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