While I'm working, I listen to an extensive amount of non-fiction in convenient audio form. And I'm all for saving you, dear reader, from wading through all the bad stuff yourself. Peruse the capsule reviews below, and look for some high-rated tasties the next time you are looking for something informative for your ears!

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Site: http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/FRAT002.shtml

This was, unfortunately, another one of those lectures where somebody gets up and says a series of things about problems with government without really have any central thesis or narrative. The result is a weak lecture that leaves you with no real new ideas, historical insight, or specific action to take.

If I had to categorize Frank's work in general (I've read his articles and heard his lectures before, but never have I read an entire book), I would say that he functions as somewhat of a historian of, but not for, the conservative movement in America. This is useful as an exercise, to be sure, but tends to be about as engaging as a history book typically is as well.

I suppose if you are someone who has no idea what the political right has been up to in this country for the past half century, then you might find this lecture interesting. If not, I'd skip.

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Site: http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/NELD001.shtml

Recorded right down on the waterfront at the Elliot Bay Book Company, this is the promotional lecture for Pullitzer-winning author Deborah Nelson's book The War Behind Me. The concept behind the lecture (and book) is simple: to get Vietnam War veterans' stories of war atrocities down on paper while the opportunity still exists.

It is self-evident that the only lesson learned by this country from the Vietnam War was that tighter media control is necessary to properly pursue what would otherwise be an unpopular war. We certainly haven't learned anything else, because we continue to engage in conflicts very similar to the Vietnam War without exercising any additional caution for the benefit.

War is ugly. As interesting as the Geneva Conventions are as an experiment, the reality is that if you are engaged in a full-scale war, perhaps for your country's own survival, nobody is going to pay any attention to them. We only respect the human rights of others when our own human rights are secured, to coin a phrase.

So the heart of the matter is that the responsibility for war atrocities rests squarely on the shoulders of those who made the decision to go to war in the first place. As much as people like to complicate things, that is the simple truth. I don't believe there is a way to execute a "civilized" war, because in the history of mankind, I have yet to read about one. Once you make the proclamation that your citizens may take the lives of the citizens of another country, you should expect atrocities, for you have at least explicitly authorized murder, if not worse. Endless dithering about whether or not you were attempting to bomb a "valid target" when you hit a civilian area seem so hopelessly misguided, I truly wonder if anyone has any perspective.

Which brings me back to this lecture. The primary benefit of the material here is exactly that perspective. Forever keeping fresh the facts of what happens when you send people into war is of vital importance. The United States has been continuously involved in small-scale warfare all over the globe for as long as I've been alive and then some, all conflicts similar to Vietnam in one way or another. I think it is crucial that, as a nation, we finally acknowledge the fact that when you send people to war of any kind, they are going to commit unspeakable acts. Therefore, we must commit them to do so only in times of extraordinary need, a definition which by no means applies to most (if not all) of our conflicts since Vietnam.

Recommended.

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Site: http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/PILJ003.shtml

Journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger opens this lecture with a brutally sarcastic anecdote from his service in Vietnam, where the US made a formal gift of Uncle Ben's Rice and electric-flush toilets to a village in order to "win their hearts and minds". From there, Pilger fast-forwards to the present where he lays out a rather sweeping condemnation of Barack Obama's policies and opiate public relations message of "Hope". I should first state that I am in no way an unbiased reviewer for this lecture. I hold an extremely unfavorable view of Barack Obama, beginning from when I heard him say, in the Democratic primary debates, that "all options" were on the table for dealing with Iran, and continuing to this day as I observe his rather abhorrent policy decisions. In this past Presidential election, I voted for him at the last minute, despite my reservations. Normally I will either write in a candidate or vote for a decent progressive candidate if they are fortunate enough to make it onto the ballot. But the McCain campaign had become so insulting to me by election day, for some reason I decided it was better to have as strong a Democratic victory as possible. That's the last time I ever make that mistake. I would not be surprised if my vote for Obama is the last vote I ever cast for a Democrat. In hindsight, it's one of the few black marks on my voting record since I began to actively follow politics, and that is rather shameful to me. Which brings me to this wonderful lecture by John Pilger. It is essentially a soapbox lecture, condemning Obama for perpetuating essentially the same imperialistic foreign policies as George W. Bush, while simultaneously placating his predecessor's left-wing opponents with one of modern politics' best dog-and-pony shows. I think my favorable reaction to Pilger's lecture is due largely to the fact that I hear so much stumping and demagoguery that is patently false and blatantly misleading, it's good to hear a passionate speaker give an emotional lecture on something with which I actually agree. I just wish more people would listen, and actually consider the possibility that we really do cause massive damage throughout the world by our policies, and that a little bit of demilitarization on our part might go a very long way towards a better world. Pilger employs a wonderful quote from Milan Kundera: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." With this framework in mind, I believe it is no exaggeration to say that Barack Obama is today's most powerful weapon on the side of forgetting. In many ways he parallels John F. Kennedy: a young (by presidential standards), attractive, charismatic, powerful speaker who has a lot of grandiose things to say about what America could be, who simultaneously allows all of the worst of American imperialism to thrive under his command. With Bush, there may have been a limit to the nefarious doings of the United States, because he began with a large percentage of citizens disapproving of him, and that percentage continued to grow over time. With Barack Obama, will the same be true? I can only hope that actions speak louder than words. Recommended.

