The Mighty and the Almighty, By Madeleine Albright

I downloaded this from Audible.com as my free selection for buying my Insignia mp3 player. I am not yet a member of Audible, but I am giving it consideration. More about that at the end of this post.

I was no fan of the Clinton administration, nor of Madeleine Albright, so I went into this book expecting a lot of political CYA. The reviews at Amazon were none too positive, either. But, as a person who cares intensely about the relationship between politics and religion in his country, it was a must. I was pleasantly surprised.

Yes, there was a great deal of criticism of the Bush Administration, and a good deal of it was justified, but she was quite even-handed in her evaluations, and even defended the President on several occasions. Best of all, she wanted to issue a corrective to future diplomats everywhere; that they be less ignorant of religion when dealing with other nations. This is not the Cold War, when our biggest concern was the Soviet Union, a government that was atheistic on paper, and in practice.

She also gives caution to how we deal with Turkey, a Muslim nation with a secular government, which has the distinction of having positive diplomatic relations with Israel. The Turks are going through the process of becoming a member of the European Union, and is a member of NATO, with the 2nd biggest armed forces in that organization next to ours. I learned a lot about Turkey from this book that I had never heard before.

One of the reviews I read was also critical of her reading voice. This person may have had an ax to grind for the former Secretary of State. I thought she did a fine job.

I give this a book 4 stars for being informative, timely, and thought-provoking. It was well-paced and engaging, and the narration was above average.

As far as Audible is concerned, it would be an incredible break in programming for me to start paying for audiobooks. NetLibrary is free, although limited to a little over 1,400 titles. The brick & mortar library is also free, but the act of ripping the CDs and reloading them is a nuisance, not to mention being limited by their inventory and its availability. I might want to have access to the content of audible once in awhile, but it would not be often enough for me to drop $14.95 per month for the silver plan (1 audiobook per month plus an audio version of either the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times available every weekday) or $22.95 per month for the gold plan (add an audiobook to the silver plan each month). The "Listener" membership is only $9.95 per year and gives you a 30% discount on audiobooks you buy, plus access to some free content that is made available regularly. That last one is a lot easier to swallow, but I already have loads of free content via podcasts. Still, if I end up buying a couple of books during the year, it might be worth it.

Later! I'm embarking on a 20 hour novel, so it will be a few days before I post again!

Life with the Insignia NS-DV2G

OK. I've had more than a week with this little wonder. Now it is time to weigh in on both its usefulness, as well as strategies for its use.

When I had my iRiver IR-899, I had a nifty mp3 player with 1GB of memory, and FM radio, and a voice recorder with a built in condenser mike. I don't listen to music, but as a podcast device, it was awesome, easy to use, and the PC interface software was the greatest.

This device, due to the extra space and the video capabilities, has seduced me into trying to do a lot of new things. This has lead to mistakes being made by the user (me), and a reassessment of what I wanted this thing for.

To begin with, I loaded a lot of songs from my CD collection: about 100. I liked the idea of having Al Green, Marvin Gaye, James Taylor, and even Neil Diamond, at my fingertips when the mood struck me. However, my podcasts were mixed in with them inexplicably, and I had to skip songs manually to get to the next one. This caused me to lose the set-it-and-forget-it convenience of the old method. Now, I just load a few songs that I don't mind interspersing with my podcasts, although they still get loaded on the device in an unpredictable order.

Part of the problem is that the management software, Rhapsody, is more interested in dragging you to their music store to buys stuff than in helping you manage your playlist. In fact, it cares not a lick about your preferences. I'd like to figure out how to get Windows Media Player to manage it, but this "WindowsPlaysForSure" device does not appear to speak to WMP. It wants to be managed by the proprietary music store software, Rhapsody. A pox on them.

Videos need a separate software, ArcSoftMediaConverter2, in order to convert the file and to move it to Insignia. That is not so bad, but it keeps bugging me to register the software, even though I already did, and I can't make it stop. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

It's also important to know that although the player will save your place in a long audiobook, if you switch to another book, you have to start the other book all over again. And if you synch the player with your computer, THAT will make you lose your place. So, plan ahead...

I will continue to tell you about this player later. In the meantime, if anyone has found a way to use other management software other than "Crapsody", let me know...

Your Marketing Sucks, by Mark Stevens

This was another free download from NetLibrary.org. I am always interested in business books, with a particular interest in biographies and CEO memoirs, but I am also interested in sales and marketing.

