Geddy Lee was the bassist and lead singer of Rush, my all-time favorite band.
(I discovered Rush in the fall of 1982, when I heard “New World Man” playing on FM radio. I was instantly hooked. At some point, I’ll probably write a longer piece about my passion for Rush. For now: suffice it to say that I’ve been a rabid fan for 40-plus years.)
Geddy Lee begins his memoir with a discussion of his childhood. He was born Gary Lee Weinrib in Canada in 1953. Lee was the son of Jewish emigres and Holocaust survivors.
Lee discusses his Jewish identity and his youthful experiences with antisemitism. (Canadians, it seems, aren’t all nice…at least they weren’t in the 1950s.)
He includes a chapter about his parents’ ordeals in the concentration camps, in both Poland and Germany. This was not something that I had bargained for when I bought the book. But it’s one of the most interesting chapters, despite the dark subject matter.
He then takes the reader on a journey through the long history of Rush, album by album.
I devoured the book in about three days.
My only complaint was the repetitious—and inevitably tiresome—references to marijuana smoking. After a while, I was like: Okay, you guys toked up a lot; I get it. Enough already! But that’s a minor quibble about an otherwise engaging story.
Speaking of story: Geddy Lee is a talented and relatable storyteller. My Effin’ Life is obviously a book that will only be of interest to Rush fans. But if you do like Rush (and if you don’t, what’s wrong with you?), it is a read that you shouldn’t miss.
In the short days since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee, there has been a concerted effort to portray Vice President Kamala Harris as the Voice of Generation Z.
It begins—where else?—on TikTok.TikTok is now overflowing with “Kamala is BRAT” memes, in which video clips of the dancing vice president are juxtaposed with rap music and various urban settings.
Meanwhile, the DNC has enlisted a handful of Gen Z music celebrities—all of whom have a long track record of being left-of-center anyway—as Harris shills.
One of these, Olivia Rodrigo, is a constant source of boilerplate, knee-jerk leftism. When I read that Rodrigo had jumped on the Harris bandwagon, I was like: “Well, of course.” Did anyone really believe that Rodrigo and her camp followers were poised to vote for Trump, until the Democratic Party swapped the 81-year-old Biden for the (ahem!) 59-year-old Harris?
Nevertheless, we may concede a point here. The 59-year-old Harris is 22 years younger than President Biden, and 18 years younger than former President Trump. The Democratic Party ticket is now headed by someone the age of the typical grandparent, versus the typical great-grandparent.
A personal aside: I was already in junior high when my maternal grandparents were 59 years old. They were in their early 60s when I was in high school.
Their sixties. VP Harris is soon to enter that senior citizen territory herself. The vice president was born on October 23, 1964. So she’ll be 60 years old on Election Day.
Generationally speaking, Harris has a lot more in common with Trump than she does with Gen Z voters. Trump and Harris are both—wait for it!—members of that much-maligned Baby Boomer generation, which was born between 1946 and 1964. Trump was among the cohort of the earliest Boomers, and Harris was among the latest.
But a Boomer is a Boomer. You can say, “Okay, Boomer,” to either Harris or Trump, and still be technically correct.
Another personal aside: I’m 4 years younger than Vice President Harris, born in 1968. At 56, I would never claim to be fully relatable to one of 2024’s 18-year-olds, who were born in 2006.
Too much time has passed. I was 18 in 1986, when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the Internet was unheard of, and America was a fundamentally sane place.
There is only one candidate in the race so far who can even marginally claim the mantle of youth candidate: Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance. Born in 1984, J.D. Vance will enter his 40s next month. Vance is not a Boomer, nor even a Gen Xer, but a Millennial.
Vance is 20 years younger than Harris. He came of age with the Internet. His formative experiences are not exactly those of Gen Z, but he’s the closest thing to a Zoomer that the race currently has.
The media, though, has ignored J.D. Vance’s youthful status. Vance doesn’t fit the mainstream media narrative. “Youth” must belong to the Democrats. I suspect that the media also resists the notion that a “youth” candidate could be anything but a woman from a diverse ethnic/racial background. J.D. Vance is white, male, heterosexual, Appalachian…and young. That’s a combination that the mind of the typical mainstream media journalist simply cannot process.
But maybe the emphasis on superficial youth is misguided, anyway. If youth were the priority in a leader, both parties would run nothing but 35-year-olds (35 being the minimum legal age for POTUS).
Ronald Reagan, moreover, did very well with young voters in 1980. Reagan was 69, and our oldest presidential contender at that time.
