Guardian of Lies, by Steve Martini

This audio book was obtained from Overdrive Audio through the Alachua County Public Library. It was 14 hours and 13 minutes long and was narrated by George Guidall.

This is 10th in a series of novels about Criminal Defense attorney Paul Madriani and his partner, Harry Hinds. The early novels were really good, but they fell off a bit in quality for awhile. So it was an act of hope that I downloaded this one and I am very glad I did.

This begins as a murder case and ends up as international espionage as Paul Madriani's client turns out to have ties to an old Russian nuke that is being recommissioned by Jihadists for a terrorist attack on America. This is only plausible in a world in which we are all connected by networks, but we do live in a world where we are all connected by networks. It's well-told, and the characters are believable and we have been set up for a sequel. I will get it. I give this one 4 stars.

The Defector, by Daniel Silva

This audio book was obtained from Overdrive Audio through the Alachua County Public Library. It was 10 hours and 58 minutes long and was narrated by Phil Gigante.

The most recent of the Gabriel Allon series. Gabriel is an Israeli secret agent and assassin who restores old master paintings as part of his cover. He is in the middle of a piece commissioned by the Vatican when his pleasant life is interrupted by the call to duty because a Russian defector has been kidnapped in America. This defector is believed to be a re-defector, and that he has been acting as a double agent, and is just going back home. Gabriel knows better, because the man is a friend who saved his life in the last book.

Although Daniel Silva's stories are well-written, Gabriel is the weak point. He just isn't a very engaging character. Some of his co-stars are more interesting and human, but Gabriel never becomes more than a really competent covert agent that no one wants to cross. Over all, it was a 3 star book.

The Accidental Billionaires, by Ben Mezrich

This audio book was obtained from Overdrive Audio through the Alachua County Public Library. It was 7 hours and 19 minutes long and was read by Mike Chamberlain.

Think of it as the long-awaited "Facebook Story". Ben Mezrich, the author of the fabulous "Bringing Down the House," has done an exhaustive job of researching Facebook's genesis, and has created a work that is enough of a dramatization to make it almost a novel. To be sure, Mark Zuckerberg, the youthful founder of Facebook, did NOT sign off on this. And I cannot say I am surprised.

The story begins with Zuckerberg, and his friend, Eduardo Saverin, trying to meet girls at Harvard, where they are both undergrads. Mark gets an idea to create a website that archives photos of all the girls at Harvard and pairs random pictures for users of the site to choose which is hotter. While the site is in it's experimental phase, some of his computer science friends pass the site around and it goes viral in a short time and nearly gets him kicked out of school for hacking school databases and stealing the picture files that he used. His notoriety alerts some other students who were working on a social networking site of their own, and they approach him to help with it. He agrees, but then leaves them high and dry to create his own site, which goes on to become Facebook.

This is morality tale about friendship and how money changes everything. You will find yourself taking sides in this book, and perhaps even changing sides by the end of it. The Facebook relationship status "It's Complicated" is a fitting description of what happened between Mark and Eduardo. I think Mark was a lousy friend, and Eduardo was a lousy business partner. It's your call to decide which you think is worse.

The reader sounded so much like my favorite, Scott Brick, that it bumped this fun, interesting story into 4 star territory.

Superfreakonomics, by Levitt and Dubner

This audiobook was obtained (as usual) from Overdrive Audio through the Alachua County Library. It was read by one of the authors, Stephen J. Dubner, and was 7 hours and 28 minutes long.

Economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner have struck again with another provocative look at incentives in the human marketplace. People either love or hate these books, or maybe just parts of them. Either way, Superfreakonomics is thought provoking and informative, even if you have problems with some of the information.

Perhaps the most controversial part, and a timely controversy it is, is the last chapter. It is about alternative solutions to Global Warming. The ideas presented are intriguing and liable to cause some heated arguments, but I consider that a good thing.

As a bonus, I would like to make this mp3 download available. Click here. It's an interview with Stephen Dubner, conducted by Michael Medved.

This is a fun read, and will fly by as it is quite entertaining. I give it 4 stars.

Cheap, by Ellen Ruppell Shell

This audiobook was obtained form Overdrive Audio through the Alachua County Public Library. It was 11 hours and 33 minutes long, and was narrated by Lorna Raver.

