Reviewing "The Monuments Men" by Robert Edsel

The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History

With a title like that, how could one go wrong?

After all, it was made into a movie, right? Some editions even have George Clooney et al. on the cover with the “Now a Major Motion Picture” seal.

Of course, any book that was ever turned into a movie must be good.

Reviewing "All the Gallant Men" by Donald Stratton

I listened to the audiobook version of this memoir by one of the survivors from the Arizona. In All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor’s Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor, Donald Stratton recounts the events that led him to joining the United States Navy, what happened that day of infamy of December 7, 1941, and its aftermath. Though gruesome in parts, I was surprised at how clean the prose was (this is a sailor’s memoir we’re talking about, remember), and was refreshed by the glowing patriotism. Particularly interesting was Stratton’s account of 9/11, hearing his perspective as someone who experienced one horror and lived long enough to witness another.

Picture Book Read-Along

My sister made an audiobook recording for a school project, and to my delight chose one of my favorite picture books, What Do You Do With a Kangaroo? by Mercer Mayer. She recruited friends, family, and classmates as voice-actors, incorporated sound effects, and the result (in my completely unbiased sisterly opinion) was pretty awesome.

What I didn't realize was that she posted this audiobook to her YouTube channel.* Had I but known, I would have shared it earlier. As it is, I know now, and so I'm sharing it:

This is one of those "listen and read-along" audiobooks, and thus doesn't include the illustrations in the video. To enjoy the full experience, you can purchase the picture book online, either on Amazon.com or AbeBooks. 


*Blatant nepotistic plug for my sister's YouTube channel. See, I did it again!

Lives in Ruins...and no, I'm not talking about that one movie

Coming off my reading of The Death of Caesar, it seemed only fitting to transition to something more…lively. And quite coincidentally this audio book, which had been on hold for several weeks, came into the library just as I finished reading Caesar. 

Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble. The title itself was most promising.  In this book, author Marilyn Johnson doesn’t so much look at how archaeologists work, but rather why they do that work in the first place. The answer, she thinks, is a sort of infatuation that takes hold of you when you look at a remnant of the past and see the past through it.

Reviewing Barry Strauss' "The Death of Caesar"

Every book you will ever read will be a message from the past. 

Think about it. Even if a book is written at break-neck speed, there’s an entire process of editing, beta-reading, publishing contracts, manufacture and distribution that takes a bit of time. Then there’s the additional and varying lag-time of how long it takes you to learn of a particular book’s existence.  Sometimes, especially with a series of novels, it’s easier to keep track of this last factor. One can pre-order, pre-purchase, pre-hold so as to get the book hot off the press. 

But if you’re like me, you have a To Be Read Pile that is dangerously close to knocking the International Space Station out of orbit. So even if you do receive a book ASAP, it may be buried under a pile of other books. (I can almost imagine the books I own saying to my library holds, “Back of the line, take a number.”)

Back to the main point: because a book is a message from the past, it behooves* a reader to not only be a lot geeky about literature, but also a little geeky about history too. The further back a book’s publication goes into the annals of time, the more a reader might have to dig to understand what the book’s contemporary readers would have taken for granted. Try reading Jane Austen without learning about the social rules of 1800’s Britain and you’ll soon understand what I mean.

I think my “To Be Read [History]” pile is possibly just as tall as my pile of other miscellaneous books. Like good literature, nonfiction history books serve a greater purpose than just entertainment: it helps the reader better comprehend the world around them. If an architect wanted to understand the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the first thing they would need would be to research the building’s foundation. Thus, in order to understand politics, sociology, international relations, conquests, wars, racial problems, religious movements, and other things that are so prevalent in the news these days, we should look to the foundation of our current world by reading history.

Source: https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-HJ525_bkrvce_12S_20150312123601.jpg

One such book that I think does this well is The Death of Caesar: The Story of History's Most Famous Assassination. I imagine writing history lends itself to two temptations:

-          To elaborate and speculate and make almost a novel out of events

-          To stick only to what can be proven through archaeological evidence and cross-referencing primary sources, basically turning it into a textbook

Agatha Christie's "Endless Night" - A Review

It’s hard to describe Agatha Christie’s Endless Night without worrying about slipping up and spoiling the ending.  So I am not going to even try. 

 So, um, if you don’t want spoilers, don’t read this.

Surprises and Disappointments: "The Birds of Pandemonium" and "Drood"

After the pleasant surprise of my previous audiobook What If? (which I briefly reviewed last week) I almost though it would be pressing luck to immediately get another random audiobook from my long library queue. However, I’d already clicked “Place Hold” so there was no going back, and before I knew it The Birds of Pandemonium: Life Among the Exotic and Endangered was waiting for me at the checkout counter.

When getting nonfiction books, I often stumble across little pockets of our world heretofore unknown to me. I didn’t know the blog xkcd existed until I read the book What If?, and even now I’m not sure I know how to spell it. 

 

The same thing happened with Pandemonium. The Pandemonium Aviaries is a nonprofit bird sanctuary that started out as a woman taking in unwanted birds, then developed into a breeding program for endangered species. The main characters are the birds themselves, of course, along with the humans who love them. 

Reviewing Gabor Boritt's "The Gettysburg Gospel": Part 2

So much for the “Gettysburg” part.  What about the “Gospel”? 

In religious terms, “gospel” is a Christian term, which means “good news,” and refers to the perfect life, sacrificial death, and the triumphant resurrection of Jesus, all in order to save everyone on earth from eternal punishment and to give each person a chance to reconcile with God and have a relationship with Him.

Throughout The Gettysburg Gospel, Boritt kept making the point of Lincoln using the word “God” instead of referring directly to Christ. The implication was that Lincoln was throwing those pious masses a bone. In my tabula rasa state, I had no real preconceptions that Lincoln was a Christian (I have my doubts about other presidents), but it seemed odd that Boritt kept underscoring this.  But, this being the first “adult” nonfiction book I’d read about Lincoln, I didn’t know who to trust. Was Boritt being a secular historian trying to minimize Lincoln’s spirituality?

Well, I went to someone I do trust, not only in American History matters, but in everything else.

Reviewing Gabor Boritt's "The Gettysburg Gospel": Part 1

I went into this book feeling like I had preconceptions about Lincoln, Gettysburg, and the American Civil War. But I knew I was ignorant, and in a way acknowledging ignorance is a good way of becoming a sort of tabula rasa.  

It was easy to admit ignorance (at least to myself). With a title like The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech Nobody Knows I expected to learn something I didn’t know. And I didn’t feel ashamed of it, since apparently nobody knew it. 

The book doesn’t recount the events of the battle of Gettysburg. It assumes the reader already knows it was the turning point of the war. And though the reader may assume he or she knows how bad the devastation was, Boritt begins his book with in-depth descriptions of how bad it actually was. Imagine wounded and dead in such large numbers that it overwhelms the population of a city. Bodies lay neglected in fields because there simply wasn’t manpower to remove them to hospitals or to bury the corpses. Even when corpses did get buried, it was such a hasty job that later they had to dig up the graves in the attempt to figure out the identity of the soldier lying there, what side he’d fought on, who his next of kin were…and finally, to give him a decent burial.

That was the reason Lincoln came to Gettysburg. Not to give his famous speech, but to lay the buried dead to rest in a national cemetery. Boritt describes the dignitaries, the journey by train to the site, the celebrity fever that caused people to flock to Gettysburg to hear the dignitaries and catch a glimpse of the president.* He poses the question of whether Lincoln wrote the speech in a flash of inspiration (as was the legend), or if he wrote it carefully over a period of time (as some historians suggest); Boritt never quite answers this question, instead going over the impact the Gettysburg Address has had over the course of history from the World Wars to September 11. 

Source: http://www.audioeditions.com/audio-book-images/l/The-Gettysburg-Gospel-305058.jpg

The First Time I Met Lincoln

This entry probably should be subtitled “A review of Gabor Boritt’s The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech Nobody Knows.” However not only is that subtitle too long (and also confusing because The Gettysburg Gospel also has a subtitle), but it wouldn’t quite be true.  This entry could double as a review, I suppose, but its focus is not on the book (for once).  Because though the content of the book was interesting enough, it sparked a process of thought that meandered far away from the author’s original purpose.