It might be better to ask: what are the priorities of Generation Z? Having a hip, youthful leader who will dance in the Oval Office?
I would wager that the average young voter accepts and expects that the next POTUS will be significantly older than them, both chronologically and temperamentally.
Savvy young people also grasp when older people are pandering to them. And they can guess at ulterior motives. Anyone with a teenage son or daughter will agree.
The mainstream media tells us that Gen Z voters mainly want a.) an abortion clinic on every corner and b.) a relentless societal focus on LGBTQ issues. We are also told that every young person is obsessed over the situation in Palestine.
I wouldn’t deny that there are some young people with that combination of priorities, but such a perception skews disproportionately toward college students, who are disproportionately left-leaning.
But haven’t you heard? Fewer young people are college students than has been the case in decades, and young male college enrollment is way down. The student protestors on CNN are not necessarily the voices of their generation.
I wouldn’t bill myself as the voice of Gen Z. (Like I said, I’m 56.) But I do have opportunities to talk to many of them in my social circle here in Ohio.
Yesterday I spoke to a 26-year-old restaurant worker who is also the mother of a six-year-old. She is not married, but she is in a long-term, monogamous heterosexual relationship with the father of her child. She and her partner are focused on buying a house.
Is she also focused on Pride celebrations, abortion, and Palestine? Perhaps, but I’m skeptical. I’ve spoken to this young woman many times. Like most young parents since time immemorial, her focus is on kitchen-table issues.
I’m not implying that all members of Gen Z hold conservative views. The polling shows otherwise. And even if the polling is skewed toward the views of left-of-center university students, it can’t be ignored completely.
What all young voters want, however (even if they won’t admit it), is a POTUS who unabashedly acts like a full-fledged adult. From a young person’s perspective, the POTUS is not a weekend buddy, nor even a parent or a professor. The POTUS is a distant figure who (hopefully) provides a secure, prosperous environment in which the young can thrive.
Nor am I pointing my finger only at Vice President Harris. During the last presidential debate on June 27, both Trump and Biden—our oldest candidates ever—waxed juvenile at times. (Remember their brief back-and-forth about golf?)
But if there is one party that consistently bends over backward to play the faux hipster, the make-believe youngster, that would be the Democratic Party. This has been true since at least 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for the first time.
It’s a fool’s errand, anyway, whichever party does it. Take it from an 18-year-old of 1986, who can still remember the way I saw most anyone over the age of 29 or 30. From the perspective of 18, both 59 (Harris) and 78 (Trump) look, well, old. And you won’t fool any young person with bad dancing.
In 1938, the planners in Nazi Germany know that war is coming. They are eager to acquire the atom bomb.
They are working against Allied governments, operating both in Germany and abroad. (And not all of the Reich’s accomplices are German nationals.)
A group of ordinary Americans and Germans are forced to choose sides. Their choices will lead them into a web of betrayal, murder, and espionage.
Their paths meet in Cairo, Egypt, where the Reich is hunting a fugitive atomic physicist.
The main characters:
Betty Lehman is a 19-year-old girl from Dutch Falls, Pennsylvania. Her family is active in the German-American Bund. Betty has been recruited to betray her country in the service of the Reich.
Rudolf Schenk is an undercover agent of the German Gestapo. He wants to do his duty. But can he abandon his last shred of conscience?
Jack McCallum is an American treasure hunter in Cairo. He falls for two women: one who is working undercover for the Third Reich, one who is fleeing the Gestapo.
Heinrich Vogel is a physicist who fled Germany for Egypt. He and his young adult daughter, Ingrid, face a daily game of cat-and-mouse with the Gestapo. His goal: to reach Britain or America before the Gestapo reaches him and his daughter!
How I wrote a horror novel called Revolutionary Ghosts
Or…
Can an ordinary teenager defeat the Headless Horseman, and a host of other vengeful spirits from America’s revolutionary past?
The big idea
I love history, and I love supernatural horror tales.“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was therefore always one of my favorite short stories. This classic tale by Washington Irving describes how a Hessian artillery officer terrorized the young American republic several decades after his death.
The Hessian was decapitated by a Continental Army cannonball at the Battle of White Plains, New York, on October 28, 1776. According to some historical accounts, a Hessian artillery officer really did meet such an end at the Battle of White Plains. I’ve read several books about warfare in the 1700s and through the Age of Napoleon. Armies in those days obviously did not have access to machine guns, flamethrowers, and the like. But those 18th-century cannons could inflict some horrific forms of death, decapitation among them.
