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.

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.

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.

Lovesick Blues, by Paul Hemphill

This audiobook was obtained for free from NetLibrary.com through the Alachua County Public Library. It was 7 hours and 22 minutes long and was narrated by Jonathan Hogan.

This was an amazing story of Hank Williams, a sick, flawed man from nowhere who was probably the greatest country music singer and songwriter of all time. He was born with a form of Spinabifida that made his life miserable all of his days. It was probably a contributing factor to his early alcoholism.

As a teenager, he was the "Singing Kid" on a local radio station in rural Alabama. He had learned the art of being an entertainer from a black street musician named Rufus Payne. His rise to stardom had many fits and starts as he kept sabotaging his career by being so unreliable due to his alcoholism. This dogged him throughout his career, which ended ironically with his failure to get to a performance because he died in the car on the way there.

I knew next to nothing about Hank Williams when I downloaded this audiobook. But I was so fascinated that I am bent on buying some of his music. This is a wonderful and terrible story about a man with genius for creating hit songs and little else. His death is all the more tragic because it came at the age of 29. This is a 4 star car wreck you just can't stopping staring at.

East to the Dawn, by Susan Butler

This audiobook was obtained from Overdrive Audio for free through the Alachua County Public Library. It was 18 hours and 43 minutes long, and was narrated by Anna Fields.

This is the story that goes beyond the legend, and beyond the comfort zone of many who may have admired her. She was a brave and daring aviator, an outspoken feminist, and a bit of a head case.

Back in the early days of aviation, there was very little regulation and it was one of the places where women had the most freedom. Amelia Earhart learned to fly from another woman pioneer, Neta Snook. Amelia had learned about mechanics from her days as an ambulance driver during WWI, when you also had to know how to fix your vehicle. And it's a good thing, because early airplanes needed to be fixed often.

Flying was just a hobby for her for several years. She was earning her living as a social worker. Other women were looking to be the first woman to cross the Atlantic after Charles Lindbergh had become an international celebrity for doing so. American socialite named Amy Guest, who was also a pilot, had wanted to do it, but her family made her back off. She still wanted the project to go on, so she offered to back someone else that she would recruit who would have the right image and do women proud.

Amelia Earhart got the call from a promoter who had heard of her, and asked if she wanted to fly across the Atlantic. Amelia jumped at it, and it made her fortune. She used it as a springboard for a speaking and publishing career.

Amelia eventually married her publisher, who had been married when they first began working together. She didn't want to be tied to one man, however, and actually requested that theirs would be an open marriage.

This book chronicles Amelia's life from early childhood to her disappearance over the Pacific in 1937. Very little is left unexplored, and it done in a sympathetic manner. It's hard to put down, and full of interesting information. That's what makes it a four star book for me.

River of Doubt, by Candice Millard

This audiobook was found at the Alachua County Public Library, came on 10 CDs, and was narrated by Paul Michael.

When my customers find out what an audiobook junkie I am, they sometimes make suggestions to me from their own reading. This year, someone told me about "River of Doubt" and I was immediately intrigued because I am a big fan of Teddy Roosevelt. I could not find this title for awhile, and even now it is unavailable at Amazon.com. But one day a search on the library website turned it up, and I put it on reserve. It was waiting for me when I got back from vacation.

This is a wonderful mix of history, biography, and suspenseful adventure. Any one of those descriptions is enough to lure me in, but all three, combined with Theodore Roosevelt risking life and limb in the Amazon jungle as a form of post-election therapy makes this unforgettable. Candice Millard takes you there with research that would rate as overkill if it were about anyone else.

It's both gripping and sad, as it also turns into a father and son examination. TR and his third son, Kermit, near-lethal hardships and acquit themselves admirably. Kermit was very much his father's son when it came to physical endurance and toughness in the midst of calamity. But away from the snake and cannibal infested testing ground, they were two totally different men.

I will avoid the spoilers and say that this is a 4 star delight, whether you are a history buff or and adrenaline junkie.

Consider the Elephant, by Aram Schefrin

This book is available for free from Podiobooks.com, and is available in 37 installments. Find it here. This dramatized, unabridged audiobook is not suitable for younger listeners because of explicit sexual content.

