Twelve Black Code Monkeys

My killer feature for the iPod is something that probably doesn’t appeal to you. Ok, maybe some of you, but not many. It’s the feature that Apple introduced with the 4G iPods back a couple of years ago. The feature is the ability to speed up (or slow down) audio without changing the pitch (if you are familiar with variable speed tape recorders, you understand that simply speeding up the playback of something tends to also make the speaker sound like a chipmunk).

Why is this a killer feature? It lets you play one minute and fifteen seconds of audio for every minute you listen. In other words, you get an extra 25% of content. I listen to a lot of spoken audio – audio books and podcasts – and this means that I get to enjoy a lot of extra content in the same stretch time. It’s a time saver. You get to save countless hours by listening at faster speeds, just as a speed reader gets to read many more books in the time a normal reader would.

There are some downsides, but I don’t think they are significant for most audio. One is that you have to pay closer attention, since drifting off a bit will mean that you will miss a lot more than you would normally, plus it just takes more concentration to comprehend everything at a higher speed. There are some audio artifacts that sometimes occur as well. Those artifacts aren’t jarring, but do degrade the sound quality slightly. Oh yes, and of course you just have a different listening experience. For some audio, timing and cadence can be a big part of the narrator’s performance. Speeding this up can wreak havoc on it - especially for dramatic naration of audio fiction. On the other hand, I’ve gotten so used to listening to nonfiction at this speed that now when I listen to podcasts at the normal speed, the speaker sounds like he’s talking in slow motion! So to some degree it’s just a matter of getting accustomed to it.

While the iPod is the only (or one of the few) digital audio players that has this functionality built in, it doesn’t let you just listen to anything in this fashion. Nope, you can listen to Audible.com audio books (or Audible’s other paid content like radio programs, newspaper transcripts, etc.), and you can listen to files in AAC spoken word format (.M4B). Since most podcasts are in MP3 format, you have to convert them. This is one reason why I use Doppler Radio as my podcast program, or “podcatcher” – it is the only podcatcher that I’ve found wihich converts files to .M4B. Some others convert to .M4A, but you still need to rename them and that implies updating iTunes with the new filename – a manual and cumbersome process.

While Doppler’s conversion works well, it has its disadvantages too, the main one being that iTunes (which is the program actually doing the conversions) can take a while to convert files. The fastest I’ve seen it work is 20X (or 20 times real time). So an hour-long show will take about 3 minutes at that speed. But most of the time, it seems to range from 5 to 12X, or 5 to 12 minutes per hour-long show. iTunes can only convert one show at a time, and so if you have a couple of hours worth of shows downloading at a given session, this could take upwards of 25 minutes to convert! It’s far from ideal.

Now, while I do have this killer feature with the iPod, I would rather that such a feature existed on other devices so that I wasn’t forced to only use an iPod. Don’t get me wrong, I like my iPod, but there are certainly things I don’t like about it as well. The main thing that irks me about it is that you can’t use music subscription services like Yahoo! Music because it won’t play Windows Media files. Apple’s system is built to be proprietary – you can only use the iTunes Music Store to download music (other than free MP3’s from independent artists or your own ripped from CD), and the iTunes Music Store only supports Apple devices. For those who need the speeding up feature, unfortunately, the iPod still seems to be your only choice.

While I could not find other players with this functionality, I thought I’d see what I could find out about speeding up audio in general. My main find proved quite interesting. It’s a Windows software program that does this very thing called, inappropriately enough, Amazing Slow Downer (or ASD), by Roni Music. I guess the name is somewhat appropriate because it can slow audio down, but it can also speed it up. I’m not sure about the utility of slowing things down, but my guess would be so that musicians can listen to a song at a much slower rate in order to pick up notes and chords more easily?

ASD allows you to take any MP3 file (or other formats as well), speed them up or slow them down arbitrarily with a fine degree of control, and then rip them to MP3 (or another format for other encodings). You can control the pitch yourself, although it seemed to automatically handle that. You can also control the audio qualities via an equalizer in order to yield the best quality sound. I played around with the trial version I downloaded from Roni Music’s site and was able to speed up a sample podcast by 42% and still follow everything. I figure you could probably train yourself to understand higher and higher levels of speed.