I was first exposed to the “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” via the 1949 Disney film of the same name. The Disney adaptation was already close to 30 years old, but still popular, when I saw it as a kid sometime during the 1970s.
Headless Horsemen from around the world
While doing a bit of research for Revolutionary Ghosts, I discovered that the Headless Horseman is a folklore motif that reappears in various cultures throughout the world.
In Irish folklore, the dullahan or dulachán (“dark man”) is a headless, demonic fairy that rides a horse through the countryside at night. The dullahan carries his head under his arm. When the dullahan stops riding, someone dies.
Scottish folklore includes a tale about a headless horseman named Ewen. Ewen wasbeheaded when he lost a clan battle at Glen Cainnir on the Isle of Mull. His death prevented him from becoming a chieftain. He roams the hills at night, seeking to reclaim his right to rule.
Finally, in English folklore, there is the 14th century epic poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. After Gawain kills the green knight in living form (by beheading him) the knight lifts his head, rides off, and challenges Gawain to a rematch the following year.
But Revolutionary Ghosts is focused on the Headless Horseman of American lore: the headless horseman who chased Ichabod Crane through the New York countryside in the mid-1790s.
The Headless Horseman isn’t the only historical spirit to stir up trouble in the novel. John André, the executed British spy, makes an appearance, too. (John André was a real historical figure.)
I also created the character of Marie Trumbull, a Loyalist whom the Continental Army sentenced to death for betraying her country’s secrets to the British. But Marie managed to slit her own throat while still in her cell, thereby cheating the hangman. Marie Trumbull was a dark-haired beauty in life. In death, she appears as a desiccated, reanimated corpse. She carries the blade that she used to take her own life, all those years ago.
Oh, and Revolutionary Ghosts also has an army of spectral Hessian soldiers. I had a lot of fun with them!
The Spirit of ’76
Most of the novel is set in the summer of 1976. An Ohio teenager, Steve Wagner, begins to sense that something strange is going on near his home. There are slime-covered hoofprints in the grass. There are unusual sounds on the road at night. People are disappearing.
Steve gradually comes to an awareness of what is going on….But can he convince anyone else, and stop the Headless Horseman, before it’s too late?
I decided to set the novel in 1976 for a number of reasons. First of all, this was the year of the American Bicentennial. The “Spirit of ’76 was everywhere in 1976. That created an obvious tie-in with the American Revolution.
Nineteen seventy-six was also a year in which Vietnam, Watergate, and the turmoil of the 1960s were all recent memories. The mid-1970s were a time of national anxiety and pessimism (kind of like now). The economy was not good. This was the era of energy crises and stagflation.
Reading the reader reviews of Revolutionary Ghosts, I am flattered to get appreciative remarks from people who were themselves about the same age as the main character in 1976:
“…I am 62 years old now and 1976 being the year I graduated high school, I remember it pretty well. Everything the main character mentions (except the ghostly stuff), I lived through and remember. So that was an added bonus for me.”
“I’m 2 years younger than the main character so I could really relate to almost every thing about him.”
I’m actually a bit younger than the main character. In 1976 I was eight years old. But as regular readers of this blog will know, I’m nostalgic by nature. I haven’t forgotten the 1970s or the 1980s, because I still spend a lot of time in those decades.
If you like the 1970s, you’ll find plenty of nostalgic nuggets in Revolutionary Ghosts, like Bicentennial Quarters, and the McDonald’s Arctic Orange Shakes of 1976.
***
Also, there’s something spooky about the past, just because it is the past. As L.P. Hartley said, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
For me, 1976 is a year I can clearly remember. And yet—it is shrouded in a certain haziness. There wasn’t nearly as much technology. Many aspects of daily life were more “primitive” then.
It isn’t at all difficult to believe that during that long-ago summer, the Headless Horseman might have come back from the dead to terrorize the American heartland…
Hello, Dear Reader. I hope you have a safe and happy Memorial Day, and remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of the USA.
For traditional holidays like this one, you can’t beat Norman Rockwell. The artist painted the above work, Homecoming Marine, in 1945.
If you look closely, you’ll see that the painting conveys a significant amount of backstory. The young marine, and his relationship to the setting, are evident in the painting. The painting also gives us a rough idea of where he served. (Hint: not Europe.)
The obvious youth of the marine in the painting reminds me that at 55, I am now decades older than most of those who served in World War II and all subsequent wars.