It is very fashionable to beat up on capitalism at this time. This book makes sure that LOW prices also get their day in the stocks. The best part of this book is the history of discounting that is therein. The worst are the central planning solutions alluded to by the author.

As a self-employed person who has had his own business for almost 30 years, I found Ms. Shell's ivory tower cluelessness grating. Her bleeding heart sorrow for the plight of low wage workers could have been mitigated by the revelation that local governments have raised the barrier of entry to small business startups through zoning regulations that would have prevented New York's garment trade from ever getting off the ground. Only the rich can go into many businesses precisely because of top down planning. Save your time. One star for its overbearing politics.

A colossal Failure of Common Sense, by Lawrence G. McDonald

This audio book was obtained from Overdrive Audio through the Alachua County Public Library. It is subtitled, "The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers". It was 16 hours and 38 minutes long, and was narrated by Erik Davies.

If you want to be better informed about last year's economic collapse, this is a good place to start. Lawrence MacDonald tells his story of how he became a Wall Street trader, about his successes at Lehman Brothers, and about the people who worked there.

If you just want to know who to blame, there is plenty of it to go around. During the Clinton Administration the seeds of this collapse were sown by ideologues on the left who pushed the mortgage industry to give loans to poor people, and free marketeers on the right, who repealed the Glass-Steagal Act that allowed these bad mortgages to tie up money throughout the economy.

As a story, this is suspenseful and well-told. There are heroes, villains, and bystanders with feet of clay. And I have to admit that I think the author is one of the latter. I know that traders are not supposed to create panics because it is a form of market manipulation. But their inside knowledge of the disaster to come should have been at least leaked to the press, especially the sale of sub-prime loans to people who were encouraged to lie about their incomes.

This was a 4 star page turner.

The Spire, by Richard North Patterson

This audiobook was obtained from Overdrive Audio, through the Alachua County Public Library web site. It was 11 hours and 3 minutes long, and was narrated by Holter Graham.

Mark Darrow was a star quarterback at his high school, but going nowhere, when he is offered a scholarship by the Provost at a local college that probably plays at division 3. It's a great opportunity for this orphan who lives with the family of his best friend, Steve Tillman. Mark accepts on the grounds that a place can be found for his Steve, and the Provost, ex-military Lionel Farr.

At the end of Mark's time at Caldwell College, he stumbles across the body of a young black woman, a student he knew fairly well, who was strangled at left at the foot of The Spire, a major landmark at the college. He is quickly cleared, but his friend, Steve, was the last person seen with her. He is arrested, tried and convicted.

Sixteen years later, Mark is a very successful attorney, and very recently widowed. The Provost calls him to come back and be the college President after the past President was investigated for embezzlement. Mark agrees, but he quickly finds himself at odds with a board that has its mind made up about how to pursue the investigation. And he just cannot let go of the unlikely conviction of Steve Tillman for murder.

Although it's hard to get past a 38 year old college President, the character is superbly written. And although figuring out the villain was not overly challenging, it was still a good story apart from that. I give it 3 stars.

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

This unabridged audiobook was obtained from the Alachua County Public Library website, was 63 hours long, and narrated by Scott Brick.

The only book I ever read by Ayn Rand was Anthem. That was in High School, and I disliked it so much, that the last thing I ever wanted to do was read a 1300 page novel by this woman. Thanks to the advent of the downloadable audiobook, and fast Internet connections, I finally decided to take on this behemoth.

As a novel, it's quite engaging. The characters do not leave you without some sort of emotional reaction, even though that reaction ranges from low grade annoyance to a desire to be a part of their firing squad. The story has enough action to keep you moving to the next long-winded diatribe, and even those serve the purpose of helping you distill the whole into your own personal outrage. There is even a romantic element. Dagny Taggart, railroad tycoon and serial femme fatale, finds a love of her life for different stages of it: Francisco D'Anconia when she is young and idealistic, Hank Riordan when she is successful but frustrated with a world that despises achievment, and John Galt when she is ready to do something about it.

As a philosophical vehicle, it is a bit pretentious in that it tries to present itself as a closed system in which all its questions are answered. In the entire story of a dystopian society dying a slow death by central planning, in which its paralyzing worldview of passing no judgment has created an aimless leadership over mindless drones, there is not a single religious character. In a 63 hour storyy, was there not time? Although churches and preachers are eluded to, they are irrelevant to the story; that is, until John Galt's 3 hour speech. This Magnum Opus of Ayn Rand's belief's lays all the world's problems on the doorstep of people of faith.

