Given that I’ve listened to all three of the full-cast audio productions in the last month and have active plans to enjoy the rest as they’re published this year, I greatly enjoyed this. If you’ve been intrigued by the reviews, it may give you some idea of the vocal talent at work. I haven’t heard any of the ‘older’ actors yet — the children change actors beginning in book 4 — so it was fun to hear a preview of them — and to SEE these voices in my head. I knew Mark Addy’s voice was familiar, but I’d rather thought it was because he was trying to stick so close to Robbie Coltrane — not that I’d known him from Still Standing. (Also, Hugh Laurie looks distressingly old. I always imagine him as Bertie Wooster, never Dr. House…..and now he can do a very good Dumbledore. I actually like him more than Richard Harris or Gambon, to be frank.) If nothing else, click here to experience Kit Harrington as Gilderoy Lockhart. He was such fun to listen to.
Harry Potter is in a bit of trouble: he’s accidentally blown up an awful woman, his uncle’s sister, and now he’s on the lam and expecting to be expelled from Hogwarts. (She’s blown up like a balloon, I should say, not like C4.) When ministry officials find Harry at the Leaky Cauldron, they’re surprisingly relieved – and not at all wrathful. There’s a serial killer on the loose, it seems, and one who has a connection to the awful night that Harry Potter’s parents were killed and Harry himself was left with a strange scar on his forehead. Although there are many funny bits here, Azkaban starts the series’ ramping up of drama and seriousness – or should I say siriusness? There’s an increasing feeling of forebodingness and besiegement here, as the spectral ghouls who are ‘guarding’ the castle from the killer Sirius Black drain joy and hope from the kids, and fear soars when Black appears to have been able to find a way to sneak inside the school regardless.
Reviewing this title almost seems a pointless exercise, following so closely on the heels of my other full-cast audio reviews. We have some new voices now, of course, primarily Remus Lupin and Sirius Black. Lupin’s casting is excellent, I think; Black took some getting used to, but part of his ‘roughness’ may owe to the story itself. Ditto the casting of Trelawney: her breathy voice, varying tone and inflections are all profoundly irritating, but given her interactions with the trio – especially Hermione – I think that’s intentional. Snape’s voice actor continues to underwhelm, especially when he’s being emotional: this is funny in one scene, where he’s positively whining to Fudge that he simply doesn’t appreciate what a nuisance Potter is. I think the ambient or atmospheric sounds – characters reacting in the background, trunks being opened, crickets chirping – has been raised a bit, but I am not positive. I listened to the previous books while driving in my car, so they were contending with the motor, the highway, and so on, whereas I listened to a lot of this book from my PC soundbar. There were a couple of scenes in which the amount of simultaneous audio (effects, music, and dialogue) pushed into interfering with one another, but only to a minor degree. Music, as mentioned in my first review, is used sparingly and typically to good effect..
All told, this was another wonderful entry in the full cast series. The books are going to get darker and longer, but even so — I look forward to the upcoming releases — one a month from February until May.
Today’s Long and Short Reviews blogging prompt is funny book titles. I sometimes begin drafts for posts weeks in advance and accidentally posted this week’s last week — so, now I have to post last’s week’s topic this week! But first, WWW Wednesday!
WHAT have you finished reading recently? James Madison by Richard Brookhiser; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, full-cast audio edition. (SO GOOD.)
WHAT are you reading now? Three Philosophies of Life, Peter Kreeft; With Malice Towards None, Stephen B. Oates. The former is a study of Ecclesiastes, Job, and the Song of Solomon; the latter is a biography of Abraham Lincoln. I’m mostly done with The Real Lincoln but am trying to investigate some of its claims, so I haven’t finished it yet. With Malice is also huge, so place your bets on if it appears next week. Believe it or not, I am tiring a bit of the mid-19th century…
WHAT are you reading next? Your guess is as good as mine! I got an early birthday present from the ladyfriend, a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, but I’ll probably wait on him until I’ve finished the pre-Civil War presidents. (Remaining: Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Polk.)