I am also humbled. I have never served in the military. But I send out my appreciation and respect to those who have, and do.
I am a diehard fanatic of only a handful of books, movies, and musical oeuvres. And I evangelize only a subset of those.
For example, I love the music of Rush and Iron Maiden; but I don’t consider the appeal of these bands to be universal, by any means. Likewise, I realize that a coming-of-age movie that spoke volumes to me in 1984 might not have the same significance for a teenager of 2024. Or for a Boomer who was a teenager in 1964, for that matter.
But everyone should see The Americans.
The Americans is part family saga, part period drama, and part espionage thriller. The show is set in both America and Russia during the last decade of the Cold War.
I watched The Americans in its entirety during the show’s original primetime run on FX from 2013 to 2018. During those years, I looked forward to each new episode.
I loved the series so much, I recently decided to watch it again. But as is so often the case with these modern conveniences of ours, the situation has been made less convenient than it would have been in pre-Internet days. No longer do non-primetime shows circulate to rerun syndication in non-primetime hours. They move to paid streaming platforms.
If you want to see all six seasons of The Americans in 2024, you have several options. You can pay to download each episode from Amazon, or you can purchase a subscription to Hulu, where the series is now streaming.
Or you can purchase the complete series on DVD. I determined this to be my best and most cost-effective option. The above package arrived on my doorstep from Amazon yesterday.
I look forward to watching this series again from beginning to end. And if you haven’t yet seen The Americans, you might consider buying the DVDs, too. They are still in stock on Amazon.
I just finished reading Stephen King’s fantasy-horror-adventure novel, Fairy Tale.
This being a recent Stephen King novel, it’s been summarized in detail throughout the Internet, so I’ll stick with the high points here.
Length, scope, and pacing
This is a long book (almost 600 pages).
Fairy Tale begins with a coming-of-age plot, something that Stephen King has always done well. That goes on for about 200 pages before the fantasy part really gets going.
The fantasy portion of the novel takes place in a parallel world called Empis. Fairy Tale is almost like two stories stuck together. Depending on your tastes, that may be a feature, and it may be a bug.
Overall, Fairy Tale takes a long time to get going. The grand finale is a page-turner, but there are long sections of this very long book that are extremely slow-burn, and kind of a slog.
Stephen King’s evolved style
I should provide a bit of context here. Sometime in the late 1980s/early 1990s, Stephen King’s style changed dramatically. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he wrote plot-driven stories that were tightly structured with minimal fat (Stephen King’s well-known aversion to outlining notwithstanding).
I became a rabid King fan based on the early novels: ‘Salem’s Lot, Christine, The Dead Zone, The Shining, etc.
Some of those early books were actually quite long. But you never noticed, because the plots were so engaging.
Later on, King started writing long, meandering novels like Duma Key, Desperation, The Outsider, etc. I first noticed the change in style with It (1986), but the longer, slower storytelling has been a consistent feature of Stephen King’s writing for decades now.
And some fans, I should note, prefer the later style. 11/22/63 is an 850-page fantasy/alternate history tale that was published in 2011. It has a huge fanbase. It left me very lukewarm. Give me Pet Sematary or Cujo any day.
Or better yet, King’s first short story collection, Night Shift.
Among the books that King has written and published since 1990, I have definitely tended to prefer the novellas, short story collections, and short novels. I particularly liked Joyland (2013) and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).
Am I glad I read ‘Fairy Tale’?
Overall, yes. This is still a good book, compared to most of the horror/fantasy novels being published nowadays.
I am admittedly prejudiced, because as an early (since 1984) reader of Stephen King, I always want him to write the kind of book that he might have written in 1978 or 1982. And lo and behold, he rarely does.
That’s rather presumptuous on my part, of course…especially since Stephen King’s longer, less plot-driven style has been a thing for 30 years now.
Some books bring back memories. And so it is for me, with Stephen King’s illustrated novella, Cycle of the Werewolf.
I remember purchasing this book at the B. Dalton bookstore in Cincinnati’s Beechmont Mall in the mid-1980s. I had only recently become a Stephen King fan, and I was working my way through his entire oeuvre, which then consisted of about ten years’ worth of novels and collections.
The copy I bought in the 1980s has long since been lost. I’m glad to see that the book is still available, with the original illustrations from Bernie Wrightson.
You can get a copy of Cycle of the Werewolf on Amazon by clicking here.
