Audio Books of 2018: A Year In Review

It's that time of year. Magazines make lists of the top movies, most important books famous people who passed away, significant events and other such things. While looking over my past 11+ years of blogging I noticed how in 2010 I'd shared a list of audio books I'd listened to that year.

In case you haven't noticed, I like books. I like reading them, and when sufficiently motivated I like writing them. And, I especially enjoy sharing what I've been reading. So without further adieu, here are the audio books I have completed in 2018 (an exception is cited.) There have been at least two or three dozen additional audio books begun but abandoned for various reasons, most frequently because I did not want to remain in the company of the reader for one reason or another. Occasionally a book is so tedious it gets lost in the weeds, or rather its own minutia. And so, here is my list... (with hot links on those I have written about elsewhere.)

Audiobooks 2018

1. Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams

2. The Death of Ivan Ilyich . Tolstoy
This was my second reading. Am thinking I may read it again in 2019.

3. The Innovators:  How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution . Walter Isaacson

4. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men . David Foster Wallace
Wallace is a great writer. Was not my favorite book.

5. A Lowcountry Heart [Reflections on a Writing Life] .  Pat Conroy
Made me feel I have been missing something by not reading him sooner.

6. Invisible Man . Ralph Ellison
Blown away by its power.. I read about one-third intending to finish later... which I must do.

7. Shane .  Jack Schaefer
A childhood favorite. Have read it a couple times over course of a lifetime. This was third time.

8. Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success . Phil Jackson
You can read the review.

9. In Their Lives [Great Writers On Great Beatles Songs]
Rewarding.

10. Both Flesh and Not [essays] . David Foster Wallace
Wallace is superb.

11. Murder in the Mews: Three Perplexing Cases for Poirot . Agatha Chistie

12. My Life in Middlemarch . Rebecca Mead
A original memoir, a unique approach to sharing the meanings of one's life experiences.

13. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest . Kesey, Ken
Second reading, as I'd watched the film again this year. An incredible book.

14. Filthy Rich [A powerful billionaire, the sex scandal that undid him, and all the justice that money can buy : the shocking true story of Jeffrey Epstein] . James Patterson
How the other half live. That is, how justice is seldom served when it comes to people with power. Sad.

15. Endless Night . Agatha Christie

16. The Truth Matters : A citizen's guide to separating facts from lies and stopping fake news in its tracks . Bruce R. Bartlettought the paperback afterwards.
Useful and important. I b

17. Heart of Darkness . Joseph Conrad

18. Star Island . Carl Hiaasen
A romp like all his books.

19. Richistan: A journey through the American wealth boom and the lives of the new rich . Robert Frank

20. Razor Girl .  Carl Hiassen

21. Skinny Dip .  Carl Hiassen

22. Collected Fictions . Jorge Luis Borges
Same reader as LikeWar, which made me like LikeWar all the more.
Borges was a chief influence in my fiction writing.

23. James Madison: The Fourth President .  Garry Wills
Many insights about a president I knew little about.
 
24. Andrew Jackson .  Robert Remini

25. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less .  Barry Schwartz
Excellent book. Explains a lot of things we get frustrated with.

26. The Cold War Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace . Paul Thomas Chamberlin
An important book for all of us, but especially Baby Boomers who lived through much of this.

27. The Untold Story of the Talking Book .  Matthew Rubery

28. We Die Alone .  David Howarth
A compelling read from start to finish. Superb writing, made all the more powerful because it really happened.

29. The Year of Less [How I stopped shopping, gave away my belongings, and discovered life is worth more than anything you can buy in a store] . Cait Flanders

30. The Flight [Charles Lindbergh's daring and immortal 1927 transatlantic crossing] . Dan Hampton

31. Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics, Explained by its Most Brilliant Teacher
This is a set of six lectures by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman

32. Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America . Walter Borneman
Another of the presidents I knew little about.

33. Dopesick [dealers, doctors, and the drug company that addicted America]
Some would call this unbalanced reporting as the author has an agenda. A lot of good research and insightful.

34. Never Trust a Liberal Over 3 - Especially a Republican . Ann Coulter
Same as #33.

35. LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media . P.W. Singer

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So many books, so little time.

My list of non-audio books is longer and shorter, many read for specific portions as research for other things. Some still in process. I found my re-reading of Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil to be a thought provoking and rewarding read this year, prompted in part by Gordon Marino's The Existentialist's Survival Guide, subtitled How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age. 

An important idea set in motion this year was this one: In matters of virtue, one of the most needful virtues for our time is for courage.

