DWD's Reviews

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2012. Read by Joe Barrett Duration: 8 hours, 55 minutes . James McPherson is undoubtedly the most popular living Civil War historian. He writes in a common, easy-to-understand style that flows nicely and does not dumb down the facts. His latest book, War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865 continues that tradition. Union Admiral David D. Porter - Leader of the Naval forces in the Vicksburg campaign. If you read a typical Civil War history you get a just a little bit of the information, usually in passing, about the war on the open sea, in the bays, harbors, up and down the rivers and even in the swamps. McPherson reverses that arrangement in this book and focuses on the strategies, personalities and challenges that faced both navies and mentions the land campaigns in passing. If you are a frequent reader of Civil War books, little of this material will be new. But, the special focus does make the sto...

Published in 2012 by Hyperion Audio Performed by Dan Stevens Duration: 4 hours, 42 minutes. Unabridged. I am torn by this book. I liked the message (just live your life, enjoy the time you have, don't be a clock-watcher) but this short book felt like it was jammed full of padding. The Time Keeper features a man named Dor who lives at the beginning of civilization. He is happily married to his childhood sweetheart, has kids and is also the first man to measure time. He creates sundials, water clocks, measures the cycles of the moon and notices the days get longer and shorter as the year progresses. His childhood friend is the king and the creator of the Tower of Babel. His friend wants to harness this ability to measure time in some way to build his tower but Dor refuses. They are banished and eventually his wife dies from a disease. Dor returns to the tower and storms up the stairs just as God punishes the builders of the tower (sort of like it is described in Genesis). Do...

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2012 Duration: 10 hours, 57 minutes Read by John Pruden Chimera is the third installment of new author T.C. McCarthy's remarkable Subterrene War trilogy.  This is not an easy trilogy. It has brutal battle scenes, shows the reader an uncomfortable vision of technology pushed too far and asks important questions about what it is to be human. And, on top of that these three books are well-told, hair-raising trips through three different war zones in a truly dysfunctional world. In Chimera McCarthy introduces a new set of characters, as he does in every book in the series. Stan Resnick is an assassin. He seeks out and executes germline clones created by the American military to be frontline shock troops in Kazakhstan. They are all female (the males cannot be controlled), start fighting at age 16 and are pre-programmed to die at age 18. But, some have fled the war zone and have escaped to countries all over the world, surviving in a pathetic ...

Published in 1995 by Sunset Productions Performed by John Dhyani Running time: about 3 hours . Note: I assume that this book was abridged. It's original length in paperback was 182 pages and 3 hours would not normally cover that many pages. Back in the 1970s and 1980s John Jakes ruled the paperback historical fiction market with series like North and South trilogy and his Kent Family Chronicles. Wear a Fast Gun  was written in 1956 and is a pretty typical western. A new sheriff named Reb Fallon has come to the town of Longhorn. Longhorn is a dangerous place and Reb Fallon is a hard man so it seem to be a perfect fit. Fallon sets out right away to confront the random violence associated with the saloons and also with a gang of cattle rustlers that hide behind hoods. Along the way he makes a lot of enemies, a few friends and encounters a possible love interest. The story itself is neither bad nor good - like I said before, it is a pretty typical western. But, the re...

Published by Bantam Audio Publishing in 1991. Multicast performance.  Duration: 1 hour, 4 minutes .   Louis L'Amour's famed Sackett family adventures continue with this full cast dramatization of of a short story about William Tell Sackett. Tell Sackett appears in seven L'Amour novels and two of his short stories. In Booty for a Badman , Tell Sackett is prospecting for gold and not finding anything. He is close to giving up completely when he is approached by one of his successful gold-mining neighbors with a proposal. The successful miners are piling up quite a stash of gold (50 pounds among the group) but they fear their claims will be jumped if they leave for town to deposit it in the bank for safekeeping. Even worse, they could be robbed and killed along the way - a fate that has struck other miners So, they want Tell Sackett to sneak their gold to the bank in exchange for a small cut of the gold. This way, their gold gets deposited, Sackett can make hi...

I have rarely been carried into another (horrible) world so thoroughly as I was by this audiobook. Published by HighBridge Audio in April of 2012. Read by Kyle Munley. Duration: 12 hours, 13 minutes. Unabridged. Paul Grossman's   The Children of Wrath is a dark detective story set in one of the most tragic situations in all of history: The Weimar Republic in the weeks before the rise of the Nazis. A series of murders of boys combined with the impending failure of Germany's experiment with democracy, the collapse of the American stock market and the open street fighting between the Nazis and the Communists makes this tragic piece drip with a sense of the impending descent of Germany into the madness that enveloped it after the Nazis took command. Willi Kraus is the only Jewish detective in the Berlin police force (and perhaps all of Germany). He is a decorated veteran of World War I but his country treats him with no respect because he is Jewish. His fellow detectives...

