. I sort of understand this, but the stuff I was wanting to move to my MP3 player is stuff you can get for free at netlibrary.org. You use your library card number to register for an account with them, download audio books for free, and they expire in about 3 weeks. And the downloads are very fast.

Well, there are some mp3 players that will play DRM protected files. Net library has a list of those "approved" players. And since Best Buy will be sending me a gift card in exchange for the player, I can go buy one of the other ones. So, this is a good thing! I think...

The only bad part is that I have to mail the player off. I've had to jump through a few hoops, and I may be without an mp3 player for 4 weeks. Aaaaaargh! So, I will be using those antiquated tape players and CD players for awhile. Dangit.

Don

Friday, October 06, 2006

Company Man, by Joseph Finder

Last year I listened to Finder's last book, Paranoia, and it was such a good time that I have been dogging the library waiting for another.

This was another corporate suspense novel, which I rather enjoy, but this one had a lot more going on than did Paranoia. Nick Conover is the CEO of a major manufacturer of office furniture, and he is a single parent to a surly teenage son and a pre-teen daughter. His wife died in a car accident the previous year, and now Nick is the town pariah after a layoff of 5,000 employees. So it's no wonder that the small town police are half-hearted in their attempt to find out who has been breaking into Nick's house and leaving ominous messages scrawled on the wall, even after the perpetrator kills the family dog and leaves it floating in the pool.

Looming just as large is the sneaky way that some of the people in his own company are trying to undermine his authority and sell his company to a Pacific Rim investment company. But the real dilemma begins when Nick kills and intruder on his property, and spends the rest of the book avoiding the law.

A complex story, with many well-written characters made this a real "tape turner". Yes, I got this one on tape instead of CD, so I had to use an actual tape player. This is not the most "family friendly" book, with F-bombs falling like rain, as they do in most detective fiction. Yes, there is a detective, an African-American woman named Audrey Rhymes. Her husband is one of the layoffs from Nick's factory, and their marriage is a difficult one. He is sitting at hime, watching TV and getting fat. She is losing patience with him while trying to be understanding. She is a devout Christian, and there are many Bible references and a refreshing amount of spiritual content that is not designed to make her look bad, as so many books do. And this juxtaposition of this good woman with a rather profane line of work was done, seemingly, with no agenda. I have no idea what Joseph Finder's take on Christianity is, but this depiction worked very well as part of the story.

I haven't used a "star system" for rating these books, but I guess if I were giving them out on a one through four scale, this would be a 3 star book.

Don Marsh

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life


I got this from my library on 6 audio CDs. Since I don't like to listen to a CD player while I am working, (too much skipping, and a drain on batteries), I copied the discs to my hard drive and then I sent them to my iRiver mp3 player.

This was Ben's life from where his ancesters came from to beyond his death. This book takes in Franklin as a whole person: the precocious teenager who loved to write and crack jokes with grown-ups. In fact, he said that humor was the quickest way for a boy to insert himself into adult gatherings. Everyone likes a wit.

As he grew up, he became the consummate networker and image forger. He loved to engage in commerce as much as conversation. He formed a philosophical society in his early 20s that helped him expand his influence in his home town and across the country, abroad, and throughout history.

He was so successful as a printer that he retired from business at 42 and started to fid new ways to improve the world around him through the formation of libraries, fire departments, and as an inventor. He never stopped trying to improve himself and the world around him.

This book was wonderfully written and performed.

DonTWC