The Pale Horseman, by Bernard Cornwell

This book was obtained from the Alachua County Public Library, is on CD, and is 14 hours and 35 minutes long. It is ably narrated by Tom Sellwood.

Uhtred returns, and he is nastier than ever. Perhaps it only seems that way because he is no longer the youth we made excuses for. He is also much more focussed on regaining the lands of his noble heritage, and he has the best chance of gaining them back under Alfred, who is trying to get England free of the Danes.

Alfred (one day to be referred to as "the Great") has tried negotiating his way to peace with the savage invaders, and each time he is betrayed. Lives and lands are lost, but Alfred, who is portrayed here as a bit of a religious nincompoop, keeps trying to use peaceful means while trying to save his enemies' souls. Uhtred finds this insufferable. Even though he likes the Danes, he is willing to kill all that he must to regain his own security. As you recall, Uhtred was raised a Dane after being captured as a boy, looks and dresses like a Dane, speaks the language, and is a very capable warrior and spy.

In spite of Alfred's well-meaning incompetence as a military leader, enough things break his way to keep him in the hunt for a unified English nation. So far, the Angles, the Saxons, the Britons, and the Northumberlands have warred on each other from time to time, and it is only now that a common enemy is making them work together. Although Alfred is pretty hard to take by the warriors, it is his vision that eventually saves England and its future.

Uhtred and the other bloodthirsty Saxons are indispensable, lethal tools in the service of Alfred. Neither could have prospered without the other. In this book, Alfred is a much better character than he was in the last. And he seems somewhat vindicated in his steadfast faith that God is for him, even when Alfred keeps screwing things up.

There are historical notes at the end. This one only gets 3 stars because it was not quite as interesting as the first one. I am going to take a break from Uhtred for about a week. Then I will take up the latest installment, Lords of the North.

The Last Kingdom, by Bernard Cornwell

This book came from the library. It is 12 hours and 58 minutes long, was on 11 CDs, and was narrated by Tom Sellwood.

Be warned: I am on a Bernard Cornwell bender. I saw an add for his latest novel and decided to check with the library to see if they had added any of his titles lately. I struck gold. They had all 3 novels in this new series, begun in 2005. When I put them on reserve, I had no idea that all 3 would be available in just a few days. I must take this opportunity!

This is not one of those smutty romance novels disguised as historical fiction. This is more like "Braveheart", only without the romance and idealism.

Cornwell uses some real persons from history, but his protagonist is almost always some nobody who is on the scene and taking an active part. Uhtred is the son of a minor nobleman in the late 9th century. At 10 years old, while his father's army is repelling Danish invaders, Uhtred is captured, enslaved, and eventually adopted by a danish warlord named Ragnar.

Uhtred's brother had been killed while spying on the Danes before the conflict began which killed his father. Now Uhtred is being raised by Ragnar as a Dane, unencumbered by any rules or priests, and he begins to prefer it. Nonetheless, Uhtred grows up wanting his former estate more and more, which frequently leaves him swinging between the 2 sides when it serves his own interests.

Eventually, Uhtred ends up serving Alfred the Great, Lord of the last Kingdom in England. He is all that has stood between the Danes and a complete conquest of England. This is very much a religious war as well as a war for land, which is what motivates the Danish raiders in search of better lands than their own. The church, portrayed as a hobbling factor to devout English monarchs, wants peace at any price and is always pressuring its secular rulers to let God do their fighting for them. This only encourages the pagan Danes, who see the English as weakened by their Christians. After a bad storm takes out half the Danish fleet, the church and Alfred feel vindicated, but Uhtred is still unconvinced. He still wears Thor's Hammer charm around his neck, and believes more in fate than in any personal god.

Uhtred is 20 at the end of this book, and you can tell there will be more. There is an epilogue in which the author tells about his approach to using the history, and embellishing it, in the service of telling a fictional tale. It is good to know these things if you are a stickler for detail. This is a 4 star book, well-read by the narrator.

A Rage for Glory, by James Tertius DeKay

This audiobook was 8 hours and 56 minutes long, and was narrated by John McDonough.

This is the heroic, yet tragic, story of Stephen Decatur, America's forgotten naval hero.

This story begins with the report of Decatur's mortal wound and painful death from a duel in 1820, when he was only 41 years old and at the zenith of his career. So famous and highly regarded was he that it is entirely possible that he would have been President instead of Andrew Jackson, a less celebrated entity.

The author, having told us the end, goes back to the beginning and tells Decatur's life story. He was born in the middle of the American Revolution, in 1779, while his father served as an American privateer: a sea captain who ran blockades for profit.

Young Stephen goes to sea with his father and learns about sailing as well as the old man's obsession with honor. Of course, they were in good company. The times were such that honor was frequently defended with deadly force. Stephen Decatur grew up in a dueling culture, which was only an extension of a similar worldview that valued fame and glory above mere wealth.