This was a great find and maybe there are other such applications out there but I haven’t found any yet. As nice as it is, though, I can see using it for major jobs, but not on such a regular basis as Doppler. Much of the spoken word audio I listen to is downloaded via Doppler on almost an hourly basis. So when I listen to something, it’s often only hours or at most a few days old - an ongoing stream of current podcasts. Unfortunately there’s no way to have Doppler “talk” to this program and have it automatically convert these podcasts into faster ones. Neither is there a command-line interface as far as I can tell, so even if Doppler could issue external commands (which I’ve seen in some other podcatchers), this wouldn’t work. What you would have to do is dump all my podcasts into one directory (Doppler puts them into separate directories named after the podcast’s title) and before uploading them to the iPod you would have to run this program and tell it to convert all new files – also determining which of those files were new so that you weren’t reconverting already converted ones (you could change the names or put them in different directories but this would then mean having to go into iTunes and tell it where those new files were, or what they’d been renamed to – otherwise iTunes would remove them from the iPod). Neither will ASD do anything with Audible files, which is to be expected since they have a proprietary DRM. Then there’s the issue of speed. The trial version of ASD only lets you work with 3 minutes worth of audio. I was able to rip this to a 2-minute-long MP3 in a matter of seconds, but it’s hard to extrapolate this to a 30-minute podcast, let alone a bunch of podcasts of various lengths adding up to a couple of hours worth of listening.

Where ASD might come in handy is if you find a bunch of MP3 spoken word files that you want to listen to - say open source stuff from Librivox or Project Gutenberg. Or possibly if you find a podcast that you’ve never heard but has been recording for many months and you want to catch up and listen to all the old episodes. Or you buy a new audio book on CD and want to rip it to MP3 to play it on your portable device. I can see using this for such things because they are one-shot deals rather than a constant, ongoing process.

We can dream that Erwin Van Hunen, the creator of Doppler, will put this type of functionality into Doppler 3.0, but considering how busy he is with other things, it’s hard to imagine that he could devote such resources to what is essentially donationware.

Despite the probably small number of people who find this functionality irresistible, perhaps there are enough of us to encourage a developer out there to create a podcatcher that has similar functionality, or maybe the developer of ASD will actually consider developing a podcatcher with it? Or perhaps we can get Roni Music to partner with Erwin and come up with a premium podcatcher that has this functionality. Well, we can dream!

Sorry for getting this out a bit late, but all you undecided voters still have a day to figure it out. To help you do this, you can sign up with Audible.com who has recently put together a new site called Listen Before You Vote (this site is no longer available) that’s devoted solely for highlighting their politically oriented Audio Book files. Audible.com has been offering a service for downloading or streaming audio books, radio shows, and newspaper and magazine transcripts through your computer or downloaded onto your iPod or other portable player for at least 5 years now. They’ve amassed quite a collection of titles, including lots of political stuff. While it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to listen to more than one or two full books before you have to vote tomorrow, there are a number of items that Audible has been offering for free which will consume a lot less of your time, including The Economist’s Swing State Report, various speeches (from the Democratic and Republican conventions), debates, public hearings and congressional reports (like the 9-11 Commission’s), etc. This is a nice way to preview the service and see how the audio sounds on your device. For politicos I’m sure that the reports and hearings will be fascinating, but personally I find it a bit hard concentrating on such stuff. Give one of their politically oriented audio BOOKS with a good narratore, though, and I’ll be captivated, or appalled, or incredibly amused, as the case may be.

Those who’ve read my blog for a while will know of my long-time membership with Audible.com, which provides audio books in the form of digital files you download from their site, kind of like MP3 files, but with copy-protection. Initially, one could sign up for a subscription that would give you five audio books per month for $30 or so, only $6 for each book! Nice deal except that unless you spend most of your waking time listening to the stuff – maybe if you’re a truck driver or something similar where you always can listen while doing other things – eventually you’ll probably get behind on your pile of books!

Eventually, as Audible grew, they dropped the book total down to where it is now – two (alternately you can get one book and one “subscription” to a radio show, magazine or newspaper transcript), for $20 per month, or $10 per book. Still not bad compared to the exorbitant rates you see for books at a Borders or Barnes and Noble – anywhere from $15 to $100 depending on how long the book is and whether it’s abridged or not. Books you buy via your subscription at Audible are based off of your monthly “credit” meaning the equivalent of $10, no matter the length. However, the problem is that you are limited to those two books. If you want to purchase more in a given month, you can, but you have to pay the higher Audible price, which is just a more discounted version than what you would pay in a bookstore, or what the book is listed for. So it’s still a savings, but you can also end up paying $50 for one book, if not more.

Once in a while, Audible has sales, and today Audible happens to be having a type of sale that I’ve only seen once before, maybe twice, in the last year or two. This sale entitles any Audible.com member to buy as many books as they want at a flat rate of $10 per book. There are so many great books on Audible’s site, that I have a hard time keeping my wish list under 400 titles, so this will help me out. Later today I’ll probably by a bunch of titles I’ve been eyeing for a few months now. Trust, me, though, it will still be a tiny fraction of my wish list!

Apparently, you can sign up for Audible.com count today and take advantage of the same sale for customers – this according to Audible.com customer support. One can sign up without a yearly contract, but what I have done in the past is take advantage of a deal that Audible has that gives you $100 off of a whole series of devices that can play audible files, including iPods, Treo 600’s, and many others. A third option is to sign up for a year and get a free Muvo MP3 player to play your music on.