Much more could be said, but that is always the case, is it not?  May your holiday season be rewarding and meaningful. Merry Christmas. And I'll catch you on the flip side. 

The Flight: Dan Hampton Chronicles Charles Lindbergh's Sensational Transatlantic Crossing

This past week I finished Dan Hampton's The Flight, a re-telling of Charles Lindbergh's historic trans-Atlantic crossing in The Spirit of St. Louis. The author was himself a pilot who has earned numerous medals for his distinguished service as a pilot, which clearly contributed to his understanding of what Lindbergh must have experienced on his solo adventure.

There were several features of the book that helped maintain reader interest. Foremost of these was Hampton's intersplicing of historical context at various points along the journey. If the author had just told the flight portion without context, it could have left readers fighting sleep the way Lindbergh was fighting to stay awake during his flight.

There were many pieces of information that were new for me or had been forgotten. That Lindbergh did not catch up on sleep before leaving was interesting. By the time he landed in Paris he had been awake for 55 hours, no small achievement in itself. Instead of resting before the flight he decided to take in a Broadway play. The lack of sleep nearly cost him his life.

I was also unaware that Time magazine was inaugurated in 1927 and that Lindbergh became Time's first Man of the Year.

His nicknames were Lucky Lindy, the Lone Eagle and Slim, and the author chose to continually call him Slim as if they he and Charles were best buds.

It was also useful to learn about Lindbergh's childhood, what his parents were like and how they influenced the man he later became. I'd known that his parents were from rural Minnesota, but I did not know that his father had become a congressman who was opposed to the U.S. entering World War I.

Like a number of other famous people (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs come to mind) Slim also dropped out of college to pursue his passion, which in his case was flying.

Lindbergh bought his first plane for $500, which seems like a steal until you factor inflation into the cost. Today's price tag on that barnstorming machine would be just over $6200... still a pretty good deal.

The trans-Atlantic flight was a huge deal, though. Whoever made that first successful flight from New York to Paris or vice versa would be awarded a $25,000 reward called the Orteig Prize, nearly $360,000 today. Several pilots had already crashed and burned during the previous year, one French team only weeks earlier.

Lindbergh himself was unaware of how many people were following this journey once he was on his way. When he arrived in Paris more than 100,000 people met him at the airport. Souvenir hunters tore off pieces of his plane and stole his log book in the pandemonium that followed his landing.

It was also probably a wise decision to focus on the flight itself, the author giving only a cursory summation of the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh's son  (which newspapers called the crime of the century) and other post-flight events. The book focuses on the historic achievement and why Lindbergh was such a heroic figure in his time, though the fame it brought him led directly to that heartbreak.

If you can find it in you library it's called The Flight: Charles Lindbergh's Daring and Immortal 1927 Transatlantic Crossing. If not, you can find it here on Amazon.

For What It's Worth Dept: There are several scathing reviews of the book on Amazon. Half are related to some technical information that only pilots would know. The author himself flew F-16s so maybe he missed a few details. I would not have known. One of the other negative reviews recommended acquiring Lindbergh's own book about the flight. Alas. I enjoyed the ride here. Not a Pulitzer for Literature but a great moment in history captured and shared.

What are your dreams urging you to accomplish?

Spread your wings and fly!

Local Art Seen: Flight at the Zeitgeist Cafe

Last night I attended the opening reception for Ann Klefstad and Bridge Riversmith's exhibition titled Flight at the Zeitgeist Arts Cafe. The art primarily features paintings related to birds, though a few pieces reflected other nature themes, including water, butterflies, and rabbits. The opening, on the upper level of the restaurant, was well attended, almost packed even.

Fascination with birds is probably as old as time. Bird characters appear in Egyptian hieroglyphics, and at the turn of the 16th century A.D. Leonardo DaVinci took an intense interest in birds, making drawings and writing a treatise on how birds achieve flight. He had a personal interest in manned flight.

I myself have done more than a few paintings and drawings of birds. Not sure what makes them so compelling, but it has been a recurring theme from long ago. Hence, it only feels natural to find an art exhibition in which birds are the stars.

As a young artist Ann Klefstad spent a number of years in Los Angeles before becoming a North Country transplant. Her love of our natural surroundings is reflected in her work, which includes sculpture, photography, painting and drawing. She has a wealth of knowledge about art and the arts, and served at one time as an art critic for the Trib.

