The Artful Read-Aloud by Rebecca Bellingham

Rating: WARTY!

This was a non-fiction abridged audiobook about the importance of reading aloud to children to engage them in the written word and enrich their lives. That's a sentiment I am fully onboard with, but it felt to me like this was written more for teachers than for parents and there's an awful lot of PhD-Speak in it. I don't believe it's going to reach those parents who would most need it and most benefit from it. I made it to about the halfway point and gave up on it because of this and other issues.

It started out well-enough, but there were so many lists in it - in just the 50% I listened to - that it was hard to keep track and there was no ready 'take-home' message from any of it. The blurb talks about ten principles, but there were scores of them in the lists. I have no idea what the specific ten principles were because everything was so mixed up and repetitive that it just confused things - and in an audiobook, you cannot readily go back and re-read a paragraph or find the particular spot to re-reference something you heard earlier with any facility.

The other problem, especially given that this was an audio-book is that the reader, who was also the writer, did not offer any real examples of what she meant in the text. She would refer to some technique or to something in a book that would make you want to stop and talk about it, or that would make you want to read it in a special way to better engage listeners, and then she would not read an example to illustrate what she meant. This was an abridged version, so maybe the full version offers that. I don't know. All this version offered was a website to visit where presumably, you could hear examples, which is frankly an annoyance, especially since you cannot get to that without logging in, which requires your email address, so no! I am not giving my email address out so it can be handed around so I can get more spam than I already do! And not when that stuff ought to have come with the book.

There was one amusing contradiction in it when, after a chapter bemoaning how children these days never look around them, because they're always looking down at their device, the very next chapter started with a chapter quote about the importance of looking down - which contradicted what the author had said previously! LOL! I am not a fan of chapter lead-in quotes. They're pretentious and meaningless to anyone but the author, and typically they have zip to do with the content of the chapter they precede. Additionally, though the author kept mentioning older students, she seemed like her focus was primarily on very young children, and on fiction - she never mentioned the possibility of applying this technique to non-fiction works. Not in that first 50% anyways.

Though the book claims it's speaking to all parents and guardians of children as well as teachers, to me it felt strongly like it was only speaking to professionals as judged by the educational buzzwords being tossed around, and the academic-level speech and concepts being used. For example, the author frequently referred to an alphabetical scale by which books - and I assume book reading difficulty/ease - are measured. She kept talking about things like "the O, P, Q band" and so on, using one or another triplet of sequential alphabet letters, but nowhere was there any explanation whatsoever as to what that was, what it meant or how to use it!

With my wife's solid support, I've raised two children and put them through school and never once have I encountered this scale. This is what I mean by PhD-speak and why I feel the book is aimed at professionals with little regard for your everyday parent or guardian out there. It would not have hurt to explain what that scale meant, but the author kept on referring to it without evidencing any desire to explain it at all. Maybe in the unabridged version this is explained, but that doesn't help here, and it's a lousy way to treat your reader.

Another issue regarding elitism was that there are authors mentioned here and there as worth paying attention to (without really giving us a reason why or a short example of their work to judge by), but I hadn't heard of a single one of them! I do not count myself as any sort of great authority on children's fiction by any means, but I am very widely-read across all genres and age ranges, yet not one of the names she mentioned was familiar to me at all.

Worse, she mentioned a Newbery award winner, which turned me right off. I have no respect for 'award-winning books' which to me are almost (not quite, but almost) universally trite, pedantic, and tedious to read. There wasn't a single well-known or widely popular author on her reading list apparently, and when she spoke of someone I had never heard of as an "acclaimed" author, I had to wonder momentarily what it was that made that author so acclaimed? Was it just that this author happened to like her? Was it that this author had read her name a few times? Or was there something more? I dunno, but it tried my faith in her examples and her assertions to have things like that put out there unsupported.

The author made a lot of references to the performing arts and there are authentic parallels to be drawn between those, and the act of reading aloud to engage a child's mind, but I'm not a theater-goer and I detest musicals, yet these were the only things the author referenced, as though other such forms: TV, movies, streaming services, YouTube, for example, are beneath her. It felt snobbish and elitist. I suspect most of the people who would truly stand to benefit from this book are not theater-goers either, so this felt, ironically, like it was falling on inattentive ears.

So while I whole-heartedly support the idea of reading to children in your care, even if you do not embrace any of the suggestions this book offers (it's still better than not reading!), personally, I found this book to be of little helpful in any signifcant measure. Instead, to me it felt rushed, confusing, and babbling, which is precisely the opposite of what you need to be if you wish to artfully read aloud to children. Consequently, I can't commend this.

Essential Anaïs Nin by Anaïs Nin

Rating: WARTY!

I misunderstood this one completely. I'd thought it was going to be a collection of her best work read by the author (whose full name is the immense Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell) herself, but instead, it was a very short collection of some random speeches she'd made, usually talking about people I'd never heard of. It was a delight to hear her voice which I never had before, but the speeches were mostly boring to me because they lacked context and were presented with no introduction or background. There was some humor and one or two interesting insights, but for me this simply wasn't really worth the time or the money. Quite honestly I felt rather ripped-off. Fortunately I had this at a discount so it could have been worse! But I can't commend it unless you're truly a Nin-y!

The Concordia Deception by JJ Green

Rating: WARTY!

This novel held my interest long enough to finish it, but I skipped bits here and there and wasn't really very happy with it overall since it made little sense far too often to let it slide.

It's a sci-fi story about a colony ship that takes almost 200 years to reach another planet. They're sent there because Earth is so trashed and they don't think it can support any more humans. They fear humanity will die out, but given how much it had to have cost to build the ship, I don't get how people couldn't have improved conditions on Earth dramatically with all those resources, thereby avoiding the need to go elsewhere, but again, and foolishly as it happened(!), I let that slide.

