Here is my holiday present for you--a list of good books on tape from the Madison Public Library (or the other 49 libraries of the South Central Library System) that I have listened to in the last two or three years.  I got some of these suggestions from some of you.  [To get the books, simply use the LINKcat computer system of the libraries to find the book, then type in PH (for place hold), and indicate the most convenient branch for the book to be delivered to when it is available.  You can do this at the terminals in each branch library, or you can use LINK's telnet gateway at telnet://telnet.scls.lib.wi.us on your own PC.]

Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert.
This is a history of the exploitation and despoiliation of water resources in the American West, with particular attention to the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers.  It is an amazing story of lawlessness, greed and short-sightedness, not only by conservatives like Mulholland (and his cohort of businessmen who "stole" all the water of the Owens Valley for Los Angeles), the big growers and oil companies, but also a lot of liberal politicians (TR, FDR, Alan Cranston, Stuart Udall, George McGovern, Gary Hart, Ed Muskie, LBJ, etc.).  Floyd Dominy, the brilliant and ruthless head of Reclamation, and Col. Peck of the Corps, were among the worst villains.   There aren't many heroes, but notable among them are John Wesley Powell, David Browder of the Sierra Club, and a state engineer in Colorado who fought the Narrows Dam.  Jimmy Carter is the only President who seems to have understood what was going on, but he was so naive and inept politically that his efforts to reign in the water projects were total failures.  Unfortunately, the reader, Wolfram Kandinsky, has an irritating style, and you may prefer to read a printed version of the book.  All in all, an eye-opener--one of the best books on American history that I have ever read.

Andrew Revkin, The Burning Season:  The Murder of Chico Mendes.
This is a marvelous book by an environmental journalist on the destruction of the Amazon.  It focuses on Chico Mendes and his alliance with a Brazilian anthropologist, a British documentary film maker, North American environmentalists, and Brazilian Indians to protect the Amazon rain forest, but it also has a very good discussion of the environmental problems of the Amazon as a whole.  It also presents an excellent picture of the lawlessness of the Brazilian frontier and the rich ranchers who are behind most of the forest destruction and murders of progressive leaders.   The account of the organization and growth of the rubber tappers' movement is so good that I am assigning several chapters to my graduate students in my seminar on grassroots development next semester.  Well read by Grover Gardner.

Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao.
This is probably the most amazing and astonishing book I have ever read.  It is an intimate and detailed account of Mao by his private doctor for more than 20 years.  Few, if any, officials had a closer or more intimate knowledge of Mao.   We don't have this kind of biography from an intimate insider for any of the other great villains of history, such as Hitler or Stalin.  Li was a Communist and admired Mao in the beginning, but he grew to hate and fear him--and even more, Mao's wife.   But he was trapped in his job and couldn't escape from it, though he was clever enough to avoid disaster until after Mao's death, when he was imprisoned for a time.  During the Cultural Revolution, when he was most in danger, he destroyed all the notes he had been keeping for fear of being killed or imprisoned.  After he was released from prison he was able to escape from China and settle near Chicago.  He promised his dying wife that he would write a book about his years with Mao, and he finished it just before his own death.  Because it has astonishing detail for a book written from memory, some question its veracity.  A couple of China scholars I have talked to, though, say that most of the stories are probably true.  And the picture that Li gives of himself is none too flattering and exhibits his own biases very openly.  I shied away from the book when it was first published, because the reviews dealt mostly with Mao's sex life, which was utterly scandalous and repugnant.  But that is only a small part of the book.  Its chief value is as a kind of political history of China during the reign of Mao.  It is clear that Mao caused as many deaths of innocent people as Hitler or Stalin.  The book is well read by Geoffrey Howard, who has no trouble with the Chinese names.

Jung Chang, Wild Swans.
This is a perfect book to read after The Private Life of Chairman Mao.  It is a memoir by Jung Chang of the life of her grandmother, her mother, and herself in China before and during the Maoist era.  Her grandmother was the concubine of a KMT warlord in the early years of the century, but she escaped from her situation and eventually became the wife of a Chinese doctor.  Her mother grew up during the time when the Communists were fighting against the Japanese and the corrupt KMT government and army.  In spite of her bourgeois background--which caused her to be perpetually suspect after the Communists took over--she became an ardent Communist and revolutionary.  She married a young Communist leader who was as dedicated, idealistic, and incorruptible as you could ever find, and he became an important regional political leader.  But such a person could not survive in the Chinese political system, and after he wrote a letter to Mao challenging some of the terrible policies the government was pursuing, he was imprisoned, where he was essentially destroyed.  Jung Chang survived the famine as the child of an important political official, and when the Cultural Revolution arrived she became, somewhat reluctantly, a Red Guard.  But she became disillusioned with the policies of the Party, and especially after she finally realized that Mao was behind them all and that they were not carried out without his knowledge.   Eventually she was able to escape from China and move to England, where she wrote this book.  It is a fascinating and touching story of suffering.  Giovanna Merli tells me that almost every Chinese family can tell similar stories.   The book is well read by Rowena Cooper.

John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
This is a wonderfully entertaining nonfiction book about the wild and wacky characters who live in Savannah, Georgia.  About half of the book is about a celebrated murder case in Savannah involving an eccentric art dealer, who went through three trials.  The critics say that it is the best account of a trial since Capote's In Cold Blood.  But this book is pure fun.  As the black drag queen says repeatedly, "I'm serious!"  Very well read by Jeff Woodman who has all the accents just right.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Wait Till Next Year.
Goodwin is best known to academics as a serious historian and biographer of Presidents, but to the public she is best known as one of the baseball commentators on Ken Burns' documentary series on Baseball.  That got so much attention that she decided to write a memoir about her love affair with the Brooklyn Dodgers and Jackie Robinson as a young girl growing up in the 1940's in Brooklyn and Long Island.  It is a delightful and touching book that will appeal whether or not you are a baseball fan yourself.  Unfortunately, the library has only a 2-tape abridged version of her book (which is about half of it), but I would still recommend it.  She reads the book herself, which is a good thing, since she is such an attractive person.