Biomachine Whales Clean Up Trash Islands

I first saw one of Bridget Riversmith's creations at a Duluth Art Institute Steampunk show in 2012. Called a Recycl-O-Scope it was a variation on 19th century zoetropes. I've since been at a couple shows where her work was featured. Much of her work has a playful quality with titles like Red Rabbit Evades a Vaportrail, and Biomachine Whales. On one wall upstairs was a sequence of five pieces that were designed like frames in an animated short. This was titled "Letting Go" and featured a character releasing a bird.

Ravens and crows feature prominently in Klefstad's work, with a variety of titles like Angry Crow, Ukranian Crow, Crow Over The Lake, Crow In Snow, Inquiring Crow and Old Crow. There were other themes, however, from Catspaw and Sea Snake to Blue Fog and Lonely.

The show itself fits the space nicely with pieces both captivating and delightful. Recommended: take a friend to lunch or dinner and spend just a little extra time taking in the show.

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Riversmith's "Letting Go" (fifth picture)

Meantime art goes on all around you. Enjoy it. 

Local Art Seen: Double Opening at the Duluth Art Institue

Cuttlefish galore. (48 patterns in all)

The Duluth Art Institute hosted an opening reception for two very different shows Thursday evening. Despite bitterly cold temperatures many brave friends of the arts chose to attend.

The George Morrison Gallery featured a unique show by Japanese-American artists Ryuta Nakajima and Aya Kawaguchi called Natural Contract. The two have been collaborating for more than a decade and after a two-year stint in Hawaii they chose Duluth for their home this past ten years.

Nakajima, who is an associate professor of painting and drawing at UMD, finds source material in squid, octopus and cuttlefish, exploring the way they create color and patterns. He finds similarity in the way humans and cephalopods take external information and react by producing new shapes and colors. This show features more varieties of cuttlefish than you have ever imagined in your life.

Kin Ika

Admittedly, over the course of a lifetime I have not given much thought to what cuttlefish are. What I know is that they do not appear to be cuddly. I have since learned they are a marine creature in the Cephalopoda family, which includes squid and octopus. They have eight arms, and two tentacles with suckers on them to hold their prey. Most are small, sic to nine inches, though there is a large species which runs 20 inches and weighs about the same as my son's dog Noodles, 23 pounds.

Artists and photographers who are familiar with sepia tones, which is something akin to brown stain, may not know that the original Greek and Latin word for cuttlefish is sepia, based on the brown liquid it disgorges when frightened. Next time you have a sepia-toned print, think cuttlefish.

from Pillow Drawing Series

According to the program guide Kawaguchi's art explores the differences between experiencing something and interpreting it. When she sees something she finds beautiful, she often finds she has a memory or other experience that connects her back – interlacing the two. She adds or subtracts information from her photographs to transform the originals into something more personally meaningful. The main part of the gallery featured dozens of varieties of drawings of patterns on pillows.

In addition to the variously decorated or designed cuttlefish sculptures, there were several large paintings and also a large flat-panel monitor showing underwater footage of what must have been a cuttlefish in its habitat.

NOTE: Mark your calendar for March 19. There will be an Artist Talk that evening at 5:30 p.m. at the Gallery.

Sunday Drive by Chris Dillon

The Steffl Gallery featured work by the Lake Superior Watercolor Society in a show titled A Retrospective Response. Though I enjoy seeing the variety of subject matter and the colors, I occasionally get depressed by exceptional watercolorists. If you've ever worked with watercolors you know that it requires an uncommon patience, something I liked when I attacked this medium.

The Watercolor Society has been quietly producing art for as long as there have been artists in the Northland. There are few places in the world as conducive to painting as our Lake Superior region. This show will be on display thru May 1 and Natural Contract thru April 19. Next time you visit the library, put a couple extra quarters in the meter and visit these two exhibitions at the Depot.

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Don't forget the opening reception tomorrow evening at the Zeitgeist Cafe featuring work by Ann Klefstad and Bridgett Riversmith. The show is titled Flight. From 5 - 7 p.m. you can meet the artists and ask questions about their work. Enjoy!

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Engage it!

Did She Really Disappear?

Celebritydom existed long before television. The brightness of Edison’s light still shines in America. Many others have carved out monument sized memories in the national consciousness. But in aviation, in the early decades of the twentieth century, there are really only a handful of superstars. with the Wright brothers, Eddie Rickenbacker, Charles Lindbergh, and perhaps Howard Hughes heading the list. No list is complete, however, without including the remarkable Amelia Earhart.

Perhaps her star shown with special brilliance because women were finally getting some recognition on the national stage. After her historic 1932 flight, as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, she became a media sensation.