The idea is that there are genetically generated farmers who have hardiness and skills for farming, as well as a smaller crew of scientists who support them. Again this made no sense: if their genetic engineering is so advanced on Earth, how come they had such trouble surviving there? Later in the story, it comes out that people on Earth have been largely wiped out by a new flu strain (this was written before Covid), yet they have advanced genetic engineers? They couldn't fix the flu? We're on the verge of doing that now, but these future people couldn't do it? Once again, it made no sense!

So these colonists are exploring this planet, but they seem to have no advanced technology: no satellites that can do a decent survey from space. No drones to survey the place at near ground level; no robots to help on the ground? Again, it made no sense. We have all of those things now. Why would they not have them in the future?

On top of this, there's a rebel movement which has people embedded in the colony who are trying to sabotage it. They're apparently up in arms against the unnatural aspects of this genetic engineering, but then why go on the ship? Why not just let 'em go, and say good riddance, and stay on Earth to enjoy their natural life? This was not a religious order, so there was none of that fanaticism; just the 'natural' PoV, and it wasn't enough to account for the behavior.

The book description is all about this Cariad character who is one of the scientists and who plays a relatively minor role in the colonization. The main character who gets no mention in the description is Ethan, who is a 'gen' - genetically developed 'farmer' - who is a respected leader in the farming community. The thing is that the farming community never actually does any farming! Farming is a full-time job, but though Ethan has his own farm, he never goes there. He's never shown working. In fact he gets so distracted that he neglects his farm to the point where it could well be failing - he doesn't know. He hasn't been there in a while.

The gens decide to quietly abandon the colony to start their own independent colony on the coast, where they occupy a series of caves and tunnels in the cliff face by the ocean. They have to explore these caves on foot with torches because they apparently never heard of drones. It made no sense. One of the gens is the saboteur, but that made no sense either because this person had no training in explosives and no clue as to where to put them since there had been no extensive survey of the caves to find the weak spots, yet the caves are effectively destroyed and many lives are risked!

This goes to my point, which I think I've demonstrated conclusively by now, that if the story isn't getting it done, you need to quit gamely plodding on to the end and ditch it for something that will entertain. It's not worth wasting your time on something that's failing you. I can't commend this as a worthy read because it was so badly-written.

Blow the Bloody Doors off by Michael Caine

Rating: WORTHY!

Michael Caine's autobiography is read by himself in the audiobook version and it was interesting, informative, and laugh-out-loud funny on occasion. I confess some slight disappointment that he doesn't talk more about the making of the various films he's been in. He does talk a lot about them, but his approach every time seems to be to focus on the elements which would help aspiring actors: offering tidbits and advice, and lessons he's learned, which is great, but I felt like he wasn't really talking to me, somehow.

I don't regret buying the book though - it's well worth listening to if you like him as an actor or are interested in the movie business. He covers his life from birth through youth to his first interest in the movies and thence onto his career: how there was a struggle and then how it took off once he'd made two relatively early and successful movies where he had major roles, such as Zulu in 1964 and Alfie two years later. This brought him to international recognition, and got him a lot more choice roles, and brought him into the world of movie superstars with all the attendant pleasures and problems.

Throughout the book the author remains grounded, good humored, and informative. He has no illusions about the movie business and tells it like it is - the good parts and the bad parts. He offers a lot of information and advice, and jumps from one move to another to make a point or illustrate an aspect of his life or his career. I'd have liked a lot more depth and breadth in his discussions of the movies, but I did appreciate what was offered. I enjoyed this book very much and commend it as a worthy read.

A Natural History of Color by Hans Bachor, Rob DeSalle

Rating: WARTY!

The idiot librarians at Goodreads have this author listed as Bacher and Bachor. Way to go! It's yet another reason to ditch Amazon and all its works. Evidently there's no respect for writers in those quarters, only for profits. This audiobook was read nicely by George Newbern, but ultimately it was disappointing for me. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting from it, but what I got was less than that, whatever it was! The biggest problem for me was that the book was far more dense and technical than I expected. I did not expect an academic paper and to be fair, that's not what this was, but in many ways it was annoyingly close at times.

If I'd been sitting comfortably with no distractions I could have followed it a lot better, but I would still have had a problem with the density of the technical stuff. A book like that, if I'm going to read it, I need to have in front of me as a print, or ebook. Audiobooks do not work well for me that way. The fact that this book went off on tangents meandering as far back as the Big Bang and later off into evolutionary genetics did not help. While I would not have minded brief excursions in either direction, these things just went into far too much technical detail, and were much too long.

There was a huge amount on genetics and mutations, and on and on, and it started to feel more like a dry biology text book than one about color and color perception so I also tired of the topics. I made it through most of the book, but eventually decided my time would be better spent on a different topic, and I did not regret swapping this out for a book on relativity, which was far better written and much more educational and entertaining. I can't commend this one.

Fever, Feuds, and Diamonds by Paul Farmer

Rating: WORTHY!

Read decently by Pete Cross, this audiobook was short, to the point, and highly informative. Farmer talks about the 2014 epidemic of Ebola that assaulted Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, but the roots of the problems reach far back beyond that into almost ancient history - that of the exploitation of Africa beginning with a conference in 1884 that resulted in some 90% of America being "owned" by European powers by the turn of the twentieth century. Slavery may well have been considered over by then, but in effect it really wasn't. The location of it was merely switched back to Africa instead of remaining visible in Europe and the Americas.

Farmer does an excellent job of digging beneath the scary news headlines of the ravages of various diseases on the African continent, particularly Ebola, the most nightmarish of them all, but he never loses sight of the victims of this horrific outbreak, or of what truly caused it to be so devastating. As the book description says, he rebuts "misleading claims about the origins of Ebola and why it spread so rapidly" and "he traces West Africa’s chronic health failures back to centuries of exploitation and injustice.

Books like this one ought to be required reading (or in this case, listening!), especially in times like these when a world-wide and equally scary pandemic is affecting everyone, everywhere, from all walks of life and socio-econiomic backgrounds. You will never view African epidemics in the same way again. I commend it.

Gender Rebels by Anneka Harry

Rating: WORTHY!

Promoted as "50 Influential Cross-Dressers, Impersonators, Name-Changers, and Game-Changers", this audio book covered a surprising and sometimes disturbing variety of women who went outside the norm (as it was back then since most of these stories are historical, although some are contemporary) to get the life they wanted. The tongue-in-cheek mini-bio book is narrated by author Anneka Harry, along with Gemma Cairney, Maya Jama, and Suranne Jones, all of whom were eminently listenable. There is an interview section at the end which was hilarious and highly entertaining.

I've seen some negative criticism of this book which talks of it being disrespectful, or employing an inappropriate approach or humor, but I think the problem with those reviewers for the most part is that they simply did not understand the British sense of humor. For me this book could do no wrong. It was outstanding and not only respected the women described here, but also championed them. Many of them I had already heard of, but most I had not, and this is from someone who has gone out of his way to learn more about such women. Another criticism I saw was that some of these women were not nice people. No, they were not, but nowhere does this book promise only to report on angels and goody-two shoes women. It's merely talking about those who broke the mold, and it promises nothing about whether they were good people or bad.

The women featured are (in order of appearance!):

• Hatshepsut
• Hua Mulan
• Saint Marina
• Joanna of Flanders
• Onorata Rodiani
• Joan of Arc
• Elena de Céspedes
• Mary Frith
• Catalina de Erauso
• Queen Kristina of Sweden
• Kit Cavanagh
• Julie d'Aubigny
• Ulrika Eleonora Stålhammar
• Mary Read
• Anne Bonny
• Mary East
• Catterina Vizzani
• Margaret Woffington
• Mary Hamilton
• Hannah Snell
• Margaret Ann Bulkley
• Kaúxuma Núpika
• Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin aka George Sand
• Charlotte Darkey Parkhurst
• The Brontë Sisters
• Mary Anne Evans aka George Eliot
• Ellen Craft
• Loreta Janeta Velázquez (note that this particular one is disputed)
• Lillie Hitchcock Coit
• Cathay Williams
• Jeanne Bonnet
• Violet Paget
• Mary Anerson
• Clara Mary Lambert
• Qiu Jin
• Isabelle Wilhelmine Marie Eberhardt
• Dorothy Lawrence
• Umm Kulthum
• Florence Pancho Barnes
• Dorothy Tipton
• June Tarpé Mills
• Saraswathi Rajamani
• Dame Stephanie Shirley
• Rena Rusty Kanokogi
• Bobbi Gibb
• Pili Hussein
• Sisa Abauu Dauh El-Nemr
• Tatiana Alvarez
• Maria Toorpakai Wazir
• Sahar Khodayari

Note that this list is from the audiobook, so I make no claims for accurate spelling, although I've tried to get 'em all right. It's the only complete list I know of outside of the book itself.

I really enjoyed this book and highly commend it - unless of course you don't get British humor and/or are not entertained by a playful narrative in which case you might want to opt for something staid - or stay-ed?

The Man Who Would be Jack by David Bullock

Rating: WARTY!

This is one of many books that push the author's personal favorite 'solution' to the identity of Jack the Ripper - which short of inventing a time machine will never now be solved. They all push their own pet theory and dismiss out of hand all the previous ones that other authors have pushed with equal fervor. The central problem with all of these books, including this one, is that each author is so besotted with their own theory that they never look at it critically even as they eviscerate the claims made by their rivals. Ultimately, this is what makes their own claim so putrid.

Bullock isn't the first to name this guy who sports the unfortunately à propos name of Tom Cutbush. His name was put forward by reporters within a couple of years of the last known Ripper murder. Bullock essentially just regurgitates their evidence. He also adds, as have other writers, one or two murders to the canonical list, just to puff-up his claim and 'prove' that the murders continued right up to the point where Cutbush could not have committed any more since he himself was committed. It doesn't matter that those other murders and assaults do not fit the MO.

We've had theories about there being no Ripper - just a series of murders that were lumped together by the media for sensationalistic purposes, which is nonsense. The police of that era not stupid and they were sure the so-called canonical murders were committed by the same guy. We've had theories that there was more than one Ripper - either working together or in tandem - because different knives were used, so they claim. This is really poor evidence. One psycho killer couldn't use more than one knife? We've had murders that were committed before and after the ones typically ascribed to the Ripper, and we've had so-called canonical ones subtracted just to fit a theory.

The problem with extending the Ripper's run after Mary Kelly's death, as this author does, is that they fail to explain how this psychotic killer managed to step down his carnage after Kelly, which was an horrific murder involving extensive mutilation. This was the Ripper's only indoor murder and he was undisturbed for an extended period, which accounts for how out of control his attack was, but the problem for Ripper solution addicts is that no serial killer can step down. They can delay their urges, but like the addict they are, they need a bigger thrill each time. This was why there was a double murder in September - the Ripper was interrupted during the first one and was unable to get the fix he needed, so he attacked another unfortunate woman to satisfy his violent urges.

So each time, they need more and after Kelly's horrible death, how is Cutbush going to step down and revert to stabbing people in the buttocks for his thrills? It doesn't work. It seems to me the Ripper committed suicide or died, or perhaps was committed to an asylum after his last murder because someone found him somewhere, incoherent after Mary Kelly's brutal death. The thing is, we'll never know.

This book does spend a bit more time on the victims than books of this nature typically do, but the real focus, as usual, is on the favored suspect, and it's really become quite tedious to read books like this, so I am done, and I can't commend a book so blinkered, biased, and ill-conceived as this one is.