In any case, if this entry does end up motivating you to start an account with Audible (“leviwallach”), all I ask is that you enter my audible ID as the referrer, as this will give me an extra book credit or two. Again, this sale is only for today – September 15, 2004, so if you are reading this even a day after, you’re already too late, sorry, but Audible is still worth a look if you like Audio Books and don’t want to deal with the hassle of tapes, the expense of retail price, or the inconvenience of library borrowing.

Update: Oops! This sale is not one day as I mention above! Maybe the last one was just a day and that’s what confused me. This one turns out to be 10 days! It lasts throug September 24. Sorry about that!

I recently traded in my older 30GB third generation iPod for one of the newer 40GB 4th generation ones. Other than the added capacity and storage space, the main reason, I told myself, I needed one, was the new iPods’ ability to speed up or slow down audiobook playback without actually increasing the PITCH of the speaker’s voice and making it sound like you were listening to Alvin recite Master and Commander – or alternately Fat Albert.

As some who’ve been following my blog for a while know, I like listening to audiobooks. I have a subscription with Audible.com, which is a great service if you like Audiobooks, have a high-speed internet connection, and want to pay less than what you would if you bought the same thing at a store. Of course going to the library would be much cheaper, but then you have to return it within a given period of time, among other issues. Once you buy a book on Audible, you can download it as many times as you want from your central “Library.” You can buy books ala carte, or you can subscribe to a “Listener” program where you get a couple books a month at $10 each. Audible has radio programs and newspaper and magazine transcripts read that you can subscribe to as well.the iPod is one of the devices that can play Audible content, which isn’t in an open format like MP3. In any case, I have subscribed for about five years now, although after starting to date my now wife I put the subscription on hold as I simply didn’t have the time to listen. After we got engaged I got her a subscription and renewed my own. Now we both listen so that we don’t have to talk to each other! Just kidding!

While two books a month may not seem like a huge amount, that might average out to 20 hours, or about 45 minutes a day just to keep up. Of course along the way Audible has thrown a free book at me here and there either because I referred someone or because I made a complaint about a problem or for completely unknown reasons. This and the propensity for me to be addicted to NPR radio, thus usurping prime downtime away from audio books, has left me with a large backlog of books I haven’t read. Something on the order of 35 books. Just stop listening for a couple of months and you’re yet another 4 books in the hole!

When we stopped by the Apple Store in Tyson’s Corner in order to get an iTrip for my wife’s new iPod Mini, I had no clue that we would be confronted by the new “4G” iPod models as they are called. I convinced myself that I should buy the new one and sell my old one, thus getting away with simply paying a small “upgrade fee” and potentially benefiting by getting through audio books faster, and thus having a real hope of reading all my Audible content within my lifetime! Of course, this was back in July when I had started listening to NPR again and hadn’t listened to an audiobook in several weeks. Getting the new iPod somehow didn’t remotivate me to get back into audio books until now. After all, there was the Democratic National Convention, the Olympics, and now the Republican National Convention, and we also had a vacation.

Now that I’m finally back to the books, I decided to try out the speeding up feature of the new iPods. It does what it’s supposed to, but with some caveats. You can definitely hear some “clipping” of some of the voice here and there. It hasn’t been so bad that it’s distracting or makes it harder to understand, although once in a while it does seem to cut something out that makes a difference and I have to just accept that I’m not going to get that particular sentence. Because things go faster, it does actually encourage you to pay more attention. Depending on the audio book, I can sometimes lose focus, just as with a book, then I find myself realizing that I’ve been thinking about something else while I’ve lost seconds or minutes worth of the book! But I found myself paying more attention because without that, you can easily miss things, or more things than you would at a slower playback. I don’t know if it is the clipping or something else, but the other issue I’ve had is that the playback seems like it is of a lower quality. It almost sounds like the audio artifacts you might get from a satellite phone, but not nearly as extreme and only for split seconds here and there.

Finally, I just decided that I needed to quantify the benefit I was supposedly getting from this speeding up of the book. I expected it to be dramatic, but I also wasn’t sure how it worked. In principle it’s very easy to imagine how programmers might simply scan ahead through a file and look for spaces where there is very little in the way of sound, and then tell the iPod to skip over most of this blank space. Thus, I figured, the amount you save it time must vary a lot based on the book. If a narrator has lots of dramatic pauses, and generally speaks more slowly and methodically, the time savings could be much more dramatic than a narrator who speaks quickly and with few pauses. So, I played a couple of audio books with the speed set to high and looked at where they were at 1, 3, 5, 10, 20, 30, and 60 minutes. At first it seemed like as I was taking the numbers down, the “time compression” rate was changing, but I soon found a pattern, and that pattern was repeated in two different audio books I tried this with, ‘Tis Unabridged by Frank McCourt, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. Perhaps others could confirm this with other test, but the testing was too similar to deny this pattern. What I found was that for every X amount of regular time that went by 1.25 times that amount would go by within the audio book. In other words, to read a 10 hour book, it would only take 1/1.25 x 10 hours or 80% of the normal 10 hours being 8 hours. This is a decent amount of time saved, although it does take a lot of books before it really gets noticeable. If my 35 or so books average out to 10 hours (it’s probably a bit higher), than that’s 350 hours, and so if I play them at the higher speed, I end up saving 70 hours of time! That’s almost 3 days! Or more applicably, it’s probably a good 2+ months worth of listening to small amounts on a daily basis.

