REHAB is the perfect place to listen to audiobooks. I’ll be reviewing the entertaining Simon Brett dramatizations starring Bill Nighy as Charles Paris in a few days. But right now I’m listening to the Black Mask Stories. This first volume features “Come and Get It” by Erle Stanley Gardner, “Arson Plus” by Dashiell Hammett, “Fall Guy” by George Harmon Coxe, “Doors in the Dark” by Frederick Nebel, and “Luck” by Lester Dent. The narrators are first-rate. The stories show why Black Mask is legendary. Six hours of entertainment on six CDs at this price is a bargain! Highly recommended!

Sun Midnight Sun features some of Sara Watkins best work. My favorite songs are “When It Pleases You,” “Be There,” and “Take Up Your Spade.” If you’re in the mood for a blue-grass, country-folk, or borderline rock song this is the place to find them. I admire Sara Watkins’ range of material. No two songs are alike. GRADE: B+
TRACK LIST:
The Foothills (1:22) Performed by Sara Watkins
You and Me (3:23) Performed by Sara Watkins
You’re the One I Love (1:45) Performed by Sara Watkins & Fiona Apple
When It Pleases You (6:49) Performed by Sara Watkins
Be There (3:50) Performed by Sara Watkins
I’m a Memory (3:56) Performed by Sara Watkins
Impossible (3:54) Performed by Sara Watkins
The Accord (3:21) Performed by Sara Watkins
Lock & Key (3:39) Performed by Sara Watkins
Take Up Your Spade (3:25) Performed by Sara Watkins

Living in the 21st Century presents plenty of challenges. Arlie Russell Hochschild’s new book explores some of the trends in our society like Love Coaches. Yes, finding the Right Person takes plenty of time and energy. However, a Love Coach (for a fee) will help with that search and find that Ms. or Mr. Right. Or maybe you don’t want a soulmate, you just want a child. Arlie Russsell Hochschild shows how to buy an egg online together with high-grade sperm of your choice (maybe from a Nobel Prize winner) and arrange for a surrogate in India to carry the child for you (of course, all of this costs mucho dinero). You just have to show up in India nine months from now to pick up the child of your dreams. I found The Outsourced Self fascinating and disturbing. GRADE: B

Michael J. Sandel teaches the very popular course, JUSTICE, at Harvard University. Every semester about 800 students pile into the large lecture hall to hear Sandel’s thought’s about how to make moral decisions. What Money Can’t Buy is an extension of Sandel’s thoughts of moral limits on behavior. Sandel points out some things are not for sale. For example, friendship. Or love. Yes, you can buy sex, but you can’t buy love. Sandel provides examples like Wal-Mart buying insurance on their employees (and collecting when they die). Moral or not? A woman has set up a trust that will pay drug-addicted women $300 to be sterilized so they don’t give birth to drug-addicted children. Moral or not? Sandel gives the reader plenty to think about in What Money Can’t Buy. GRADE: A

Summertime is the time to read Big Fat Books and at 784 pages, George F. Kennan certainly qualifies. George Kennan served in the State Department as an expert on the Soviet Union and was the architect of the “containment” strategy. It took decades, but Kennan’s containment strategy avoided a nuclear war and did ultimately bring down the Soviet Union. John Lewis Gaddis presents a complete picture of Kennan’s life from his early life in Wisconsin to Kennan’s later years at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. If you’re interested in one of the most important diplomats in American history, George F. Kennan is a magisterial biography: it won the National Book Critics Circle Best Biography Award. GRADE: A

The Deadly Isles is another of Jack Vance’s excellent mystery novels. Best known for his science fiction, Jack Vance proved to be capable writer of mysteries, too. The Deadly Isles concerns a wealthy family that finds itself changed by a wedding, but menaced by a death and an attempted murder. Although Vance sets the action in the South Seas, the alien environment might as well be the Gaean Reach. Jack Vance can generate his own special brand of strangeness in a contemporary mystery. The Deadly Isles is availabe in the Subterranean Press omnibus Dangerous Ways and as an ebook.

About a month ago, I reviewed Adam Kirsh’s excellent Why Trilling Matters here. I enjoyed that book so much, I decided to read another book in the Yale University Press “Why X Matters” series. I chose Why Arendt Matters because I’ve read several of Hannah Arendt’s books and found them thought-provoking.  Arendt is best known for her Origins of Totalitarianism. And for her phrase “the banality of evil” in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Young-Bruehl defends Arendt’s controversial relationship with Nazi philosopher, Martin Heidegger. I really enjoy these “Why X Matters” books because they illuminate their subjects in a brief but comprehensive overview. And they point to resources where you can do further research if you feel so inclined. GRADE: B+

With the opening of The Bourne Legacy just a few weeks away, I figured I would rewatch these classic spy/action movies in Blu-ray. When each of these movies came out, I doubted if Matt Damon could carry the action. Damon still doesn’t seem like an action-hero to me. But, each time in each movie, Matt Damon won me over. I prefer the second two movies over the first, but all of them are extremely well-crafted spy thrillers. There’s a little of the Robert Ludlum book in The Bourne Identity and about zero in the next two films. No matter. Matt Damon will have you on the edge of your seat. GRADE: A

Timothy Noah speculates that the great divergence of incomes between the 99% and the 1% really took off in 1979. America was reeling from inflation, oil shocks, and technological change. When Reagan became President and broke the Air Traffic Controllers union, weakening the union movement all over the U.S., the wage disparity between workers and their bosses spiked. The greater power of banks and hedge funds and financial institutions accelerated the gap between the billionaires and everyone else. And the Bush tax cuts finished the job. Timothy Noah sees plenty of problems ahead if this trend continues. Economic inequality leads to political instability. Noah provides a list of suggestions to reverse this trend, but will anyone in Washington be willing to fight for the diminishing Middle Class? GRADE: B+