Unqualified by Anna Faris

Rating: WARTY!

I've long been a fan of Anna (pronounced Ahna) Faris as a comedy actor, so I thought this audiobook might be a riot as well as offer some interesting and amusing insights into the movie business, but it offered nothing that any woman of her age and similar experience could have written even had she nothing to do with the movie business, and I quit about halfway through it, in real disappointment and boredom.

Yes, she does mention a movie here and there in passing, but she never really talks about her experiences on them. Almost the entirety of the book (at least as far as I listened, which was about 75%), is about relationships and sex and body hair. The book description claims "A hilarious, honest memoir-combined with just the right amount of relationship advice." No, that's completely wrong. There's way-the-hell too much relationship advice and barely anything about movies, so I have no idea what this is supposed to be a memoir of.

Personally, I had no interest in who she had a crush on at school and I'm sure the guys she mentions will not appreciate the notoriety. I sure wouldn't, even if I were someone who'd been nice to her. And while she's listing these people by name, she complains about similar kinds of things happening to her, which seems hypocritical at best, but what I found truly sad is how much she seems to need to validate herself with a guy - right from the off and repeatedly throughout the book, she keeps harping back to guys again and again. The amount of times she validates herself through guys is disgusting, shameful and very sad.

She goes on and on about how great, wonderful, etc., her relationship is with Chris Pratt, but this book is two years old and she's divorced from him now, so it makes all these stories seem so shallow, short-sighted, or clueless. That's not to say she doenslt ahve a decent relationship with him now, for all I know, but really? If she'd stuck with her movie experiences, maybe mentioned a guy or a relationship in passing here and there, it would have been a much different book and she would not have forced me to repeatedly skip multiple fifteen second segments at a time to get past yet another sexual encounter or crush, or lusting, or discussion of guys.

In the end I was skimming more than I was listening and I asked: why am I even continuing with this? I ditched it and moved on. I cannot commend it. The title is missing a word - something like 'Disaster' to appear after 'Unqualified' and maybe 'Unqualified' should be traded for 'Unmitigated'. It's not a good book. She may amuse me in the movies but she isn't the kind of person I would enjoy talking to in person so I think I am going to relegate her to position two in my esteem and elevate Aubrey Plaza to number one! She's much more entertaining.

#VERYFAT #VERYBRAVE by Nicole Byer

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This book pretty much does exactly what it claims it will do: presents a brave and frankly not-so-fat Nicole Byer in a bikini - and then another, and another. And another! And she looks great in most of them, a bit weird (and usually intentionally so!) in the rest, although my personal favorite was the picture at the very end of the book where she was laying down in a simple dress, and looked awesome. The fact that the author has the cutest face does not hurt these images one bit. I don't know how old she is, and it doesn't matter; all I can say is that whatever age she is, she looks half that age because of her face.

This book had no intention of offering advice on diet or healthy eating, and maybe it ought to have. That clearly wasn't the author's intention, but part of having a positive body image - of loving your body - is knowing that you're not only comfortable in your own skin, but that you're taking care of that skin and whatever's in it whether you're #VERYFAT or #VERYTHIN or anywhere in between. In a study of almost 6,000 Coronavirus patients, ones with poor outcomes nearly always had underlying conditions, and 41% of those fatalities were at least in part because the patient was obese. Body positivity is the only smart way to go, but that doesn't mean becoming willfully blind to health considerations.

But this book is unashamedly about bikinis, how to buy them, how to wear them, how to mix and match tops and bottoms, with a few hints and tips about getting the best fit, and handling idiots who think it's their duty to comment uninvited on others, but mostly it was a string of photos of the author sporting various items of clothing, nearly all of which were varieties of bikini (but not string bikinis!).

There were some oddball instances of confused text, most notably when I read: “...sliding her vagina down my face” but this isn't what happened. I promise you it was her vulva she slid down Nicole's face, not her vagina. It was sad that Nicole was grossed out by this, but not by the possibility of garnering an STD from this stranger with this uninvited sexual contact.

I could have done without so many four letter words, so be warned there are multiple ones in here, and I'm never comfortable with the use of the word 'bitch' which can strangely e both and endearment and an insult, so for me, that was over the top, but apart from that I think this is an amusing book. The author has a great sense of humor. It was fun, entertaining, and educational, and uplifting, and I commend it was a worthy read.

Bonk by Mary Roach

Rating: WORTHY!

I get through a number of audiobooks and I'm less picky about those than print or ebooks because I have this captive time while commuting so I may as well get experimental to avoid getting completely mental, so I go out on more of a limb with audiobooks. Not anything crazy. I mean I don't try sitting on the case while driving, or hanging CDs from my mirror to catch the sunlight, but I tend to listen to a wider variety of material than I read, and I read a pretty wide variety as it is. Anyway that's my excuse for this one, which turned out to be highly entertaining with a few LOLs and belly laughs along the way.

Mary Roach has an interesting take on life, her humor dry, sly, and wry, and she puts it to full use here in this survey of studies on human sexuality with some animal variants tossed in for good measure. This is an historical survey, so it goes way back - before even Kinsey Masters Johnson, so it covers some ground and gives an interesting perspective on how white men studied female sexuality back then and the bizarre ideas they had about it. Unfortunately we're still suffering from that kind of bias even in much more recent studies of many aspects of human health and bodily function - not just sexuality which routinely exclude women for no good reason and to the detriment of our understanding, particularly of when it comes to female health.

Anyway, without going into any details, I can commend this as an interesting, educational, and worthy read.

Frida & Diego by Catherine Reef

Rating: WORTHY!