But we’ll start with the book at least. The Gettysburg Gospel was a whim checkout at the library. I was in need of an audiobook, my holds of said “listening material” taking far, far too long to come in. When my commute is an hour a day, I rely on a constant flow of audiobooks for making the time move faster, as well as actually chipping away at my colossal reading list. While I’m in the car, I’m literally a captive audience, making a good book like the embrace of a friend, and making a bad book tempt me to reinvent the Frisbee with the compact discs. 

"The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells: A Review

A long time ago when I was just entering adolescence and had spare time to waste on doing nonsensical things, I was trying to construct a pyramid out of marbles. Marbles being round and therefore not exactly conducive to stacking like bricks, this was a laborious and time-intensive goal. Enter listening to audiobooks while I did these sorts of things. In fact, I’m not at all sure, so long after the fact, that these sorts of nonsensical enterprises weren’t created in order to be doing something while listening to audiobooks. Like the chicken and the egg, I’m not sure which came first.* 

It’s a strange thing how sometimes two sensory memories, the sight of marbles, for instance, can be connected to others, such as the sound of The Time Machine being played on cassette. But when I started composing this review, that’s exactly what happened.  Remembering my first experience with H.G. Wells made me think of what I was doing while listening to that audiobook for the first time over ten years ago.

You Win Some, You Lose Some: Agatha Christie's "Elephants Can Remember" and "The Moving Finger"

The hazard of finding an author you like whose work is prolific is that sometimes you find yourself disappointed. I’ll explain by giving a specific example: Agatha Christie. With 66 novels, 156 short stories, about two dozen plays (though some were based on aforesaid novels and short stories), and even a few nonfiction books, the odds are that even though I may love many of her novels, there are a few that will fall through the appreciation cracks.

It’s easy to understand how this happens. As a rule I’m not drawn to an author once I know they’ve written over a hundred works, figuring such a behemoth of work has probably resulted in a dilution of style, characterization, and plot. Quality is sacrifice for quantity. In fact if I see a book whose author’s name is larger than the title, I usually steer clear of it. A novel should rest on the merits of its title and plot alone, not on the name of the author. Marketing around an author’s name excludes new readers who may not know Agatha Christie is a master mystery novelist as opposed to some woman with two first names.*

The other reason this tends to happen is because an author gets “typecast” and stuck writing the same types of things, and when they start to get sick of it their prose suffers as a result.  Christie notoriously got sick of writing Hercule Poirot, just as Arthur Conan Doyle got sick of Sherlock Holmes. The creative writer in them may have longed to try something else, but these series were what put food on the table so they were compelled to continue long after their excitement of writing these stories was depleted.

Susan Ronald's "The Pirate Queen": A Review

Moving on to my next nonfictional audio book, The Pirate Queen by Susan Ronald. It was coincidental I got this book the same day as The Outlaw Sea, because although I do like to read about nautical topics from time to time, it wasn’t because I was in any particular seafaring mood on that specific trip to the library, but simply because those were two of the few audio books my library owns that I have not read yet. (The pile is dwindling dangerously low in that section.)

The Pirate Queen is subtitled Queen Elizabeth I, Her Pirate Adventurers, and the Dawn of Empire, and the thesis for this book is pretty plain: Queen Elizabeth used her Pirate Adventurers (basically sanctioned pirates, also called privateers later in history) to buoy up a chaotic and politically precarious Britain into a stable foundation for the empire that was to come. When Elizabeth took the throne, she was a Protestant monarch of a small island surrounded by powerful Catholic kingdoms, all doubting the legitimacy of her claim to the throne, all thirsty to add her lands to their own empires, and she had very little to work with in the way of money or firepower to fight against it. 

Reviewing William Langewiesche's "The Outlaw Sea"

The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos and Crime by William Langewiesche was a perfectly decent nonfiction book, often riveting and mostly well-written, but marred by two and a half flaws.

