DWD's Reviews

Published in 1997 by Publications International, LTD. At first glance, The Blue and the Gray: The Conflict Between North and South is a typical coffee table book about the Civil War. There are tons of them - I ought to know, I own several myself. They are all over-sized, hardback and full of great pictures. Most have lots of details about the battles and the strategies of the war and a little about topics such as the daily life of the soldier, medicine of the time, the use of spies or daily life in camp. This book is set up exactly in the reverse. It is all about those other topics, discusses the overall strategy and offers very little about the specifics of any actual battles. There are literally no battle maps. But, that doesn't stop this from being a great book. It is a great book precisely because it doesn't treat those other topics as interesting filler - it treats them as topics that can stand alone and are worthy of exploration.  Every page is colored either blue or g...

Published in 2017 by HighBridge, a Division of Recorded Books. Read by Danny Campbell. Duration: 8 hours, 8 minutes. Unabridged. Finn Murphy is a long haul trucker, meaning he drives the trucks that you see on the interstate. Murphy doesn't just haul anything - he drives a moving truck. He packs, loads, hauls and unloads households - more than 3,000 of them by his estimation. Finn Murphy's transportation for a promotional book tour . Murphy tells about the generalities of driving a big truck, particularly a moving truck. He includes several entertaining stories about his life on the road.  The listener (I heard this as an audiobook) gets a feel for the comings and goings of the truckers in the moving industry.  His story of his first day as a mover is a classic "how can this get any worse" story. I first heard about this book in an interview on NPR with Terry Gross . This is ironic because the author discusses how so many truckers listen to NPR because i...

Originally published in 2012. I teach high school. This book exploded onto the scene 6 years ago. It was everywhere. Girls carried it around. Boys read it on the sly. Even if boys didn't read it, they knew the basics of the plot. But, I had never gotten around to reading it. But, after hearing so much about John Green and his podcasts from my own high schooler and after seeing him on my adopted hometown's PBS station (same adopted hometown as John Green - Indianapolis) discuss books with Andrew Luck of the Indianapolis Colts, I finally decided to read this book. And...it deserves all of the hype. The kids sound like kids - exceptional ones to be sure, but they sound like kids. Kids who have been dealt a very bad hand in life and are still trying to figure out what it means to be a grown up, what it means to fall in love and what it means be alive. They are sarcastic, inexperienced and smart. What kind of book is it? It's the kind of book where you laugh out loud on one p...

Published by Penguin Audio in 2016. Read by Sean Pratt. Duration: 3 hours, 26 minutes. Unabridged. This short book takes a fresh look at Christmas by going back to its roots. Keller correctly notes that Christmas is unique in that it is our most popular secular holiday and our most popular religious holiday. And, the secular holiday focuses on Christmas as a moment of hope - "Peace on Earth and Good Will Towards Men" can happen. Keller asserts that the religious tradition of Christmas says just the opposite - mankind is irredeemable and God had to come to mankind and provide the way out of its mess - through Christ. He tells it with a lot of eloquence.  The  best part of the book, though, is the discussion of Jesus' pedigree in the Book of Matthew. Keller looks at why certain people were mentioned and why others were not. For example, " David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife" points out the fact that David (Israel's gr...

Published by Tantor Audio in 2010. Book originally published in 1981 by Ballantine Books. Read by David Drummond. Duration: 16 hours, 10 minutes. Unabridged. As the American frontier pushed ever-Westward during the Colonial Era, there were multiple major conflicts between the new White settlers and the various Indian groups. The last, and the biggest, was the war that Americans know as the French and Indian War (1754-1763). It was truly a global war involving not only France and England, but also a variety of countries around the world such as Prussia, Austria, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Russia and the Mughal Empire in India. The war began as a power struggle between French and English colonists along with their Native American allies. Technically, a young Virginia militia leader named George Washington started the war when he tried to remove French Canadians who were building a trading post in what is now western Pennsylvania. The entire frontier was soon at war and little settlem...

Could Have Been Something Special. Instead, This Book Is a Hot Mess. Published by Random House Audio in October of 2018. Read by Michael Beck. Duration: 17 hours, 36 minutes. Unabridged. American soldiers during the Bataan Death March in 1942. Pete Banning was a decorated World War II veteran and had been home less than a year in 1946 when he took his pistol to town and shot and killed his church's minister. The question everyone had was why this Mississippi-born-and-bred hero would do such a thing. This book features romance, betrayal, racial injustice, an execution by electric chair, hit-and-run guerrilla warfare against Imperial Japan, the Bataan Death March, two court cases, a family member committed to an insane asylum, a murder, a suicide, explosions, war crimes, a submarine sinking a ship and marital infidelity. The amazing thing is that, after all of that, this book is a tedious mess - something to be endured more than enjoyed. The problem with this book is tha...