The real question, though, is all this added time I will have worth the lesser audio quality of the books. I also assume that some books just will not take very well to the faster pace. You lose something tangible but also something intangible in a beautiful narration of some books. A dry non-fiction piece would probably be fine, but a novel with a skilled narrator that inserts dramatic pauses, and has a very specific and effective timing, which is dashed by the speeding up, would not work very well, I’m afraid. I guess the conclusion, then, is just to take it book by book. One strategy might be listening to the first 10 minutes in normal speed to get a feel for the narration, and then switching it and seeing how they compare – whether too much is lost or whether it gives about the same feel, just faster.

First let me say that this 21 Dog Years made me laugh harder than any other book I’ve read since Me Talk Pretty One Day. It’s kind of Office Space meets Tetherballs of Bogainville meets Andy Richter and probably was especially funny to me because I lived through the exact same time and had experiences that while not as outlandish as the author’s, still felt very familiar.

Mike Daisy, who wrote this book which describes his experiences after college first in the temping world and then in the world of a .com company (actually the .com company, Amazon.com) describes himself as a slacker, a dilettante, and a geek, but not a particularly “high-level” geek. I could describe myself in the same terms, but not quite as flamboyantly. In high school I was an introverted science-oriented student, but lacked the savant capabilities one often sees portrayed in the movies where the resident geed can get in front of his computer, start typing really fast, squint, strains as if a bit constipated, and then shout “I’m in!” as he’s just hacked into a national defense supercomputer. I did, however, participate in things that either amazed or confused my family since at that time the Internet was something only a small group of academicians knew much of anything about. This was, after all, back in the early 1980’s.

Daisy is a few years younger than me, and while I somehow lucked into my first job as a programming assistant in a student travel/exchange company, it appears he roamed his way around Europe in true bohemian style, at least for a bit before coming back and continuing a pseudo-bohemian existence in Seattle, where it seems it is very easy to be bohemian, or at least it was in the 1990’s. Instead of going on to grad school as I did, Daisy just temped for a while and eventually lucked into a job with Amazon.com in 1998 when they were just starting to fly.

What ensues is a tale of an Amazon.com insider, or at least an Amazon.com Customer Support insider. Being a telemarketer in high school for a summer and after college being a technical support drone for a software company, I know first hand that one can become cynical very quickly. Daisy describes how this became, at least for him, an opportunity to ship scandalous books to clergy or others who were nasty to him, or to alternately refund or send free stuff to people who were nice. In order to decrease his long call resolution average, he would simply hang up on customers within a few seconds of picking up their call.

As with other blindingly successful .coms of this era, Amazon.com was (and still is) headed by a charismatic leader, Jeff Bezos, whom all the Amazon.com employees seemingly looked up to as a “geek Mesiah.” Daisy intersperses his prose with emails that he wrote (but never sent) to Bezos. These emails are so intimate because they were never meant to be sent, more of an exercise in soul searching and Daisy trying to understand his very conflicting feelings toward Bezos and Amazon.com. On the one hand, Daisy was overtaken with the “coolness” of the ideas that Amazon.com pitched and it’s divine Jeff. On the other hand, Daisy is slowly having his soul sucked out of his body by answering the same questions, request, or complaints every day all day long. He finally is able to maneuver out of phone support to a more coveted “Business Development” department by making up a study he has concocted, but this just serves to show him how random and meaningless things are.

In fact, the whole book is really Daisy’s search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe. From his college days where he attained the superfluous degree in Aesthetics, to his wanderings in Europe and Seattle, he, along with many of us from his generation, were convinced that some monumental event in the future (something similar to the incredible events we watched happening in the late 80’s and early 90’s in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union) would somehow wipe the playing board in some way that would make whatever we were doing at the moment irrelevant. So what was the point in working hard, saving money, and generally being miserable?

Amazon.com, as Daisy portrays it, and really the whole internet, became something to “believe in” for all those non-believers. It was the revolution and the revelation rolled into one. But when it became obvious that while the rules were turned on their heads, this was not necessarily better than the old rules. They were just less comprehensible and more based on random fate. This, the final reckoning that all .com’s went through when the investors all of sudden realized that they had actually needed to turn profits, and his own conscience, finally broke Daisy down to a point where something had to give.

