dearpru

A fabulous journey

Revisado: 10-17-23

Perfect is the only word to describe both overall story and performance. Engaging from word one.

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Mandatory Reading

Revisado: 10-05-23

A primer for those who often scratch their heads and wonder, "What the hell happened to our country?"

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You'll Never Say "Hillbilly" Again

Revisado: 10-05-23

This book is everything that Hillbilly Elegy was touted to be but was not. Although a novel, Demon Copperhead rings true about those living with the boot of poverty on their necks and the moniker "white trash" hung around their necks. And it's all wrapped in a brilliant story that echoes its namesake, David Copperfield, in ways both obvious and subtle. In fact, one of the fun parts of reading this was to try to find the places that "rhymed" with Dickens' book. The narration is good--a bit twangy, but you'll get used to it.

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A Revelatioin Told in Gripping Detail

Revisado: 10-05-23

As Americans, what we don't know would fill a bookshelf. Fortunately for us, many of these books on this shelf are penned by Timothy Egan, one of our nation's foremost investigative journalists who, thanks to his due diligence, exposes stretches of American history that *somehow* got left out of our history books. This book reveals, in heartbreaking detail, how easily ordinary people can be bamboozled, bribed, and blackmailed into behaving badly--murderously bad--by one megalomaniac man, in this case, Grand Dragon of the Indiana KKK, David Stephenson. The saddest part for me was how the actions of these long-ago citizens who fell hook, line, and sinker into the arms of the KKK are so reminiscent --in both their behavior and their rhetoric--of those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and those who refuse to admit that the 45th president lost the 2020 election. This book, narrated by Egan, will keep you spellbound. Like any good story, there is a real-life hero and a constellation of others, including Edgar J. Hoover, who could have acted better. Every "character" is presented as the flawed human they are. Despite his later creepiness, Hoover doesn't come off too badly. And there are also the requisite bad actors--more than you ever thought possible. It's a good read and a great listen. And, if you have an empathetic bone in your body, you'll rethink a lot of issues, especially reparations and how we sequester a huge percentage of our nation's Black men in prison. I wish more people would read this book...especially those with the power to make changes that might somehow help heal these deep-seated wounds caused by David Stephenson and his followers.

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Puts the "Rigged" in Oil Rigs

Revisado: 10-05-23

This book is not about the period when, in the mid-1800s, the Osage Indians were kicked off their traditional lands--over a million acres in the heart of what later became the United States-- and forced to live in Osage County, a tiny corner of Kansas where, years later, rich oil deposits were found in the hitherto worthless land. Rather, this book breathes life into one of the many tragic episodes in our nation's history where our burgeoning economy's need for oil supplanted morals, humanity, and treaties with all manner of criminal behavior by so-called "leading citizens" of Osage County, Kansas. The maddening twist is how this criminal behavior was endorsed by and covered up by so-called "good" White citizens ranging from local lawmen, including the judiciary, to everyday citizens who, rather than turning in their neighbors for ripping off and murdering Osage Indians for their oil rights, had their hands in the oil till to grab whatever monies they could while the oil still flowed. You will leave this book frustrated that the fuel you put in your vehicles, that cooks your food, and warms your home is part of this poisonous legacy.

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Follett Phones It In

Revisado: 10-05-23

While listening to The Armor of Light, I kept wondering "Is this the same author who wrote the captivating Pillars of the Earth and World Without End?" This newest book about denizens of the Kingsbridge DNA pool never ignites as Follett's other Kingsbridge books do. Instead, it sparks and sputters, introducing the requisite bad guys who either disappear without much explanation or come to a predictable, hackneyed bad end. Two characters are so similar that I kept having to stop the recording to backtrack in my mind exactly which of the two adulterous Methodists in the rag trade it was. On the plus side, I did get a refresh on the birth of the textile industry in Merry Old England. The book begins when individual spinners produced threads and yarns for individual weavers and, by book end, there are factories with water- and steam-powered looms with programmable cards for patterns. So that's fun. The narrator sometimes forgot to switch voices in time so would read the description parts in one of the character's voices. That was weird. I think I'm done with this series, as much as I loved the many gingers who push the action forward to the modern world we live in today.

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Riveting because it all really happened

Revisado: 04-24-23

You’ll never feel the same about flying into Washington, D.C.’s Dulles airport again. You’ll never feel the same about the CIA, the FBI, and the US military again. This is scary, eye-opening information that, once seen and understood, will rock your world and leave you feeling as if you’ve left the Garden of Eden far behind.

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Narrator ruins listening experience

Revisado: 12-29-22

Elizabeth Hardwick’s writing is evocative and elegiac. Her words and imagery are punctured by a narrator who sounds like an AI bot whose batteries need recharging. Monotone delivery with abrupt stops and starts. Simply awful. I want my credit back!

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Ambitious attempt to capture reality

Revisado: 04-12-22

This book bit off a big, toxic chunk of what is really happening to indigenous people all over the world and narrowed it down to the lives of a handful of individuals living in one African village who narrated the story. Entrancing at first, the tale soon grew preachy and heavy with on-the-nose wide-ranging reflections & observations made by the characters who became increasingly self-righteous, victimized or corrupted.

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Enlightening, but...

Revisado: 09-11-21

The story of Meg Lowman's scientific prowess, her weaving of intuition, observation, and innovation, deserves to be told in a believable voice--a voice that has the gravitas of a woman in a serious scientific field. Instead, the main narrator (not Sylvia A. Earle,) sounds like the bright, smiling voicemail "lady" who tells you to visit www.whatever.com if you want to find the answer to the question you hoped would be addressed by a real human being.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas