At this point I spend more money on audiobooks than I spend on print books (although that's in part because loved ones send me print books as gifts (thanks, loved ones!)) and it adds up fast. For me, it's worth it, but the hefty price of audiobooks makes it hard for a newcomer to try things out, especially when there's so much free audio available online. Why pay for the professionals? Again, for me, the professionals earn their keep, but I can easily see why this is a hard case to make.

So it's very smart of Audible.com to hold these holiday and summer sales. The one going on now is a doozy: a list of "summer paperbacks" (which I assume means the audio versions of books that, in print, are paperbacks) for only $5.95 each.

I just grabbed these, all unabridged:

• Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers by Michael Barone
• How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion
  by Daniel H. Wilson
• The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism by (yes, our very own) Dr. Robert P. Murphy

The only reason The Whiskey Rebellion by William Hogeland isn't also on that list is because I already own it.

Here are the on-sale titles I didn't buy but do recommend:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clark
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Another on-sale title that I already own and listened to only last spring is The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug by Thomas Hager.

It is a fascinating and little-known tale about the first false steps and real advances that took us from an age of epidemics and common childhood death and crippling disease to a medical era of inoculations, antibiotics, and surging survival rates. It does have an unbelievably naive chapter about the heroic government finally gaining the power to reign in and regulate the evil capitalists, but you can fast-forward through that section. The rest of the book is unexpectedly engrossing.

I'm embarrassed by how little of this I knew and how much of our current condition I'd taken for granted. Less than 100 years ago, the rich and powerful shared with the poor and marginalized the likelihood of seeing at least one of their children (or the mother, giving birth do those children) die from the sort of disease and infection we barely think about today. Millennia of disease followed by less than a century of pharmaceuticals.

My whole family took turns being miserably sick last week from a mysterious infection, so this topic hits home right now. After listening to The Demon Under the Microscope, I'm more grateful than ever to have been born in the 20th century and to still be alive in the 21st.

You will thank me for this one.

Years ago, our dear friends AC and Carolyn taught us the ultimate cure for having a song stuck in your head. In fact, that's probably at least part of the reason they became such dear friends. (I may not be sociable, but I'm good at gratitude and loyalty.)

The trick is this: you can displace a stuck song with another song; of course, this new song will then annoy you just as much if it stays stuck, so you have to displace the first song with "the world's least sticky song." After that, you will have found peace. At least until you listen to the radio again.

This is the world's least sticky song, only 99¢ at Amazon.com/mp3:

Free Resource (#514) - March 11th, 2008

Today's Resource of the Day

Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity

In this book forum from the Cato Institute, John Stossel (Co-Anchor of ABC's 20/20) discusses his latest book Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel—Why Everything You Know is Wrong. In his entertaining, no-nonsense style Stossel advocates opening up K-12 education to the free markets because he feels American public schools are falling behind the rest of the world and competition would give school systems the necessary kick they need to get America's schools back on top. This audio program is available on MP3 download as well as streaming audio from the Cato Institute and streaming video from FORA.tv.

Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity

If You Like This Title You Might Also Like...

Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity

Consumer advocate, investigative reporter, and bestselling author Stossel is back with a new audiobook based on his top-rated "20/20" segment, which debunks popularly reported misconceptions.

Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity

Just discovered:

The Engines of Our Ingenuity is a radio program that tells the story of how our culture is formed by human creativity. Written and hosted by John Lienhard, it is heard nationally on Public Radio and produced by KUHF-FM Houston. Among other features, this web site houses the transcripts for every episode heard since the show's inception in 1988. Click here for the newest Engines episode, No. 2342. Recent Engines episodes are now available as a Podcast. Click Here. Each individual episode begins with a link to its audio version.

Also available through iTunes U.

Lew Rockwell does great radio. He's really at his best as a public speaker. Here's Lew talking with Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio about the intellectual and political legacy of the New Right founded by the recently departed William F. Buckley, Jr. (1, 2, 3).

Play here:

or download MP3 here. (53:27)

(via blog.Mises)

In response to the hullabaloo around yesterday's article on George Washington, Jeffrey Tucker offered the following defense of Rothbard's treatment of The Founder:

This article hurls a dead cat into the temple of the civic religion — and does so in way that only Rothbard can.

