DWD's Reviews

Originally published by HarperPerennial in 1991. Richard Shenkman has written several books that show that many of the commonly-held beliefs about history are not quite true and some are absolutely false. The title comes from a quote from President Warren G. Harding when he was asked about a popular newspaper article that asserted that Paul Revere did not actually make his famous ride. Ironically, Paul Revere only gets two mentions: once on page 10 and the other on page 192. The mention on page 192 is simply the complete quote from Harding that inspired the title of the book. So, if you were thinking this was going to be a book about Paul Revere, you will be disappointed.  Instead, Shenkman's I Love Paul Revere, Whether He Rode or Not is a reminder that there are always multiple views on history. Anybody that tells you that a certain group all believed a certain thing or they all did something for one reason is simplifying things and losing some of the nuance of how it re...

Published by HarperAudio in July of 2019. Read by Pam Ward. Duration: 3 hours, 47 minutes. Unabridged. Cecelia Watson is a historian whose research has made her an expert on the semicolon. Why the semicolon? She describes herself as a reformed member of the grammar police and really enjoys looking at how authors use punctuation in their writing. I did learn some interesting (albeit trivial) facts about the origins of the semicolon and I as a world language teacher and I did appreciate Watson's de-emphasis of grammar in favor of meaning. But, sometimes this short book sometimes felt like it was slowing to a crawl as the focus went on to how various grammar books explained semicolons (and other points of grammar) over the years. The author, Cecilia Watson Personally, I avoid semicolons. My theory is that in most cases it would be better to make two smaller sentences than having one longer unwieldy sentence held together by a semicolon, although Watson does point out a brillia...

Published by Penguin Audio on March 31, 2020. Read by the author, Jonathan Karl. Duration: 10 hours, 16 minutes. Unabridged. Jonathan Karl has had a long relationship with Donald Trump. Karl is a reporter Jonathan Karl and Donald Trump in 1994 and nowadays. ( The New Republic , The New York Post, CNN and ABC) and he first met Donald Trump in 1994. Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley had just gotten married and were staying in Trump Tower for their honeymoon. Karl convinced Trump to do an interview about why celebrities would want to stay in his building. Trump personally led Karl on a tour of the building. Over the years, Karl interviewed Trump multiple times for multiple reasons. Because of this relationship, Karl was called on to interview Trump when he toyed with the idea of running for president before 2016 (5 times). Karl moved on to be the White House correspondent for the Obama administration for ABC and stayed when Donald Trump was elected. This book will not change...

Originally published in 1972. Howard Fast (1914-2003) was a prolific author with a particular love of historical fiction. He is most famous for the novel Spartacus , the book that the famous movie is based on. The Hessian is set in rural Connecticut late in the Revolutionary War. The war has moved on south of Connecticut. The main character is Dr. Feversham, a veteran of the Revolutionary War and wars in Europe who is sick to death of war. He is not a particularly pleasant man. He is a lapsed Catholic while most of his neighbors are Protestants. There is also a scattering of Quakers in the area. A British ship dropped off a squad of 16 Hessians who cause a panic. Hessians are German soldiers hired by the British to help supplement their soldiers during the Revolutionary War. They were particularly hated and feared because they were mercenaries (and they fought very well). The Americans could understand why the British fought, but what was the motivation of soldiers who were rented out...

Originally published in book form in 1990. Published in 2017 by Blackstone Audio. Read by Paul Heitsch. Duration: 12 hours, 33 minutes. Unabridged (see below) Clocking in at 12 and one-half hours, A Short History of Reconstruction: 1863-1877 is an abridgment of a larger work about Reconstruction that Foner published in 1988.  Still, it is plenty long enough to reveal the scope of the tragedy that was the post-Civil War Reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln often thought about the conditions necessary to bring the seceded states back into the Union. He called that plan Reconstruction because the separate state governments would be rebuilt and then the Union itself would be reformed. There were certain ground rules, including not letting power players in the Confederate and seceded state governments return to power. Most importantly, slavery had to be ended in the areas under the authority of the Emancipation Proclamation that was effective on January 1, 1863. When Lincoln was ass...