I picked up the audiobook version from my library without really knowing (or being able to discern from the blurb on the back cover) what it was about. All I knew was it was vaguely nautical and catalogued as nonfiction. It turned out to be about four main stories to do with modern seafaring—I say “about four” because sometimes the storytelling was fluid enough to merge one story into another, and other times the “storytelling” stopped while the author went on a tangent about the politics of international shipping companies and policies—and these stories varied from a shipwreck due to the boat being too old, to a case of modern piracy, to the accidental sinking of a ship in the Baltic, to an investigation into “ship-breaking yards” where old ships go to be literally broken up and junked. 

Reviewing Cervantes' "Don Quixote"

I like to review books that I recommend as opposed to standing next to a book with a warning sign, partly because my mission is to encourage you readers in the great expanse of the internet to love books as much as I do, but also because, as my fellow English majors would agree, it’s easier to criticize a book’s failings than laud its merits.** So as an exercise in positivism, I stay away from books I hate and try to put forward the hidden literary gems from classic and not-so-classic genres. 

That said, being a voracious reader sometimes comes with the same side-effect as being a food critic. Just as a gourmand may turn up their nose at a lot of things in favor of one quality bite, I sometimes find myself feeling “meh, it was okay” about most books. But then once in a while that one quality book comes along that reminds me of what drew me into reading in the first place. 

One of those books was El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha AKA The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, AKA Don Quixote.  Now, I’ve owned this book since I was about twelve and started to snobbishly buy any book that looked old and had gold leaf on the spine. 

“Oh look,” I’d say to myself (quietly because this was usually at a library book-sale and librarians tend to frown on exclamations of joy even when said exclamations are caused by reading material***), “This book has gold leaf on it, it must be a classic!  I am SO smart and will read this and be cultured, sitting in my leather wing-back chair next to a fireplace with the theme song from Masterpiece Classic playing in the background.”

The Aeneid: A Multipart Review - Introduction

Much as I enjoy reading epic poetry, I don’t enjoy reading epic poetry. What I mean is that I don’t like reading it in black and white, on paper and ink, out of an honest-to-oh-so-goodness book. Frankly my mind starts wandering and my eyes start skimming the lines.

So when I read epic poetry—or really any long book that might tempt me into this half-hearted reading—I listen to it on audio book.  Not only is this an authentic way of enjoying things like Homer’s The Odyssey, but it is also a way to get a lot of reading done when you’re doing other things like driving or folding laundry—hopefully not both of those activities at the same time, that’s taking multitasking TOO far!

Therefore this is how I read The Aeneid by Virgil. I listened to the Blackstone Audio book read by Frederick Davidson and translated by W. F. Jackson Knight. I specify the reader and translator because both of these roles are important factors in how the audience (me, in this case) understands and enjoys an audio presentation of a story that was written in a dead language. 

Reviewing Homer's "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey"

The Trojan War is one of the most famous wars that maybe really happened. Verifying its historical origins, however, is secondary to all the literature written about it in Ancient Greece. Homer’s The Iliad is an epic where the gods of Olympus play favorites with mortals to satiate their own pride, where heroes and villains are split between the two factions until the reader doesn’t know which side to root for. 

It all starts with stealing Helen of Troy…wait, no, it all starts with the Judgment of Paris…wait, no, that’s still wrong. It all starts with the Wedding of Thetis. And, like a fairy tale, everyone knows that when you forget to invite the evil fairy, something bad is going to happen. Eris, goddess of discord, crashes the party by throwing a golden apple with “To The Fairest” engraved on it. 
(Unfortunately this was before Snow White was born, so the decision was a lot harder than it would’ve been in other circumstances.) 

The Best Books to Listen To

Before there were books, there were still stories. Epic poems recited and improvised upon around a bonfire at night. Passed by word from one generation to the next and spread from one village to the next until some bright kid invented the alphabet and wrote all these stories down. Even today some cultures maintain that oral legacy of storytelling. Now you can recreate the experience of listening to great oral works, too! Below are three categories of books that work particularly well in audio format, as well as a few suggestions of the best authors and readers available.