I discovered the books of historical novelist John Jakes (1932 – 2023) as a high school student during the 1980s. The television miniseries adaptation of his Civil War epic, North and South, aired in 1985.
North and South was extremely well-done for a network (ABC) television production of the mid-1980s. The cast included Patrick Swayze, Kirstie Alley, David Carradine, Lesley-Anne Down, and Parker Stevenson. The sets were realistic and the production values were high.
After watching that, I decided to give John Jakes’s books a try. I read North and South(1982), plus the subsequent two books in the North and South trilogy, Love and War (1984) and Heaven and Hell (1987).
Then I delved into The Kent Family Chronicles. The books in this long family saga were published between 1974 and 1979. These are the books that really put Jakes on the map as an author of commercial historical fiction.
I emphasize commercial. John Jakes never strove for the painstaking historical accuracy of Jeff Shaara, or his approximate contemporary, James Michener. Jakes’s first objective was always to entertain. If the reader learned something about the American Revolution or the Civil War along the way, that was icing on the cake.
As a result, John Jakes’s novels lie somewhere along the spectrum between literary fiction and potboilers. His characters are memorable and he imparts a sense of time and place. But these are plot-driven stories.
At the same time, Jakes’s plots have a way of being simultaneously difficult to believe and predictable. Almost all of his books have a Forrest Gump aspect. His characters are ordinary men and women, but they all seem to rub shoulders with figures from your high school history classes.
That said, Jakes is one of the few authors whose books pleased both the teenage me and the fiftysomething me. This past year, I started rereading The Kent Family Chronicles, and catching up on the few installments I missed back in the 1980s. I have changed as much as any person changes between the ages of 17 and 55, but I still find these books to be page-turners.
This past week, I started listening to the audiobook version of California Gold. This one was published in 1989, after Jakes’s long run of success with The Kent Family Chronicles and the North and South trilogy.
California Gold is the story of Mack Chance, a Pennsylvania coal miner’s son who walks to California to seek his fortune in the 1880s.
I will be honest with the reader: I don’t like California Gold as much as Jakes’s earlier bestsellers. California Gold is episodic in structure, and the main character is far less likable than some of Jakes’s earlier creations. In California Gold, Jakes indulges his tendency to pay lip service to the issues of the day (in this case: the budding American labor movement and early feminism) through the voices of his characters. Most of these pronouncements are politically correct and clichéd.
Worst of all, California Gold employs sex scenes as spice for low points in the plot. This is always a sign that a writer is struggling for ideas, or boring himself as he writes. When Jakes wrote California Gold, he may have been a little burned out, after writing The Kent Family Chronicles and the North and South trilogy.
California Gold, though, won’t be tossed aside on my did-not-finish (DNF) pile. This is still a good novel. Just not the caliber of novel I’d come to expect from John Jakes. No novelist, unfortunately, can hit one out of the park every time.
There really was something special about growing up in an era when video games were not old hat, but something brand-new and on the cutting edge of the technology of that time.
I suppose I like my 21st-century iPhone and my MacBook as much as the next person, but they are tools for me, not objects of indulgence. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed anything quite as much as that first Atari console I received for Christmas in 1981.
Did I have a favorite game? Of course I did. Space Invaders, hands down. Missile Command came in a close second, though.
Today’s solar eclipse was a bit anticlimactic here in Cincinnati. The local news channels all predicted a 99.2 percent eclipse in my area just outside the city.
That didn’t happen, not by a long shot:
Me, eagerly awaiting the full eclipse as the shadows start to lengthen
This is going to get good any minute now! I tell myself. But I am already growing skeptical.
The high point of the eclipse, at around 3:20 p.m. EST. The sun has been noticeably dimmed, but it’s a long way from dark.
What can I say? Here in Cincinnati, the local weather forecasts are right only about 50 percent of the time. Why should the eclipse forecast be any different?
This was worth walking outside for, but I’m glad I didn’t make a day of it.
I hope the eclipse was better for you, if you live in an area that was forecast to experience it.
Termination Man is a corporate mystery/thriller. I wrote this story in 2012, and it was inspired by my experiences in the automotive industry.
I also took inspiration from some of the more unsavory corporate HR practices I’d read about, including the controversial practice of “managing out” an unwanted employee. (This basically means: making the employee’s life so unpleasant that he or she will want to quit.)
Who should read Termination Man? This is a good fit for readers who already like the corporate/financial thrillers of Joseph Finder. Fans of John Grisham will find significant overlap, too.
Termination Man will be available on Amazon Kindle at a reduced price through the end of this weekend. Kindle Unlimited members can read it there gratis, too.