L&S review’s prompt is an interesting one for me because I grew up in a Holiness church that did not allow televisions: they were “worldly entertainment”. The strictness of this rule, though, varied by the preacher, so my parents had a TV when I was very young, got rid of it when I was around 5, accepted a black and white set from a cousin when I was a bit older, got rid of that set when the preacher changed, and so on and on until at some point computers and the internet overwhelmed those strictures. (I left that church at 20 and do not have a TV: my parents now constantly watch tv or tv programs on their phones. Go figure.) Anyhoo, I have very dim memories of watching Rescue 911 when I was young and we still had a tv, but they’re hazy. I know for sure I watched a lot of Full House as a young kid, because we’d literally drive to a family member’s house to watch it with them.
Daily writing prompt
Write about your first name: its meaning, significance, etymology, etc.
My name is Stephen, which translates to something like ‘crown’. I was named after the Biblical personage of St. Stephen, who is regarded as the Church’s first martyr — stoned to death for preaching. (Or, as one jokster-pastor put it, ‘rocked to sleep’.) I’ve known STEPHEN means ‘crown’ since I was a kid, though in St. Stephen’s case I wonder if that’s not a crown of martyrdom. According to Etymonline, only monks used the name in Anglo-Saxon England: the name became more broadly popular after the arrival of the Normans. According to that same source, Stephen and ‘nephew’ are tied together in a particular way, as their use of ‘ph’ is atypical in English usage. I spell my name the traditional way, of course, or as I sometimes say — the right way.
Today’s TTT is “goals for 2026”. Hmm – well, I’m sure I won’t get to ten. But first, two teases from James Madison by Richard Brookhiser:
Madison showed intelligence and humor. One evening he proposed an experiment to see how many bottles of champagne it would take to induce hangovers the next day. (No result was recorded.)
“The wine,” wrote one dazzled Federalist senator, “was the best I ever drank, particularly the champagne, which was indeed delicious. I wish [Jefferson’s] French politics were as good as his French wines.”
(1) Finish my second Classics Club. It should not be difficult: only a couple of of the books on my current list are girthy challenges (The Shahnameh and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America). The trick is getting started.
(2) Do proper justice to my America @ 250 challenge for this year.
(3) Complete The Bible in a Year challenge following Fr. Mike Schmitz’s program. I am currently on track. Fr. Schmitz’s approach isn’t a straight read through; instead readers get different books concurrently (Genesis and Job, for instance) with a splash of Psalms or Proverbs at the end of the day for flavor. It keeps one from getting bogged down in laws and “begats”. I think there are also some liturgical calendar considerations at work: right around Easter, for instance, there’s an abrupt switch from the book of Judges for a “Messianic Checkpoint” week spent in John.
(4) Continue to avoid reddit. I’ve never been a compulsive user of social media — I use facebook and instagram very sparingly — but when I “stumbled on” reddit a few years back I found it had the same addictive and poisonous effect on me that other social media platforms have on others. This year I decided to quit it cold turkey and am so far holding out.
(5) More writing. Given how active this blog is, I realize that may sound like a strange goal, but I have a local history blog I created a few years ago and have done little with – including publicizing it, because I haven’t been able to post there consistently enough to justify promoting it – and last year I began to share a series of local-drama short stories I’d written. I don’t know that anything will come of the later, aside from my own joy, but I’d like to continue exploring that as ideas come to me.
(6) I’ve been wanting to expand my role as a local history expert for a couple of years now: to a degree, this is working insofar as I’m the go-to person for people writing books that touch on my town, but I’m wanting a more integrated expertise – one that incorporates our surrounding counties, since my town’s prominence came from having been an ‘in-gathering’ site for the region: we were the place everyone else sent crops to sell, and the place that received goods from outside for people to purchase. Expanding this role would entail me attending historical societies meetings in those counties. I’ve begun networking with people in a couple of counties but have yet to attend a proper meeting, let alone establish myself as a regular, predictable presence there.
(7) Read Johnny Clegg’s autobiography – or rather, the first part of it. Unfortunately, we lost Johnny before he could properly finish it. Clegg’s music was literally the first time I ever watched a movie’s credits because I wanted to find out who sang that song. (“Dela”, from George of the Jungle. Yes, I was in middle school – but I still love it.)