This was a good read, full of horror stories that will either help you avoid marketing mistakes, OR help you position your bloodsucking ad agency under the idiots who make them. It's mostly a good shake-up for your marketing paradigm if you are the kind of person who arrives at a marketing budget figure before you know what to spend it on.

As a lifelong cheapskate, and a hard-boiled skeptic about the value of most advertising, I found this both affirming and instructive: affirming because I am already on board most of this stuff, and instructive because I see how insidious the trap is that draws us into conventional ideas about marketing. I am in the middle of a new project that is pretty innovative; yet I find myself being drawn out of my guerrilla marketing mindset and into the lazy way of simply repeating what has already been done.

Four stars for usefulness and entertainment value.

The Footprints of God, by Greg Iles

This was a new author for me, and frankly I had never heard of him. But the title made me at least look at it, and it seemed to be some sort of thriller. I had a lot of books already, so I didn't feel like I was taking such a risk by getting it, and then being stuck with nothing but it to listen to. Well, I was very pleasantly surprised.

The story begins with the death of a Nobel prize winning physicist being murdered in his office in such a way that his killer knows for sure that it was a murder. Only one person suspects otherwise, and he believes that he is next.

This got off to a slow start, in spite of the murder, and it may be because of the subject matter: the government's goal of creating a supercomputer with human intelligence. Our hero, Dr. David Tennant, is a medical ethicist who has been appointed to Project Trinity to keep an eye on the morals of this operation. He is also one of several scientists who has had his brain scanned with some super MRI machine and had all his brain data stored away for future use. You see, in order for a supercomputer to have real human intelligence, it helps to add a real human.

The scientists who have been scanned have each developed a neurological disorder as a side effect. Dr. Tennant's is narcolepsy, which causes him to fall into deep sleep with little warning. During these sleep episodes, he has dreams that seem to be messages from God, and David Tennant, an atheist, is struggling with this idea as much as he is with the instructions that are in the dream.

When the same people who wanted the first scientist dead come after David Tennant, he runs but he is not alone. His psychiatrist, Dr. Rachel Weiss, believed he was just hallucinating. Now she knows that something is up, and yet harbors doubts about David's sanity as she runs with him. But is she running with him because David's would be killers are using her to track him?

This would be a fairly routine novel of its genre if it weren't that the author spends so much time in David's head, dealing with God, Jesus, and the meaning of life. And this was the most riveting part of the book. I wanted to know more about how he resolved his "memories" than I did about the supercomputer, which does achieve human intelligence, and takes over the world...for a little while.

This was really different, and I enjoyed it a great deal. I couldn't get the tapes in and out fast enough. I give it 4 stars.

Patriarch, by Richard Norton Smith

This was my first successful download from NetLibrary, and it was a long book, coming in at almost 19 hours. It was written by Richard Norton Smith in 1993 and was narrated by Nelson Runger, one of the better voices in audiobook publishing.

I have been on a real Founding Fathers bender lately, and I still have a biography of Samuel Adams on my hard drive, waiting for me to cleanse my palette with some light-hearted silliness. Patriarch was a very engrossing story of George Washington and his often overlooked administration. Midway through this book I realized I knew next to nothing about George Washington, the post-war Confederation and his 2 terms as president under our present Constitution. I also learned a great deal about Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, and the rest of what you could call the original cast of "West Wing".

There is enough infighting and animosity inside George's administration that I can no longer think of the expression, "the Founders' original intention," without rolling my eyes. They were all over the map on every subject, and many of them couldn't stand each other. There were so many intrigues that the first President did not want to finish his first term, let alone get stuck with another. The pressures of maintaining the peace was just as challenging as winning the war, and it all seems quite familiar with our current controversies.

I would have loved every minute of this book if there had not been so many of them. I started getting lost in the Washington family adventures after awhile, and I think we could have done without the frequent appearances of various nieces and grandsons. George and Martha Washington had no offspring of their own, but they took on the task of helping to raise the children of relatives and those from Martha's first marriage.

The overall effect is a great deal of interesting history worthy of 4 stars, interrupted by bursts of 2 star soap opera. Overall, it's a 3 star effort that every student of American history should read.

DM

Parallel Lies, by Ridley Pearson

A man loses his family to a faulty rail crossing and seeks revenge against the company. A mere settlement was not enough. He wants them to admit they were wrong.

Secondary story: the man who is investigating a series of train derailments got this job after a police homicide department punts him under the shadow of police brutality charge.