For an atheist, Ayn Rand seems to have a difficult time coming up with a good religious straw man. If anything, the dim-witted, equivocating, pontificating leadership of her Declining America is suspiciously Liberal in the mold of our current band of politically correct leaders. Even the scientists, foreshadowing our own Global Warming movement, are political toadies pulling the levers of Washington to elevate their esteem in the world.

I found much to disagree with, but much more to like. It is a challenging book that will test your beliefs and work your mind. And it could change a world if enough minds were willing to do the work. It's much easier to believe in God.

I give it four stars.

Guilty, by Ann Coulter

This audiobook was obtained from Overdrive Audio through the Alachua County Public Library and was 10 hours and 27 minutes long. It was narrated by Barbra Streisand...JUST KIDDING!!! It was narrated by Margy Moore, an actress who obviously doesn't mind being blacklisted by Hollywood forever.

There isn't much middle ground where Ann Coulter is concerned. You either think she is an evil harpy who is a continual fountain of hate speech, or you see her a warrior princess on a mission to execute judgment upon egomaniacs in the media and the Democratic Party.

This book is about the victimology of political liberals and their willing accomplices in the press and popular culture. She builds a pretty solid case that there is a liberal media hegemony that has controlled most of the information we get about political and social issues. And now they are outraged as the Internet and cable TV and talk radio have created outlets for those voices who dare to disagree with them. Using many examples and quotes from those she mercilessly excoriates, Coulter examines the hypocrisy of a political establishment that attacks conservatives relentlessly for doing the very same things they themselves have perfected.

In my case, she is preaching to the choir, which is why I gave it 4 stars.

The Hunted, by Brian Haig

This audiobook was 18 hours and 13 minutes long, and was obtained from Overdrive Audio through the Alachua County Public Library. It was narrated by Scott Brick.

A better than average story with below average heroes and above average villains, this novel about a young Russian billionaire has enough bright spots to keep you engaged, but could have been a lot shorter.

Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, capitalism is beginning to get a foothold, and young Alex Konevitch has made a fortune in arbitrage and banking. He has used his substantial fortune to back Boris Yeltsin, thus helping the fall of communism in a big way. Angry, vindictive KGB officers want to know who has been helping Yeltsin, and when they discover what Alex has done, they begin to use their connections and ruthlessness to ruin him.

After being kidnapped, tortured, and forced to sign over his holdings to a former KGB general, Alex and his wife, Elena, escape and spend months being hunted from Europe to the US, and then persecuted by the FBI, whose politically opportunistic director wants to trade them to Russia for a favorable working relationship.

There is a line between the plausible and the laughable, and this story crossed it just enough times to make it a disappointment. Still, some of it is really good, so that salvages 2 and 1/2 stars for it.

The Anglo Files, by Sarah Lyall

This audio book was obtained from Overdrive Audio through the Alachua County Public Library. It was 9 hours and 53 minutes long, and was narrated by Cassandra Campbell.

Subtitled "A Field Guide to the British", this could have been a lot funnier, but it is instead a very thoughtful, revealing, and even alarming look at Her Majesty's subjects. Ms. Lyall is American-born, but married to one of the natives. She uses her inside knowledge and an overview of recent British history to explain the self-deprecating humor and low expectations of those who are descendants of a world empire. For instance, the devastating effects of WW2 left a lot of wartime rationing in effect for a decade after peace finally came. There was no "Peace Dividend" for the British, who did not really join post-war prosperity until late in the Thatcher government.

She manages to shed some light on the inscrutability of cricket without helping us to understand it, and reveals a nation's rampant alcoholism that is famous all over Europe as Brits go on drinking tours of Eastern Europe. This book has many light moments, but I found it mostly sad. I didn't want to live there, and was less inclined to visit it, although I may watch BBC programming in a new light. I give it 2 and 1/2 stars.

America Alone, by Mark Steyn

This audiobook was a free download from Overdrive Audio, made available through the Alachua County Public Library web site. It is in MP3 format, is 6 hours and 15 minutes long, and was read by Brian Emerson.

In Mark Steyn's opinion, radical Islam is taking over western nations that are too timid to stop them. He also has some numbers that are difficult to deal with, as that timidity manifests itself in the form of birth rates that are too low to replace these western nations. Meanwhile, the Islamic immigrants to Europe are having babies at double the rate of the native populations, and that is not an opinion.