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Site: http://forum-network.org/lecture/dna-and-exit-freedom

This lecture was the first I've ever heard from a convict (and I use the term technically) eventually exonerated by DNA evidence. It was superb. Johnson is a charismatic speaker, and put together a beautifully paced lecture that covered his case, his prison years, his retrial, and its aftermath.

At least for me, the notion of a wrongly convicted man being cleared by DNA evidence usually conjures up this image of a rigged case where the prosecutor bribes some other convicts with deals if they testify against the accused. Or a Shawshank Redemption-esque coincidence where Johnson happened to be at or near the scene of the crime, and discovered in some way that made it appear as if he been the culprit. Contrary to this notion, Johnson's case serves more as a reminder that the justice system needs no such dramatics to fail miserably.

For example, in Johnson's case, the victim failed to identify him. There were no witnesses who testified that Johnson had confessed to them. There was no circumstantial evidence. In fact, the only evidence they had actually cast doubt on Johnson's culpability: hair samples taken from the victim did not match Johnson's.

Odder still was the fact that Johnson was actually tried for two rapes sequentially. The police believed that the same rapist committed two separate rapes, and Johnson was their suspect. However, the rapes occurred in different jurisdictions, so Johnson had two trials: one for each. In the first trial, there was an all-white jury, and Johnson was convicted. In the second, it was mixed ethnicity, and he was acquitted.

Not that I would invite anyone, from solely this, to draw the conclusion that twelve white people in Georgia might convict an innocent black person on scant or even contradicting evidence. Especially if said black person happened to have a prior arrest record. I would never suggest that.

Of course the other option is that they're just mentally retarded, and Georgia code doesn't require jurors to be capable of forming complete thoughts. But that would also be inappropriate to suggest, so I shall refrain from suggesting anything.

Johnson spent sixteen years in jail, and when he was finally exonerated, the state of Georgia paid him $500,000 in compensatory damages. That's approximately thirty-thousand dollars a year. I'm not sure how they arrived at that figure, and I'm not prepared to speculate as to what someone's freedom is worth per year. But for juxtaposition, I will point out that in the famous case of Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants, the plaintiff received $640,000 in damages for spilling coffee on her own self.

So just to be clear: if McDonald's were to have gone out to that woman's car, abducted her, printed that she was a rapist in their circular, kept her in the back of the Ronald McDonald House in forced confinement for sixteen years, then released her, our government would have thought it $140,000 less damaging to her life than serving hot coffee in a poorly designed container.

But I digress.

The more important takeaway from this lecture, I think, is that while things like the Innocence Project and other valuable organizations are worth supporting and serve to alleviate the problems with our judicial system after the fact, the truth of the matter is that there are fundamental flaws in the way we process criminal cases that we need to fix.

Listening to Johnson describe his case lead me to think seriously about something I had not considered before: although our criminal justice system purports to be based on an "innocent until proven guilty" philosophy, the mere fact that only one person is on trial for a crime belies that. There's no way you can arrest someone, keep them in custody, march them into a courtroom, seat them by themselves in a box for "the defendant", and then claim that you are not assuming they are at least likely to be guilty.

Johnson pointed out that in both his trials, the prosecution employed the standard TV drama gesture of asking the victim on the stand if "the rapist is in this courtroom", and "could you identify him", with the victim naturally pointing to Johnson. But at least in the first trial, the police report clearly stated that when the victim was originally asked to pick the man who raped her from a lineup, she did not pick Johnson. So even when it is abundantly clear that the victim is not capable of providing useful testimony as to the identity of her assailant, this sort of thing skates.

As Survivor-like as it may sound, I do truly wonder if the police should be made to go through their narrowing process in front of the jury, rather than having the case be presented once they decide on a single suspect. If, for example, the jury had been there to witness the victim picking another person from the lineup, surely they would have been much less likely to convict Johnson of the crime! Yet that emotional impact is lost, buried in the police report, and the presentation of her positively identifying him in the courtroom is the only vision with which they are left.