These values both make and break the men of those time. As a young naval officer, Decatur steals into the harbor of Tripoli and boards a heavily guarded ship that had been captured by the Barbary Pirates. He and his small band put all the guards to the sword, so they die quietly, set the ship ablaze, and barely escape to sea under musket and cannon fire. This exhilarating deed deprives America's enemies of their most potent weapon, a retrieves the honor lost by the captain who surrendered the ship. This famous deed earns him the rank of captain at the age of 25, ahead of others on the list for promotion. It is only the beginning of a life of both military and diplomatic success that makes him a household word for the next 16 years.

But the undoing of Stephen Decatur is under way from soon thereafter. An early captain he served under, James Barron, is court marshaled for something unrelated to Decatur, other than the fact that the younger officer had to serve on the board of inquiry, even though he tried to get out of it. Barron was barred from military service for 5 years, and went overseas to captain ships privately, though he made little from it.

This resentment festered for years. Barron frequently wrote Decatur to attempt to provoke him into a duel. Decatur resisted as long as he could, but finally decided to get it over with. He actually confessed to a friend that he knew he might die because, although he was a crack shot, he did not want to shoot Barron. He apparently hoped that they would both do what many duelists did to save face, and their lives: fire into the ground or overhead. But Barron set the deadliest terms possible; that they present, aim, and then fire with a count of three. Decatur only insisted that he be close to his home in case he should need a doctor.

There was also an author interview at the end, which easily made this a 4 star book.

The Summer We Got Saved, by Pat Cunningham Devoto

This audiobook was free from NetLibrary.com, was 12 hours and 53 minutes long, and was narrated by Katie Firth.

Tina and her younger sister, Tab, are part of a southern family in the 1960's that is collectively ambivalent about its connection with the founding of the Ku Klux Klan. The older members are proud and defensive of their heritage. Tab and Tina are more concerned about makeup and the pecking order at the malt shop. The girls' father, Charles, is hoping the coming changes will happen smoothly and gradually. The girls' aunt Eugenia is a flaming civil rights activist, and she is here on her annual, excruciating family visit.

Eugenia proposes to take the girls to visit some other distant relative for a week, and the other adults are relieved to let her go. What no one realizes is that Eugenia actually plans on taking the girls to the Highlander Folk School, a training camp for union and civil rights activists since 1932.

A parallel story involves Maudie, a childhood friend of the girls who went to Tuskegee Institute for polio rehabilitation, and is now running a voter education program at a black Missionary Baptist Church. She is not entirely welcome there. Blacks in the community don't all get it, and see this activism as a nuisance that will only draw fire from the local rednecks. It's an uphill struggle for Maudie, who fits in with no group. She is the "crippled girl" and is treated with derision by the young "cotton girls" who live to drink and carouse.

Tab's clueless innocence isn't quite ruined by what she has learned by participating in a sit-in at a Woolworth's counter. After all, she gets to go home from all of this. But she will never simply parrot the family lore any more. It's not that she thinks it isn't real. She has simply encountered something more real.

I gravitate toward stories like these because I lived through the Civil Rights Era on television. It simply was not an issue in my town, and in my school. I never went to a segregated school. My Boy Scout troop was integrated, but we never thought about it as such. I had an African-American History class in the 6th grade (1969), and it was a real immersion into the incredible injustices that were perpetrated in the past. It made me wonder if people in the South were actually human. Now I live here, and sometimes feel like I am not in on the secrets. I think I may have gotten a few clues from this engaging story. It gets 4 stars from me.

Undead and Unwed, by Mary Janice Davidson

This book was a free download from NetLibrary.com, was narrated by Nancy Wu, and was 9 hours and 10 minutes long.

This one may cost me what few credibility points I have in regard to my taste in books. I was browsing the slim pickings in the humor section of NetLibrary, and saw that there were 5 in the "Undead" series. They sounded like they were probably funny mind candy. I was mostly right. The chewy center snuck up on me.

This was the first in the series about a laid-off secretary named Betsy Taylor (cue the Liz Taylor gags) who walks into the path of an SUV, dies, and rises out of her casket to discover that she is one of "the undead". Her first reaction is to be appalled at what her family let her wear into eternity.

Soon after she begins her sojourn in the land of the living, she finds out that she is actually a vampire and has some strange new powers. The vampire community believes she is their prophesied queen, but she is having none of it.

This is an exceedingly silly book that reads like a sitcom. Though it is a likable sitcom at first, I felt ambushed toward the end when it turned into a smutty romance novel. It was a fairly sexy book before it got graphic. Ms. Davidson did a pretty good job of demonstrating how vampires can be a good vehicle for eroticism. I felt it went over the edge about 15 or 20 minutes before the end.

I give it 2 stars because I actually did laugh at some of it.