Meanwhile, America has a birth rate that is barely at the replacement rate, which leaves it as the world's last best hope to keep Islam from overrunning what has been a progressive, liberating, democratic civilization.

If you are a non-Muslim, and you are the least bit concerned about your children and your children's children living under Sharia Law, This is definitely worth the read. It is a subject that our politicians are not willing to campaign on or to which they might apply their leadership. It's a demographic challenge to Europe that may very well leave America alone as the sole free society in the 21st century.

This is very provocative, and difficult to talk to your friends about. But you might want to buy them this book. It's a four star page turner.

Speech-Less, by Matthew Latimer

This audiobook was 7 hours and 20 minutes long and was read by Lincoln Hoppe. It was obtained from Overdrive Audio for free through the Alachua County Library.

A young speech writer in the Bush White House details his early years as a Reagan Republican, through his work life as a staffer for congressmen and for Donald Rumsfeld, until his ultimate goal of writing speeches for the President. This book is a kind of tell-all by a disillusioned young man, yet it is not the kind of exposé that a closet liberal would have written.

Matthew Latimer is a young conservative who saw the disaffection of conservatism from the inside. He and the other speech writers were sometimes ordered to write things they thought were ridiculous. They were often the last check before mistakes were made. It was disheartening to read, yet it was good to know that the failures of the last administration were not the failures of conservatism, but of the people who merely used conservatives.

This one gets 4 stars.

High Crimes, by Michael Kodas

This audiobook was 11 hours and 23 minutes long, and was downloaded from Overdrive Audio through the Alachua County Library. It was narrated by Mark Deakins.

This book is part True Adventure and part Investigative Reporting. Like other books about recent climbs on Mt. Everest, it is a harrowing tale of well-off adventurers meeting the ultimate equalizer. These people pay up to $60,000 each to be taken on an attempt to summit Mt. Everest, and some never come back. Some return to have severely frostbitten fingers and toes amputated. It is a sobering look at what a dangerous proposition this trip can be.

If the mountain and the awful climate are not bad enough, Michael Kodas uncovers a dirty secret: the other people on the mountain can be just as dangerous. And they can also be a bunch of crooks.

In the past couple of decades, climbing Mount Everest and other 20K peaks has become a thriving business for some, and the rich climbers are the unwitting prey of others. Unscrupulous guides can abandon their meal ticket on the mountain after they have already been paid. Poor Sherpas may steal the supplementary oxygen canisters from rich climbers and resell them to other rich climbers, leaving the first climbers in peril. And angry guides, who don't like what you have siad about them on your blog, may want you to die. It's all enough to make you take up something safer, like lion-taming.

This was a thoroughly engrossing story about specific miscreants on the big mountain, and it was never boring. I give it 4 stars.

Bones, by Jonathan Kellerman

This audio book was 12 hours long, in Windows Media format, and was read by John Rubenstein.

This is the 23rd novel based on the Psychologist, Alex Delaware. He is joined by his regular sidekick, Detective Milo Sturgis, to solve some murders where the bodies are turning up in a protected marsh land, without one of their hands.

This is a typical Kellerman murder mystery that gives you a lot of shifty people to consider while trying to solve the crime. Newcomers to this series will find it interesting that Sturgis is gay, but working against type. He's an overweight, cigar smoking curmudgeon that hates exercise and bad guys. Alex is kinda straight, living with a hottie who makes musical instruments for rock stars, and is squeamish with firearms.

This one is worth 3 stars.

The Google Story, by David A. Vise

This audio book was 10 hours and 26 minutes long, produced in Windows Media format, and was narrated by Stephen Hoye.

This is the story of how two Stanford University PhD students created the word's most popular and successful search engine, Google. Sergey Brin and Larry Page met at Stanford, and started to purchase all the cheap computers they could in an attempt to download the entire internet in their quest to create better search results.

This story covers their rise from students to startups to billionaires. There are details of their misadventures as a company with the motto: "Don't be evil". They have been criticized for mining personal data to improve their delivery of advertising as well as gathering information that could be abused by over reaching government authorities. Most troubling, in my estimation, was one of the founders' musings about the day when we might have the internet available to our brains on a microchip, making all the world's knowledge accessible at will.

A must read for anyone who wants to be hip to the world's most ubiquitous company. I give it 4 stars.

The State of Jones, by Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer

This link is also to the Amazon Kindle version, but the book is available in other formats, including audio CD.

This is the story of how one man's desertion from the Confederate Army started one Mississippi county's secession from the Confederacy.

Newton Knight was one of many white farmers who was forcibly conscripted to serve in the Confederate Army. His home community, Jones County, had even sent a delegate to the Mississippi convention to vote against secession. This delegate was faced with a lot of pressure to vote for secession, however, and voted to go along with it.

What follows is a long insurgency against the Confederacy, who conscripted the unwilling, took their crops and their livestock, and left a bitter, poor, hungry populace behind. They were further abused by the Confederate enforcers who kept taxing them, which made it easier for Newton Knight and his cohorts to hide out and conduct guerrilla skirmishes against them.

Knight and his band of rebels hid out in the same swamps as runaway slaves, who helped them survive in the same inhospitable wilderness. Knight became more sympathetic with the oppressed blacks than he had already been, and eventually married a former slave woman and had a large family with her.

After the Civil War was officially over, hostilities continued against Knight and his relatives and friends for many years. He long feared assassination, and that was not without reason. Mississippi was just too far away from Washington to get much help, and President Grant was too willing to let the locals work it out. Unfortunately, Knight's race-mixing had cost him a lot of friends, and even family members had begun to change their last name to avoid the association.

It was a long, hard, bitter life for a man who just wanted to be left alone. For all practical purposes he had chosen to become a black man in Mississippi, which was a form of race treason in the Jim Crow South.

This book is a gem and easily gets 4 stars.

Satchel: The Life and TImes of an American Legend

Warning! The link to this book is in the only format that Amazon has available: the Kindle. The Kindle is an electronic book reading device that can download digital material without a computer. It has a cellular modem inside and can "phone" into Amazon wirelessly and download the books directly to the device. If you are interested in purchasing or are even thinking about it, I will link the device in the sidebar.

This audio book was read by Dominic Hoffman, and was 13 hours and 37 minutes long. I obtained it for free from my public library and their vendor, Overdrive Audio.

Satchel Paige began playing pro baseball in the old Negro Leagues back in the 1920s. He was only 18 and had just spent 6 years in a reform school where he got some coaching from a man who worked for the institution. He was a success almost immediately, and had a long and profitable career playing for many teams, including the ad hoc barnstorming teams that often included white major leaguers in the off season. This is where we get an idea of just how good Satchel Paige really was, and Larry Tye's long overdue report on the career of one of baseball's most enduring legends makes a compelling case that he may have been one of the greatest pitchers of all time.

This story is also of Satchel, the man, who made a lot of money in baseball and was as bad at managing it as anyone who has ever played any game professionally. He loved to play ball, and would have played for the rest of his life if he could. He depended on it, since he spent money like the paydays would go on forever.

It's also a story of the times he lived in, and how he contributed to the slow awakening racial equality in America. Satchel had played the roll of the amiable Negro for so long that it wasn't until he had been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971 that he began to sound off about racial unfairness and how he had been mistreated by those who ran the game he loved.

I gave this book 4 stars for its thoroughness and the fascinating topic of the man whose career I was too young to watch.

Your Heart Belongs to Me, by Dean Koontz

This audio book was read by Malcolm Hillgartner, and was 8 hours and 33 minutes long.

As a long time Dean Koontz fan, I will read anything he produces. But that doesn't mean I will always like it. This one had its problems, but it was still a page turner.

This is the story of a 34 year old dot com millionaire who discovers that he has an incurable heart condition and needs a transplant. He finds a good surgeon, gets on the transplant list, and is encouraged by his perfect girlfriend to just let this happen. She knows he will try to manipulate his place in line for a new heart, and he agrees to trust his current doctor.

This would be a fairly simple story if the girlfriend did not have a disturbing back story that causes our protagonist some discomfort. Her twin sister was taken off life support by her own mother after getting counsel from a right to die advocate who collects mummified remains. The mother is now romantically involved with this ghoul, and this feeds the paranoia of a heart patient with enough money to manage his fears and the people around him.

This is a Koontz morality tale with a twist. I wish the characters had been a little more compelling, and that the villain had more substance. I give it 2 stars

Against All Enemies, by Richard A. Clarke

This audio book was 11 hours and 54 minutes long, and was narrated by Alan Nebelthau.