I will conclude now before I recount the entire lecture, which I am fast in danger of doing. Needless to say, I highly recommend a listen, and if you are feeling supportive, you can also order a copy of Johnson's recent book on the subject.

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Site: http://forum-network.org/lecture/sandbox-investment-kids-first-politics

I wish that most of the time I was reviewing non-fiction that was good. But really, a lot of it is bad. But I assume it's just as important to post the bad ones as it is to post the good ones so that people know not to waste their time on material on which I've already wasted mine.

Which brings me to this gem of a discussion group lead by David Kirp. This presentation left me feeling that a) I wasn't entirely sure what the context was for a number of the comments made, because the speakers made no effort to explain background material before referencing it, and b) that I didn't actually care that I wasn't sure, because the things the speakers said were so pointless and "chummy" that I didn't have any interest in their opinions.

I couldn't even listen all the way through.

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Site: http://forum-network.org/lecture/israel-lobby-governing-us-foreign-policy

This is a difficult lecture to review. On the one hand, I am inclined to agree with the lecturers and their position, and I suspect I would enjoy their book. On the other, this particular presentation seems to contain very little factual information, thus rendering it largely uninteresting as a stand-alone piece.

The primary thesis of the book is that pro-Isreal lobbies (and they name APAC, the Anti-defamation League, Christians United for Israel, and others as examples) play a prominent role in dictating US foreign policy, often in ways that are detrimental to the interests of the United States and Isreal alike.

I suppose if that suggestion seems to you to be unusual or hard to believe, then this lecture might be of interest. But already being of that assumption, I was hoping for something more complete, and I did not get it. Worse, the lecturers did raise several points on which I was interested, but then failed to elaborate. Examples include the absence of evidence that oil lobbyists played any part in the push for war in Iraq, that Israel was in favor of war with Iraq only because it was assumed that Iran would be next, and that without APAC the push for war in Iraq would have failed.

But these points were stated without much support. This is perhaps due to support being presented in the book, but even so, that doesn't make the lecture any more interesting. Therefore, much as with The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein, I would rate this as an uninteresting lecture about a potentially interesting book.

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Site: http://forum-network.org/lecture/susan-cooper-role-fantasy-childrens-lives

If the WGBH forum was intending to bury a great lecture underneath a horrible introduction, they certainly succeeded. Before Susan Cooper takes the stage to deliver an emotionally moving speech, the hosts of this particular series somehow felt it appropriate to spend fifteen minutes assaulting the listener with a guest performance by members of The Revels. Without going into an extensive digression of how much I personally dislike The Revels (I have seen their live Christmas performance before), let it suffice to say that this is like putting hot feces sauce on an ice cream sundae.

As a listener, I felt insulted on the speaker's behalf.

That said, Cooper's lecture was brilliant. As a child, I actually read her Dark is Rising series of books, and remember them fondly, if in little detail. But no familiarity with her work is necessary to enjoy what she had to say, as she focuses primarily on the concept of children's fantasy literature in general.

Cooper rather adeptly brings the listener along through a series of anecdotes, personal and otherwise, to a rather exciting conclusion: that how we perceive the world is driven largely by the story into which we try to place each event in our lives.

I myself am often concerned about the lack of importance that I perceive fiction to have in the world, especially given that I work on creative media as a profession. Are the stories we tell important? Are they simply entertainment? Can they be useful to society, and if so, how?

This lecture went a long way towards reassuring me that fiction is not just important, but perhaps more important than non-fiction, when it comes to what people believe about the actions of man. In that sense, this is above all a motivational lecture, and there are precious few of those on this topic.

I highly recommend listening to this lecture, especially since it is available for free via the WGBH Forum Network. Just remember to skip past the terrible introductory sequence so as to not due Susan Cooper the disservice of having her thoughtful presentation unfairly marred.

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Site: http://forum-network.org/lecture/man-who-wrote-frankenstein

This lecture is notable less so for its presentation, which is poor, but for the inspirational quality of the arguments to which it refers. After listening, I was excited both to read the author's thesis (The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein), but also the original 1818 edition of Frankenstein.

I have never been particularly fond of classic literature, and if forced would prefer a Jane Austen to something in the "horror" pantheon such as Frankenstein (although this may be largely due to my extreme dislike of Dracula, a truly dreadful "novel", and works of fiction which are told in correspondence form in general). Thus it had never occurred to me to read Frankenstein.

