DWD's Reviews

Published by Blackstone Audio in June of 2019. Read by Traber Burns. Duration: 8 hours, 36 minutes. Unabridged. In February of 1859, Daniel Sickles, a sitting U.S. Congressman, shot and killed a man in Washington, D.C. across the street from the White House. Why is this not just a weird moment in American history? Five reasons. #1) Daniel Sickles went on to become the highest-ranking Union officer in the Civil War that did not graduate from West Point. He performed very well at the disastrous Battle of Chancellorsville and performed bravely, but with great controversy at Gettysburg, where he lost a leg. #2) The victim was Phillip Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key, the author of the Star Spangled Banner. Phillip Barton Key was also the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. #3) Key and Sickles' wife had been carrying on a long-term adulterous affair and Sickles had just discovered this fact. #4) The new technology of the telegraph spread this story to newspapers across the countr...

Published in 2014 by Random House Audio. Read by Dick Hill. Duration: 1 hour, 27 minutes. Unabridged Lee Child was a prolific writer of Jack Reacher stories. I say was because he recently announced his intention to stop writing those stories. His brother will start writing them instead. Child wrote numerous books and short stories in no particular order, bouncing around the timeline of Jack Reacher's life. This one is set in Maine. I presume it fits in on the timeline with the other Reacher stories that take place in Maine and New England. Jack Reacher is hitchhiking to the end of I-95 at the U.S.-Canada border. Another of his books starts at the other end of I-95 down by Miami, Florida and Reacher makes a point that he wants to have traveled from one end of the road to the other. Once he gets there, he gets out and is soon picked up by three younger Canadians who are headed to a four day long hiking trip. Their trail starts at one town and ends up at another. Reacher decides...

Published in October of 2019 by Grand Central Publishing. Read by the author, Joel Stein. Duration: 7 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged. Joel Stein's In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You're Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book is an interesting book. The title suggests that it is a tongue-in-cheek look at politics, but it is much more than that. To be sure, there are plenty of jokes, wisecracks, puns and witty observations of varying quality throughout the book. But, there is also a lot of solid political analysis, especially in the last third of the book. Stein's primary argument is that populism, embodied by both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders for the last 4 years, is a road to nowhere except authoritarianism. Stein, like most elites, is worried more about Trump than Sanders (makes sense - he is President, while Sanders is a Senator). Trump is well-known for his anti-intellectual tenancies. He discounts expertise and people that might have ...

Published in 2014 by Blackstone Audio. Read by Grover Gardner. Duration: 14 hours, 11 minutes. Unabridged. Joseph Wheelan's Bloody Spring is a look at General Grant's Overland Campaign from May to June in 1864. This was Grant's first experience against Robert E. Lee and he brought a change in strategy to the Eastern Theater. Rather than try to defeat Lee in a single battle like the previous generals, Grant decided that it was best to find Lee, engage in a battle and never disengage and let the superior resources and manpower grind Lee's army into surrender. Grant understood that when Lee surrendered the Confederacy would surrender. Wheelan spends little time talking about the causes of the war, but he does offer a short recap before he delves into a lively and interesting narrative history of the forty days of the Overland Campaign.  Union soldiers near the Battle of North Anna in May of 1864. They are on a small bridge. A larger pontoon bridge is behind them. This c...

Published in August of 2019 by The University of North Carolina Press. As the title states, one of the most common myths of "the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery" crowd is that thousands and thousands of African-Americans served in organized units in the Confederate Army. To be fair to the mistaken people that advocate for this position, there were African-American people traveling with the Confederate Army. They were not there as volunteers - they were there as body servants to their masters. There were also a great number of slaves that were commandeered by the Confederate government to dig ditches and fortifications, much like horses were taken to pull wagons and replace cavalry mounts. They were there as property - as tools, but not as soldiers. Is it conceivable that some of those slaves picked up a gun in the midst of a fight and fired it in anger? Certainly. I am absolutely certain that it happened. But, was that the plan? No, that is simply what happened in...

Published by HarperAudio in March of 2019. Read by Will Damron. Duration: 6 hours, 55 minutes. Unabridged. Arthur C. Brooks was the President of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute from 2008 to shortly after the publication of this book in 2019.  The author, Arthur C. Brooks Brooks is deeply worried with the present level of political discourse in America. Debates where the candidates just insult one another. Derogatory comments rather than actual proposals. Look at your typical Facebook political argument. Anonymous posters with names like "Trump_2020_Forever" arguing with "Trumpsters_Suck" and using terms like "libtards" and "conservacunts" while they insist that the other side is nothing but a literal bunch of communists and Nazis. This is getting us nowhere. And that is his point. What we are showing each other is contempt. He quotes a couples' counselor that he can work with all kinds of marital struggles ...

Published in 2015 by HarperAudio. Read by Simon Jones. Duration: 3 hours, 22 minutes. Unabridged. The author, Dan Ariely Behavioral economist Dan Ariely has written a lot of books and articles about his various behavioral experiments. I was not aware that he had a regular column in the Wall Street Journal that functions an awful lot like the Dear Abby column has done in newspapers for more than 60 years. People write in questions about relationships or work concerns and Ariely tries to come up with a concise, humorous answer. The fact that Ariely is a famous behavioral economist did little to make this collection feel any different than a collection of Dear Abby columns. It was not a bad listen, but not a great one either. I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  IRRATIONALLY YOURS: ON MISSING SOCKS, PICKUP LINES, and OTHER EXISTENTIAL PUZZLES by Dan Ariely .

Published by Oasis Audio in 2013. Read by Dean Gallagher. Duration: 4 hours, 58 minutes. Unabridged. Brian Zahnd is an American pastor of a megachurch in Missouri. I had never heard of him before I ran across this book. I was intrigued by the topic because the election of President Trump has been an interesting experience for this lifelong member of a religiously conservative church. Over time, Zahnd has become convinced that pacifism is the way that Jesus would have us go. It is not a popular opinion, but Zahnd makes a strong argument for it. Zahnd's message is essentially that the church is at its best when it acts like the Old Testament prophet Nathan in 2nd Samuel chapter 12. Nathan comes to David to tell him he had done a great wrong and call him on it. Now, according to Zahnd, t he church went from being the accuser of wrong-doing - the one that holds it to a high standard - to being the defense attorney of the government. Zahnd describes it as  the church is the chapla...

Originally published in 1958. Published in 2001 by ibooks. Howard Fast (1914-2003) was a prolific author of all sorts of works - poetry, plays, screenplays, essays, short stories, science fiction, fiction, articles for various publication and historical fiction. He literally worked as a professional author for his entire life, publishing his first book at age 18 and his last book at age 85. I've decided to make a commitment to reading a Howard Fast historical fiction book from time to time after I read his novel about the Battle of Lexington and Concord, April Morning , this past summer. It was easily one of the better books I read last year. Moses is the story of the towering figure of the Old Testament. It was intended to be a two part story, but as Fast notes in a forward to this 2001 reprint, he literally ran out of time to write the second half of the story. This novel covers Moses life up until the time when he kills the Egyptian beating the Hebrew slave and then flees ...