1. I am Malala. Malala Yousafzai. My rating 10 -audiobook listened Jan 2025. An excellent choice for my first audiobook. Malala's courageousness, and that of her father, in the face of the Taliban's religious and misogynistic extremism is amazing, and her story equally compelling. She fails, however, to draw from it any wider conclusions about religion.

 

2. The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War – published March 12 2024 by Jim Sciutto. My rating-8.5. audiobook listened Feb 2025. A very good discussion of global affairs centered on Russia actions in The Ukraine, and Chinese ambition in relation to Taiwan. Written in early 2024 before Trump's reelection, it was already somewhat dated by the time I listened to it, and will soon be more of a moment in history piece than current affairs.

 

3. Hillbilly Elegy. JD Vance- paperback read Jan 2025. My rating 8. A biography of the current vice-president, but only up to the time of its writing in 2016. He shows himself to be thoughtful and intelligent in describing the problems of middle America and how he succeeded in overcoming them despite his difficult family situation.

 

4. A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters. Andrew Knoll. Paperback read spring 2025. My rating-8.5. A good short simplistic summary of our planet's geologic and biologic histories and the science behind our understanding.​​

 

5. Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century Published Aug 2019 by Charles King -My rating 9. audiobook listened June 2025. The confusing main title of this book comes from an obscure remark made by one of its secondary subjects, and is at best tangentially related to material covered. The book gives an in depth and stimulating history of Franz Boas and his many influencial students, most notably Margaret Mead, and their efforts to counter the prevailing attitudes of the later 1800s and pre-WW2 1900s towards race and other anthropological matters. Ultimately they were very successful, albeit tragically too late for millions, in swaying public, and especially academic, viewpoints towards one of "cultural relativity". Although I strongly disagree with what that term has come to mean today [with the pendulum having swung too far left, now refusing to recognize obvious differences among people and the value of different cultures], a monumental shift from where things stood then could not have been more necessary. Particularly noteworthy, ironic, and disturbing is its discussion of Hitler's admiration for American conceptions of race inequality and the management of such. An educational and enjoyable read.

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6. Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva. Rosemary Sullivan 2016. My rating-7.5. Audiobook listened July 2025. Too long at almost 20hrs [752pp] seeming to mention every friend she had or letter she wrote, but mostly enjoyable, often fascinating. Among many unexpected turns in her life are showing up without warning at the US embassy in India to defect knowing that this would estrange her from her children , falling under the cult-like sway of Frank Lloyd Wright's wife, which resulted in Svetlana's only child with whom she remained in contact, returning to Russia before again leaving, and living out her later years in poverty.

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7. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. David Grann. My rating-8.5 Audiobook listened Aug 2025. Are the strangely oil-wealth rich Osage people of Oklahoma of the 1920s being murdered in some sort of conspiracy for their inheritances? A disturbing piece of American history, made into a major motion picture in 2023.​

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8.Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Daniel Goldhagen 1996. My rating-a 7 as a book for reading, but a 10 as a historical document. Paperback read Feb-Aug 2025. This is dense academic material and difficult reading [unrelated to the expectedly highly disturbing material covered]. It is not a history of the holocaust itself, but an investigation of the motives of the killers themselves, and of wider German society at the time. Goldhagen does an excellent job of proving his points: the killers were not coerced or reluctant, nor extreme members of German society. Instead they were willing and enthusiastic participants, under the sway of a society-wide virulent racial eliminationist antisemitism, who often took pleasure in torturing their victims unnecessarily prior to killing them. As far as I can discern, the controversy that this book generated seems to misrepresent what Goldhagen states, to the point that it makes one wonder how many of the critics actually carefully read the book. For instance, the first sentence of the wikipedia listing for the book [accessed Aug 2025] states "he argues collective guilt", while in fact he devotes pages of the forward to the 1996 German edition to explaining that he "rejects categorically the notion of collective guilt". If you feel the need to delve deeply into these questions [as I did], then it is a very worthwhile read. If not, I'd suggest you just take my word for it!

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9. Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel. Matti Friedman 2019. My rating -9. Audiobook listened Aug 2025. A fascinating aspect of Israel's early history, detailing the work and situational ironies of four Jews from Arab countries who became Israeli spies in Beirut. Useful ethnic curiosites when they started, the expulsion of nearly a million Jews from the lands of their births following the War of Independence, soon rapidly changed the character of Israel, despite limited acknowledgement of such by the Askenazi-led elite. Relatively short [6hrs].

