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.

Higher, by Neal Bascomb

This audiobook was obtained for free from NetLibrary.com, was 11 hours and 10 minutes long, and was narrated by Richard M. Davidson.

The 1920s were the perfect time for egos, ambition, idealism, and innovation to thrive. And it was at the very apex of the Roaring 20s, just before the collapse of the stock market, that the modern skyscraper began to flower.

This story is about the men who designed, financed, and built the tallest buildings in the world at the dawn of the Great Depression. Walter Chrysler, the newly minted automobile magnate, was an engineering junkie who played an active roll in designing the Chrysler Building. The architect, William Van Alen, was a highly regarded designer who had acrimoniously split with his business partner, H. Craig Severance. Severance was now building a competing project at 40 Wall Street, and both men were determined to build the tallest building in the world.

This is a more interesting book for all the background on the creation of the technology that allowed buildings to go from the load-bearing masonry construction that limited height, to the steel-cage design, high speed elevators, and improved hydraulics that make it possible to both build and inhabit skyscrapers.

But it's the human story with its attendant drama that takes "Higher" to another level. All of the parties who were involved in these projects had come from humble beginnings, and these buildings were also intended to be monuments to ideas and hope; something that we would do well to grasp in our cynical age. This is a 4 star book.

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.