In 1935 Earhart set her sights on one truly great adventure, a trip around the world in a twin engine Lockheed Electra. In 1937, along with navigator Frederick Noonan, Earhart set off to reinforce her superstar status. Tragically, her plane disappeared without a trace and she was never seen or heard from again. Or so the story goes.

This winter, Hillary Swank is slipping into the bigger than life role of Amelia Earhart to bring this woman’s achievements and heartbreaking end to the silver screen. Or at least one interpretation.

Another project has been underway, serving as the contrary yang to Swank’s ying. I am referring to researcher Tod Swindell’s efforts to assemble a documentary that seeks to tell the real Amelia Earhart story.

Swindell’s version of the story goes like this. Amelia Earhart was so uncomfortable with the media adulation she’d received for her cross-Atlantic flight and other successes, she simply had to come up with a creative solution that would enable her to re-establish a private life outside the public eye. The disappearance which took place in 1937 had been orchestrated over a two year period that would enable her to get all in place for a new, alternate identity.

It sounds pretty far out, until you allow Swindell to lay out his case. True, this theory has surfaced before and been rejected for various reasons. But Swindell claims that incontrovertible evidence has now emerged.

The success of Earhart’s escape down the gopher hole required complicity from other people in high places.

History produces cover ups like an untended garden produces weeds. And it is not uncommon for Hollywood to get the story wrong in an effort to tell a good story.

I’ve been in contact with Tod Swindell since first discovering and writing about the Amelia Earhart alternative story. (Burden of the Public Eye) Here is a short interview with Swindell as he strives complete the project which has been a burning passion of his over many years.

Ennyman: How long have you been involved with The Irene-Amelia story?
Tod Swindell: I have been involved with Earhart investigative research since 1991. She was my maternal Grandmother's hero. 'Gram' (Doris) told me Earhart stories as I grew up. (Doris was three years younger than Amelia, raised my mother and uncle alone.) So I grew up with an instilled interest.The website, www.irene-amelia.com is entirely mine. My two partners died in recent years. They were Joe Gervais and Rollin Reineck, WWII vets who I befriended in the mid 1990s, and came to love and admire greatly for their Earhart research achievements. The interesting thing, I find, is how even though it is obvious in a hidden historical sense, how Gervais was correct about his ID pin on the former Earhart in 1965, since WWII world society has been left to accept Earhart's loss as an everlasting mystery only. That is to say, historical dictum has done well to convince all the Gervais claim was a hoax, or an outright fraud, where in truth it makes great forensic historical sense, and if one does look into it with true objectivity, he or she realizes such a thing.

E: You’re currently producing a documentary on the Irene-Amelia story. How’s that coming along?
TS: I'm currently seeking funding to complete my documentary which is about 70% filmed. I have two French narrators, a man and a woman. The final documentary version will feature French voice over narration with English subtitles.

E: What is your marketing plan?
TS: To finish producing the film on Hi-Def with silent partnership, have a color print made, seek distribution while entering it in festivals, hopefully land a book contract and feature deal through said efforts. The deadline for Sundance entries is late October. But there are many, many festivals.

E: And how long is the documentary?
TS: 70 minutes.

E: How does it compare to Expelled or Michael Moore's stuff?
TS: I think it's a different animal, but it does shed some distrustful light on our national media and on our national historical dictum influences. As mentioned, it is to be narrated in French with English subtitles. I wanted it to sound like a foreign take an American historical issue.

E: Is it a made for TV documentary?
TS: Yes, but festival and four walls worthy, too.

E: Do you envision trying to get an Oscar on this project?
TS: Absolutely.

E: Ultimately, what’s you’re motivation here? What is it that drives you to go to these lengths to put your convictions out there like this?
TS: To me the truth is the truth and it cannot be changed, and I have a duty to share what I have learned and what I know. This was the point of building the website, and remains the point of still trying to complete the documentary. For the website begins to let the truth be told in a public sense, and the documentary should lead to the feature and book efforts. And yes, there is a script and a nice booklet presentation for the documentary.

If you get a chance, visit Swindell's Irene-Amelia website, dedicated to unveiling the curtain that has shrouded the Amelia Earhart story. Maybe we’ll never know the truth, or maybe we’re discovering it and find it simply too hard to believe. Earhart's disapperance certainly one of the great unsolved mysteries of the past eighty years. Where's Sherlock Holmes when you need him?

To learn more about this amazing woman, check out these two short YouTube videos.