DWD's Reviews

  Published in September of 2013 by HighBridge Audio. Duration: 1 hour, 15 minutes Multi-cast Performance NPR's "A Prairie Home Companion" has an extensive collection of audio CDs based on lots of different themes, including skits that highlight certain regular actors on the show. This CD focuses on  T im Russell , an actor with a real talent for mimicking celebrities and an admirable repertoire of original characters to draw upon. He has been a member of the cast since 1994.  This CD has 19 different tracks that were broadcast from 1996-2012. Some are laugh-out-loud funny, some are merely amusing, and a couple are just okay (I am not a fan of "Guy Noir" or "The Lives of the Cowboys" - these are two recurring and popular skits that feature Russell) . To be fair, Russell figures prominently in the collection of highlights featuring fellow cast member Sue Scott and I think she got the funnier bits on her CD.  Altogether, this is still a very solid hou...

Published in 2011 as an e-short story in kindle format. Estimated length: 11 pages The most interesting thing about this short story is the opening paragraph: Like Superman, Walter tried to catch the bullet. Unlike Superman, it went through the fleshy part of his palm between the thumb and forefinger. After that, the story just deteriorates in a hurry. Walter is stealing a fortune in bearer bonds from his company without his partner's knowledge, but he gets robbed almost as soon as he steps out on the street. From there, things spiral out of control with one betrayal after another and once it got going it was pretty obvious that it was going for full bore ridiculous - and it got there. I found none of the characters sympathetic and it was very hard to actually care about them in any way. I rate it 1 star out of 5. This e-book can be found on Amazon.com here:  THE ROBBERY: A SHORT STORY .

Originally published in 2006. Way back when when I got my Kindle 2 in 2009 this was one of the first books that I got - it was part of a free promotion and somehow I never read it. I guess I was afraid that it would be too cheesy. Boy, was I wrong. Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) The premise of this book is a mashup of How to Train Your Dragon with Master and Commander. It is the middle of the Napoleonic Wars and Napoleon is planning to invade England. All that stands between England and Napoleon's massive army is their far superior navy and a small contingent of dragons. Yes, dragons. It turns out that in this alternate world dragons occur naturally in the wild and have been trained to fight in war, much like horses and dogs occur naturally in the wild and have been trained to fight in war. Dragons, however, are smart and are able to talk with people. In fact, dragons bond with a human and they become a team. Dragons come in different sizes and jobs, much like an a...

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2013. Read by Brian Hutchinson. Duration: 10 hours, 8 minutes. Unabridged. Author Scott McEwen co-wrote American Sniper , the auto-biography of famed SEAL Chris Kyle and from those contacts and the stories he heard he was inspired to write this fictional story of American special forces in Iran and Afghanistan. The insignia of the Navy SEALs This is really three separate operations deftly told as three separate stories with overlapping characters and a little overlap when they get back to base. The first operation is the insertion of a lone operative into Iran to kill a weapons designer. McEwen uses this fairly straightforward story to introduce the weapons and other equipment that will be used throughout the book. The second and third operations deal with a captured American female helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. She is part of a unit that inserts and extracts special forces all of the time so the men feel a real connection to ...

Published by Recorded Books in 2011. Read by George Guidall Duration: 11 hours, 23 minutes Unabridged The Secret Soldier is my first John Wells book. For those not in the know, John Wells is a former CIA agent who is also a Muslim (if not a particularly devout one when it comes to all of the formalities). He now freelances, sometimes working with the CIA, sometimes not. The first part of The Secret Soldier deals with John Wells tracking down a former operative in Jamaica and bringing him back to the United States. I am unsure as to why this was included in the book - it had nothing to do with the rest of the story except to establish that John Wells is burned out and is unsure about the life of violence that he has led.  The heart of the story involves a plot against the royal family of Saudi Arabia. Wells is hired by the King  of Saudi Arabia himself to investigate a series of terrorist attacks within Saudi Arabia. As Wells investigates he discovers that the sour...

Published by HighBridge Audio (Mysterious Press- HighBridge Audio Classics) in 2013. Read by Jeff Woodman Duration: 7 hours, 24 minutes Unabridged Originally published in 1977. This is my first Dortmunder novel. I know this is a classic series and I was looking forward to hearing it once I saw HighBridge audio was re-issuing these books. Nobody's Perfect features master thief (who always has the worst luck) Dortmunder being recruited by a "rich" man who has run out of cash thanks to his philandering and spendthrift ways. This man wants Dortmunder to recruit a team and steal a piece of art in an insurance fraud scheme. Dortmunder will keep the painting and then return it once the insurance check clears in exchange for $100,000. Sadly, I have to say that while I found the oddball characters refreshing at first, the first half of the book was slow and the amusing situations took too long to develop. they stopped being funny and started being unwelcome intrusions...

Published November 1, 2012. Kindle e-book. Estimated length: 405 pages. Reminiscent of the TV show Firefly , this show has humanity moving out into the galaxy and occupying multiple planets. Also, like in Firefly , the newly settled planets fought a civil war. But, instead of an oligarchy, this universe's civil war resulted in an emperor, much like the chaos at the end of the Roman Republic led to Julius and Augustus Caesar. Now, hundreds of years later, the current emperor is assassinated in a plot led by one of the admirals of one of his fleets of star ships. The fleet proceeds to move against the emperor's only heir, his daughter, as she travels to the planet where her school is. But, she is protected by the praetorian guards and their leader Jonathan Radec. At the cost of all of the praetorian guards (except for Radec) the princess survives. The Last Praetorian  is the story of the Radec and the the princess and their romance and why they broke up and how they ...

Published by HighBridge Audio. Originally broadcast in 1996. Multicast performance. Duration: approximately 3 hours, 15 minutes. The third installment of NPR's STAR WARS -based radio dramas was also written by sci-fi author Brian Daley (Sadly, he died of cancer very soon after it was recorded). The budget for RETURN of the JEDI was much, much smaller than the original so the recording was about half the length of the first. It still features the wonderful original music soundtrack by John Williams and the original sound effects that make the listener feel like they are part of the action.  Anthony Daniels returned as See-Threepio. Mark Hamill, however, decided to opt out of this one. Ed Asner stepped in as Jabba the Hutt (he sounded like he was choking as he spoke, though) and John Lithgow took over as Yoda (sadly, he sounded like John Lithgow pretending to be Yoda rather than creating a real voice). The shorter run time hurts RETURN of the JEDI when compared to th...