DWD's Reviews

Published by Disney and Blackstone Audio in October of 2014 Read by MacLeod Andrews Duration: 2 hours, 18 minutes Unabridged Big Hero 6 is, in my mind, one of the best superhero movies that has been made in this time of the renaissance of the superhero movie. It is fun and colorful, but it also has loss and shows the power of friendship and love. It also demonstrates how love can be twisted into something evil. Hiro Hamada is a teenaged robot-building prodigy who competes in robot fighting contests. His brother attends the local university in the future city of San Fransokyo and also builds robots in a high-tech lab in the school with several other talented young engineers. When his brother dies in a horrible explosion at the lab, Hiro is thrown into a profound depression. He re-discovers Baymax, a health care robot built by his brother, and he and Baymax discover clues that his brother wasn't killed in an accident, but was murdered instead. Baymax, Hiro and his brother&

Published in 2013 by Blackstone Audio. Read by William Hughes Duration: 11 hours, 42 minutes. Unabridged Thomas Fleming readily admits that he mostly writes about the era of the American Revolution (such as his excellent book Liberty! The American Revolution ) but he felt compelled to make a long commentary on the origins of the Civil War by writing this book - a lengthy commentary that is interesting Fleming's take on the causes of the war are based on a comment from James Buchanan's that the furor over slavery was a "disease in the public mind." Fleming is quite confident that this disease was mostly caused by the North. Shelby Foote alludes to this, in a way, in the Ken Burns Civil War documentary when he notes that there was a war "because we failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise...our whole government's founded on it and it failed." An exhibit at the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois. Photo by DWD

Published in 2014 by Disney. Read by Chris Patton. Duration: 1 hour, 39 minutes. Rocket Raccoon Unabridged (sort of). This is the sanitized, unabridged version of the abridged book of the movie. That means that not all the movie is in this book, but the audiobook version that I listened to does have everything that the abridged book has in it. We picked this up to listen to on a short family trip. We are all fans of the movie but we were interested in a version with no cursing and less sexual references when we were listening in the car. Some scenes are edited and lots of great dialogue has been added that was not in the movie. It makes me wonder if the author was working from an early script. The reader, Chris Patton, does a good job of voicing each of the Guardians, especially Rocket and Drax. But....despite all of these good things the book ends at just past the halfway point - the point where the Guardians just lost the Infinity Stone to Rona the Accuser. The story just