Elizabeth Peters--series of detective stories about Amelia Peabody, a wildly eccentric proto-feminist English Egyptologist in the early 1900's.  This delightful series of detective novels set in Egypt was recommended to me by Hal Winsborough.  There are 7 or 8 Amelia Peabody books on tape.  Start with The Crocodile on the Sand Bank and then The Curse of the Pharaohs.  Beautifully read by Barbara Rosenblatt, who does the different voices very well.

Ellis Peters--series of detective stories about a medieval Welsh monk named Cadfael who is a former Crusader who now lives in a monastery in SW England.  Recommended to me by Erik Wright.  Well written stories with lots of detail about the life and politics of the period.  There are many books and two different readers.  The ones read by Stephen Thorne are much better.  He's one of the very best readers.

Lawyer novels.  Most of the books by John Grisham and Scott Turow are on tape, and they are consistently well-plotted and engrossing, as well as instructive about the legal system.

Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha.  I am reading this novel now, and it is as good as the critics say.  I don't know how an American man could learn so much about an institution that is largely hidden from Westerners.

James Michener, The Caribbean.  Michener's books are usually crammed full of historical and cultural information, with plots woven around it.  This is no exception.

Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove quartet.  This is the most interesting and entertaining set of novels I know about the West from the 1840's to the 1890's.  The first and best is Lonesome Dove, about a cattle drive from Texas to Montana by two former Texas Rangers, Gus McCrea and Woodrow Call.  Then McMurtry wrote a sequel, The Streets of Laredo, which is not quite as good, since he killed off his best character (Gus) in the first novel.  So then he wrote two prequels.  The first was Dead Man's Walk, about Gus and Call's first days as Texas Rangers.  Finally, he wrote Comanche Moon, which fills in the years before Lonesome Dove.  Maybe his work resonates with me because we grew up in the same place in Texas about the same time, though I didn't know him.   (I was in Vernon and he was a few miles away in Archer City.  The Chisholm Trail went through the area.)

Larry McMurtry, Buffalo Girls.  Another wonderful McMurtry picture of the old West, focusing on Calamity Jane, the mountain men, Buffalo Bill, etc.

Wallace Stegner, A Sense of Place.  This is a two-cassette collection of Stegner reading his own essays on the environment and the West.  Very good.

Christopher Wills, Yellow Fever Black Goddess:  The Coevolution of People and Plagues.  A popular scientific account of plagues and history.  Read by Richard M. Davidson.

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders.  This 1722 novel was perhaps the first modern novel.  It gives a fascinating account of English life and the English underworld.  It is a much better novel than his later and more popular Robinson Crusoe

Barbara Tuchman histories.  All of Barbara Tuchman's books are great!  She is probably the most readable of historians.  I especially recommend
    The First Salute--the American Revolution, which was successful only because of aid from the Dutch and
        the French
    A Distant Mirror--about the horrible 14th century
    The March of Folly--how the Renaissance Popes lost half of Christendom,
        how the British king and politicians lost the American colonies, and how
        American politicians blundered in Vietnam
    The Guns of August--about the first month of World War I (the ultimate march of
        folly!)
    The Zimmerman Telegram--about how the U.S. was induced to enter WWI

Peter Hoeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow.  In spite of the improbabilities of plot, an enjoyable book because of the atmosphere in the unusual settings of Denmark and Greenland.

Tony Hillerman novels.  I have liked all of the Hillerman novels about two members of the Navaho police that I have read, and I like the reading of George Guidall.  Hillerman also has a novel about Vietnam called Finding Moon.

Michael Korda, Man To Man.  This is a short, graphic and engrossing account of Korda's operation for prostate cancer.  Recommended particularly for any man who has prostate trouble.

E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News.  A serious and highly praised novel about a chronic loser who becomes a journalist in Newfoundland.  Fascinating for its strange characters and exotic setting in an area that none of us knows anything about.

Peter Hopkirk, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road.  Fascinating account of the little known explorations of early archeologists in Central Asia.

Eugene O. Smith, Lee and Grant.  Superb tandem biography of the two principal opposing generals in the Civil War.

Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore.  Excellent account of the transportation of English and Irish convicts and the peopling of Australia in the 19th century.

Alan Moorhead, Nile histories.  Both The Blue Nile and The White Nile are filled with fascinating stories of the exploration and history of the Nile valleys in East Africa.  Cooper's Creek about the exploration of theAustralian outback is also good.

Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels.  Superb historical fiction about the Battle of Gettysburg, with authentic historical detail.  Don't visit the battlefield without reading this first.

Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes.  A history of the Crusades from the point of view of Arabs and other Muslims.  A devastating picture of the Crusaders.

Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day.  An excellent account of D-Day in World War II.

Henry Hobhouse, Seeds of Change.  Extremely interesting accounts of the origins and development of different commodities that have had a profound impact on history.

John D. MacDonald, Travis McGee mysteries.  Next to Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin, Travis McGee is my favorite detective.  He wrote a large number of Travis McGee mysteries, as well as a large number of other mysteries.  Though this was published as pulp fiction, he was an exceptionally gifted writer  I think there are two dozen of the Travis McGee mysteries on tape.

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front.  One of the most famous of all anti-war novels, from the German point of view in World War I.