Daisy actually performs pieces of this book (I can’t imagine him performing the whole things as it would be over 7 hours), as well as other monologues at various venues. He currently seems to be in NYC. He also maintains his own blog. Daisy did amateur theater before Amazon.com and so the monologues are I suppose an extension of that. If you can, I would highly recommend getting this book in Audio format. I listened to it via Audible.com where it is narrated by Daisy. Daisy has an incredibly expressive voice that can have you laughing your head off at one moment and then make you depressed the next. His writing is, for someone of his own generation, anyway, brilliant. He goes off on pop-culture-induced rants, parodies coworkers, customers, and supervisors, and generally makes the book enormously enjoyable to listen to. Daisy looks a bit like Andy Richter, and his humor is not too far from Richter’s, perhaps just infused with a bit more literary and historical references that he feels obligated to throw in as compensation for his otherwise seemingly impractical college degree.

Even if you missed out on the whole “internet revolution” and find much of the book to be unfamiliar ground, I would still recommend it on the basis of it being a fascinating look at an interesting subculture or subcultures during the heady days when people were deluding themselves completely about how all the rules had changed and they no longer really had to pay any heed to common sense anymore. Plus it is a somewhat moving story about a guy who is struggling with the nihilism of today’s culture and somehow trying to stay sane, even if he seems completely insane half of the time.

National Public Radio has been derided by conservatives as being an example of a liberal slant in the media. Maybe this is true, maybe not. But to me more than being slanted towards one side or another, NPR distinguishes itself as being thoughtful and in-depth rather than based on fluff and stereotypes. They don’t base what stories they do on the old adage “if it bleed it leads” because they are not out to gain the highest ratings in order to maintain funding via advertising. They have been ridiculed as being elitist, snooty, pretentious, etc. There are definitely times where I get this feeling too, and I’m probably less likely to get it because I’ve been listening to them for so long. Despite its flaws, NPR is an incredible resource of information. You may not trust everything that you hear, but neither should you from any one source of media, be it NPR, Howard Stern, or CNN. There are inherent biases no matter how much someone puts on a show of being “objective.” Fox’s whole “fair and balanced” mantra is nonsense. What they are is a network that has a very definite slant towards the right. I know some may say it just seems that way because most of the media is so far to the left that Fox seems like it’s to the right even though it’s really in the middle, but that doesn’t ring true to me. It has many obviously conservative commentators and only one admittedly liberal one. I admit I haven’t watched it since we got rid of cable a year or so ago, so I can’t speak to it’s current state, but somehow I don’t think it’s changed much.

I first stumbled onto NPR in college. When I was growing up, I simply never heard it in our house. It would have fit in, since my mom is a news junky, but we were too fixated on TV and I don’t think there was a 24-hour NPR station in NYC in the 70’s and 80’s, although I could be wrong. In high school I was listening to K-Rock in NYC, which played classic rock. Then towards the end of high school, or perhaps the beginning of college, I started listening to a shortwave radio I had bought. It was a whole new world. Shortwave broadcasts are generally government run stations from around the world without commercials and with very in-depth coverage in addition to a wide array of different programming. I was particularly interested in listening to Radio Moscow at the time as I had started to study Russian and was very interested in the country and it’s struggles in trying to open itself after 70 years of tyranny. As it turned out, I actually transferred into the school of communications at Boston University in my Sophomore year, this after realizing that Astronomy was 90% math and 10% physics or thereabouts, and that I had a foundation in neither. My thought was that I would study journalism and potentially become a foreign correspondent, hopefully in Russia. I eventually learned that one normally didn’t have one’s choice in where one went on assignment, and moreover the journalism classes I took did not leave me particularly enthralled. However, the school of communications at BU also housed an NPR studio, WBUR, and at the time I recall the Car Talk guys broadcasted from this building, although I never actually saw them. Being such a fan of NPR now, I wish I had taken more advantage of being at this school and gotten more involved in radio.

Naked in Baghdad is a book written by a veteran foreign correspondent from NPR, Anne Garrels. In it she recounts her time in Baghdad both leading up to, during, and after the U.S.-led invasion of last year. If you listen to NPR, Garrels’ voice is immediately recognizable. She rattles off insightful details in a way that rivets you, and you can tell she is intimately in tune with her surroundings. She tells her story matter-of-factly, and although she laces it with personal experiences that exposes her vulnerabilities and not-so-pretty side, she keeps her reporter’s steady tone, as if she is reporting on someone else’s story and not necessarily her own.

