DWD's Reviews

Originally published in 1986. Richard Petty is NASCAR's winningest driver, with 200 wins. He raced from 1958-1992. He won seven championships, he won the Daytona 500 7 times and is one of the few drivers to win at every track he competed on during the course of his career. In 1967 he won 10 races in a row (!) on his way to winning 27 races for the season.  He also won the very first NASCAR big time car race I ever saw at Michigan in 1981.  I was already a fan - and I was sure that he would win every race I attended from the point forward (he didn't). The Petty family raced in stock car races back when they really were stock cars - you could buy replacement parts at local dealers or in junkyards. They raced when you could drive the car to the track - but that was a bad idea if you were caught up in an accident and couldn't drive it back home. They got in on the ground floor of NASCAR, with Richard Petty's dad winning 3 of the early championships and Richard, his brother,...

Originally published in 1962 in  the magazine If: Worlds of Science Fiction. Published in 2017 by Author's Republic. Read by Phil Chenevert Duration: 19 minutes. Unabridged. 2 B R 0 2 B is set in a future world where the population is kept at a strict limit so that the living can live in a clean and safe environment. When a new person is born into the world, someone must volunteer to leave because aging has pretty much been cured. The Federal Bureau of Termination keeps track of all of the births and deaths to be sure that the math works out. The phone number for the Federal Bureau of Termination is 2 B R 0 2 B - pronounced "two be or naught to be." The story is about a father whose wife is about to give birth to triplets. One of the grandparents of the triplets has agreed to die. Unless something changes, the future parents will have to pick out two babies to kill... This is an intentionally provocative short story that had a quick and brutal ending that surprised me.  ...

Published in 1988 by Pocket Books I used to be a gigantic reader of Star Trek books. In the mid-80's I had a rather large collection. In fact, my cousin and I had a complete collection if we put ours together (we would share back and forth so we wouldn't miss any book). I was quite the fan. I ran across this book when I was picking through the stacks of a used book store that had lost its lease and picked it up for old times sake. I don't remember the plot of Timetrap at all so this must have been published after I had stopped making sure I had EVERY Star Trek that was printed. Synopsis: The story occurs in the same region of space as The Original Series episode " The Tholian Web ." The Tholians had the ability to make an area of space phase in and out of alternate universes. Or, maybe it was natural - who knows? After all, the Tholians are a mysterious species and no one knows much about them. In that show, a federation ship was trapped and phasing back and fort...

Originally Published in 1943. The edition I read was a re-print published by Scholastic in 1966. While not a terribly deep dive into Lincoln, Daugherty's (1889-1974) very readable small telling of his life has some of the most poetic prose I have ever read in a biography.  There are a couple of factual errors in the book. One example that I noted is the assertion that Robert E. Lee replaced a wounded James Longstreet at the head of what became known as the Army of Northern Virginia in 1862. It was Joseph E. Johnston. That bears very little bearing on the story of Lincoln, even though I am sure he would rather Johnston would have been in the fighting rather than Longstreet.  Here is an example of Daugherty's excellent prose (concerning Lincoln's early days as a lawyer):  For the long, bony, sad man who was Billy's partner, the law office became a sanctuary and a refuge and a workshop, where through the years he slowly grew and learned and thought out the dark meanings an...

Originally published in 2000. Performed by Andrew Cullum. Duration: 14 hours, 49 minutes. Unabridged. Also published under the alternate title "The Archer's Tale" Harlequin is the tale of Thomas of Hookton during the early years of the Hundred Years' War . Hookton was a tiny English fishing village that was destroyed by French raiders from a ship. The raiders burn and loot the village, kidnap as many women they can, burn the village, and steal a religious relic - the famed lance that St. George used to kill the dragon. Thomas heads off to join up as an English archer so he can get his revenge on the French noblemen that destroyed his hometown and get St. George's lance back. The bulk of the book is about his adventures in France in a series of battles in the Hundred Years' War serving as a harlequin.  A harlequin was the French term for an English long bow archer. The battle scenes in this book are unbelievably well-told and Andrew Cullum's performance as...

Published in 2013 by The Great Courses. Lectures delivered by the author, Philip Daileader. Duration: 12 hours, 32 minutes. Unabridged. The idea behind The Great Courses is that anybody can have access to high quality college instructors who are truly experts in their fields. In this course the focus is the Early Middle Ages (roughly 300 CE to 1000 CE).  Daileader starts with the start of the decline of the Roman Empire, somewhere around the year 300 CE. He looks at the trends of the late Roman Empire and how they led to the fall of the Roman Empire in the West (Rome, not Constantinople) and how those trends led to the political and economic systems that typify the time period we know as the Middle Ages. There is a heavy focus on what is now France, which is well-deserved since Charlemagne is one of the biggest historical figures of this era. But, other areas get a fair amount of attention, like Ireland, Spain, and the Islamic world. The sudden appearance of the Vikings contribute...