One of those is Bobby Mackey’s Music World in Wilder, Kentucky. (I live in suburban Cincinnati, Ohio. But Wilder, Kentucky is less than thirty minutes from my front door. I’m a hop, skip, and a jump from the Ohio River.)
Bobby Mackey’s has been the subject of many paranormal studies and documentaries over the decades. I won’t venture a guess as to whether or not the site is haunted, but the building (a former slaughterhouse) is loosely associated with a gruesome murder that occurred in 1896.
The murder itself is a matter of historical record. Two men beheaded a young woman, Pearl Bryan, nearby. Bryan was pregnant at the time, and one of the murderers was the father.
The killers were promptly caught and hanged for the despicable crime. But Pearl’s head was never found.
Guess where urban legends say the head ended up? Bryan’s headless body was found 2.5 miles away, in Fort Thomas, Kentucky. But if you believe the local legends, the killers tossed Pearl’s severed head down a well in the basement of the slaughterhouse that would become Bobby Mackey’s Music World in 1978.
Photo by Nicolas Henderson
Over the years, many patrons of Bobby Mackey’s have reported various phenomena: cold spots, disembodied voices, and worse. Above the main bar hangs a disclaimer, stating that the building is haunted, and that management is absolved of all responsibility for injuries or trauma caused by wayward spirits.
I’ve also talked to patrons who report that the only danger is the very living, very human clientele. Bobby Mackey’s has a reputation as a mildly dangerous place. Despite its popularity on the ghost tour circuit, the bar draws a rough-and-tumble crowd on the weekends. But if you’re a certain kind of person, that’s part of the charm, maybe.
No, I have never been there myself. Partly because I don’t like the bar scene (especially the country music bar scene), and partly because I don’t like to tempt the paranormal…especially when demonic forces are said to be involved, as is the case here.
I don’t know if the stories about Bobby Mackey’s Music World are true or not, but I don’t want to find out.
And now it looks like I won’t get the chance, anyway. The 76-year-old Bobby Mackey is moving his business to a new, and hopefully unhaunted, location nearby.
This blog wishes Mr. Mackey success at the new site.
I’m a child of the Cold War. I was twenty-one when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. I well remember the Soviet Union as a topic on the evening news. I grew up with a dark fascination with the USSR. I am always interested in acquiring new books and other materials about it.
I was therefore eager to listen to Anne Applebaum’s book: Gulag: A History. Although she’s recently taken to opining about current events on Twitter, Applebaum is the author of a handful of books on Soviet history.
Gulag, as the title suggests, is focused on the Soviet work/concentration camp system, which often housed political prisoners.
Gulag is a thoroughly researched book. Applebaum draws not only on Soviet-era documents, but also on extensive interviews she conducted with camp survivors.
The book has no ideological ax to grind. Applebaum doesn’t soft-pedal the human cost of the Soviet gulag system. Nor does she endlessly bludgeon the reader with authorial intrusions of shock and disapproval. Applebaum assumes that the reader can make her own moral judgments.
While there are passages about the leadership of the USSR and Kremin-level politics, the emphasis of the book is on the prisoners’ experience. Gulag gives the reader a sense of what it was like to have been an inmate in a Soviet prison camp, as much as any book could.
The only downside to this approach is that the many, many firsthand stories sometimes overload the reader with repetitive details.
I’m listening to the audio version of this book, but the printed version is 736 pages. My guess is that 436 pages could have accomplished the same ends in a more succinct manner.
But no book, either fiction or nonfiction, is perfect. Gulag: A History is a worthwhile read for anyone with a serious interest in Soviet history.
I am a big fan of making use of all available time. During the spring and summer months, I mow two suburban lawns. That means about three hours of walking behind a lawnmower.
Here’s the problem, though: ordinary earbuds don’t provide sufficient hearing protection while you’re mowing the lawn. Nor are you likely to hear much of what you’re listening to, unless you only want to listen to KISS and AC/DC.
It took me only a minute to sync my pair with my iPhone, which is loaded with podcasts and audiobooks. These headphones muffle the sound of my lawnmower to a very small background rumble, and I can hear the spoken audio content perfectly.
You can also accept incoming calls on these bad boys. Even with the lawnmower going, the party on the other end of the call can hear you perfectly if you speak at normal volume.
Highly recommended for audiobook enthusiasts who mow their own lawns. Audiobooks make the task of lawn-mowing much more pleasant.
