DWD's Reviews

Published in 1996 by Sunset Productions Read by Gene Corbin Duration: Approximately 3 hours (abridged). Stewart "Hoagy" Hoag is a retired novelist and semi-retired ghost writer who, like the novelist Jessica  Fletcher in the old TV show Murder She Wrote , has a remarkable ability to be around when someone gets killed. In The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy  we find Stewart and his on again / off again relationship with his celebrity ex-wife in an on again phase. They have a baby and Hoagy is still adjusting to this reality. His basset hound Lulu is not happy having been removed from her position as the de facto child of the couple to being merely the family dog. But, this small family's routine is thrown into an uproar when Hoagy's old literary mentor Thor Gibbs arrives on his motorcycle with his 18 year old stepdaughter on the back. Thor Gibbs is a an Ernest Hemingway-type  character that is really into the mythopoetic men's movement -type stuff, except his ve...

Published December 2011 by GraphicAudio Multicast Performance Length: 52 minutes. Unabridged. This short audiobook was originally a short story in a larger collection but author Joseph Nassise has expanded on this story with several other books. GraphicAudio has adapted it to a radio drama format with multiple cast members and plenty of special effects. The Templar Chronicles: This Cleansing Fire features Captain Cade Williams, a member of the hidden Catholic order the Knights Templar. They are charged with fighting supernatural forces. One would think they might be a bunch of priests, but they are an elite commando unit carrying modern combat weapons and special swords. In this story, the team is sent out to find and destroy a group of Asian vampires. They are not Asians, per se, but this type of vampire originated in Asia. Another team was already sent in but they are not reporting back and Captain Williams and his team fear the worst. GraphicAudio's high production qu...

Written in 1919 and first published in All-Story Weekly magazine in 1921, The Efficiency Expert is a rare non-science fiction book for Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. I read it on my kindle but if it were a paper book it is estimated to have been about 130 pages. The Efficiency Expert features Jimmy Torrance, a talented young college student who is a great athlete and natural leader and all around great guy to have at a party but  does not take his studies seriously. When he is almost tossed out of college during his senior year for having no apparent hope of completing the curriculum in four years, Torrance buckles down and somehow passes. Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) Having turned over a new leaf, he turns down the opportunity to manage the family factory and decides that he will move to Chicago and make it on his own. Jimmy's expectation that the world will come knocking at his door because he has a college d...

Published in 2008 by Thomas Nelson Ted Dekker is a stalwart member of the Christian publishing world. He usually offers up a large helping of action, mystery and suspense with a Christian flavor. Dekker's strengths are maintaining a quick pace and the creation and development of interesting characters. In Adam  an FBI psychology expert named Daniel Clark is on the trail of a serial killer nicknamed "Eve" (he writes "Eve" on the walls above each of his victims) who kills twenty-something women every dark of the moon. He leaves no clues behind except that he drives a stolen white van, eats candy bars, drinks cherry Cokes, kidnaps his victims with an ether-like medicine that knocks them out. he kills with a form of meningitis and his rituals have strong religious overtones. He always leaves those clues and no others. Clark is obsessed by this case and it has wrecked his marriage and threatens his career. One night his team almost catches "Eve...

Published in 2006 by Tor Danger: Spoilers follow. I am torn when it comes to this book. It starts out with a clever premise: What if the super-heated political debate of the last few years was actually being created by a third party that was trying to get red-staters and blue-staters to start fighting. Once the bullets start flying a seemingly disinterested third party might be able to step in and assume the powers of government in the form of a dictatorship that promises to stop the insanity. So, when the President, Vice-President and most of the cabinet are killed by commando terrorists of unknown origin the country gets very unstable very fast as the finger pointing and the political spin machines start to crank up. Great premise. Strong start. But, when the mechanized walking tanks and the hoverbikes, led by a George Soros-type character (who has unlimited funds, apparently) start to attack New York City the action is first-rate and gripping but the believability fa...

Published by Simon and Schuster in 2005 Read by Richard Thomas Duration: 9 hours, 29 minutes Abridged This is technically a re-read of Team of Rivals for me. I read the original 944 page hardcover book (see my review by clicking here ) and I have marveled when I have seen the 41+ hour unabridged version at the library. I love audiobooks but that is a commitment that I am not prepared to make. William Seward (1801-1872), Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State But, this abridgment is a very reasonable length and gives the listener a solid grasp of the political talents of Lincoln and some of what he faced. While the book does not cover all of his difficulties, it does a solid job of  presenting the relationship between William Seward and Lincoln, George McClellan and Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and Lincoln and Salmon P. Chase and Lincoln. Those were his most important relationships in the cabinet and they were all very different. Two became great allies (one after...

Published by Fireship Press in 2012 Set in 1613 Venice, Thirst: A Novel is a story of family secrets, racial purity, religion and raw power. This is the first novel for the author, Mary Donnarumma Sharnick . As a first novel goes, this one has potential, but also has issues, which is not uncommon.  The scenes throughout the book are very vivid and easy to imagine with fully fleshed out characters (which is usually the hard part for first-time novelists) but there just needs to be more detail to tie the scenes together to make the story flow, more explanation of Venetian society and the way it worked so that the story moves more smoothly and the reader can fully appreciate what everyone is doing, why it matters and the risks that certain characters take when challenging the powers-that-be. This is a very female oriented work with lots of details about menstruation, fears of first-time sex, rape, child rape and a very detailed childbirth scene with lots of d...