Yet even though I found the speaker to be muddled and digressive, the seemingly solid case for Percy Shelley as the actual author of Frankenstein, and for the 1818 edition as a seminal work in English literature (as opposed to the more proliferative 1832 edition), caught my attention. Furthermore, I was intrigued by the author's suggestion that the original work contained thoughtful discussions on atheism, science, homosexuality, and ostracism, and that it was intentionally neutered to form the 1832 edition by William Godwin (Mary Shelley's father) after Percy's death.

As one would expect, despite having been said before (both at the time of its original publication, and as recently as twenty-some-odd years ago), Lauritsen's suggestion that Frankenstein was not written by Mary Shelley was apparently met with considerable hostility in academia. I suppose when your life is based around the study of a particular author or authors, or such-and-such a "movement" or what have you, then you assume that things like authorial misattribution are important, even though it should be evident to you from casual observation that the rest of the world isn't listening and doesn't care. If asked who wrote Frankenstein, I'm sure the average American would say something like "Kenneth Brannaugh".

So while I am not certain I would recommend spending the hour to listen to this lecture, I might recommend picking up a copy of the 1818 edition of Frankenstein to see if it deserves the superlatives laden upon it by Lauritsen when describing its place in English literature. I suspect I will pick up a copy of my own shortly.

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Site: http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/WOOS002.shtml

In this lecture, Steffie Woolhandler, herself a practicing doctor, provides a data-packed review of the health care situation facing the nation as Congress prepares to pass new legislation.

If you're tired of hyperbolic talk from politicians about health care reform, this lecture provides a welcome break. Woolhandler highlights a number of useful statistics that show how individual changes to our health care system could improve care or cut costs, often both.

Among these statistics are that single-payer systems have administrative costs that are half of what our average costs are (16% administrative overhead in Canada, for example, vs. 31% overhead in America), mandate-based plans lead to worse care (based on data from Florida and Massachusetts which have experimented therewith), and that everywhere else in the world pays less for drugs than we do in America because we do not have collective bargaining powers with drug companies (even Medicare is prohibited from doing so, thanks to pharma-driven legislation).

In conclusion, Woolhandler says that the current bill being considered by Congress is so terrible that she's not certain it will actually accomplish anything at all. If, like me, you place some trust in the speaker after hearing her well-considered lecture, this will come as an unfortunate, if unsurprising, news.

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Site: http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/CHON195.shtml

Another in a long series of Alternative Radio interviews with Noam Chomsky, this particular interview introduces nothing new. If you've heard Noam Chomsky speak a few times, you've heard everything contained herein. If not, it is probably not the best introduction.

Not recommended.

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Site: http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/BACA002.shtml

As always, interview-format Alternative Radio rarely is as engaging and complete as lecture-format. That said, I had never heard Andrew Bacevich speak, and overall I found his opinions to be thoughtful and measured. Along the same lines as Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy, the central thesis of this interview (and presumably Bacevich's latest book), is an analysis of the decline and impending collapse of the American empire. What makes the interview interesting is Bacevich's citation of numerous interesting elements from our history which are rarely cited in this context, and for that reason alone, it is recommended listening (and perhaps recommended reading). I will be looking for The Limits of Power on audiobook, to be sure.

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Site: http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/HAYT001.shtml

I'm not quite sure what the thesis of this lecture was meant to be, if there was meant to be one. It may have just been a get-to-know-you bookstore stop. Regardless, there isn't any content here worth noting. If I had to summarize, I would call it a meandering tour through the current and past state of the Democratic party.

Not recommended.

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Site: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400082131

This was a fantastic book from start to finish. Despite the odd byline at the Random House page, this is not the story of "one doctor's search" for the first miracle drug. Instead, it is the collation of dozens of related stories that surround the birth of modern antibiotic medicine (and perhaps, one could argue, modern medicine in general). Author Thomas Hager does a brilliant job of keeping the (literally) dozens of characters and plots in motion, and his efforts are not wasted. I came away from this book with significantly better retention of the specifics than just about any other non-fiction book of this size and complexity, and quite a few good anecdotes to boot.

Highly recommended.

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This guy has a metric ton of lectures on Alternative Radio, but this is the first one I've heard. I have to say, I was delighted. I don't think there's anything in this lecture that you wouldn't have heard before, but the overall perspective from which it approaches the subject matter is beautifully stated and I think it helped crystallize some things in my head that were previously floating around disjoint.

Recommended.

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This Point of Inquiry interview with Peter Singer only lightly touches on the subjects of the book, and tends more to discuss Singer's ideas in general. I've actually read the book in question, and while it is a good book, the interview itself not only fails to convey much (if any) of the useful information therein, but it also fails to provide anything else of real interest.

