DWD's Reviews

A solid biography in many aspects, but not without its problems Published in 2010 by Thomas Nelson Inc. First, a bit about this reviewer and Civil War books. This is my 80th Civil War book. Robert E. Lee figures prominently in almost every one of them. I consider him to be the the most talented general that served on either side in that war and that is high praise indeed because many generals rose to the top and did distinguished themselves in that war. If Lee is the most talented general in that war, he is the most talented American officer of the 19th century and one can make the argument that he may have been the best ever (assuming one overlooks the massive point that he earned that reputation as a fighter by breaking his oath and taking up arms against the United States government, which I am.) No one did so much with so little against an opponent that was better fed, had better and more numerous weapons, and outnumbered him in literally every battle. He fought with principl...

So, your first question has to be "What is a jinglebob?" Published in 1995 by Kensington Pub Corp A jinglebob is part of the little spinny thing on the back of a set of spurs - the sharp part. It makes the "ting, ting, ting" sound you always hear in westerns as the cowboys are walking along and setting up for a big shoot-out. The main character is The Jinglebob Man because he is imprisoned tortured by a sadistic superior officer with a set of sharpened spurs during the Civil War because he is accused of treason. Our protagonist, Tyler Carradine, escapes from his prison and is now forever on the run, afraid of meeting someone from his past and in pain due to a lost love that he feels will not accept him due to his physical deformities and the accusations against him. Carradine stumbles into a corrupt mining town years after the war and is finally forced to turn and fight rather than continue to run. Oh, and he finally has a chance to find love again (but no...

Good, but predictable Audio version originally published in 1986 by Random House Audio Multicast performance with sound effects Duration: 55 minutes. I like Louis L'Amour. His descriptions and conversations are top notch. However, his plots are predictable so I really am grading this on a curve. Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings I am also rating the audio version of  Riding for the Brand  which is interesting because it is told by Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash. It was quite enjoyable to hear the four of these men work together - they were all quite good, especially Kristofferson and Nelson. This audio edition has features that most don't, including special effects and a music soundtrack that was sometimes reminiscent of Clint Eastwood's Spaghetti Westerns and sometimes reminiscent of Silverado . The inclusion of the special effects did speed the plot along (you don't have to describe th...

Oh, I am torn on this movie in so many ways... Was Garfield - The Movie a good movie? No, not really. If I never saw it again that'd be fine with me. Was it a good family movie, meaning was my 4 year-old entertained by it and was it devoid of anything overly scary or offensive? Absolutely. My daughter would love to see it again and that would be fine with me. Was the animation of Garfield good? Yes, top notch and it looked like he was really interacting with his environment, including Odie and the other cats.  Was it true to the comic strip? Only in spirit. Real fans will be irritated by the elimination and consolidation of characters. A digital Garfield talking to a real-life Odie The DVD has little to offer in the way of extras. In fact, there are no extras to speak of - no deleted scenes (although, I think it would have been difficult to delete any scenes in this skimpy 82 minute movie), no behind the scenes extras showing us how they created Garfi...

Tries too hard to set a mood, loses focus on the history. As a history teacher, I love well-written historical fiction. It places the reader right in the story. A judicious author can blend the history and the fiction together in a harmless fashion and tell the story in an accurate and entertaining way. A Separate Country  does not live up to those standards. It it presumptuous of an author of historical fiction to take the first person with a very famous historical figure. Commonly, if a first person perspective is used it is with a fictional character - an aide to a general that witnesses events but does not effect them, for example. In this case, Hicks has taken one of the "name" generals from the Civil War and turned him on his head. He has sacrificed the "historical" in the name of the "fiction." Hicks places John Bell Hood into a series of historic events, some of which are quite true (such as the lottery drawings - many Confederate ex-gene...

A solid sci-fi story saddled with a fantasy genre name Published in 2000 by Baen Books. Just seeing the title of this book you would assume that David Weber's first solo novel is all about ogres, witches and elves. The cover shows differently, of course. The Apocalypse Troll   is an action-packed bit of sci-fi that includes time travel, a threat to planet earth and a lovely lady. Here are the plot basics: an alien race from the future lands on earth in an effort to destroy it and humans from the future arrive in an effort to stop them. But, their defense was less than successful so current day humans are left to fight on with the advice of a surviving human from the future. And this story works. Mind you, this is not "great" literature - but it is a romp through space and time with plenty of military action, a truly evil villain and lots of snappy dialogue. Be warned, there is not a lot of character development and the reader really doesn't know the enti...

Originally Published in 2007 An odd and interesting bit of history from the Pacific Front in World War II The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II   is a well-researched telling of the story of two sets of American fliers (one Army and one Navy) who were shot down over Borneo by the Japanese. The survivors end up living with the Dayaks, the famous headhunters of the highlands of Borneo. Borneo was largely unmapped and unknown to the West. It was, and still is, one of the remotest locations on earth. Most of Borneo's interior is like the old line, "You can't get there from here." Well, you can if you jump out of an airplane. The author, Judith Heimann doing research in Borneo The author, Heimann, does a good job of giving the reader a feel for the Dayak way of life, but the shortage of maps makes the story of the soldiers being moved from village to village for their protection a...

