Basic Economics, by Thomas Sowell

This audiobook was obtained for free from Overdrive Audio, the media vendor used by the Alachua County Public Library. This audiobook is 18 hours and 31 minutes long, is in WMA format, and is read by Brian Emerson.

Although this was informative, interesting, and entertaining, it was also very long. I think Mr. Sowell's publishers should have turned this out a four books of a more digestible size. Each oe would have been a good advertisement for the rest of them. Therefore, they would have sold a lot more of them. But, as Mr. Sowell postulates, Economics is not about how to run a business or make money. To quote Lionel Robbins in his 1932 essay, it is, "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." Sowell uses a variation of this statement throughout the book.

In each section of the book, whether he is talking about labor, international banking, farming, or war management, Sowell has historical examples of the misallocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses. One of the early examples in his book is how the Japanese military ran out of qualified pilots during World War 2 because they did not recycle their experienced pilots as instructors. What was learned from fighting in Manchuria in the late 30s and in the Pacific in the early 40s was lost as they were eventually shot down. Meanwhile, American fighters were rotated back to instruct new pilots, and air war changed dramatically.

This was very enlightening, and a must for our politicians in Washington, as well as all of us who elect them. I give it 4 stars.

Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer

This audiobook was obtained from Overdrive Audio through the Alachua County Library website. It was 7 hours and 6 minutes long.

This book originally came out in 1996, but is now getting fresh attention because it has recently been made into a movie. It's the story of Chris McCandless, a 24 year old Emory University graduate who forsakes modern life to become a modern Henry David Thoreau. Without telling his family, who all believe he will be attending law school, he gives away his college fund, starts using an assumed name, and heads out west to live a life at loose ends. His travels take him to remote places, from Mexico to the Dakotas, and ultimately to the Alaskan wilderness. It is there, at life's extremities, and with no help in sight, that he comes to a miserable end.

Krakauer tells this story as only another person who enjoys extreme living can tell it. He helps you to get to know Chris McCandless by exhaustive research, including Chris' last written accounts and interviews with the people who were touched by him along the way, and through his own insight as a person who has been bewitched by the wilderness experience. You may come away admiring or pitying Chris McCandless, but you will not be able to forget him. I know that I want to see the movie when it comes out. I give this one 4 stars.

Crowdsourcing, by Jeff Howe and Kirby Heyborne

This audiobook came from Overdrive Audio via the Alachua County Library's website. It is in Windows Media Audio format, and it was 9 hours and 45 minutes long.

If you are interested in keeping your business alive and growing in the 21st Century, this thought-provoking book will help you come out of the economic Dark Ages.

Before hiring experts, look to the crowd. In today's global community, you can find out what will work and what will not by accessing niche groups who will not only tell you what they like, but help you build it as well. Collaborative effort is not just for your research team, and your team may not even be on your payroll. Enormously important projects with global scope and billions at stake are created by virtual communities of passionate enthusiasts in partnership with professionals. The Linux operating system, Wikipedia, and a host of smaller enterprises are examples of the amazing power of crowds. These crowds can now be assembled into working units on very technical projects by using the Internet, and even small companies do it.

If you already have a can-do attitude, this will take it up to another level and change your paradigm. I give this book 4 stars.

I still have a blog...

If you have been wondering where I have been for almost 4 months, it's like this: business took off and I hired 3 people. Now business is dragging the bottom (as it usually does in June-July) and I am really hustling to keep my guys doing something. What I am trying to say is that whether I am training people or selling new accounts, I have precious little time alone in the world of audio any more. It's been a big change, and I hope to figure out how I am going to reintegrate audiobooks into my life. I enjoy them too much to quit.

I will post a review soon, but it will take a real effort to do so. It is also the escalation of the political season, and I am a very busy political activist. So please hang in there!

Don Marsh

The Appeal, by John Grisham

This audiobook was obtained from Overdrive Audio, through the Alachua County Public Library. It was 12 hours and 33 minutes long, and was narrated by Michael Beck.

Typical John Grisham story of noble, financially challenged attorneys doing battle with a huge company represented by the legal armies from Hell. In spite of being predictable and uncommonly preachy, it is still a good read. Characters and dialog pop off the page as a good writer does his job. If you have time on your hands and nothing else to read, it's worth three stars. If you have other books waiting, downgrade it to two and try a new author.

Rise and Shine, by Anna Quindlen

This audiobook was obtained for free from Netlibrary.com. It was 10 hours and 49 minutes long, and was narrated by Carol Monda.