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10. Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East. Kim Ghattas 2020. Audiobook listened Aug 2025. My rating- 8. A bit too long at 17hrs and too many minor players included, but she does a good job at detailing ME history and connecting the dots of much of the problems in the ME to either the Iranian revolution or SA's response to the Mecca Grand Mosque siege also in 1979 [which unlike the Iran rev, I think few westerners are aware of, I only heard about it several years ago]. Some of it was news to me such as Pakistan's Zia-Ul-Haq's military coup leading to radical Islamization of his country, and US acceptance of it in order to have him help fight Russia's invasion of Afghanistan, and also how little actual Sunni vs Shia violence existed for centuries prior to 1979.

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11. Age of Anger: A History of the Present. Pankaj Mishra 2017. Audiobook listened Aug 2025. My rating- 3. Mishra seems more interested in letting the audience know how much of an intellectual he is via unnecessarily verbose prose and quotations than in teaching us anything. The narrator's tone is correspondingly condescending. Sentences seem to jump all over the place without much logical sequence, although each individually could be the topic of a dissertation. His thesis is that the world's current problems are outcomes of the inevitable failures of modern liberalism. He offers no solutions, nor tries to justify his title via any discussion of anger or attempt to show that angry young men are more common today than in the past. Listening to this audiobook was so painful that mid-way through chapter 2 [of 7], I decided to just forward to the last chapter to see if he provides any useful advice for society. He does not. Don't waste your time on this.

 

12. Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked it All Up. Tom Phillips 2018. Audiobook listened Sept 2025. My Rating-9. From the former editor of BuzzfeedUK, if you don't mind the corresponding style, this book takes a lighthearted, sarcastic look at serious topics, with many interesting stories that you are unlikely to have heard before from the failed attempt at a Scottish empire to the disaster of leaded gasoline.​​

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13. Agent Jack: The True Story of MI5's Secret Nazi Hunter. Robert Hutton 2018, Audiobook, listened Sept 2025. My Rating- 8.5. Carefully researched from newly declassified documents, it tells the very interesting story of Eric Roberts, a true internal WW2 British Spy- spying on, and successfully manipulating his own wannabe traitorous countrymen. Also some very interesting and impressive stuff on his colleague, Baron Victor Rothschild.

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14. I Survived the Battle of D-Day, 1944 Lauren Tarshis. Audiobook, listened Sept 2025. My Rating- for adults 5, for kids 10? [assuming that I have any ability to judge such...] Vancouver Public Library did a poor job by including this book in the adults section, and not having any clues in their summary of it explaining that it is fiction, and part of a for kids series. That said, being in Normandy at the time, and as it is only 2hrs long and started off [and remained] very engaging, in conjunction with my difficulties switching course once an evening's listening has begun, I decided to finish it.

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15. American Poison: A Deadly Invention and the Woman Who Battled for Environmental Justice. Daniel Stone 2025: Audiobook listened Sept/Oct 2025. My Rating 9.5. The full history of the disaster of leaded gasoline, with interesting sides on many topics including occupational medicine and the automobile. Well written and read, makes the science easy to understand, as well as the political and corporate decision-making processes. Some staggering hypotheses discussed, including the possibilty that the rise and fall of crime in recent decades was a result of childhood low level airborne lead poisoning, and such's ending.​

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16. How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going. Vaclav Smil 2025. Audiobook listened Oct 2025. My Rating 8. Would have been better to read than listen given the near constant assault of facts and numbers, however very educational, especially with regards to energy, food production, globalization, and what he calls the four pillars of modern civilization, ammonia, plastics, steel, and concrete. He defends a realistic / centrist view on climate change, and our potential to rapidly decarbonize. A short discussion of dietary advice is poorly done [and tangential to the rest of the book], and his discussion of risks and the environment, although better, are patchy.

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17. The Satanic Verses. Salman Rushdie. Published Sept 1988. Audiobook listened Oct/Nov 2025. My Rating- 7.5. I have long been very interested in this book given my distaste for religion and censorship, and the controversy and violence that it spurred [the fatwa was issued Feb 1989, however there had already been protests, violence and deaths. Rushdie was attacked in 2022, losing sight in one eye]. I had considered it a couple of times in bookstores, but was rapidly put off by the author's overly elaborate verbose style, finding it difficult to read. I decided to give it another try as an audiobook, and was very happily surprised to find it much more enjoyable when someone else was doing the reading, thereby controlling the pace regardless of the linguistics [Sam Dastor's narration is excellent].   While the principal plot and interwoven dream sequences are very exciting and interesting, there is just too much else going on in this book. Too much time spent on tangential characters, and too much GGM-style magical realism [my opinion of 100 years of Solitude is very low]. While there is a lot to be learned from this book on multiple topics, it is very hard to know when Rushdie is making an allusion to a real event [There really was a Maurice Wilson who flew into India and attempted a solo ascent of Everest in 1934, although many of the details are false, while there was never been anything even within a magnitude of fifteen thousand killed in a coal mine disaster], forcing one to constantly consult AI for context. Similar comments apply to the fascinating allegories of Islamic history and religion, and it is easy to understand why so many were angered [although such can never justify their actions].  Rushdie's sarcasm is, however, equal opportunity with prominent targets, in addition to Islam, being Indians, the British, and even England's northerly latitude itself with its "winter-naked trees". Ultimately, it is very hard to understand what Rushdie, an atheist, is trying to say when secular-minded characters are put into a fictional universe where supernatural events really do occur to them.