I've long been interested in Frida Kahlo and the life she was forced to live, so when I happened upon this larger format print book I saw in the library, I grabbed it up without thinking twice. It tells the individual stories of the childhood and youth of the two artists separately, and then of their life together, problematic as it was at times. It discusses their work and how events in their lives influenced it, and of Frida's struggle with health issues, beginning with polio, and then with a tramcar accident which resulted in a metal hand rail piercing her hip - a major and life-threatening injury from which she never fully-recovered and for which she was still having surgeries long after the accident.

As if that wasn't bad enough, she ended up falling for a serial philanderer which led to a codependent relationship that neither party could move on from, not even after they divorced. The book covers a lot of ground and contains a wealth of fascinating detail. The author has done her work without question.

The only thing about this book which bothered me was that so little of their art was depicted. There is a lot of imagery and quite a few of their paintings are included, but most of the pictures are photographs of them and their friends, so for me, too little of the art was on show. That aside though, I enjoyed reading this, and I commend it as a worthy read for anyone who is a fan of either artist, or even of art in general. Both the over-used phrases 'struggling artist' and 'tortured artist' apply quite literally to Frida Kahlo and she's always worth reading about.

Kick Kennedy by Barbara Leaming

Rating: WORTHY!

Kathleen Kennedy was nicknamed "Kick" which sounds stupid to us today, but which was right in line with kids for the era in which she grew up. She was a part of a very large Catholic family, sister to John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Edward Kennedy. This audiobook tells of her time from her first trip to Britain in the late 1930's and her eventual marriage to the Marquess of Hartington, heir apparent to the 10th Duke of Devonshire. She lost her husband to the war in Belgium in 1944, not long after the marriage, and died in Europe herself just a few years later, at the age of 28 in a plane crash.

This book which sports, I have to say, some rather fanciful story-telling here and there it seems to me, recounts her life and death, surround by Lords and Dukes and Grand Dukes and Viscounts, and Marquises. It's really quite shameful how spoiled-rotten these people were, and how easy their life was, drifting from one event to another, from one function to another, from one party to another, never doing a lick of work because they were so rich, they didn't have to. Now that doesn't make it right that she died so young, but it does make it hard to sympathize with her when she lived a life most people who live into their eighties can't even imagine.

That said it makes for an interesting read, even if parts of it are so far from one's personal experience that it seems like reading fiction even when it's true. Having started to fall for the guy, she found herself torn away from him by her father's insistence that his entire family return to the USA as hostilities between Britain and Germany, via France and Czechoslovakia's travails. The Kennedys had been welcomed and even somewhat revered in Britain, and Kick was very popular with her own set, but when Joe Kennedy started talking, back in the USA, about leaving Britain to it when it came to fighting this war, his popularity plummeted in the UK and he saw this starkly on his return.

Meanwhile all Kick wanted to do was return to see Billy. She eventually got her wish and they married to opposition from her Catholic, but far from catholic parents, and this was despite her not giving up on Catholicism herself. All she had to do was agree to the children being raised Protestant, and she didn't protest about that at all. The thing was that her husband stuck his head up, either unaware that he was being fired on by a German machinegun, or not realizing it was dangerous, and was shot in that same head. It was a whole week before Kick learned her husband of only four months had died - only one month after Kick's own brother, Joe Kennedy Junior, also died in a plane crash.

The book moves a lot more quickly after this and it would seem that Kick had changed her view of life by then, so instead of seeking out someone she truly loved, now she was little more than a gold digger. Having lost her status since her husband's death and seeing the dukedom go then to his younger brother (who was married to one of the feisty Mitford sisters), it wasn't so very long before she began chasing after the married 8th Earl Fitzwilliam, who was even richer and had higher status than her late husband had.

Prior to reading this I had little idea of Kick Kennedy other than being intrigued that she was JFK's sister and had died young and was tied to the area of Britain where I had grown up (she's buried in my home county). Now I've read this (listened to it, more accurately) and learned plenty about her, and while I commend this book as a worthy read, I can't imagine I would ever have actually liked Kick Kennedy had I been alive in the era which she lived. In fact, our social circles would have been so divorced from one another that I would never have even met her at all, and that would have been fine with me because she disgusts me.

Betty and the Silver Spider by Craig Luebben, Jeremy Collins

Rating: WORTHY!

Amusingly, but carefully written by mountain guide Luebben and illustrated ably by artist Jeremy Collins, this graphic novel teaches important safety and technique for both new and expert climbers. Although the initials of the title spell BATSS, there's nothing bats about the story, as near-expert climber Betty attempts the top-level Silver Spider climb on the indoor 'rock face', and her partner, Moe is literally learning the ropes and when not to let go of them.

The book discusses equipment and technique, offering hints and tips for safer, better climbing, including belaying, bouldering, gym etiquette, leading, top-roping (you'll get it when you see it!), tying knots, and everything else you will need to know to have a fun, educational, and above all safe climb in your nearest rock climbing gym. I am not a climber, nor am I planning on becoming one, but even so I enjoyed it and learned a lot - who knows, maybe I'll write a novel about a climber one day, and if I do, I'll know just where to go to get the low-down on the high up. I commend this as a worthy read especially if you're into climbing.

Uncomfortable Labels by Laura Kate Dale

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Erratum:
“The more I learnt into trying to hide it, the more it hurt.”
I'm not sure what she was trying to convey with that! I wonder if the 'R' in 'learnt' ought to have been omitted so that it read 'leant' which is Brit-speak for 'leaned'. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what’s being said there.

This made for a difficult read because of what that author went through, but it was a worthwhile read, and I commend it for that. It was well-written, informative, educational, and important. It felt like a sick joke how much was piled onto this author's plate: mtf transgendered woman who is queer and on the autism spectrum which poor understanding by those closest to her and a late diagnosis of both the ASD and the transgender circumstances did nothing to help. This is precisely why we need understanding and education, so that this doesn’t happen to other people undergoing these same realizations and discoveries.