The story Garrels tells is a fascinating one. She first came to Baghdad months before the invasion and witnessed a regime trying to hold onto it’s grip while also trying to avoid war with the least amount of concessions. What I found most insightful was her reports on Iraqis and their opinions about America and the Iraqi regime. Much of this, especially before the war really got under way, was something Garrels has to interpret from indirect statements. Once the war has started and especially after the U.S. has successfully taken Baghdad, she gets to voice much more open opinion from the Iraqi people and it is a contradictory and diverse opinion. Iraqis, she reports, are grateful that Americans have ended Sadam’s hated regime, but also feel humiliated that a foreign power had to do this for them. They are a proud people in other words. They were also fearful not so much about the war itself as they had faith in the accuracy of the U.S.’s bombs, but about what might ensue after the actual invasion had concluded, and here it seems they have not been proven totally incorrect. There is still, one year later, a great deal of uncertainty about what will happen in Iraq. Will the disparate groups, many of which carry great animosity for one another based on sides taken during all the power plays over the last 30 years, ever be able to live together peacefully? No one knows.
I listened to an unabridged version of this book via Audible.com, and recommend this as the most natural way to ingest the book, since it is written by a radio correspondent. Interspersed between different sections of the book are “Brenda Bulletins” which are letters that Garrels’ husband Vint Lawrence wrote to an email list of Garrels’ friends to update them on her travails. So we hear Garrels’ own reporting, then we here Vint’s, which reworks it, by both putting it in the third person, but ironically making it more personal in some ways. I had mixed feelings about this device. In some ways, it might actually help in that it gives two different voices to the story, making it more heterogeneous and thus more interesting. On the other hand, there’s a lot of information that is simply repeated, and some of Vint’s letters are so stylized, especially after Garrels’ directness, it sometimes seems a bit flakey or pretentious. This may also have to do with Vint’s voice, which sometimes seems a bit affected compared to Garrels. Vint’s letters do seem to get more poignant and less playful and punny towards the end, thankfully, but then again perhaps I was just getting more used to them by that point. Of course this is only my opinion and I’m sure that others might actually have the view that these letters add to the overall experience. In any case, the book, especially the audio version of it is an extremely interesting, exciting, and poignant portrayal of what it was like for one reporter who actually stayed in Baghdad from before the war started to after the U.S. had secured the city, one of only a handful of journalists who did so.

Not having studies early American history since briefly in high school, my familiarity with Benjamin Franklin consisted mainly of a couple of facts. One is that Franklin is on the $100 bill, and the second was his “discovery” of electricity via the famous experiment with a kite and a key. I wonder how many other Americans have a similarly superficial knowledge. I would contend all of us would benefit from getting a clear picture of this very influential founding father.

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, by Walter Isaacson has generally had very favorable reviews from readers and critics alike and I would not disagree with them, although I don’t presume to be expert enough in historical matters of early America to comment on its accuracy. But it does seem like a fairly detailed account of Franklin’s life from the time he was 16 till his death at the age of 84.

Isaacson describes a man whose characteristics are not only likeable by most of us, but so familiar that one could easily imagine this man in today’s world. That’s not to say that Franklin would not be considered extraordinary even by today’s standards. His skill in diplomacy, rational thought, science, statesmanship, management, and many other areas would characterize him as a dynamic and multifaceted person by most. Among the items that impressed me greatly were the following:

Although Franklin initially looked down on blacks or rather black slaves as thieves, he very quickly changed his opinion upon seeing a classroom where black children were learning and started aided these schools monetarily. His opinion became that slavery itself made the individual (whoever they were) into less of a person, and became one of the most strident early abolitionists. Unlike those who wrote theoretically about slavery being an evil but who still maintained their own (Jefferson is one quick example), Franklin put his money where his mouth was.

Franklin never belonged to a specific faith, but especially late in life would sometimes evoke god as the creator of things in trying to promote humility. His view of the divine however, was pragmatic and rational, and he took the opinion that it was useless to bother his mind with questions about the details of scripture – even such a major one as to whether Jesus was divine – when there was no way to prove this. Instead he boiled all religions into the common denominator of “do good to others.”

His scientific thoughts and experiments were of course very impressive, and all of this was amazing for a man who was self-taught, of humble beginnings. He was indeed, the first Heratio Alger story, and assuredly Alger used the example of Franklin to model his stories.

Since Franklin’s death, his image has increased and decreased in status as those who were his antithesis gained stature and influence. David Brook’s Bobos in Paradise explains this long struggle between Franklin’s rational, practical Bourgeois, and the romantic Bohemian characterized by Keats and so many others. Admittedly Franklin does seem to embody the bourgeois stereotypes almost to an extreme, and yet I come away from this book with nothing but admiration. Perhaps because I’m not overtly passionate about most issues myself. Some people prefer a polite and rational argument to passionate entreaties, screaming, or other dramatics. Not everyone has to embody both rationalism and passion, and few can pull that off, so why not have prime examples of the most effective in both of these?

I actually listened to this as an audio book download from Audible.com. It was an abridged version, but even so was over 7 hours. I’m sure the book or unabridged version would go into a great deal more detail but it’s hard to know how helpful that added detail is, especially as an introduction to a topic that one has little knowledge of to begin with..