The Rabbit Factory, by Larry Brown

This novel was a free download from NetLibrary.com, was 12 hours and 23 minutes long, narrated by Tom Stechschulte, and was the author's last novel (2003) before he died.

If you are a fan of Carl Hiaasen, you will love this book. It reads like a collision of Southern short stories about flawed people having moments of nobility, with sometimes hilarious results.

A rich septuagenarian with performance issues is trying to hold on to his hot young wife with kindness and a love of old movies. A young hooker is doing community service in a nursing home when she brains an abusive nurse with a metal pitcher after watching her slap an old man around. Now she is on the run from the law. An ex-con is driving a truckload of dope and frozen meat for a mobster when he hits a deer. It's a big deer, and he likes venison, so he stops to put it in the back of his refrigerated truck. When he opens it up, he finds that some of the meat he is hauling looks like body parts. Just then a police car pulls off the road behind him...and he acts rashly, shall we say.

There is more than this going on, so you won't be bored. Not every thread is neatly tied off; at least, not the way we'd like it. But it is entertaining and the characters are largely likable. It gets 3 stars.

The Takeover, by Stephen Frey

This is the author's first novel, was written in 1995, and was 12 hours and 47 minutes long. The narrator was Paul Hecht.

One of the first things I picked up on was the awkwardness of a book written just before momentous changes. This book was pre-September, 11, pre-Internet, and pre-cell phone. Yes, someone has a "car phone" (remember those??), and the main character has a "Bloomberg terminal" at his apartment so he can work at home, but it seems pretty clunky when so much has happened to alter our lives in the past 12 years.

Aside from the bad luck of timing, this was a pretty sorry book anyway. The politics is too preachy, the characters are not very compelling, and there are some holes in the story that are not resolved. And the obviously Clintonesque Democratic President is an innocent man beset by evil Republican villains out to frame him. More bad luck.

There was also a romantic interest too many. It divided any emotional power that should have been focussed on just one relationship. It was confusing at times, and never very interesting. There was nothing to pull for.

In defense of the author, (as I give him 1 star for this one), "The Day Trader" (2002) was much, much better. It was a 4 star book. "The Takeover" was worth missing.

Gone, by Jonathan Kellerman

I got this book on tape from the library. It's on 7 tapes and is 11 hours and 46 minutes long, and read by John Rubenstein.

Gone is the 23rd novel that features Dr. Alex Delaware, a child psychologist who periodically does some work for the police. This work usually involves helping a police detective solve grisly serial murders. The detective that gets paired with Delaware is Milo Sturgis, a rumpled, dumpy, cynical cop who is an outsider at his department because he is gay and out of the closet. He is also the best written character in these books. Sturgis is all business, with his sexuality only being a part of his personal landscape.

In this story, a series of disappearances is linked to an acting workshop led by ditzy heiress. She has two brothers. one of whom is the "responsible one" who handles the family estate, while the other is borderline retarded. The family's rental properties are cleaned by another man who has a history of being a peeping tom, and everyone who lives near him keeps their kids away from him.

Kellerman's strength is his characters. The stories are hit and miss. This one is typical of his work, so it is fairly predictable. If all his characters were as well done as Sturgis, it would be easier to forgive him. Alex Delaware serves a necessary purpose, but he has never caught on with me. The women in his life are superfluous. He has been apart from his usual love interest, Robin, who is a fairly two-dimensional hottie. I was disappointed to see that she was back, and that she has had custody of Alex's dog, Spike. I mean, what kind of man lets a woman dump him AND take his dog??

John Rubenstein's narration and the pleasure of Milo Sturgis' company are all that save this from being a real dud. But it still gets only 2 stars.

Down From Troy, by Richard Selzer

This book was 9 hours and 9 minutes long, and was narrated by Sam Gray.

I got this from Net Library, and it got my attention because I grew up in Troy like the author, Richard Selzer. Dr. Selzer is about 3 years older than my Dad, who also grew up in Troy, NY. I phoned home and was actually surprised when I found out that they did not know each other.

Dr. Selzer loves a good turn of phrase, and his writing is nearly poetic in its narration. It was, at times, a sentimental trip down memory lane for me, although I didn't think he covered enough of the Holy ground for my taste. This book was much more about how and why he became a doctor, and about his parent's opposing influences on him than anything else. Troy is just a backdrop, and one before my time. Only some of the real icons of the city, like Frear Park, Manory's, the Troy Music Hall, the Green Island Bridge, and the Troy Public Library (where I got my first library card), get much description that is familiar to me.

By the time I grew up in the 60s and 70s, the gangsters and the whore houses were all gone. So was much of its manufacturing. Time was passing Troy by. This book will be most interesting to modern Trojans, as well as fans of Depression Era biography. For its excellent writing, hobbled only by too much attention to medicine, it gets 3 stars.