I Expected So Much... Published by Alfred A. Knopf in July of 2012 I love Stephen L. Carter the essayist. He writes brilliant essays. He makes me think and I learn a lot. I have now determined that I just don't care much for Stephen L. Carter the novelist and I will stick to the essays. When I saw the topic of this book I was thrilled. Carter is a law professor so he knows all of the legal angles. I am an enthusiastic student of the Civil War so I was already very familiar with all of the politics, legal issues and personalities that would have been involved with an impeachment of Lincoln. The premise of the story is that Lincoln was not killed by John Wilkes Booth, although he was gravely injured. Vice President Andrew Johnson was killed and Secretary of State William Seward was injured so badly that he has not been seen publicly since the attempt on his life. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (1814-1869) plays a key role in this alternate history novel. In real li...

Performed by Johnny Heller Duration: 11 hours, 6 minutes Published 2012 by  Hyperion Audio Last winter I listened to audiobook #3 in this series, Heat Rises , and I was initially struck by the absurdity of a book written by a fictional author in a television show. I thought it would be a joke. We have a book written by a writer who was created by a television show writer. You would think that this would be a recipe for disaster - a mere cheap marketing ploy to generate some publicity for a television show. However, if you thought that, you would be wrong. Whoever is in charge of the "Richard Castle" franchise at Hyperion books has taken this quite seriously. Frozen Heat is a great police thriller. The story is about a murder case that homicide detective Nikki Heat's squad is investigating. Evidence points to a connection with the murder of Heat's mother 10 years earlier. As they investigate this connection, Heat and her writer boyfriend Jameson Rook travel ...

Published in July of 2011 by Vook Vook is a publisher of e-books enhanced with video clips ( V ideo + B ook = Vook ). This history is short (Amazon estimates it would be about 32 pages on paper) so it is unlikely to satisfy a history purist. However, for a 32 page history of the United States in the 1990s, it is pretty solid (but admittedly lightweight due to its short length) and very readable. The most famous image from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The topics covered include: -A New World Order/Fall of the USSR; -Clinton's Impeachment; -Creation of the World Wide Web; -Cloning/Genetic therapies; -David Koresh/Oklahoma City bombing/First Twin Towers Bombings; -The 1992 NBA Olympics "Dream Team"; -Grunge Music. I rate this e-book 3 stars out of 5. This e-book can be found on Amazon.com here: The 1990s: A Brief History Reviewed on November 6, 2012.

Published in 2011 by Innersky Books Tempting Yerva is a Kindle short story. If it were on paper it would be about 13 pages long, according to Amazon. An adolescent girl named Dore is a young nun in the Yerva sect. Like monks and nuns across most faiths, her life is a lot of hard work, meditation and discipline and this young girl is miserable. She hates it. She is bored and her raging hormones make her think an awful lot about sex. The religion seems to have a superficial similarity to Buddhism in that the goal of the aspirant is to achieve "bliss" - a sense of nothingness. Dore has no interest in any of this. One day, alien (literally from another world) voices start to whisper to her and promise her powers, sex and more in exchange letting them use her. She agrees. Her wildest fantasies come true, she is granted magical powers, no temptation is left unsatisfied and the entire sect is endangered. My takeaway? Dore has been untempted in her life, but once she is a...

Published by Crown Publishers in March of 2012 Indomitable Will: LBJ in the Presidency is a biography composed mostly of snippets of interviews edited together to tell President Lyndon Johnson's story. The book is designed to give the reader a view of Lyndon Johnson - the man. Johnson was a controversial man  - easily one of the most controversial of the 1960's. He is easily caricatured and mis-characterized. This ambiguity is odd considering that he was one of the most successful presidents of all time when it came to pursuing and passing a legislative agenda. If not for the Vietnam War, his legacy might be much different today. Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973) While I learned a lot more facts about Johnson than I knew before reading this book, I did not get a better read on the man himself. His motivations were so mixed and his outbursts so frequent that I could not (and still cannot) tell if he put himself behind legislation like the Civil Ri...

Before You Try to Impress Your Friends with All of Your New-Found Factoids, Verify Them  Published by Adams Media in 2011 This book was a first for me in a way. Fact. Fact. Bullsh*t! was the first book I ever read on my phone thanks to the Kindle app for my android phone. In a way, this book was made for reading on a little phone screen. It is entirely composed of a topic with three "facts" that follow. After that the reader will find out that at least one of those "facts" will be correct and at least one will be incorrect, or bullsh*t as the title notes. The  facts and the bullsh*t answers are explained. This makes for fairly interesting short-term reading but it is not built for the long haul. This would be a great book to have for standing in line at the bank or if you have to wait for a bus or a train because you can get in and out of a topic in just a few minutes. But...some of Stewart's facts are more factual than others. For example, he inco...