Salt, by Mark Kurlansky, is a fascinating book about the history of, you guessed it, Salt. It’s amazing how something we take for granted because it is so cheap and on every table, whether at someone’s home or at a restaurant. It is given away for free at fast food restaurants, and is in copious supply in our vast oceans that take up most of the surface area of the planet. Yet Salt was not always taken for granted. Kurlansky talks about how for thousands of years it was a vital resource that played into economics, politics, wars, technological progress, and culture in general.

Kurlansky is incredibly thorough in his accounting of the story of Salt. However, at points the level of detail gets a bit too deep for me. Like other nonfiction books that treat a subject with lots of history, sometimes the relentless listing of people and places, and events get overwhelming. Salt also seems to jump around relentlessly both geographically and chronologically. I still found it very
interesting, just a bit bewildering at points! One thing that Kurlansky recounts which I think could have been left out is his recounting of recipes that somehow involve salt as an ingredient. These recipes go back thousands of years and they are sometimes fascinating, but they are all quoted from their original sources and thus use somewhat archaic language and ingredients that most would be unfamiliar with today. A few of these might have been good to spice things up, but Kurlansky probably includes a couple dozen or so of these!

All in all, it was a decent read, but one that I fear many may put down after a while or at least have to skim through. I actually listened to this book on Audible.com. The narration, by Scott Brick, was affective and kept my attention throughout most of the reading despite some of the problems with the subject matter as expressed above.

Bill Bryson is a favorite of mine, having written a bunch of books that are in the genre “travel narrative.” Bryson’s wit and insight not just about travel but life in general, is amazing. But just as wonderful is his voice. Luckily, most of his books he narrates himself with his half Midwestern half Brittish accent. This description doesn’t do it justice; of course, you really have to hear it. It’s not like an affected Brittish accent taken on by some (the head of my high school comes to mind), but just an odd intonation that alerts one to the fact that Bryson probably hasn’t spend his whole life in the U.S. In fact, he moved the U.K. when he was in his early 20’s and settled down there. Back in the mid-1990’s, I believe, he decided to come back to his native country and settled in a small town in New Hampshire with his family. Unfortunately it looks like we’ve lost him again as he has moved back to his adopted homeland.

Recently when I was on Audible.com’s site, looking through new books, I noticed “A Short History of Nearly Everything” in non-abridged format! I was ecstatic. The length was a full 19 hours. Back in July when I saw Bill Bryson had a new book out and it was available for download on Audible, I jumped at it, despite the fact that it was an abridged version. At over 6 hours, it was still a decent length. Now with a non-abridged version available, I felt compelled to snatch it up. Silly me I assumed that Bryson narrated this unabridged version; after all, he’s narrated all of his other books available on Audible. The narrator, Richard Matthews is British, but doesn’t have nearly the pacing and intonation that make Bryson such a pleasure to listen to. Nevertheless, you can still hear Bryson’s voice sometimes through the words if you try. At over 19 hours, there’s of course a lot more detail – mainly a bit fuller explanations and technical details of the science, which can be helpful if there are areas that are hard to grasp without examples, etc.

I would have to say that “History” is one of those books where I find the abridged version slightly better than the unabridged. One could probably say this about many poorly written books that drone on and on and could be actually improved by an abridgement. But this isn’t the reason that I prefer the abridged version, of course, it’s the narration! Matthews narration is by no means bad, but it is the difference between good narration and wonderful. It’s hard to explain, but Bryson’s voice, pacing, intonation, etc. is just so distinct and of course his actual voice reflects that which actually wrote the words down to begin with. Somehow I felt like I learned and remembered more from the abridged version than from the unabridged. Part of this may have to do with the content and that the unabridged version simply fills in some of the details that the abridged version leaves out but still purveys in a general sense that can be understood.

I have also come to the conclusion that in some cases for non-fiction books, less is actually more. When a certain historical event is covered, that’s one thing, but a broad accounting of events throughout history begins to get overwhelming after a while and even with the best of authors can start to feel like a mere log of events and persons. I’m sure the more one is already familiar with the events and people the less this is the case. I have read a lot of science history, so much of this was familiar, but Bryson’s book is tour de force of science, including almost all sciences you can imagine. Kind of a Cosmos of the 21st Century. A nice thing about the unabridged version that I didn’t notice in the abridged (although perhaps I just overlooked it) was that Bryson quotes a lot of other science writers, which gives one recommendations for further reading in most areas of science.

For those who like reading about science or even who just like Bryson, I would still recommend the unabridged version, but I think it should be read in addition to the abridged version, not instead.

The first I actually heard the name Philip K. Dick, it was from a radio host on WBAI, Jim Freund, a true Dick fanatic. He was a member of a local bulletin board system in New York City called Magpie, created by Steve Manes. A bunch of us were invited over to WBAI to watch him do his show, The Hour of the Wolf, which was unfortunately 5am to 7am. But this was back in the 80’s and I was still young and all-nighters were not a rare occurance for me back then. A few years later Jim Freund actually got us tickets for a theatrical performance of Dick’s Close My Eyes The Policeman Said put on by a theater group from NYU.