If either experience (the transgender or the autism) had been the only one this writer endured, it still would have been difficult, but it might also have made for a better outcome. Having both of these to deal with together not only served to confuse things, but also seemed that one would sometimes to feed off the other, obscuring what ideally ought to have been early recognition and a smooth treatment to help both the ASD and the transition to what was to become, if unfortunately belatedly, her natural gender.

The book is divided into three sections: before, during, and after, and each has its own story to tell and difficulties to relate, particularly the last section. For me, who didn't have to go through this, that last one sounded the most painful, but the middle one gave it a close run for its money. The first section as sad, but in some ways very cute and endearing. The whole is a heart-warming story with a happy ending, and a useful tool for others in similar circumstances. I highly commend this as a worthy read, and an essential one for anyone who wishes to understand and learn.

Dear Fahrenheit 451 by Annie Spence

Rating: WARTY!

Subtitled Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks, this audiobook sounded like fun, and I love librarians, so I felt I owed the profession a review of this or something like it, but in the end, I didn't love this book for several reasons. I had hoped for something much better.

The first and foremost of the problems I had with it was that despite being published only a year or so ago (as of this review) the book seemed obsessed with antiques and classics rather than addressing any of the newer material that's out there. I don't have a lot of reverence for the classics - certainly no more than for modern works and certainly not simply because they're so-called classics! Yes, it did cover some more recent material but very, very, little.

Another issue I had with it was that, for having been written by a librarian, it wasn't very good. There were some interesting 'letters' and some outright laugh-out-loud moments in it, but those were few and far between and the more I listened to this, the more I found myself skipping sections either because they were boring or because I had zero interest in the book being addressed. It felt like anyone could have written this, no librarianship required.

Worse than this was the vulgar language. I have no problem with that in a novel. People use foul language in real life so there's no reason at all it should not be depicted in a novel, but it felt completely out of place in this work, and it really grated when she used it.

For these reasons I cannot commend this as a worthy read. My apologies to librarians everywhere; I can;t speak for them, but I doubt this author speaks for very many of them!

Blamed and Broken by Curt Petrovich

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

As the subtitle "The Mounties and the Death of Robert Dziekanski" might suggest, this was a curiously-biased report of a fatal Taser™ incident which took place in October 2007 at the Vancouver International Airport in Canada, where four Royal Canadian Mounted Police confronted a Polish immigrant named Robert Dziekański, who spoke no English, and who was obviously frustrated and angry, but who had not hurt anyone and was threatening no one.

According to Goodreads (and this may be in error since Goodreads librarians are listed under 'useless' in the dictionary) the book is also titled Twenty-Six Seconds: A Fateful Decision. A Dead Man. A Decade of Cover-Up, so that ought to tell you something about how sensationalist the book is. Talking of Goodreads librarians, the book is listed as" Blamaed and Broken" so Goodreads' crappy search engine will never find this. You have to search by author name to get to it. This is one good reason why I quit posting reviews to Goodreads. It's about what I expect from something that has been stained by Amazon.

Let me say up front that it's far easier to make judgments on the sidelines and after the fact than it is when you're directly involved and in the middle of something as it happens, but from all I've read and seen, including the poorly-shot and misinformed video available on You Tube, Dziekański was far more defensively postured than ever he was aggressively so. He didn't offer anything like aggression until he was tasered, and even then he was not trying to harm anyone. He was clearly reacting in pain. The trigger for the tasering was after he turned around on the mounties with a stapler in his hand, and it all went sideways.

At this point he was repeatedly tasered, and when handcuffed and on the ground Dziekanski became increasingly physiologically distressed. He was denied airport medical treatment and got none until external medical services arrived. The RCMP officers initially refused to remove handcuffs when requested to do so by the EMTs, and when the cuffs were removed and the EMTs began working on the guy, he was found to be already dead. The video is misleading because there is a male voice on it repeatedly offering misinformation - such as declaring that the guy speaks Russian when he was speaking Polish. Clearly the commentator did not know this, but that's my point: don't declare something to be so out of ignorance. The voice asks, "How is he still fighting them off" when the guy is clearly lying subdued on the floor, and barely moving.

After Dziekański's death, the entire RCMP organization retreated behind a wall of 'we followed procedures' and 'we were just doing our job,' but it seemed obvious that they mishandled this situation and over-reacted, and presented a very poor face to the public afterwards, despite a phenomenal outcry that demanded contrition and an explanation.

No one in their right mind can deny that any law-enforcement officer has a difficult job to do and it's rarely in ideal conditions, but in these circumstances where the guy was not armed (unless you class a small stapler as a weapon, which they did), and was not attacking anyone, and with whom they could not communicate effectively, and given there were four trained RCMP officers present who had the guy confined if not restrained, the mismanagement was appalling in my opinion. They had time, for example, to call in an EMT to be on standby if they had already considered use of a taser - which they had, yet they delayed calling EMT help despite obvious signs of distress from the subdued Dziekański and initially denied them clear access to the guy even after they showed up.

Despite all of this, the author is writing from the outset as though he has already decided to come down on the side of the police regardless of the facts, and everything he's doing is biasing the story that way. Instead of reporting dispassionately, he uses loaded language repeatedly, for example, at one point he wrote of the pressure on the four officers in the aftermath, "Each moment is a separate car in a freight train bearing down on them." Seriously? I about barfed when I read that line. Yes, they were under stress and doubtlessly felt bad about what happened, but let's not get carried away. Not one of them felt as bad as Dziekanski's mother did, who was initially told that her son was nowhere to be found in the airport, and then was called back later to be told he was dead?

