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.