I call myself a PKD (Philip K. Dick) fan, but I’m ashamed to say that I really have not read considerable amounts of his prose. The novels I’ve read are Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time Slip, and Radio Free Albemuth. Up until reading this collection of short stories, I’d never read any of his short fiction.

For those unfamiliar with Dick, his stories are generally dark and paranoid, and reality is shaky. Dick deals with issues of sanity, alternate realities, drug-distorted realities, religious-distorted realities, and the different perspectives of reality between artificial life (or artificial intelligence as it’s known to us today) and natural life. Dick himself had a somewhat tenuous grasp on reality during some of his life and eventually drank himself to death. Nonetheless, his copious works carry his name forward and this book is an example of how it has influenced film makers.

As a science fiction author I find he was often off the mark when it comes to some of the finer details in his portrayal of future worlds. It’s a common complaint that when imagining the future, authors often underestimate the changes in the farther future (say of 50 or more years), but overestimate the changes in the nearer future (say under 25 years). In addition, the vast majority of what Dick wrote was before the age of the personal computer, and since few authors envisioned such an enormously influential device on society, a great deal of what came before the mid 1970’s seems very dated. Nonetheless, Dick does get a few ideas eerily right. Reality may not be as dark and devastated as the ones he painted, but some of the fears he had play themselves out in the more questionable actions that government has taken since his death. Whether or not his books accurately predict our future is not of the utmost relevence, however. Appropriately enough, his work, to me anyway, is more about alternate futures; futures that could have been possible but have turned out not to be - at least mostly - or at least not yet.

As mentioned, many of Dick’s works have been cinematized. The first of these was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (although his story Imposter was apparently dramatized for TV in the 60’s), which was made into the Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. This was one of my favorite movies as a kid, and even watching it today, over twenty years after it came out, it still does not seem “dated” to me the way so many older (and even some more recent)Sci-Fi movies do. The book, although containing the same characters and also being about replicants, was turned on it’s head. In the movie, the whole point of it is that the replicants are given expiration dates because it’s found that after a certain point they develop real emotions. Whereas in the book, the reason they are being hunted is because they cannot have real emotions, like compassion, and so have no qualms about killing.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is one of the few of Dick’s full-length novels that’s been made into a movie. Most of the other movies based on his work have adapted short stories, and the collection reviewed here contains most of these screen-adapted stories. Unfortunately the cinematic versions of these stories pale in comparison to Blade Runner. Like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, most of these stories have to some degree been turned on their heads.

In Paycheck, the alternate future is more fleshed out in the book and it is one where the government is more oppressive and companies are the only entities that hold significant power outside the government. The individual has few rights. This is a common theme in Dick’s works. The political/military/economic dynamics play into the story in a central way, very different from the somewhat personal story of a lone freelancer pitted against a shady company in the movie.

In Minority Report, Dick’s view of a post WWIII future where world governments battle with military forces and industry for power changes a great deal of how the story works out. Again, much of the plot remains the same. John Anderton is a police commissioner in charge of “Pre-Crime,” a division that predicts murders before they happen, by way of idiots who babble incoherently and then their words are processed by a computer into coherent thoughts. Murder has basically been eliminated until he finds his own name being predicted by the idiots. The movie is more about Anderton clearing his name and finding the true murderer, but the book diverts from this in a very “P.K. Dickian” way, which although certainly interesting is not exactly standard movie fare!

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale was made into the 1990 film Total Recall, with Arnold Schwartzenigger. This might have been the most alterned in some ways as any of his stories. This was a fairly short story about uncovering memories that had supposedly been deleted. It ends in a fairly bizarre and abrupt way that you will never expect. Never do we see the main character, Quail, go to Mars. He simply retells a few scant details about being on the planet as an undercover agent. Whereas the movie only hints at this, in the orginal story you get hit much more up front by the question of how real memory is and what memory is real and what is fantasy.

The final story in the collection that was converted to the screen was Second Variety, which was made into the movie Screamers. This is the one film that I did not see, so I can’t really speak to the difference between it and the original story. I will say that the story is very typical of Dick, about a soldier on an Earth that has been ravaged by nuclear war. Intelligent machines have become a major element of the battle. As with other works by Dick, what we initially assume about the identity of a person starts to come into doubt. I thought this was a good, albeit pretty dark tale.

The one movie that I’ve seen based on a story by Dick which was not included in this collection was Imposter. The movie was quite terrible, so I can’t imagine the story being worse, and assume it must have been a whole lot better, but then I’m sure Dick has some duds in his collection as many prolific writers do.

The last piece in this collection, The Eyes Have It, is a spoof, very short and undoubtedly something that will make you laugh

This particular collection of stories is actually not found in a book, but rather an audio presentation by Harper Colins Audio, available on Audible.com. The stories are narrated by Keir Dullea, who does an decent job at reproducing the somewhat noirish, paranoid tone of these stories.