Not recommended.

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Hitchens never fails to amuse me, and this interview with Point of Inquiry is no exception. Ostensibly an interview about his book, God Is Not Great, the content mostly consists of Hitchens answering some boilerplate questions about religion. Although there's nothing here to surprise (unless you're somehow religious), it is a quick and entertaining listen, and I especially enjoyed the Christian sheep analogy :)

Recommended.

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This guy is an idiot and his lecture is terrible. If you'd like more detail than the previous sentence, here you go.

This lecture begins with the implicit assumption that aggregate, shipping-based business is bad and local, import-reducing business is good. Absolutely no data of any kind is provided for any of this.

There isn't a lot of complexity involved in these situations, so I'm surprised when people seem to be so unwilling to do the analysis. The cost of production of goods at A plus the cost of shipping goods to B is not really confusing. And so of all the A's, B's can pick the cheapest. If that happens to be B to B itself, then hey, that good should be made and consumed locally. If it doesn't, why is shipping so bad? The economics really do adapt to the situation. So if there's any complaint to be had with that, it would simply be that appropriate taxation isn't applied for externalities (use of public infrastructure, currency imbalance, pollution).

In general, the problem of non-renewable fuels taints the concept of shipping as being bad for the environment and sustainability. Sure. That may be true, and it may be true for the next ten years, or twenty years. But all of these things could easily change at any time with, for example, the introduction of some new kind of power (efficient solar boats, Mr. Fusion, whatever). So the tacit assumption that shipping should be eliminated because it is bad is just a flawed assumption. Shipping is actually inherently good when you remove the power consumption included, because different parts of the world are better at producing some things than others or have more infrastructure therefore. Thus shipping allows more efficient production if the shipping itself doesn't introduce more of an efficiency loss than is gained.

Now, ignoring what I just said about shipping, which would be enough of a reason to think this lecture was crap, let's go on to the other implicit assumption, which is that the cute bookstore on main street is better than a giant borders somewhere out of town (or on main street, for that matter).

Where does this bias come from? It's like religion, but for stores. It has no basis in data whatsoever.

Think about it: the bookstore on the corner is nothing but an engine of inefficiency: they do not produce a product, they simply hold a product like a warehouse, and for that privilege, they charge you more money for the book. Is this really a useful service we want protected? It's not like the make better books. They don't make anything, they just waste real estate and introduce inefficiency.

If you want a nice place to sit and look at books, that's what the public library is for.

So I outright reject the notion that there are "good" and "bad" versions of a business whose only job is to hold stuff until someone buys it. In an ideal economy, we would have zero of these to begin with, because they only introduce inefficiency (especially in the case of things like books or CDs, which do not need any services provided with the sale, such as the ability to try them on, like shoes). So who cares what happens to the mom-and-pop bookstore, or drugstore? Completely useless. Replace it with something more efficient, and hopefully, get rid of both some day.

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Well, I'd certainly always heard it said that Martin Luther King was a great speaker, but to be honest, I'd only ever heard soundbites from him and they were never all that exciting to me. This rebroadcast was the first time I really got a chance to hear one of his lectures all the way through, and wow, the conventional wisdom is spot on: he's one hell of a speechwriter.

Aside from that, there are a number of interesting things about this lecture.

First, MLK is not generally referred to as "that guy who was against Vietnam". He tends to be bucketed squarely in the civil rights bin, and, perhaps intentionally, his opposition to Vietnam was not something that goes along with the school-friendly anecdotes about lunch counters or bus seats (at least in the schools where I grew up, discrimination is eschewed but war embraced, so the selective memory would suit them). So it's nice to hear a very forceful and unambiguous speech by King that makes it very clear how he thought about the situation.

Second, there are the obvious parallels with our current situation, although we have no powerful and coherent lecturers in our present day to deliver such a speech. But we could just use search-and-replace on this one.

Third, beyond just the parallels, King also specifically discusses in the lecture his assumption that Vietnam is not an isolated incident, and that it would happen again. So at some level, it's worth listening to just so he can get a little posthumous "told you so" in there :)

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Another interview-format feature from Alternative Radio, this one focuses on a man-on-the-ground (or woman-on-the-ground, if you will) view of Pakistan as it is today. Although I generally don't like this format for AR, I did enjoy this interview, and I felt like it conveyed a good deal about the feeling of living in Pakistan for someone (such as myself) who knows very little about the actual day-to-day situation inside in the country.

Recommended.

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A largely information-free interview in which one of the principle discoverers of Buckminster Fullerene discusses his views on science education and religion.

Not recommended.

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