DWD's Reviews

Published in 2015 by Marble Arch Press Going into this book, I knew that I would have a bone to pick with almost every one of the author's choices. After all, there are 5,000 years of recorded history and every last one of them is filled with tragedy. How can you pick and choose the actual worst 10 years? Wilson, a British historian, focuses in this book on a Western point of view and the earliest date is 541 A.D. So, if you are making a pitch for the 10 worst years in the West in the last 1500 years, his choices are pretty solid. The years he picks are: 541-542: The first outbreak of the Bubonic Plague weakens the nascent Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire, killing millions. 1241-1242: The Mongols invade Eastern Europe. 1572: The Spanish Inquisition and everything that came with it. 1631-1632: The worst year of the Thirty Years War. 1709: The Great Freeze 1848: The "Year of Revolutions" in Europe 1865-1866: The assassination of Abraham Lincoln and th...

Published in 1960 by Dodd, Mead and Company  Part of the "Famous Biographies for Young People" series In the 1950s and 1960s, it was common for the children's section of the library to have scads of biographies like this one. Most of them were about 100 pages of a simple biography of a single person, featuring a lot about that person's childhood. They must have been effective because I remember enthusiastically plowing through them and learning about Daniel Boone, Abraham Lincoln and other historical figures. Now, I am a history teacher. This series is a variation on that theme. Rather than a single biography, it features approximately 12 page biographies (they vary in length) starting with a line drawing. All of the biographies are very readable, if not particularly compelling. But, in the days before the internet, books like this were gold if you were a young scholar assigned a write a report about a historical figure. Other books in this extensive series inclu...

Originally published in hardback book form in 1991. Published by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, David McCullough Duration: 11 hours, 19 minutes Unabridged Brave Companions: Portraits in History  is a collection of previously published articles and speeches. It's a smattering of this and that - sometimes it's about art, sometimes about scientists, sometimes about politicians and sometimes it's just some musings from McCullough about history. It doesn't matter, almost all of it is interesting and well-told. McCullough understands the value of telling history as a story - as always he is very approachable. My favorite entry was the story of the railroad that preceded the Panama Canal. It was an amazing story of the power of human will against nature. McCullough reads this audiobook, which is great because McCullough has a fantastic speaking voice and is well known for his voice work. I envy both his writing ability and his talents as a speaker. My fav...

Published by Listening Library in 2004. Read by Dick Cavett Duration: 3 hours, 36 minutes. Unabridged A lot of people aren't aware that the plot for the classic Christmas movie A Christmas Story was not written as a coherent novel but was actually a collection of short stories that the author had written about his childhood in northwestern Indiana during the Great Depression over the years that were then skillfully edited into a movie. These stories don't follow the plot of the movie exactly, but all of the high points are here, including the infamous lamp, the bully, the BB gun, the visit to Santa and the Bumpus hounds.  Jean Shepherd (1921-1999) Interestingly, this audiobook was not read by Jean Shepherd, who was a professional radio personality and told most of these stories over the air (he is also the narrator in the movie). Instead, it is read by television host Dick Cavett. At first, I was disappointed - but Cavett did a great job. This audiobook was a lot of...

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2002 Read by James Rebhorn, Bruce Davison, Becky Ann Baker, Peter Gerety, Fred Sanders, Stephen Tobolowsky Duration: 13 hours, 21 minutes Unabridged Troop D is the name for the troopers in a Pennsylvania State Police post in western Pennsylvania. They are a close-knit bunch, as you would expect. But, it's not just because of their shared struggles as police officers - they share a secret and it's hidden in a shed behind their post station. In that shed is a 1953 Buick Roadmaster - but it's not any kind of Buick that was ever built in Detroit. It was left behind at a gas station when its driver stepped out of the car, told the attendant that the oil level was fine, headed towards the bathroom and then literally disappeared. The car is weird. In fact, it really isn't a car. It can't actually drive. It's almost like someone who didn't understand the mechanics behind a car tried to build one. But, that's not the ...

Published in 2013 by Random House Audio Read by the author, Jim Gaffigan Duration: 5 hours, 26 minutes Unabridged Despite the title, stand up comic Jim Gaffigan's first book is not about weight or food. No, Dad Is Fat is about being a parent and raising 5 little kids in a small New York City apartment. Jim Gaffigan If you are not a parent, there is probably not much about this book that would appeal to you. This is a point that Gaffigan makes at the beginning of the book in a story early on about when he and his wife traveled with parents of a new baby. True, those parents were obsessive to the extreme, but just about any parent could look at that extreme and think to themselves, "Yeah. That's nutty...but it's not crazy nutty. For me, the best part was when Jim talked about his own parents and growing up in northern Indiana. His impersonation of his father and his constant throat clearing (something that Jim never points out but always does) was funny and...

Published in 2015 by Blue River Press Not many people know about the horrible story of the Sultana , a paddlewheel steamboat that sank into the Mississippi River in April of 1865. It is the worst maritime disaster in American history but was largely overshadowed by the events surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and his dramatic funeral train tour from Washington, D.C. to Springfield, Illinois. The Sultana  was grossly overcrowded. It was designed to carry 376 passengers, but it was carrying 2,155 passengers when three of its boilers exploded in the early morning hours of April 27, 1865.  Most of its passengers were survivors of the infamous Andersonville prisoner of war camp that were being shipped home.  This book is technically a sequel to Saint Patrick's Battalion . It continues the story of a boy who traveled with an American army during the Mexican War. In Fire in the Water , that boy has grown up and become a famous war correspondent. He is trav...

Published in 2012 by Random House Audio Duration: 26 hours, 59 minutes Read by Sam Dastor Unabridged For most people, Salman Rushdie is, and will always be, that author that the Iranians tried to have killed all of those years ago. I freely admit that this is an accurate description of me. Although I am an avid reader, this is the first Salman Rushdie book that I have even contemplated reading.  Salman Rushdie. Photo by Andrew Lih. Rushdie narrates this autobiography in the third person, which is a little weird and gave me the impression that he is trying to distance himself a bit from his own story. The biggest chunk of Joseph Anton tells about how Rushdie dealt with the fatwa , or ruling against him and his book The Satanic Verses by the leader of the Iranian Revolution himself, the Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini ruled that the author, the publishers and the editors of the book should die for blasphemy and that anyone who died in an attempt to kill them would be co...

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2014 Read by Wil Wheaton Duration: 6 hours, 36 minutes Unabridged Randall Munroe is the illustrator of the web-based comic strip xkcd. On his website, he has a place where people can leave "What if..." science-based questions and he tries to answer them. Why would they leave science questions on a comic strip website? Well, it turns out that Munroe is also a physicist - with a sense of humor. The author, Randall Munroe Munroe has collected the best questions and put them into a book. Questions include things like what would happen if the earth kept growing and when would you notice a change in gravity? What would happen if you fired in an arrow in a zero-gravity environment? How does all of the computing power of all of humanity stack up against all of the actual computers? What would happen if you opened up a giant drain in the lowest part of the ocean and drained it all away? And more. Many of the questions are interesting and...