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18. Flying for Peanuts :Tough Deals, Steep Bargains, and Revolution in the Skies. Frank Lorenzo. Published 2024. Audiobook listened Nov 2025. My Rating- 8. A different flavour from my usual fare. An engaging, fast-paced autobiography of the eventual Continental Airlines CEO, detailing his central role in responding to airline deregulation through innovation, takeovers, mergers, and fighting unions, shaping how the industry looks today. It would rate even higher if not for the fact that it is almost exclusively set before 1990, although he does discuss more current issues in the epilogue. The O'Reilly streaming service that I used through the VPL [all others up to now via Libby], however, was terrible, kicking me off at least once per chapter and also having poor controls.

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19. Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy. Ben Macintyre. Published 2020. Audiobook listened Nov/Dec 2025. My Rating- 10(!). By far the best of the spy books I've listened to so far. If "Agent Jack" (#13 above) is the story of Nazi intelligence failure / British counter-espionage success, this is the staggering story of Soviet success, combined with British counter-espionage bungling. Communist German Jew Ursula Kuczynski, code-named agent Sonya, became a spy while living in Shanghai. Later, from Switzerland, she was ready with an assassination plot of Hitler, but called off by Moscow when they signed the August 1939 non-aggression pact with Stalin. Although disgusted by this, she continues her activities, eventually moving to England and playing a major role in bringing the nuclear bomb to the Soviets. While she, herself, is not to be admired on many levels, the material of her life and Macintyre's self-narrated book couldn't be better. I plan on listening to more of Macintyre's true spy histories in the future.

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​20. The Way of the Strangers; Encounters With the Islamic State. Graeme Wood, Published 2016. Audiobook listened Dec 2025. My Rating- 7. This book really mostly details the views and Islamic philosophies of Westerners involved with the Islamic State. Wood never actually goes to its territories. Frequently the minor, but consequential, distinctions in opinion between the different individuals and groups become hard to keep straight. In this light I found one hadith that Wood mentions particularly noteworthy: Muhammad is said to have prophesied that the Muslims will split into 73 sects, only one of whom will be in paradise, the rest in the fire (Jews 71 sects, Christians 72, presumably all in the fire). To me, not only does this help explain enmity between groups that most in the West see as essentially the same (e.g. Al Qaeda vs Islamic State), but suggests that even if extreme Islam eventually succeeds in taking over the whole world, there will still not be peace.  However, if you doubt that religious sincerity is at the core of the Islamic State, then this book is worth reading to convince you otherwise. As for my rating, I took an additional point off for the fact that the story ends in 2016, with no afterward on either the fate of the Islamic State or any of the principal interviewees since.

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21. Salt: A World History. Mark Kurlansky Published 2003.  Audiobook listened Dec/Jan 2025/6. My Rating- 6. There are multiple problems with this lengthy and often boring book, yet some parts are fascinating (such as later sections telling the stories of Gandhi and the Dead Sea), as are some of the far too many rapid-fire facts (the word "salary" comes from salt, and salt for preservation was the limiting factor in cod and other fishing hauls). If you insist on tackling it, go for a reading rather than listening format, allowing you to skip through the long boring sections including the slight variations on how multiple societies managed salt, and countless historical food recipes [I listened to much of the book on speeds as high as 1.35x]. The audiobook also suffers from a narrator who massacres pronunciations of words in French, Mandarin and likely other languages that I was less certain about, and from a formatting problem which listed about 300 unnamed chapters, while there are really only 20-something of them. The other concern is that Kurlansky seems to overplay his hand in regards to the, clearly generally underappreciated, role salt played in history. For instance, he claims that salt transport was the principal reason for digging the Erie Canal, yet the wikipedia post does not even mention the word. In other ways he misrepresents it. For instance as a thyroidologist I can promise you that the main reason for iodinizing salt is the prevention of the once leading worldwide cause of mental retardation in children, not just that iodine deficiency causes thyroid enlargement and "can also lead to mental disability in children", and as a Jew from Montreal, I can tell you that not all of us now refer to our "lox" as "nova" salmon, realizing that such is indeed the more accurate term today (neither did my Mom). Other reviewers have stated that his facts are wrong in their areas of expertise as well...so, ironically, you must swallow everything he says with "a grain of salt"!