(8) Return to purposeful tech training. I used to be fairly intense about staying up to date with tech, but then near-death, dialysis, and transplants happened and I got thrown off — despite constantly studying during my transplant recovery. I just saw the CompTia A+ is doing 1201/1202 tests and I haven’t even reviewed all the new stuff on their 1101/1102- gen material. It wasn’t just medical issues, of course: COVID + bitcoin mining really disrupted tech prices and I don’t know that they’ve ever normalized.
(9) Re-reading. I began trying to make this a habit last year; there are books I’d like to revisit just to see how I respond to them 10-15 years later.
Madison among the rest, Pouring from his narrow chest, More than Greek or Roman sense, Boundless tides of eloquence.
Interestingly enough, it was James Madison who prompted my interest in reading presidential biographies. Early in the blog’s history, I happened upon Founding Rivals, a history of the dynamic between Madison and Monroe: both were members of the Revolutionary generation, both were Virginias who later became president, but they were often rivals. I’ve since read one other book on Madison, but it was closely focused on his connection to the creation of the Constitution; this is the first proper biography I have tried of him. I found it a readable if sometimes overly casual review of Madison’s political life, if not the man himself.
Brookhiser’s account skips past Madison’s upbringing, though we find this modest planter quickly found himself running in the best of circles through his intelligence and obsessive work ethic. Not even a fifth of the way into the biography, we find Madison already in the role we expect to find him — the politician, serving Virginia in various capacities from the Governor’s Council to the Philadelphia Convention that created the Constitution. Madison formed close friendships with Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton — though he and Hamilton would fall out over Madison’s opposition to the big-government policies adopted by the Federalists. (Brookhiser refers to Madison’s criticism of Hamilton as ‘nuts’, which brought out my John Adams glare of disdain. Call me a snob, but I dislike that sort of informality in a history book.) Brookhiser names Madison as the creator of America’s first political party, the Republicans — sometimes called the Democratic-Republicans to differentiate them from the modern party that was created in the mid-19th century. In their opposition to consolidated government, these Republicans were not unlike Jacksonian Democrats. I have to admire Madison as a man of principle: in the Federalist papers he and Hamilton argued in theory that there need be no fear of the state becoming overmighty, but when the Constitution went into effect Madison took the evidence before his own eyes seriously and struck back against it. He was author of the Virginia Resolution, with along with Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolution argued that the States were the ultimate arbiters of constitutionality. This was written in response to the Alien and Sedition acts of the Adams administration; when president himself, Madison exercised the power of the veto to strike down bills he regarded as unconstitutional. Probably the most memorable part of his presidency is the eruption of the War of 1812, which Brookhiser argues Madison planned poorly for. After leaving office to another Virginian, Monroe, Madison stayed up with politics, sharing opinions with his peers and eventually outliving all of the other founding generation.
This was a fair read; Brookhiser is an accessible author, but as mentioned the focus is entirely on Madison’s political life — as founder, framer, party organizer, public servant — with comparatively little about the man himself. Potential readers may take that as they will: I found it a useful review of the Founding generation’s attempts at working out govenment.
Quotations
Heroes can aspire to perfection, especially if they die young, through the purity of an action, or a stance. But the long haul of politics takes at least some of the shine off almost everyone.
We pay much less attention to James Madison, Father of Politics, than to James Madison, Father of the Constitution. That is because politics embarrasses us. Politics is the spectacle on television and YouTube, the daily perp walk on the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report. Surely our founders and framers left us something better, more solid, more inspiring than that? They did. But they all knew—and Madison understood better than any of them—that ideals come to life in dozens of political transactions every day. Some of those transactions aren’t pretty. You can understand this and try to work with this knowledge, or you can look away. But ignoring politics will not make it stop. It will simply go on without you—and sooner or later will happen to you.
As Madison read, he wrote down his own thoughts, first by copying thoughts he liked into a commonplace book—“The Talent for insinuating is more useful than that of persuading. The former is often successful, the latter very seldom” (Cardinal de Retz, a seventeenth-century French politician). As he grew older, he wrote essays that digested what he had learned. Writing extended Madison’s bookish discussions—it was a form of talking with himself.