This is a novel about John Wilkes Booth and the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. It is based on extensive research, using actual letters to and from Booth that reveal a great deal of detail about events and his state of mind. It is very well written. The characters are vividly portrayed, and the story is riveting, even if you know how it turns out.

Your American History class would have been a whole lot more interesting if portions of this book had been made available. A film adaptation of this book would be a unique offering that I would love to see.

This gets 4 stars.

Waiting `Til the Midnight Hour, by Peniel E. Joseph

This audio book was a free download from NetLibrary.com, was 13 hours long, and was narrated by Beresford Bennett.

As a white kid growing up in Upstate NY during the 60s, that names of Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, "Rap" Brown, and Angela Davis were not familiar to me. Even Malcolm X would have drawn a blank in a neighborhood with no unrest and few blacks. And those who did live among us were fully integrated into the neighborhood. I even had an African American history class in the 6th grade, but the aforementioned pioneers of the Black Power movement were not yet history. They were the news. At least they were in other parts of America.

This book was fascinating, enlightening, and disheartening. It was fascinating because it fleshed out the players in America's Civil Rights movement. It was enlightening because it was a very human story anyone could identify with. It was disheartening because every problem is viewed through the lens of the black/white struggle. And not every problem in the black community is the fault of white people.

One of the things that sticks out here is that all the leaders were so incredibly young. By the time he was 29, Stokely Carmichael had met Ho Chi Mihn and Fidel Castro. He had been all over the world, including China, and was a world famous icon of revolutionary struggle. What do you really know by the time you are 29? Consequently, some of the players no longer believe what they did when they were getting everyone else on board.

This is a terrific story of people insisting on being heard. It worked, warts and all. There are characters who will surprise you and impress you and annoy you. This was an engrossing story and worth every one of 4 stars.

Dark Genius of Wall Street, by Edward Renehan

This book was obtained for free from NetLibrary.com, was 14 hours and 50 minutes long, and narrated by George Wilson.

This great biography is about one of the players of America's Gilded Age, Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons.

I don't know if you can really get a grasp of American history without getting to know the players. Jay Gould was the most notorious stock manipulator of the 19th century, and one of the richest men in the world during his lifetime. He began as a teen-aged land surveyor who got stiffed by his employer. From there he began publishing the maps he was stuck with, then got into the hide tanning business. By the time he was in his early 30s he owned a railroad and was driving his competitor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crazy.

Unfortunately, he made a train wreck of his reputation in the stock market. The times were incredibly corrupt, and you had to be a dirtbag to keep from getting skinned. So he became the biggest dirtbag of them all. By the time he died, every paper could only speak ill of him.

Yet, this was a very humanizing look at a man who made a vast fortune bringing other millionaires to the point of nervous exhaustion. He was a devious competitor and a micro-managing CEO of every company he was involved in. He was brilliant, yet he was also a tragic figure who lamented, toward the end of his life, that he could give his children everything except a good name.

4 stars for this amazing trip back to Victorian Era America.

Lincoln's Melancholy, by Joshua Wolf Shenk

This book came from the Alachua County Library, was narrated by Richard Davidson, and was on 10 CDs.

This fascinating look at Lincoln and his personal battles with depression will make you think differently about mental illness. Lincoln was fortunate to live in a time when a melancholy spirit was not shunned as an imperfection, but accepted as part of the man's whole personality. However, even as a young adult he seemed to be plagued with such dark moods that his friends made a point to keep an eye on him sometimes because they feared for his life.

In the past, historians have avoided this subject. This was largely because many of them discounted the memories of Lincoln's earliest biographer, William Herndon. Herndon had been an early law partner of Lincoln, a political intimate, and someone who disliked Mary, Lincoln's wife. Later historians believed that Herndon, in an effort to disparage Mary Todd Lincoln, had embellished her husband's emotional state after a supposed love interest with a young woman named Ann Rutlege. But many more writings have come to light in recent years, which have become the basis of this book.

This book was every bit as much about clinical depression as it was about Lincoln, who is a very fit subject for such discussions. This is thought provoking for those of us who know sufferers, and a great encouragement for those who are sufferers. 4 stars.