I had heard all the detractors, my fellow conservatives, pick this book apart and speak of Richard Clarke as if he were the worst traitor. But I wanted to read this book for myself and draw my own conclusions. Now that I have done that, I will share with you my assessment of this book.

It is pretty fast moving and engrossing reading. Clarke begins with the horror of September 11, 2001, and then retraces his steps as he worked for 3 US Presidents before George W. Bush. He had a ringside seat to many decisions made about US policy on terrorism, and was a major player in some of the counter-terrorism efforts made under Bill Clinton's administration.

If I didn't pay any attention to the news at all since the early 1990s, I would have to believe that George W. Bush and his administration made every conceivable error leading up to 9-11, and that the justification of the Iraq War was a total fabrication by Bush, Cheney, and Condi Rice, who just wanted an excuse to go back and in and finish what George H.W. Bush did not. This book is a pretty tight argument for scorning both Bush Administrations for all time as a collection of bunglers unequaled in American history.

I truly did enjoy this book because I do believe that it will be instructive for generations to come, and because it shows us enough of the workings of counter-terrorism to actually give us hope that there is rhyme and reason to how terrorism is fought. However, there is just enough missing, and just enough that smells wrong to cost Clarke some credibility points. For instance, he makes a great deal of his information that demonstrates there was absolutely no reason for invading Iraq. Yet, it is completely ignored that Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, was in violation of the UN's orders to comply with the dismantling of his nuclear and biological weapons program for 12 years. This was worth mentioning, even if he just wanted to discount it for some reason.

Read with a healthy dose of skepticism, but with the sobering realization that mistakes were made that led to 9-11, and that mistakes were certainly made afterward, this is a four star book.

Saving Graces, by Elizabeth Edwards

This audio book was 13 hours and 42 minutes long and was narrated by Bernadette Dunne.

This is not the Elizabeth Edwards book in which she tells about her husband's affair. Senator John Edwards is a kind and idealistic husband and politician with a noble and intelligent wife in this book. I am not yet aware of how she portrays her relationship with John the philandering weasel, but he contrasted poorly with the hard luck missus he has in this one.

This is her story, from her upbringing in post-war Japan as the daughter of a Naval officer to the tragic death of her teenage son and her discovery of a cancerous lump just a few weeks out from the 2004 election, when her husband was the Vice-Presidential candidate. She is a smart and thoughtful woman who was devastated by the loss of her son, Wade, in a car accident that had nothing to do with alcohol. She deals with the day to day coping that goes on for years and never leaves her consciousness. This could have been a dreary book, but she is such a good writer that it never bores you. This is a solid 3 star book thtat rises to 4 if youu identify personally with either of her losses.

The Fall of Che Guevara, by Henry Butterfield Ryan

This audiobook was 7 hours and 19 minutes long, and was narrated by George McGonagle.

Before I got this audiobook, I knew almost nothing about Che Guevara, although I could pick his image out of a lineup thanks to the iconic image that has appeared on a million or so T-shirts. So, this book was a voyage of discovery for me.

The author tells Che's story as a reporter would gie you the background on the subject, but then just get straight to the facts. He uses a lot of documents from the CIA and other government sources, going as far as to get them declassified himself. What emerges is the recounting of a frustrated revolutionary who was pushing the envelope on revolutionary theory to a point that it got him killed.

Che blundered when he thought he could get a revolution started in Bolivia by inserting a little over 50 commandos out in the jungles to stir up the peasants. The peasants were not particularly unhappy with their government, being far removed from it, and did not like the armed iealists who came to stir them up. They ended up ratting him out to the government forces who were looking for him.

To Che's admirers, this is a controversial subject. Some think Castro had him killed. Some think the CIA did him in. The evidence in this book has enough holes to leave your prejudices intact, but it all seems like a bad judgment call to me. I give it four stars for being informative, clear, and not taking unnecessary time.

Charlie Wilson's War, by George Crile

This audiobook was 20 hours and 27 minutes long, and was narrated by Christopher Lane.

I never saw the movie, so I have no idea how the book and the movie are different. I always trust the book.

This is the story of how a Democrat Congressman from Texas took up the cause of the Afghan people after discovering how the army of the Soviet Union was wiping out all resistance to their invasion. As a member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, he was able to move millions, and eventually, billions of dollars to aid the Afghan insurgents who were still fighting with WW1 Enfield Rifles against helicopter gunships and tanks.