I solemnly swear I will not write this review lovingly mocking Will!iam SHATner’s cadence. But an understanding reader will grant me at least the title? Yesterday I finished listening to Together Tonight, an audio play in which the writings of Mssrs Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson were used to create a fictional conversation between men who in real life were sharp rivals. After discovering that it was a contemporary recording of a play called No Love Lost, which ORIGINALLY featured William Shatner, Jack Lemmon, and Martin Landau (!!), I had to see if the original recording was out there. It is. And it’s fun. The level of acting talent here is both a blessing and a curse: it’s MARKEDLY easier to tell who is speaking and who! is not, but at the same time my familiarity with Lemmon and Shatner disrupted immersion. However, the sound design in general is far easier for a listening audience, with a narrator describing things that cannot be heard. The script was more streamlined, through, only 2/3rds of Together Tonight, and the voice actors were distractingly…old. I could not listen to “Burr” talk without seeing Jack Lemmon sitting at the table in Twelve Angry Men, his white hair shining, rustling through papers. At the time of this conversation, the narrator informs us these men were all in their forties — but they sound like the silver haired retirees who gather in my city diner every morning to drink coffee, flirt with the waitress, and discuss the affairs of the world. Ultimately, I much prefer the modern Audible version, even if its versions of Hamilton and Jefferson take more time to tell apart — their actors do not overwhelm the roles, and the Audible version had some elements I enjoyed (like the characters’ interior thoughts) that were not present in this one.
Jefferson: I think the whole commerce between master and slave is despotism on the one hand, and degrading submission on the other. Burr: But don’t you own slaves yourself? Jefferson: I do. Burr: No inconsistency there? Jefferson: Not at all. I do not treat my slaves like a despot, nor are they degraded by me. Hamilton: In fact, you love your slaves, don’t you? ….some more than others?
After listening to The Rivalry, a play based on the Lincoln-Douglas debates and delivered with aplomb by the Los Angeles Theater Works Productions company, I wanted to experience more of LATW. Then I saw this, another play based on debate and dialogue. Together Tonight draws on the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr to put the men into direct debate together, moderated by a Mr. Pickering. Corwin originally titled this No Love Lost, and such a name is warranted: Jefferson and Hamilton were archrivals, and Burr was commonly regarded as a craven opportunist, dismissed by his peers. The initial topic of discussion is relations with France, the “Quasi-War” — but the conversation wanders all over the place. Hamilton even remarks on it — “Remarkable! One minute we are talking about the Masons and principles and children’s books, and the next about the variations in the vegetable and mineral kingdoms! ?”. One potential issue is that it is sometimes difficult to pick out who is speaking, at least between Hamilton and Jefferson: it took me about twenty minutes before I could reliably tell them apart. They’re both good voices — lots of gravitas — but the differences are subtle to an untuned ear or a casual listener. Aaron Burr was easier: he sounded exactly like a weasel.
The conversation’s life was quite good, to my ears, flowing naturally — hence some of the randomness — and Corwin smartly engineers space for intermission by having the chatter shift to an issue on which Alexander Hamilton takes such offense that he demands a moment to cool down. (At one point, Hamilton is so furious with Burr that I wondered if the historic challenge to duel — which killed Hamilton and excised Burr like a cancer from the body politic — would be issued there and then.) There is, in fact, an extended discussion on the merits of dueling — one that would surely have anyone with knowledge of how their relationship ended sitting on the edge of their seats with an anticipatory grin. Blessed are those with foreknowledge, for they shall be rewarded. While not as stellar as The Rivalry, this history major was thoroughly entertained by it. I may have to give that curr Burr a fair shake — there’s an interesting book called Fallen Founder I can take a look at.
Additional Note: When “No Love Lost” was originally performed, it featured WILLIAM SHATNER AND JACK LEMMON.
The Rivalry proceeds from an ambitious and fascinating idea for a play. The Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858 led to Douglas being elected to the Senate, but they also allowed for a sustained public debate over slavery—and gave Lincoln far more name recognition than the Illinois lawyer had previously enjoyed. These debates were long affairs, typically consisting of hours of back-and-forth speeches. It is a testament to the nineteenth-century attention span that debates and lectures of this sort were popular entertainment. (Robert G. Ingersoll, for example, used to deliver lectures three hours long—and spoke to standing-room-only crowds.) The central issue in these debates was popular sovereignty—the doctrine that territories could choose for themselves whether to permit slavery. To Douglas, this was a perfectly sensible approach that made national policy on slavery unnecessary. To Lincoln, it opened the door to slavery’s expansion and relied on the idea that the worth of some people could be decided by the mass opinions of others.