The endless and rather repetitive details quickly became tedious, removing any sort of satisfaction in the reading, but I also found some interesting omissions. It's an oddity for example, that the incident with Robert Dziekanski which took place in October, 2007 was kept in complete isolation by the author. In November that year there were two more deaths in Canada from Taser incidents with police, and there was yet another one in December. Halfway through the book, when he was well into the inquest on these events several months after the fact, the author hadn't mentioned even one of these other incidents. Out of curiosity, I searched the entire book for the three names of the people involved, and not one of them is mentioned. I wonder why? For the record they are: Howard Hyde, who was hit with a Taser up to five times about 30 hours before he died, Robert Knipstrom, and the exotically-named Quilem Registre; all tasered by law-enforcement, all dead.

One of the officers in the Dziekański case was later involved in a drunk-driving incident in which he deliberately tried to hide the fact of his drinking. He turned left in front of an oncoming motorcycle which he apparently did not see. The author describes the collision as occurring at "as much as ninety-six kilometres (sixty miles) an hour," but it may also have been as low as 66 KPH (40 miles per hour) which is still a deadly speed, especially on a motorcycle. Robinson was neither charged with drunk driving, nor with causing a fatal accident, and got away with barely more than a slap on the wrist. The news reports of this incident say that the officer took his two children away from the scene to his mother's house nearby, before returning to the scene having apparently had one or two shots of vodka, but this book seems to suggest he left the twelve-year-old girl and the nine-year-old boy home alone after they had been traumatized by being in the vehicle at the time of the accident. I don't know which version is more accurate.

At one point the author writes, "Dziekanski's actual habits when it came to alcohol and cigarettes are relevant." but earlier he had reported on the autopsy: "no drugs or alcohol were found in Dziekanski's blood." Case closed! Oh, you can argue that if he was addicted to tobacco and/or alcohol and could not get any, then he might experience some sort of withdrawal, and react badly to that, but these things could be established from his autopsy (did his body show signs of alcohol or tobacco abuse?) and from his behavior at the time which was documented on a video shot by a bystander. I saw nothing written about that. The impression I got was that this author was simply knee-jerk reacting to news reports and going off on one tangent after another like a ball ricocheting off bumpers in a pinball game. By some fifty percent of the way through, he is so all-over-the-place that I completely lost interest in the book and couldn't stand to read any more.

I can't commend this as a worthy read. In my opinion it needs some real editing and trimming. It also needs better organizing, the book is back and forth so much. At one point I read, "Underneath his deliberately cool exterior he is one part angry, one part nervous, and ninety-nine parts certain his time in the witness chair is not going to end well." That adds up to 101 parts. That's one part too many to make rational sense, and is emblematic of this book.

Once We Were Sisters by Sheila Kohler

Rating: WARTY!

This was another audiobook fail. It sounded interesting from the blurb, but don't they all? Well not really, but many of them do! The blurb says (yes in block caps!) that this is "ONE OF PEOPLE MAGAZINE'S BEST NEW BOOKS." It adds that People thinks it's "An intimate illumination of sisterhood and loss." No, it really isn't. I immediately made a mental note never to trust a People magazine rating. The blurb also says that according to the BBC, this is "A searing and intimate memoir about love turned deadly." No, it isn't. It's a rambling recollection of a childhood that was seemingly obsessed by defecation. I kid you not.

The most absurd aspect of the blurb though was when it said, "Kohler evokes the bond between sisters and shows how that bond changes but never breaks, even after death" yet the memoir is titled, "Once We Were Sisters" like that no longer holds. Unbreakable bond? Bullshit. Had it been a truly unbreakable bond, Maxine would never have died so tragically.

So the blurb was at best hypocritical, but unless they self-publish, authors typically don't write their own blurbs. In my experience that chore is typically consigned to the most inept member of the publishing team. The fact that none other than Joyce Carol "Feeling Her" Oates says this is "Highly recommended" ought to tell you all you need to know about how useless these recommendations truly are.

The author got the news that her older sister by two years, the thirty-nine-year-old Maxine, had died when her husband drove them off a road in Johannesburg. The blurb tells us that, "Stunned by the news, she immediately flew back to the country where she was born, determined to find answers and forced to reckon with his history of violence and the lingering effects of their most unusual childhood--one marked by death and the misguided love of their mother."

To me that sounded like it would make for an interesting read, and maybe provide some ideas for a story of my own? Who knows? I'm always open to ideas but that's not my primary motivation for reading anything, especially not something that came off sounding like a detective story, but in the end it wasn't: there was no detecting and there were no answers offered.

Anyway, I checked it out of the library I adore and started listening to it right away, and I noted the first problem: it's written exceedingly sparsely. It's more like a set of notes for a memoir rather than a finished work. It's read pretty well - if somewhat quirkily on occasion - by the author, but the story itself really isn't anything special or very engrossing. Apart from the excrement fetish, it's nothing more than the usual childhood recollections that any family of similar circumstances might relate. Why all this stuff and nothing about finding answers? I'm guessing this is because there were neither answers sought nor found. I have my own theory about why this memoir was written which I shall go into shortly.

It's obviously set in South Africa, but you really wouldn't know it from the writing. Apart from an occasional reference here and there, this memoir could have been of any wealthy, slightly dysfunctional family, living anywhere, which had rather more tragedy than any family ought. There really was very little to anchor it to South Africa and the story jumped around too much between early childhood and later life, so we have the author talking about an eight year old in one paragraph, having babies (which seemed to excite her quite a lot) in the next, and then back to relating how she, as a child, had urinated through the wicker chair on the porch. Really? As a listener, I wasn't prepared for the jumping between different ages, let alone for the entirely unnecessary revelation about urination.