Charlie Wilson was a liberal who voted for civil rights, abortion rights, and all manner of liberal causes, but who was also a rabid anti-communist who wanted America avenged for the Viet Nam War. The Soviets had helped the Vietnamese insurgents bleed America dry, and he wanted to give it right back to them through proxies in Afghanistan.

This is a very instructive tale about how politics actually works at the Federal level, showing how unholy alliances really work. Relationships really do seem to trump ideologies, as Charlie Wilson becomes friends with Fundamentalist Muslim leaders who look the other way at his womanizing, boozing lifestyle while he bankroles their Jihads. In Congress, those who want to fight communists in Central America with Iranian money are prosecuted while American taxpayer dollars are matched by Saudi contibutions to fight communists on the other side of the world with the blessing of the same Congress. It seems that if a liberal want so run a secret war, it's OK. But if conservatives want to do it, it's unconscienable.

Political skill transcends morality even as American politicians convince themselves that they are doing the right thing to fund a primiative militia that has no limits on the atrocities they are willing to perform on captured Soviet soldiers. Eventually, these same Afghan militias will come back to haunt us in ways the Latin American Contras never did.

This is a must read for anyone who cannot understand the holes in the news. 4 stars!

Indignation, by Phillip Roth

This audiobook was 5 hours and 31 minutes long, and was narrated by Dick Hill. It's is Roth's 29th book, and was published in 2008.

I've read a few other Roth novels, and I run hot and cold on them. They usually have some witty, funny dialog, and have recurring themes of anti-semitism and youthful debauchery. This one is not much different.

This is the story of Marcus Messner, the son of Kosher butchers in New Jersey. He is a gifted student, and is bent on getting good enough grades to escape being drafted and sent into combat in Korea in 1951. He works in the family business while in high school, and goes to a local college for his freshman year. During this time, Marcus' father becomes increasingly paranoid that his son will get into some kind of trouble. His constant suspicions and smothering behavior gradually drives Marcus away, and he decides to go to school farther away.

At the new school, Marcus finds something to annoy him in each of his room mates, which leads him to change dorms twice in just a short time. He also has a sexual encounter with a girl who had once tried to commit suicide, and has issues with alcohol, with whom he becomes obsessed. He is also indignant that one of the graduation requirements is to attend chapel forty times during your time at the school, and has a major face-off with the dean over Bertrand Russell and atheism. All these things come to a head after his parents are on the brink of divorce, and Marcus seems to start sliding into his own form of madness. Eventually, he is expelled from school and gets sent to Korea.

It is entertaining enough to be worth the time, but it would have been a disaster to make it longer. Marcus goes to war right on time, because by then I was sick of him already. Maybe it's because he became an insufferable jerk too soon for me to get to like him. I give it 2 stars.

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, by David Halberstam

This audiobook was 33 hours and 42 minutes long, and was narrated by Scott Brick.

This was David Halberstam's last completed work before he died in 2007. It is the usual top notch piece of 20th century history for which he was famous.

America and its military leaders thought that the atomic bomb was the end of conventional warfare. President Truman was looking to trim the defense budget to under $10 Billion, the American people just wanted their boys to come home, and the rest of the world was still at the brink of war. The US had gone from victory in Europe and the Pacific to total military unpreparedness in only 5 years. It set the stage for a deadly learning curve in Korea.

Much of this book concerns the mishandling of military intelligence by General Douglas MacArthur and his staff. MacArthur's best days were behind him and he didn't know it. He also had a lot of help from President Truman's domestic adversaries, mostly Republicans who made up the China Lobby. They were as hot for a confrontation with China as MacArthur was, and this desire for turning back the Communists in China nearly brought us into World War 3.

There are lots of stories from the actual conflict as well as the inside dirt on American politics during the McCarthy era. A fascinating book, even if it ran a bit long. I give it 3 stars.

Creating a World Without Poverty, by Muhammad Yunus

This audio book was narrated by Patrick Lawlor, and was 10 hours and 15 minutes long.

The title alone is enough to put you off. It sounds like the work of some dreamer, a Pollyanna who has obviously never worked with the poor. But I picked this out to listen to it because I was already familiar with the author, and with the Grameen Bank.