 

22. The Alchemy of Us, How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another. Ainissa Ramirez,  Published 2020.  Audiobook listened Jan 2026. My Rating- 8. Easy, enjoyable listening. Relatively short. The author, a materials scientist, tells some very interesting stories relating to eight material inventions including clocks, light bulbs, steel, telegraph wires, film and glass labware, with only the basic amount of science needed for understanding. Where this book is much less good, and potentially unreliable, is in her soap-box like discussions of the negative effects of these inventions. Among these, she presents the theory of widespread past human segmented sleep, and its ending by adoption of clocks, as a fact, when it is a controversy, then later draws a straight line from artificial light to less melatonin to more growth hormone to more cancer today.

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23. Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.  John McWhorter. Published  2021.  Audiobook listened Jan 2026. My Rating- 9.5. In this relatively short, but excellent polemic, McWhorter (who is black) shows how what he terms the 3rd-wave anti-racism [first wave was emancipation and equal rights, 2nd the appropriately widely successful notion of the 1970s and '80s that being racist was morally wrong]  of the last decade is nothing short of a religion [ though without a god] with unquestionable dogmas, original sin of white privilege, priests, sermons and worshippers, attempted inculcation of children when they are still to young to rationally evaluate what they are being taught, and heresy requiring the silencing and removal of dissenters. When viewed in this light, it makes it clear to me why I, with my longstanding hatred of religion, have been so uncomfortable with where the fight against racism has gone in recent years. He explains how accepting the new tenets (such as all differentials are due to racism, claims made by a black individual must never be questioned, and things such as objectivity and being on time are "white") actually pose a danger to blacks through infantilizing them. He anticipates and responds to predictable criticisms, and provides enough evidence to make it seem unlikely that he is misrepresenting the problem.

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24. Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words. John McWhorter.  Published  2025.  Audiobook listened Jan 2026. My Rating-7. This short book is really pure linguistics, and can get boring if you don't have a fetish for it, although there are many fascinating points.. Today's sociopolitical controversy regarding the use of "they" in singular is discussed at the end. McWhorter shows that English has long been changing, and the history of "they" as singular is not new, although the ideological cultural rationale for it is. He supports the efforts and suggests that linked verbs be conjugated with a trailing "-s" to differentiate from when "they" is used in plural.

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25. Thinking, Fast And Slow. Daniel Kahneman (winner of the Nobel Prize in economics). Published 2011. Softcover paperback read Aug 2025-Jan 2026. My Rating- 10. This book is complex, and requires frequent pauses for thinking through what is being said, so it should be read, not listened to. That is part of the reason that it took me 5 months to get through it despite my strong liking of it (the other is a reflection of just how little truly "free time" I have, despite being retired). However it is well worth the effort, with countless insights into how our brains work, as well as the many cognitive pitfalls humans are susceptible to. Of course, I am less susceptible to many of them than most. Or maybe I'm just fooling myself.

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26. When McKinsey Comes to Town. The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm. Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe. Published 2022. Audiobook listened Jan/Feb 2026. My Rating- 9. If you don't immediately recognize the name (as I didn't) then it is a must read. This exciting, fast paced book details the staggering connections of the world's largest consulting firm to just about every potentially bad entity of modern capitalism, from CEOs to tobacco to health care management, opioid pharma, coal, insurance, the Houston Astros and China for a partial list. Where it falls down somewhat is in determining just how guilty McKinsey actually was in their clients' actions (should their corporate secrecy allowing for such uncertainty be legal? The authors note that the firm's name was not mentioned once in an academic exposé of the tobacco industry- by Harvard historian, Allan Brandt, The Cigarette Century, which I had carefully read years ago- as proof of the policy's success), and whether its behaviour is any different from that of its slightly smaller competitors such as the Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Company (likely not). Especially disturbing is where it is revealed to have consulted for both sides such as both the FDA and the tobacco or pharmaceutical industries, among other obvious conflicts. Arthur Andersen was made to take the fall along with Enron, why should these super-large conflicted management consulting firms be essentially above comprehensive scrutiny? Something about the very idea of generic consulting (or management) by individuals with no specific knowledge of, or experience in, the industry in question just does not seem kosher to me (although I love my bacon double cheeseburgers and rising stocks...). Thanks to HK and JWK, who both recommended it.