Meghan and Bridget Fitzmaurice lost their parents at an early age. Meghan grew up to be a world famous host of a morning news show, Rise and Shine, while Bridget grew up to an unmarried social worker who also helps keep Meghan's family grounded. The city of New York is also a major character in this book, providing the classist backdrop that is constantly making itself heard.

Meghan's life takes a turn downward when she inadvertently drops a 4 megaton expletive before her mike is turned off on the way to a commercial. She is temporarily suspended while the show's producers figure out what to do, and Meghan decides to go into hiding while she sorts out her life, including her failing marriage.

It's an easy read and it wasn't boring. But I had a hard time caring enough about the characters to really get into it. I felt like a was treading water, waiting for my next book. For that, it's only worth 2 stars.

The Next Step in the Dance, by Tim Gautreaux

This audiobook was obtained from NetLibrary.com through the Alachua County Public Library. This book was 11 hours and 42 minutes long, and was narrated by Vernel Bagneris.

Paul and Colette Thibodeaux are a young married couple in an insular Cajun community called Tiger Island. Paul is a talented machinist who is happy with his work and just as happy to play his accordion and dance up a storm at the local pub. Colette is beautiful and bored, and deeply annoyed with her husband's contentment. One day she finds and excuse to leave him, and she makes her way to Los Angeles. She finds work similar to what she did at the bank back home, except there is more opportunity for advancement. She's smart, hard-working, and the boss likes her, so she is doing well when Paul decides to follow her. He is cool enough to give her some space, and he finds a job for his unique talents and he is doing well, too.

But not all that glitters is gold. They are both working for unscrupulous creeps, so they both end up returning to Tiger Island just after the jobs have all dried up. They are still separated, but now Colette is pregnant, care of a weak moment with Paul while they were living in California.

The hits just keep coming before they ever work it all out. It's a good story, but it seems to come from a different time. Paul seems way older than 24, and Colette does not seem like 23. They just seem so middle aged in their attitudes and demeanor. It was a big distraction that pecked away at the story's credulity. It had its good moments, but it was a little more work to read than I like a book to be. 2 stars.

One Mississippi, by Mark Childress

This audiobook was obtained from NetLibrary.com, through the Alachua County Public Library. It was 13 hours and 17 minutes long and was narrated by Jeff Woodman.

Daniel Musgrove gets to start his life over in Mississippi after his father is transferred to a new territory. Changing high schools is bad enough, but downgrading from Indiana to Mississippi is excruciating. But then he finds a friend, a local outcast named Tim Cousins.

It's 1973, and their high school is about to elect its first black prom queen. It's also the night that Tim and Daniel take a couple of girls to the prom, and Daniel gets his first kiss. After bringing their dates home, they accidentally hit the new queen, who was riding home on her bicycle. They flee in terror, come back to see that their nemesis, a popular jock and bully, is getting busted for it after stopping to see if she is alright. They let him hang, and when she comes to, she has a colorblind brand of amnesia: she thinks she is white.

The lunacy just keeps coming. This was very, very funny book, but it takes some very, very dark turns. Funny, thought-provoking, sad, disturbing: it gets a star for each, which makes 4 altogether.

No More Mr. Nice Guy, by Dr. Robert A. Glover

This audiobook was obtained from Netlibrary.com through the Alachua County Public Library. It was 6 hours and 38 minutes long and was narrated by Robert O'Keefe.

The long version of this title included this: A proven plan for getting what you want in love, sex, and life. Presumably, this was meant to boost Google hits. However, as a lifelong nice-guy/doormat, I could say, with apologies to Renee Zellweger, "You had me at the title".

Dr. Glover is a clinical psychologist who has been treating a lot of nice guys for years. And he recognized that they were suffering from the same sort of things that he was. They all had partners who they slavishly tried to please, which only gained them more scorn.

No friend to modern feminism, Dr. Glover blames this on an American culture which left raising boys to become men to women. When men started leaving the home to work in factories and offices, the boys had to stay home. They no longer worked with their fathers, learning the trades and learning to be men. Women raised their sons to be more passive aggressive, and when they grew up, they were incapable of providing leadership in their homes. They usually had a finger in the air to figure out what would please their wives.

This description may be a bit off-putting, but it is a legitimate challenge to our current nanny culture of risk avoidance that steals the spine from American males. It's a four star read.

Marker, by Robin Cook

This audiobook was obtained from Netlibrary.com through the Alachua County Public Library. It was 16 hours and 7 minutes long, and was narrated by George Guidall.

