Books We Read/Listen To

[chrisrenrut]

Just finished The Spoonbenders, a fun fiction about a family with mixed psychic powers in Chicago in the 90’s. I listened to it on audible and the narrator was fantastic, but I think reading it would be fun as well. It’s entertaining from the beginning, and jumps around in time and by character. Includes teenage angst, mobsters, federal agents, and a magician/con artist patriarch. Very much worth the time if you are looking to be entertained.

[USS Utah]

Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack by Steve Twomey

The author covers more than just the last twelve days before the attack, using the each of those days as a spring board to events and personalities key to understanding the Day of Infamy. An excellent introduction to the subject, some readers, at least, will be inspired to read more about the road to Pearl Harbor and America's participation in World War II. Twomey is a great story teller.

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Ballistic by Mark Greaney

The third installment of the Gray Man series finds Court Gentry fighting a war he didn't want against a Mexican drug cartel to protect the family of a man who once saved his life. Excellent.

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The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

The road to 9/11 may have begun in New York in the 1950s with the arrival of an Egyptian dissident, who later returned to his home country to be jailed and tortured as a radical Islamist. This man would inspire a movement in Egypt, some of whose members would later join forces with a group started by a wealthy Saudi dissident. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, many from Saudia Arabia and Egypt went to the Pakistan and Afghanistan to fight with the Mujahideen. The experience of the Osama bin Laden and the Arab Afghans, as they were called, bordered on the farcical, but out of it a legend was born. Because the truth did not match the legend, few in America could take it seriously when bin Laden declared war on the United States in the mid-1990s -- those that were aware of it, that is. Even after al Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Africa, and a navy destroyer in a Yemen harbor, only a handful of people considered the organization a threat. Part of the reason was that the FBI and the CIA were not sharing the information each had collected on bin Laden and al Qaeda.

A fascinating book that everyone should read.

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Admiral Arleigh Burke by E. B. Potter

After excellent biographies of Admirals William Halsey and Chester Nimitz, Potter turns his attention to Arleigh Burke. After becoming a legend commanding a squadron of destroyers in the South Pacific, Burke was appointed as chief of staff to Admiral Marc Mitscher, commander of the Fast Carrier Task Force as it fought in the Marshall, Marianas, the Philippines and off Iwo Jima and Okinawa. After the war, Burke would be caught up in the Revolt of the Admirals before becoming a negotiator in the Korean War peace talks. Then President Eisenhower would select him over a long list of senior officers to be the Chief of Naval Operations; as one of the few to serve three year terms, Burke completed his service after the Bay of Pigs fiasco under President Kennedy.

Fantastic.

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Murder Games by James Patterson

The inspiration for the new TV series Instinct, the story features a former CIA officer turned college professor and author who is called in to consult with the NYPD after a serial killer leaves his book on criminal behavior at a crime scene. I have found a certain humor in both the book and the TV series as neither takes themselves too seriously

Very good.

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The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train and Three American Heroes by Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, Spencer Stone, and Jeffrey E. Stern.

In the summer of 2015, three friends who grew up together in Sacramento, California, reunite for a backpacking trip through Europe. On the recommendation of an American they meet in Berlin, they elect to make an unplanned trip to Amsterdam, which they enjoyed so much they contemplated skipping their planned trip to Paris. Instead, they decide to make the trip to France, which puts them on the 15:17 to Paris on August 21, 2015. These are just a few of the coincidences that put the trio on the train -- had they not gone to Amsterdam, they would have taken a different route to Paris, had they stayed in Holland, they would not have been on the train -- that Ayoub al-Khazzani boarded in Belgium, armed with an AK-47 and enough ammunition to kill hundreds.

Excellent.