That is not a “Go Ask Alice” reference, though I suppose it could. I’m kicking this week off with an audiobook short round.

First up is The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, read by Scarlett Johansson . I reviewed the story proper a few years back, so I just wanted to comment n the wonderful job Scarlet did in reading this. The film Her made me aware of how talented Johansson is with just her voice, so I was absolutely up for being read a classic children’s story by her. The experience was mostly enjoyable: in addition to her straight narration, Johansson also gave voices to all the characters, and used a variety of accents — including Cockney. How effectively she pulled them off is really for a Britisher to judge, but I was satisfied — and given the amount of British media I’ve consumed, including videos on different accents and dialects of the British isles, I don’t think I’m the worst judge. Some of the character voices were annying, but the characters themselves were annoying (the Queen and King), so that may have been intentional.

Next up, and rather more serious: The Nixon Conspiracies. This, along with the title above, is a free-with-subscription title, part of Amazon’s devlish plot to keep me subscribed even though I have multiple credits stocked up. The author, Geoff Shepard, was a low-level Nixon staffer, hired after graduating Harvard Law to help codify policy decisions by the Nixon White House, principally Nixon’s law & order-esque policies. (The war on crime and subsequent police militarization began during the Nixon admin, documented fully by Radney Balko’s excellent Rise of the Warrior Cop.) Shepard wasn’t connected to any of the shenanigans that became part of the Watergate Scandal — Nixon’s attempts to find out who kept leaking information about his office, and break-ins connected to his reelection campaign — but after multiple people were fired and the affair became a public scandal, Shepard assisted in his boss’s defense, like going through Oval Office recordings and assisting Nixon’s secretary in creating transcripts. Shepard offers both memoir and history: the scandal destroyed his faith in his bosses, resulting in him leaving public service, but after the fact he couldn’t square what he knew with what was attested, and believes that the affair was a miscarriage of justice after spending the resulting decades talking to colleagues and examining documents & transcripts made available. The principal malfactor John Dean, escaped by ratting on everyone else and never served a day of his prison sentence, and in the process he exaggerated Nixon’s role and served to help take down an administration that the DC establishment couldn’t defeat at the polls. Shepard appears to have written three books about Watergate in this vein, each responding to new evidence, and he tells a story of corruption at multiple levels — a deeply biased and often challenged judge who frequently met in private with the prosecutors, for instance. I know very little about the Watergate affair, so I won’t even begin to try to judge this book on the facts: some of his sources were anonymous, and audiobook format of my edition doesn’t serve the argument well given that it’s hard to go back and review the case that’s being built. Being a libertarian, I assume corruption in DC as the default, so I wasn’t surprised by Shepard’s allegation of what we now call lawfare. (At any rate, when I condemn Nixon it’s for his economic policies like taking America off the gold standard and subsidizing sugar, leading to both inflation and pervasive metabolic syndrome as sugar became endemic in every American foodstuff.) An interesting way to spend 11 hours, I will say. The narrator had a good voice for telling the story.