Published in 2009 by Hachette Audio. Read by Peter Giles. Duration: 11 hours, 15 minutes. Unabridged. The Scarecrow is a sequel to one of Michael Connelly's earliest books - 1996's The Poet.  In The Poet, newspaper reporter and FBI agent Rachel Walling solve a murder mystery and defeat a serial killer. Since that time, McEvoy wrote a book about his experiences, moved from Colorado and took a job with the LA Times . Now, 12 years later, he is being let go as the Times is going through a round of lay-offs. He has been given two weeks notice and told to train his younger replacement on the crime beat. Meanwhile, a parent calls to complain to McEvoy about an article he wrote saying that her teenaged child had killed a woman and stuffed her body in the trunk of a car. McEvoy decides to look into the case and he and his reporter-in-training uncover some interesting facts that make it clear that the boy didn't do it. Instead, McEvoy is on the trail of another serial killer... G...

Published in 2013 by the History Press. If you were a kid in central Indiana in the 1960's, 1970's and 1980's you knew the local kid's TV show stars of Channel 4: Janie, Cowboy Bob, and Peggy. If your parents let you stay up late to watch scary movies, you also know Sammy Terry and his evil laugh. Famous Faces of Indy's WTTV-4 tells the story of how these characters came to be, why the television landscape favored these types of shows at the time and why they are no longer around nowadays. Getting to know a little about each of the actual people behind the TV characters was a lot of fun. Sammy Terry - an all-around TV guy and the owner of a music store. Janie - an elementary school teacher. Cowboy Bob - a musician and a TV cameraman who got a big break. Besides the big names, the book also tells about Brian (Jerry) Reynolds who started at WTTV while he was still in high school and soon enough was writing and producing for the various live action shows on WTTV. ...

Published in January of 2016 by HarperAudio. Read by Tristan Morris. Duration: 10 hours, 42 minutes. Unabridged. Stephen Prothero takes a look at American history in Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars . Culture wars, for Prothero, are more than the typical left-right discussion  - they are a left-right discussion with serious religious overtones. Prothero's thesis is that the major debates in American history have been those types of debates. He looks at 5 areas: 1) The fight over who would run the country after George Washington - the John Adams (1735-1826) inheritors of the Calvinistic Puritans (John Adams) or those with a vaguely defined faith (Thomas Jefferson); 2) Catholics vs. Protestants; 3) Everyone vs. Mormons; 4) Fundamentalism vs. Modernism as commonly typified by the Scopes Monkey Trial (which only gets a passing mention in this book); 5) Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority types vs. abortion, gay marriage, the Equal Rights Amendment and more. While his discus...

Originally published in 1984 by The Free Press . Note: This is a review of the original version of this book, published in 1984 and ending with the first Reagan administration. It has been expanded and updated to include events up to 2012. Way back in my undergrad days at Indiana University I took a class called American Military History . It was taught by a visiting professor from West Point and FOR the COMMON DEFENSE: A MILITARY HISTORY of the UNITED STATES of AMERICA  was an excellent choice for the text for the class. For 30+ years I have carried this book around with me - through 5 different moves and who knows how many book shelves this book was the anchor of my history section because it is quite beefy. But, I decided it was time to clear out some books. Technically, this book was a re-read but I didn't really remember anything from all of those years ago so... The book starts with colonial defense and moves along with the same format up through the early 1980's. The...

Published in 2014 by Hachette Audio. Read by Len Cariou. Duration: 50 minutes. Unabridged. This short story was the closest thing to a straight out police procedural that I have read from Michael Connelly. By that, I mean that although Harry Bosch is the main character in this story, it really is just the story of how a police officer reviews a cold case and figures out who the bad guy is based on one new clue. Any police officer could have been the main character because Harry Bosch was just sort of along for the ride. Len Cariou read the book. Cariou used to read a lot of Connelly's books. Now The narrator, Len Cariou, at the dinner table on his TV show. Cariou is best known as the grandfather on the TV show Blue Bloods and I kept imagining that he was reading it to me at the dinner table from the TV show, which kind of ruined the mood of the story (not that it was much of a story). I rate this short story 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Switchblade ...

Published in 2006 by Tantor Media. Read by Grover Gardner. Duration: 10 hours, 10 minutes. Unabridged. Winston Groom, best known as the author of Forrest Gump , is also a historian of sorts. He has written 14 non-fiction books, using his research skills he honed as a journalist to investigate a historical topic. In this case, the topic is the Battle of New Orleans. Most people know everything they know about the battle from the catchy Johnny Horton song: I n 1814 we took a little trip,  Along with Colonel Jackson down the might Mississip We took a little bacon and we took a little beans And we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans. I knew a little bit more, having read a little about the battle. I didn't know much, however, not really being a fan of the War of 1812 or Andrew Jackson. But, I am a fan of Winston Groom so I decided to give it a try. Groom is skilled at telling a narrative history and at the end, I had a much better idea of how the Battle of New Orl...