The man who is derailing the trains is also being hunted by the railroad's private security force, and they want him dead. The company's CEO fears that his new bullet train will be sabotaged, and he wants to tie up a certain loose end without resurrecting the old rail crossing case and the ensuing cover-up.

I've read better novels by Ridley Pearson. This one gets 2-1/2 stars. The villain is too weak, the characters just short of interesting. There are a couple of well-written, suspenseful scenes, but it doesn't carry the book.

Leonardo Da Vinci, by Sherwin Nuland

I absolutely loved this. It came on 4 audio CDs and it told me things about Leonardo Da Vinci that I never knew.

We all knew he was a great painter and inventor, and we may even be away of his interest in anatomy. But "interest" does not come close to describing his passion for knowing how we are made.
Leonardo was a one-man CSI unit. He dissected cadavers in minute detail, drew thousands of pictures of what he found, and made discoveries hundreds of years before they were officially "discovered" by the scientific community. This colorful workaholic was so obsessed with his inquiries that it kept him from finishing many paintings for which he had been paid. It was rough on his art career.

It would be hard to do justice to the life of Leonardo in just 4 audio CDs, but Sherwin Nuland does it admirably. He both enlightens and delights you, while leaving you wanting more.

Four stars and a comet for this one.

DM

Got a new MP3 player!!!

I finally got my store credit from Best Buy, and I have already spent it. If you recall, I was mourning the loss of my iRiver player last month. After a year of spectacular performance, I broke it by bumping into the sharp corner of a desk. Fortunately, I bought one of those product replacement warranties and after about 4 weeks, I got my replacement.

At first, I was disappointed because Best Buy no longer carries my iRiver player that I was used to. But I was ready to make a change so I could find one that would play the audiobooks from NetLibrary.org. That was my little friend's only downfall, so I was open for a change.

I decided to take a chance. Best Buy has an in-house brand, Insignia, that makes a video iPod knockoff for $119. It also plays the WMA DRM files that come from paid subscription services like Audible.com. I wasn't absolutely sure it would work with NetLibrary. And NetLibrary's list of approved devices is not very up-to-date. It was a gamble.

Even if it didn't work, this is a dandy mp3 and video player with 2GB of memory, an FM radio, and voice recording if I get an external mike. I didn't like that last part, since my iRiver had a built in condenser mike that was awesome. But, I had already decided that working with the audio files I created for my elections website was too much work, so I could live without the condenser mike. I could have gotten a 4GB Insignia for $30 more, but I was trying to stay within the store credit I had, and the tax would have taken me over the $151 and change I had from Best Buy. I got the player and 50 blank CDs and another flash memory stick, since my daughter lost my other one. That got me within 2 bucks of my limit.

The best news is: IT WORKED!!! I downloaded a free audiobook from NetLibrary, opened it with Windows Media Player 10 first, so I would be prompted to get the permissions key (you need to log in with your NetLibrary username and password), and then moved it to my new player. And the book plays! Woo Hoo!!!!!!! This will be GREAT!

And the 2.2 inch screen is clear and bright for video. It came preloaded with some music vids, which I will delete soon, and I moved some of my own over to the device, and it works great. The synching interface is not as intuitive as the iRiver was, but I figured it out after only a minimal amount of snarling and complaining.

I'll keep you up with its performance...

Terrorist, by John Updike

I want to start by saying that I have never really cared for John Updike, and I have avoided him. Maybe it was because I had to read him in high school and that I just didn't get him then. I can't remember. Besides, I thought he had to be dead or too addle-brained to write by now. But when I saw this on the library shelf, with a 2006 publication date, I had to bite.

It's about a boy who grows up with his Irish-American mother, who has been abandoned by her Egyptian immigrant husband. Perhaps it's an attempt to find an identity with his father, but the youngster embraces Islam at 11, and is a devoted student of a local Imam with Jihadist tendencies. By the time he graduates from high school, he is without dreams of his own, and only wants to please Allah. He is disgusted by the corrupt American culture of sexual immorality, exemplified by his own mother's serial dating and his provocatively dressed schoolmate, Joryleen. Joryleen invites the boy, Ahmad, to her church to hear her sing, and he is no less repulsed by the religious fervor of her African-American congregation of Jesus worshipers.

The author really takes us inside this kid's head, and inside his neighborhood, with believable dialog and characters. I had to wonder to what lengths Mr. Updike had gone for the "flava" in this novel. Maybe he watched BET for a month, but it is a very realistic page-turner, which I didn't expect from this navel-gazing old New Yorker.