A pivotal moment in the history of the series and an artifact of the 1970s Published by Random House Audio. Read by Michael Prichard. Duration: 5 hours, 27 minutes. Unabridged. Over the years I've read all of the Spenser novels, but since I do not have a photographic memory I'm going back and listening to them as audiobooks during my commute. Promised Land is a pivotal moment in the series because this is the moment in which we meet Hawk - Spenser's erstwhile partner in anti-crime in so many books in the series. Hawk is in his full glory here - a bad man who kills, roughs people up and intimidates, but still lives by his own code that Spenser somehow senses and respects. It is also a pivotal moment because there is an incredible amount of conversational psychoanalysis throughout the book, a trait that most Spenser books feature (often to their detriment, in my opinion). Spenser's personality is discussed, male/female relationships, what it means to be a man o...

A different kind of hard-boiled cop story Joe Rizzo is a detective in NYPD's 62nd Precinct. He is partnered with a young whiz kid newly minted detective and together they solve crimes, talk about crime and we learn how a determined detective can trade favors to skip bureaucratic steps. Rizzo's War is, in a lot of ways, a non-traditional detective story. Usually, there is an overarching plot (the big crime, in a detective story) and lots of smaller crimes pepper the story as interesting filler. In this book, we get a lot of little crimes to introduce the characters and give the reader the feel for the environment. The actual "big" case doesn't occur until about halfway into the book. Lou  Manfredo But, that's okay. The characters are interesting. The environment is interesting. The cases are interesting. The book feels like it is an introduction to a series and I hope that it is. I'll look for more Rizzo books. I rate this book 5 stars out o...

A dark, wearisome and depressing novel Published in 2009. Crime novels come in all sorts of varieties and flavors. At one extreme are the slapstick Evanovich Stephanie Plum books. At the other end come moody and brooding novels like those that James Lee Burke produces. I have read several of his books and I know that they are not fun-loving romps, but the morose nature of this book takes the cake.  James Lee Burke With the exception of two brief scenes  Rain Gods: A Novel  was relentless in its brooding tone. I found it wearisome. Every male character is burdened with evil deeds, obsesses over them and then acts out in self-destructive, often violent ways. All of the female lead characters offer wisdom, strength and guidance. There are literally more than a dozen bad guys and it seems that this desert Texas countryside is full of nothing but broken people, hookers, alcoholics, criminals and a couple of cops. Where are the regular people? The book was just too mu...

Michael Tait and Toby Mac continue their look at history and faith In Under God Toby Mac and Michaet Tait continue to the exploration of faith and history that they began as members of the musical group DC Talk with books like Jesus Freaks: Stories of Those Who Stood for Jesus, the Ultimate Jesus Freaks. The main themes of the book are faith, civil rights and political freedom. Many of these same themes were explored in DC Talk's best-selling Jesus Freak album with such songs as "Colored People" and "What Have We Become." For me, Under God was both a great book and a frustrating book. As a history teacher, I applaud any attempt to encourage people to learn our history. Mac and Tait do not sugarcoat the failings of our country and our Founders. But, they also are sure to point out when those same people got it right.  Toby Mac Under God is a beautiful book with a wraparound cover, jagged edge pages and faded illustrations that are oftentimes se...

Very, very, very good. 5 discs. 6 hours. Read by Dick Hill Boogers Are My Beat: More Lies, But Some Actual Journalism  is a collection of Dave Barry's columns from the summer of 2000 through September of 2002. They are read expertly by veteran narrator Dick Hill. I usually hear Hill reading crime novels and the like but I was pleased to hear that he has expert comic timing and turns out to be a perfect narrator for Barry's offbeat sense of humor. Veteran reader Dick Hill Topics include: *The 2000 Democrat and Republican political conventions; *The 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games; *The Census; *Camping in a Wal-Mart parking lot; *and the silly tips in Cosmo magazine on how women can drive men wild. Dave ends with two long essays about 9/11. One was published on 9/12 and does a great job of summing up the raw feelings and shock of the time. The second essay is much longer - by far the longest of the book. It was published on the one year anniversary of 9...

For the first half of this book I found Justin Halpern's Sh*t My Dad Says to be a refreshing change of pace. Finally, a man who says what he thinks - no political scheming, no worrying about the consequences - this man just opens his mouth and says the first profanity-laced thing that pops into his head. For example, from page 44: "I just want silence...Jesus, it doesn't mean I don't like you. It just means right now, I like silence more." But, as the stories pile up and the sheer number of comments overwhelm the reader I started to feel there was a subtle, hidden subtext here - life with this man was and is difficult. Actually, it was not all that subtle in the chapter where Halpern's dad had to to be told that Halpern was "tweeting" his quotes to the whole world and had been making money off of the quotes and was going to publish a book about it. The level of concern expressed by his brothers when Halpern told them he had to break the news t...

Published in 2010 by DK Publishing DK Publishing continues a trend of producing lavish coffee table books filled with page after page of montages of full color images. In this case, the topic is the Star Wars phenomenon. Star Wars Year by Year: A Visual Chronicle is a very large coffee table book - one inch thick, 10 inches wide and nearly a foot high. This book could just as easily have been called "George Lucas Year by Year." Star Wars dominates Lucas's career like the Eiffel Tower dominates the Paris skyline. Perhaps, even more so. Boba Fett and George Lucas As the title states, the book is a visual timeline of George Lucas, the Star Wars franchise and the people and companies involved in its production and promotion. We see early handwritten notes about "Journal of the Whills" - one of the first drafts of Star Wars Episode IV . Later on, we see further updates, including the introduction of a character named Luke Starkiller who, of course, became ...