Published in 2012 by Thomas Nelson Mondays With My Old Pastor is a fictional parable about a relatively young pastor who is starting to experience symptoms of burnout. He has had rough times with some members of his congregation, his family life has suffered as he commits more and more time to work but is dismayed to find work less rewarding and less success-filled as it was earlier in his career. His calling has become a chore. So, the young pastor contacts his old pastor, a little old man who is now retired from the active ministry and lives with his wife in a little house surrounded by a beautiful garden. The older pastor recognizes the symptoms of burnout and is eager to speak with this young man and teach him some of his "secrets" as well as constantly re-focusing him on the message of the cross. Altogether, there are 15 secrets which are explained in a repetitive format that involves the younger pastor coming to the house of the older pastor week after week for...

Published by HighBridge Audio in 2012. Performed by the guests and cast of Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Duration: about 2 hours. If you have not discovered NPR's weekly radio show  Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!  , then I pity you. This clever show is truly one of the funniest shows on radio or television or just about anywhere and this collection is promoted as a distillation of the best of a very funny crop. The question is, is it truly "More of the Best"? Yes. It lives up to its own hype. They truly are all funny. Even the people who I had never heard of like Neko Case and Tavi Gevinson were funny and interesting. Other, more well known personalities (at least to me), like Henry Winkler, Jane Goodall, Vince Gill and Brian Williams were as funny or funnier than I expected. This audiobook focuses on a part of the show - the "Not my job" segment. In this segment a celebrity is asked 3 questions about a topic about which they may not have any pa...

Published by HighBridge Audio Duration: about 2 hours. Every installment of HighBridge Audio's NPR Driveway Moments series is composed of collections of stories that aired on NPR. In this case, the common theme is cats.  The stories aired from 1984 to 2011 and cover everything from lions to mock youtube videos of a cat running for the Senate (Hank the Cat - see the video below) to the origins of the domestic house cat to cats being used in the fight against AIDS. But, the heart of the collection are the stories about the connection between every day house cats and the people they live with. There are travelling cats, vacationing cats, a cat that lives in a hotel and several stories memorializing cats who have passed on. All of the stories in the collection have first-rate production values but, as always happens in any collection, some stories are better than others. The cover of the audiobook promises "Radio stories that won't let you go" and some d...

Published by Broadside e-books on November 15, 2011 Sold by HarperCollins Publishers Estimated length in pages: 26 pages Obama: The Greatest President in the History of Everything is political satire from one end to the other. It is not subtle, but it is humorous. If you are easily offended by political criticism of President Obama, I do not recommend this book for you. Fleming has written this book as though he is a fawning sycophant of the President - everything is twisted to be something to praise about the president. I imagined the author reading in breathless awe of the man. Here is a sample: "When it was time for him to finally enter politics, he headed to the place best known for learning good values in government: Chicago. There he became a community organizer, one of the most important jobs known to man. As a result of his hard work, everyone in his community was alphabetized, placed within the Dewey Decimal, and color-coded. It was the most organized commu...

Perhaps the Beginning of a Beautiful Series? Published in 2011 by Baen So, David Weber decided to make a Young Adult (YA) series. Yes, a sci-fi author known best for his highly-descriptive military sci-fi works characterized by very long conversations is entering a field where too much violence and too much conversation are both problematic. Well, I thought, this should be interesting. Weber expanded a short story that first appeared in an short story collection More Than Honor from 1998 as part of the extensive Honor Harrington series. Eleven year old Stephanie Harrington is the main character in A Beautiful Friendship and she is an ancestor of Honor Harrington. Stephanie lives on the planet Sphinx, a fairly new colony that is part of a star kingdom called Manticore. Stephanie's family has moved to the planet because their skills are needed but Stephanie is bored by frontier life. However, she is intrigued by a mystery that is being reported across the planet - celer...

Published by HighBridge Audio in 2012 Read by Brian Holsopple Duration: 1 hour, 48 minutes A re you the kind of person who has the best of intentions but continually puts important projects aside to do other things? Is your work environment organized horizontally (stuff spread all over the desk, open chairs and any other flat surface) rather than vertically (in a filing cabinet)? Do you find that even though you put things off you still get a whole lot of stuff done - just not the stuff that you were supposed to get done? If any of these descriptions sound like you than you should check out this audiobook. I have to admit, all of those descriptions describe me. Right now I am writing a review of a fun audiobook rather than writing one of a book I read three weeks ago that was not a particularly well done book. But, I am writing and that means one more book review will be checked off of my "to-do" list. John Perry is a philosophy professor at Stanford. What start...