I don't do prologues (or prefaces, introductions, author's notes, and so on). To me they're misplaced at best, and fatuous at worst, but it's often hard to avoid them in an audiobook. I managed it here, but not without hearing the opening sentence to the prologue, which said, "This is a story about South Africa" No, wrong again! I was truly sorry because I'd wished it was, but it wasn't. The truth is, it seemed to me, that this was about the author: her childhood, her love of babies ...and defecation, her spoiled-rotten life and oh yes, I think there might have been a few mentions of this beloved sister.

The saddest thing is that even when she told us of this life of hers, it was always superficial. There were never any real insights into living in the depths (and I do mean depths) of apartheid or even anything insightful in her relationship with her sister. It was always about the author, and only the shallowest recollections even of that. This is why the story felt so bland and generic rather than richly-hued and personal.

These sisters thought nothing about jet-setting and going on ritzy vacations and fashion-buying trips to Europe, leaving their children behind. Neither did they have a problem taking lovers, yet they would not leave abusive husbands? The most powerful thing that this author conveyed to me is not so much how utterly clueless she is (or was: maybe she wised-up) about real life, but how thoroughly shallow, self-centered, and superficial she is. I detected no sign of any love here for anything but her own comfort.

Ultimately the saddest part of this is that it would seem that the author knew her sister's marriage was a bad one: that her husband was physically abusive to his wife and their children and yet no one did a thing about it. They just let it run its unnatural course and so it seems that her sister's untimely and violent death was an inevitable outcome, and that the blame for it really needs to be placed elsewhere than on this psychotic husband's shoulders. Her mother forgave her son in law. Sheila never pushed for an investigation regardless of what the blurb says.

When Maxine had indicated there were problems, she was never offered any assistance by her family, so we're forced to conclude from this memoir. Where was the love? Where was the bond? It felt like her mother and sister had said to Maxine: you made your bed; now you must die in it. In her own words, Sheila pretty much told her sister to stay in the marriage for the sake of her children, thereby ultimately condemning her to death. And it's unclear whether Maxine's husband drove the car off the road or whether Maxine took hold of the steering wheel to end it all, or whether it was simply an accident. He was wearing a seatbelt. She wasn't. Still, today in South Africa only about six in ten drivers use a seatbelt.

Had the memoir been written differently, I may have experienced it differently and now been able to view it differently, but I could only review what the author offered, and what this felt like was less of a loving memoir, or an attempt to find some truth, as it was a determined effort assuage a tortured soul: to seek absolution for the author's inexcusable inaction in light of her sister;s suffering.

In the end, it was really nothing more than an attempt to turn a hard, harsh marble sculpture of a life into a soft, pretty, pastel watercolor, and in that light, it was quite sickening to listen to. It's a very short memoir, which is just as well, because if it had been any longer I would not have stayed with it to the end, As it was, I found myself skipping parts here and there. I cannot commend this at all. It doesn't remotely feel to me like it's a fitting memorial for the tragic life of a prematurely deceased sister.

Bad Feminist Roxane Gay

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook I requested after becoming interested in the author from my reading of World of Wakanda by Roxane Gay and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The problem is that unlike the graphic novel, which I loved, this book was self-obsessed and boring.

Let's get one thing clarified right up front: it has nothing whatsoever to do with any brand of feminism, good, bad, or indifferent (and however you might foolishly try to define those!), so the title is completely wrong and disgustingly bait and switch. This is evidently one of those books where the author puts together a collection of essays and takes the title of the collection from one of its constituents. I always have a problem with that precisely because it is too often misleading.

In this case it was especially misleading because this is far more 'Bad Memoir' (assuming there are really good ones, which I confess I sometimes doubt) than ever it is anything else. The essays are just god-awfully rambling, self-serving recollections from her life, and not even ones that offer anything new, or insightful, or any great wisdom. I'm neither black nor gay and this book revealed nothing to me about either quality which told me anything I had not heard or read before, or thought of myself. So what was the point?

After listening to some essays and skimming some others, I quit this and went to look at some reviews to see if it was just me who felt this way about it, and no, it wasn't. Others had come independently to the same conclusion, and this is where I discovered that there's barely a thing in here about feminism. So maybe after all, the title is right and it's bad feminist because it contains so little about the topic in the title? Maybe? LGBTQED?

Anyway after reading those reviews, I felt no compulsion whatsoever to go back in here and listen to any more. All I can say is that I'm disappointed, sadly disappointed, and I cannot recommend this, especially since I'm unwilling to commend it in the first place!

The Imitation game by Jim Ottaviani, Leland Purvis

Rating: WARTY!

This was disappointing graphic novel which spent too much time on the wrong topics, I felt. Plus it was too long and rambling, and tried to cover too much ground instead of focusing on the core points. That said, it did a better job than the movie of the same name, which was rife with inaccuracies, and no amount of arguing that no-one expects a painting to be a photograph can excuse some of the inexplicable changes that were made in depicting Turing's life at Bletchley Park in that movie, as engrossing and fascinating as it was in parts.

The story is of course Alan Turing's life and his World War Two work on cryptography. Both this and the movie are based on Andrew Hodges's Alan Turing: The Enigma, and at least this graphic novel inspired me to read that, but the biography is over seven hundred pages long, so it will be more of a skim with a detailed reading of points of interest since I do not have the time to read a seven-hundred-page book.

Alan Turing was gay during a time when gay meant something like 'party animal' and nothing more, and when homosexuality was literally illegal - and of course the punishment for a man who loved men was to incarcerate him with a whole lot of men. This made sense how? You could argue (if you were a spiteful SoB) that the way to punish male homosexuals should be to incarcerate them with women, but that seems to me like it wouldn't work either! It makes far more sense not to have it be illegal in the first place!

The art by Purvis was scrappy and unappealing to me and the text by Ottaviani was at times confused or at least confusing and lacking sharpness and clarity, so I took to skimming parts of this. Overall he story was interesting enough to make me game to consult the source rather than read this pale imitation, but as for this version, I can't recommend it.