Given the general tenor of the pro-Washington comments, I'm not sure how many of the commentators even understand what "civic religion" Tucker is talking about, let alone the importance of violating its shrines.

Listening to the History of Rome podcast that I recently discovered, I was surprised and delighted to hear the intelligent commentary of host and author Mike Duncan on the legendary founder of an earlier empire:

It seems comically naive of the Romans to believe that so much could be owed to a single man, but when we look at our own almost religious veneration of George Washington, it begins to make sense. In 500 years, will historians be reporting that George Washington was born of a cherry tree — and had wooden teeth to prove it? That he flew over the Delaware River, defeated the British army, and designed the Constitution all by himself? It seems crazy, but as time goes by, the subtleties of actual events are compressed into small, digestible units. Horatio Gates has already been pushed from the collective consciousness and is known only to historians, but it was his victory at Saratoga, not Washington's, that led the French to support the Revolution, and thus ensure its success. That story, however, is too complicated. Most Americans don't know how critical French involvement was, let alone that Washington had little to do with securing it. Washington beat the British. That is the story of the American Revolution. As the years pass, will the name of Madison be lost? Hamilton? Even the great Thomas Jefferson, whose fame is second to none, may yet fall under the juggernaut that is this mythical Washington, as he, like Romulus, becomes the answer to all questions about the founding of America.

By the way, that's the same Horatio Gates about whom Rothbard writes, "During the campaigns of 1777 a suspicion began to well up among many Americans that Gates was an excellent general and Washington a miserable one, and that maybe something should be done about it." The same General Gates who wrote a less than flattering letter about General Washington to General Thomas Conway, after which "Washington and his influential friends immediately conjured up a nonexistent widespread 'plot,' the mythical 'Conway Cabal' … soon forced out of the army by the vindictive Washington."

I'd love to claim that this was all planned and coordinated, but really, the scheduling of this weekend edition and the publishing of this book review just happened to coincide:

The Laissez-Faire Radical: A Quest for the Historical Mises by Murray N. Rothbard

[This article originally appeared in the Journal of Libertarian Studies. You can listen (MP3) to Murray Rothbard presenting the paper on Friday, 16 October 1981, at the monthly Libertarian Heritage Series, hosted by the Center for Libertarian Studies.]

That Ludwig von Mises was the outstanding champion of laissez-faire and the free-market economy in this century is well known and needs no documentation. But in the course of refining and codifying his political views, Mises's followers have unwittingly distorted them and made them seem at one with the modern conservative movement in the United States. Mises is made to appear a sort of National Review intellectual concentrating on the free-market aspects of conservatism. While the image of Mises as an essential conservative is scarcely made up of the whole cloth, it totally overlooks rich strains of Misesian thought that can be described only as "laissez-faire radical." Unfortunately, these strands of Misesian thought have been all but lost. Perhaps this essay will help to right the balance.

There is no need here to try to define and distinguish laissez-faire "conservatism" from "radicalism." A setting forth of various radical positions taken by Mises should make the distinction clear enough.

Some anti-conservative aspects of Misesian thought are, again, too well known to require discussion. Thus, for Mises, personal liberty was required by logical consistency; for, if the government began to restrict or suppress one or a few consumption goods, why should they stop at regulating all? As a champion of consumer sovereignty and the consumer society, Mises also had no patience with aristocratic conservatives who scorned mass consumption or the rule of production by consumer demand.

[Continue reading this article at Mises.org.]

Life of a Hero by Warren Gibson

If you're going to write a biography of Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), you have your work cut out for you.

You face a mountain of books, articles, speeches, and correspondence by and about the great libertarian economist and his forebears, contemporaries, disciples, and critics, much of it in German. Because his productive career lasted from the 1880s into the 1960s, you have to be thoroughly grounded in the intellectual and political history of that time, sweeping all the way from Marxism, historicism, and fascism, through Keynesianism, and into the beginnings of monetarism. You must be conversant not just with economics, but with history, sociology, and philosophy, since Mises ranged over all these subjects. You must focus on the political and military events that shaped Austria and its neighbors in the early 20th century, because Mises was personally involved in many of them. You must come to grips with terms and concepts that are central to Mises but unknown outside the Austrian School of economics, of which he was a part — terms such as praxeology, catallactics, thymology, etatism, and Verstehen.