Muhammad Yunus, an ivory tower economist, went back to his home country, Bangladesh, to find out for himself why his nation was, as Henry Kissinger once called it, a basket case. He found people willing to work, but who could not get credit at regular banks, and were at the mercy of predatory money lenders. So, he started making loans from his own resources, and proved that the poor can be good customers, and that they could be transformed by opportunity.

That is Yunus before this book, which is largely about the concept of Social Business: businesses that exist to serve the poor, pay no dividends, and are self-perpetuating in a way that charities are not. He takes us step by step through is experiences with helping poor people and even beggars become self-employed, and even his daring joint venture with an international corporation.

This book is inspiring and instructive. It should be read by anyone who says they care about the poor. His remarkable results, which includes a 98% repayment rate, are part of a very wholistic approach to responsibility and accountability. My doubts start to nag me when I think about the poor in America, where the work ethic does not seem to be as strong as it is in Bangladesh. We have something as hard to overcome as floods and famine: apathy and a sense of entitlement and victimhood. In spite of my negative feelings, this book does make you start working them out and searching for solutions.

The last 2 disks of this 11 disk set were pretty counter productive, unfortunately, as Yunus begins to go political. He forgets that his work stands on the shoulders of the donors and investors who are a part fo the selfish capitalist system he has a bone to pick with.

This was well worth the time, and even the money to buy it if you have the chance. It's a 4 star read before the diatribes.

Leni: The life and work of Leni Riefenstahl, by Steven Bach

This audio book was read by Henrietta Tiefenthaler, and was 14 hours and 26 minutes long.

I was already aware of who Leni Riefenstahl was because I had seen a story about her on television when I was a teenager. She was famous for being the Third Reich's film maker. She was a talented director who made what has been called the best documentary ever by her harshest critic. And until 2003, she was still alive, and still unrepentant about her work for Hitler.

Born in 1902, she was the daughter of a successful plumber and a woman who encouraged her dreams of being a dancer. She began her career in the middle of the silent film era, and she gradually evolved from dancer to romantic adventure to an interest in directing her own films. After reading Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf on a train, she decided she had to meet him. Since she was a minor film starlet that Hitler admired, she got her wish.

Leni Riefenstahl leveraged her relationship with Hitler, her talent and ambition, and the vacuum left by the German film industry's expulsion of the Jews, into an opportunity to be the Reich's official filmographer. Her documentaries of Nazi rallies and the 1936 Olympics in Berlin made her internationally famous, and after the WW2, almost universally despised.

If this book were only about her work for Hitler, it would probably be interesting enough. But hers was the story that refused to die. After avoiding prison, and being labeled as only a "fellow traveler" in the spectrum of guilt, she thought she was off the hook and could continue with her career. But multitudes had been witnesses to her work, so there was always someone to remind the world that she was an unrepentant Nazi who brazenly lied about her past.

This book gets 4 stars, but Leni herself rates one flashbulb.

The Associate, by John Grisham

An idealistic Yale law student named Kyle McEvoy has a very promising future ahead of him if it weren't for his troubling past. While at Duquense University he was at a frat party where a girl claims she was raped. The case was thrown out, but new evidence has surfaced. Apparently, one of the frat brothers set his cell phone camera on a counter where it could capture the action, and that video is now in the hands of some very dangerous people who need a young lawyer in place at a prestigious law firm that is handling a lawsuit that involves sensitive defense contracts. Kyle had planned on doing good deeds for some non-profits when he got out of school, but now he has to spy for these bad guys or risk ruin and jail.

It's pretty predictable and the ending is not very satisfying, but it is fast moving and interesting. I liked it enough to finish it, but I wasn't all that happy at the end. I give it 2 stars.

The Four Hour Work Week, by Timothy Ferris

I actually listened to this audiobook twice. Although Mr. Ferris has some very revolutionary views on working and Lyfestyle Design, there are a lot of important nuggets scattered throughout for anyone who is even wondering about making money online.

Tim Ferris loves extreme living. He's a kick boxing champion, internationally competitive tango dancer, and runs his business from all over the world during his many mini-retirements. In today's global economy, with our modern mobile technology, and a free-wheeling imagination, there are few limits on what you can do. But first you must dare to do it.

In this book, Tim uses his own experiences, and those of his friends who are also members of The New Rich, to show you how to gradually free yourself from the static workplace so you can use your time more effectively for your own gain.

I give it 4 stars.