Laurie Montgomery and Jack Stapleton are both doctors with the Medical Examiner's office. They determine cause of death by day and are lovers by night. Right about the time that Laurie decides that she has no future with the noncommittal Jack, she takes notice of some unusual deaths at a particular hospital. The deaths have no apparent cause. Everyone else is willing to call them an anomaly. But the decedents are all relatively young people who came in for pretty ordinary surgeries. She begins to suspect foul play.

Laurie comes under a lot of pressure to bury her suspicions. To infer that someone is murdering patients at a prestigious hospital with a low death rate could create problems for the reputation of the medical staff there. Her only ally is the handsome, charming doctor who is the director of personnel at that hospital, who wants to get involved with her.

I know this sounds like a soap opera, and some of it is. It also sounds like the typical Robin Cook novel: young, good-looking doctor with strong ethics runs afoul of rich, powerful, greedy medical community. But Cook has been doing this for a long time, and knows just how much relationship fog to give a book without losing sight of the fact that he is writing a thriller. This is one of his better ones, and I give it 3 stars.

John Paul the Great, by Peggy Noonan

This audiobook was obtained from the Alachua County Public Library through Netlibrary.com. It was read by the author and was 8 hours and 30 minutes long.

This book is almost as much about the author, Peggy Noonan, as it is about Pope John Paul II. This is a very personal recollection of Pope John Paul II by a woman who was greatly affected by him.

Noonan, the former speech writer for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, was only a nominal Catholic when she was covering the election of John Paul II by the College of Cardinals as a reporter for CBS. What she learned about him from this fairly close perspective caused her to examine her own life and what she believed. Subsequent close encounters, including a personal audience near the end of his life, had a deep impact on her, and she is not shy about discussing how she arrives at her own need for God.

There is also a good bit about Mother Theresa, who Pope John Paul began pushing for beatification as a saint soon after she died. And, as fawning as Noonan is about Pope John Paul in general, she is pretty tough on him for not dealing directly with the American sex scandals involving priests molesting minors and the church bureaucracy that covered it up.

This was very skillfully written, very touching, and very challenging to anyone who saw the Pope as a mere figurehead in history. Give it 4 stars.

Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World, by Carl Hiaasen

This audiobook was obtained from the Alachua County Public Library through Overdrive Audio. It was 1 hour and 41 minutes long, and was narrated by Richard Gilliland.

Carl Hiaasen has been known for years for his comedic novels in which the villains are complete greedheads with no respect for Florida's ecosystem. And that's why this non-fiction offering comes as no surprise as he analyzes the corporate entity that could be a composite of all his antagonists worst traits. At least, that is Hiaasen's portrayal of Disney as it goes beyond Orlando and even threatens the skin trade in Times Square.

He makes the case that Disney is able to grow with impunity because it takes so many people with it as it prospers. Land values skyrocket and support businesses flourish, so everyone is excited when Disney is involved in a project. And its values are just as usurping as its lust for property. The level of trust that consumers have in Disney gives it a leg up in evry negotiation and the benefit of every doubt.

But Carl Hiaasen doesn't believe it. And even though he is a bit of an extremist on the other side, he does humorously make the case that Disney is a company that should be watched and held to account by the rest of us. And he does so in such an appealing way, that he gets you nodding and smiling and agreeing with him, just as he believes Disney does with its wholesome image.

It was a rather short book, but informative and funny, and left me wanting more. If that doesn't get you 4 stars, I don't know what does.

Younger Next Year, by Harry S. Lodge, MD and Chris Crowley

This audiobook was a Christmas present and it came on 6 CDs. I highly recommend that you buy it.

I often tell people that I have been fat and thin more times than Oprah. I have frequently gone on diets on which I have lost 40 pounds. At 49, I don't know how often I can get away with this. So, when I listened to this audiobook on a trip right after Christmas, I was ready to listen.

Harry and Chris tag-team this book as Chris, a retired attorney, and Harry, a renowned gerontologist, make the case for daily exercise to fight the tide of aging. They convincingly tell you how you can be "functionally younger" next year. They don't promise you that it can go on forever, but that you can make sure that your last years are lived feeling healthy and vibrant pretty much until the end. Well, sign me up!

Motivation is an important part of the program, which is why a daily regimen is necessary. Anything else is just treading water, so there is relatively little payoff. Harry has the numbers, and Chris has the stories. I wish there was a place to download this for free, but it ain't there yet. However, I can direct you to their website, and I can give this book 4 stars.