Your own prejudices will likely be activated either by Mises' extreme positions or by an occasional belief that he failed to follow through on his own principles. You must try to divine the mental and emotional life of a man who kept his feelings to himself and whose devoted wife very likely took a number of his personal secrets to her grave. Lastly, you must condense and shape your work into something people will want to read.

[Continue reading this book review at LibertyUnbound.com.]

I wish this had been around a year or so ago when I was trying to learn ancient history:

THE HISTORY OF ROME

A weekly podcast tracing the history of the Roman Empire, beginning with Aeneas's arrival in Italy and ending (someday) with the exile of Romulus Augustulus, last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire.

http://thehistoryofrome.blogspot.com/

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheHistoryOfRome

First a note from Scott Lahti, then a couple of comments:

From the folks wot brought you the "Li'l Hef" bathrobe for boys, and the sale on "Choirboy robes, half-off", the latest reason for any image-conscious corporation to keep at least one English major on retainer:

Woolworths pulls "Lolita" bed for young girls

Fri Feb 1, 9:22 AM ET
[From Reuters]

A shopping chain has withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita and designed for six-year-old girls after furious parents pointed out that the name was synonymous with sexually active preteens.

Woolworths said staff who administer the website selling the beds were not aware of the connection.

In "Lolita", a 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov, the narrator becomes sexually involved with his 12-year-old stepdaughter -- but Woolworths staff had not heard of the classic novel or two subsequent films based on it.

Hence they saw nothing wrong with advertising the Lolita Midsleeper Combi, a whitewashed wooden bed with pull-out desk and cupboard intended for girls aged about six until a concerned mother raised the alarm on a parenting Web site.

"What seems to have happened is the staff who run the Web site had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either," a spokesman told newspapers.

"We had to look it up on (online encyclopaedia) Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now."

Woolworths said the product had now been dropped.

"Now this has been brought to our attention, the product has been removed from sale with immediate effect," the chain said.

"We will be talking to the supplier with regard to how the branding came about."

(Reporting by Peter Apps)

Lahti then adds:

Just like the
Old man in
That book by Nabokov.

- The Police.

I had to double-check the lyrics, because I thought Lahti had remembered them incorrectly.

The way I hear the song in my head is "Just like the old man in that famous book by Nabokov!"

Apparently the lyrics that play in my memory are from the 1986 version, which added the word "famous." It made other very significant changes, as well, making it my favorite song by The Police: "a new, brooding arrangement with a different chorus and a more opulent production" according to Wikipedia.

I had an argument with a college acquaintance about the new version, as we listened to it on the juke box and played a game of 8-ball. He thought they'd ruined his "favorite Police song." I thought they'd made it what it should have been from the beginning. He said you couldn't dance to it anymore. I said a song about statutory rape maybe shouldn't be danceable. He had no idea what I was talking about.

"The lyrics," I said. "They call for a much moodier treatment."

"Oh," he said. "I've never listened to the words before."

Remember: he claimed this was his favorite Police song.

So anyway, my first reaction when reading this Reuters article about the Lolita bed was, How can they not know what "Lolita" means? My second reaction was, Have they never even heard "Don't Stand So Close" by The Police? Then my third reaction was to recall that brief pool-hall debate and realize that either (a) they, like my classmate, had "never listened to the words before" or (b) did listen to the words and didn't bother finding out what they meant. I suppose there's another option (c) where they fall victim to the musical mondegreen. Here are some mishearings I've found on the web:

1. Just like the old man / Who's been hit by an apple core!
2. Just let me, don't mend it, let put by nectar cup
3. Just like the old man who / Got bit by an apricot
4. Just like the old man in that book by now because!

Last comment: The unabridged audiobook of Lolita, read by Jeremy Irons who had just played Humbert Humbert in the latest film adaptation, is just stunning. Probably my favorite audio novel. Irons is even better at reading the book than he is in the movie.

To close, I'll give you the great opening passage of this great novel:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palette to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

(Lolita, Part I, by Vladimir Nabokov, 1955.)

"I heartily accept the motto, 'That government is best which governs least'; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — 'That government is best which governs not at all'; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which we will have."

– Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

(via LearnOutLoud.com)