Norman Corwin takes some of the most historically potent moments from these debates and reshapes them into a series of far shorter exchanges between the two men. These are punctuated by brief scenes in which a Republican Party leader announces events, or Lincoln encounters Douglas’s wife, Adele, on a train and they converse. These interludes are not fluff: in Lincoln’s conversation with Adele Douglas, I recognized many of the same historic arguments Lincoln made to the Little Giant himself, though delivered in a much different way — casually, rather than caustically. They also serve to give Lincoln a definite sympathetic advantage, as virtually all of Douglas’ screentime is when he is arguing (and generally on propositions current readers would object to), whereas Lincoln gets to ruminate with Adele and entertain her and the audience with his folksy stories. (Said stories are entertaining, as are his ripostes. It would be interesting to pit Lincoln against Reagan in joke-off.)
Both Paul Giamatti and David Strathairn are superb presences, and Lincoln’s humor is smartly worked in—and well delivered. I enjoyed this very much, though I have been reading about this era for several months now and am a fan of both actors; in fact, I watched films led by each of them shortly before listening to this. As someone who has encountered the debates in books such as 1858 and And There Was Light, I thought Corwin’s adaptation—rendered in a form intelligible to the modern listener—was particularly well done. While the focus remains firmly on the debates themselves, the production includes ambient effects such as cheering crowds, music, and cannon fire. While I imagine this kind of production has a small audience, it’s VERY well done. I must say, I’m loving Los Angeles Theater Works productions, and evidently I’ve enjoyed two of their prior works without realizing they were the source.
WHAT have you finished reading recently? And There Was Light, Jon Meacham. A biography of Abraham Lincoln.
WHAT are you reading now? I am listening to The Rivalry, a play composed by Norman Corwin. It turns the Lincoln-Douglas debates into a two-hour performance delivered by Paul Giamatti (Stephen A. Douglas) and David Straitharn (Abraham Lincoln). I began this on the heels of watching Lincoln, in which Straitharn plays Secretary of State Seward against Daniel Day-Lewis’ Lincoln. I was listening to a dramatization of The Hobbit but needed a break from the goblin/monster voices in general.
WHAT are you reading next? I need to read something that’s not history, but I am looking at both In Defense of Andrew Jackson by Brad Birzer and The Real Lincoln by Thomas DiLorenzo as followups to my Meacham biographies. I also ordered With Malice Towards None, a much-hailed Lincoln biography.
….this is the first time one person has captured my WWW post. Darn you, rail-splitter!
And now, today’s prompt from Long and Short reviews, which is….”funny titles”. I’ve done this twice before , at five-year intervals, and will follow the same approach I did at my last interval. I’ll take the ‘current winning’ list and see if anything I’ve read in the last five years can unseat the current champions! As it turns out, there was only one change: Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid replaced Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff.
Today’s TTT is books we’re anticipating being released this year, but I did that last Wednesday, so I’m going to offer a preview of what this year’s Science Survey might constitute. But first, a tease!
Hurrying means that you miss out on many things. Riding a train will take you far, but it’s a misconception to think that this will give you more insight. Flowers in the hedgerow and birds in the treetops are accessible only to the person who walks on their own two feet. – THE CAT WHO SAVED BOOKS
Cosmology and Astrophysics To Infinity and Beyond, Neil deGrasse Tyson
Local Astronomy When the Earth Had Two Moons
Geology, Oceanography, and Natural History Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks
Chemistry and Physics Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine
Cognition, Neurology, and Psychology: Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World – A Neuroscience and Education Exploration of Empathy, Attention, and Our Future
Biology Pump: A Natural History of the Heart
Flora and Fauna Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants
Archaeology and Anthropology A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
Weather and Climate The Secret World of Weather: How to Read Signs in Every Cloud, Breeze, Hill, Street, Plant, Animal, and Dewdrop
Ecology Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
Thinking Scientifically Books do Furnish a Life, Richard Dawkins
Wildcard: (Science Biography, History of Science, Science and Health, or Science and Society) Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet
Reading Freely 