It was read by Christopher Lane, and his narration was a first for me. He did a great job. I give this one 4 stars.

DM

American Theocracy, by Kevin Phillips

I was so happy when I found out that this had been released as an audiobook. I have heard much about it, and I knew it would not be like a Bush-hating screed by Al Franken. Kevin Phillips is a very respected Conservative writer who has real problems with the Bush Administration, and I looked forward to this.

I am writing this just a couple of days after the Democrats took over Congress, so apparently rule of the Religious Right is over and the Rapture can begin. Just kidding. But I do mean to say that some things are going an as they usually do: the ebb and flow of ideological tides, washing out the side that has risen to its level of incompetence.

When I first heard a review of this book, my knee-jerk response was, "Great. Here we fundamentalist Christians are a minority of a minority, and we are the scapegoat for all the evils in the world. We are the new Jews. The cattle cars are in the distance and closing in."

Although I am still a bit stung by the way that bigotry against Christians is part of the current political zeitgeist, I do believe that some of your best critics are your enemies. They pull no punches, and sometimes they are right. For that reason, I think that this is an important book for Conservative Christian activists to read. For one, it might help us understand that if we want to advance the Gospel, that sometimes you would rather be wronged. Victory never converts, and it can be a stumbling block to those who might eventually believe, except that you are blinded by your desire for a tax cut.

In spite of the title, and some of the persisting disagreements I have with the author about religious issues, most of the book is about oil dependency and world financial markets. It's very educational, and worth wearing out a couple of high-lighters if you get the paper version of this book. It's rich in history, reaching back from the 1500s to the present for examples of where other maturing nations have failed. It's hard to argue with the patterns as you watch them emerge in your own lifetime.

I hope this will make Christians wiser as they continue to use their rights like every other constituency group. Simply bailing out is not the answer. And becoming more ruthless and demanding is counter-productive in the long run.

There is also an interesting feud taking place between Kevin Phillips and the New York Times Collumnist, David Brooks. It's worth reading about.

DM

Other Terrific Audio Content

I got an expansion card for my Palm T/X, and now I can download and listen to podcasts, which I do as filler between books. A recent one was a Cato Institute Book Forum on Liberty for All: Reclaiming Individual Privacy in a New Era of Public Morality (Yale University Press, 2006), by Elizabeth Price Foley. It includes dissenting comments by William Galston, a former adviser to President Clinton and an expert on family policy. This is very thought provoking, informative material on the nature of personal sovreignty and public morality.

I also like to listen to Scott Sigler's podcast novels. He releases them as weekly episodes, and they often include listener comments and good natured ragging on his audience. And, as Scott says, his books include, "adult language, adult situations, and lots, and LOTS of violence!" He has released these free audiobooks into the wild and include the titles: Earthcore, Ancestor, Infection, and The Rookie is now in progress. They are sci-fi thrillers and I have enjoyed them a great deal. So far, Ancestor was the best one, but The Rookie is about as good.

I gotta go.

DM

Killer Instinct, by Joseph Finder

This was a good one. It came out just this year, and the library had it on CD. It's another great narration by Scott Brick.

Jason Steadman is a successful salesman at a company that makes big, hi-def screens. He's losing his passion to succeed just as his young wife is yearning to start a family. She comes from a well-to-do family, and is dissatisfied with Jason's lack of fire.

All this seems to change after Jason has an accident where he meets an ex-special forces guy named Kurt who drives the tow truck. Jason helps the guy out and gets him a job in security with his corporation, in spite of the dishonorable discharge he got from the military. Not long after Kurt is hired, things start breaking Jason's way. His enemies at the company have misfortune befall them and competitors have a rash of bad luck that brings customers back into the fold. It seems that Kurt is grateful and is doing a little espionage to repay Jason's kindness.

Both Jason and his enemies start getting suspicious, and Kurt has to start covering his tracks. Kurt's offhand remark about what the Marines say, "No better friend; No worse enemy," starts to come true. Jason is now in danger because he has turned on his friend.

There is lots of eerie high tech crime here to go with the brutality. It gives one pause to see how corporate security can be used to control and manipulate people, for both good and evil. It made me wonder what other things could have been going on at Hewlet-Packard this year when they got in trouble for monitoring email. Perhaps the employees had read this book and freaked.

A 4-Star effort for Joe Finder (pronounced with the short i sound, as in "window") with no graphic sex, but some graphic language.

DM