DWD's Reviews

  Published in 2020 by Workman Publishing. Read by Geoffrey Cantor. Duration: 7 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. Connor Towne O'Neill was attending the 50th anniversary recognition of the Selma to Montgomery March when he discovered something unexpected. The Selma to Montgomery march ended when Alabama State Troopers joined local deputies at the Edmund Pettus bridge and beat them until they retreated. The bridge is named for a Confederate General and a Grand Dragon of the Alabama KKK. O'Neill was looking for a place to park and drove into a graveyard. In the graveyard, he discovered a group prepping a part of the graveyard for the re-installation of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest (the original had been stolen) in the graveyard. It was on a piece of property owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the middle of the graveyard. O'Neill sensed that this was the more powerful story, no matter how dramatic that moment on the bridge had been 50 years earlier. He decide...

  Published in 2016 by Macmillan Audio. Read by the author, Giles Milton. Duration: 4 hours, 53 minutes. Unabridged. Giles Milton is a prolific British writer of histories and historical fiction. This is a collection of odd stories of history that he has run across doing his research. Lenin, preserved in his tomb.  He has gone from being an  object of reverence to a tourist attraction. There are the two stories mentioned in the title - Hitler using stimulants and Lenin's odd burial, but there are a lot more from several different time periods. The problem is that there were a lot of similar stories and some weren't really from "unknown" chapters. Lots of Nazi-related stories and three separate stories of cannibalism (a plane crash, a sailing ship caught in the duldrums and a prison escape in an isolated area). That's a lot of Nazis and cannibals for a 5 hour audiobook. I found this stories to be neither great nor bad and often repetitive. I rate it 3 stars out of...

  Originally Published in 1990 as part of the book Four Past Midnight . Audiobook published in 2016 by Simon and Schuster. Read by Willem Dafoe. Duration: 8 hours, 46 minutes. Unabridged. More than 30 years ago Stephen King released a collection of four large novellas (each was certainly large enough to be a stand-alone book) called Four Past Midnight . I snapped it up and read it right away because I was an avid fan of King's work at that time  and read everything of his as soon as it arrived in my local library.  I rem embered this story as one that I did not enjoy but I also remembered that they had made a mini-series based on this story so maybe I just missed something. After all, who puts money into making a mini-series based on junky source material? Simon and Schuster decided to start breaking up King's short story and novella collections into separate, smaller stories a few years back. When I found this audiobook for The Langoliers , I decided to listen to it this...

  Published in 2017 by HarperAudio. Read by Eva Kaminsky. Duration: 10 hours, 26 minutes. Unabridged. Brittle is a caretaker robot in a future United States.  Sort of. In Sea of Rust , the United States is dead and gone due to a war between humanity and its robot servants 30 years earlier. Robots were everywhere. They were maids, gardeners, factory workers, delivery drivers, lovers, nurses, nannies, cooks, wait staff and more. On top of that, Artificial Intelligence (AI) super computers were built to do the math and research that human beings struggled to grasp.  Humans struggled to deal with the concept of robots as thinking beings. The AI super computers were clearly smarter than any individual human and the robots clearly possessed an intelligence of their own, even if it wasn't exactly like human intelligence.  The author, C. Robert Cargill As humanity seemingly made a breakthrough in its acceptance of robots as possible equals, a shocking act of political violen...

  Published in 2020 by Random House Audio. Performed by multiple voice actors. Duration: 4 hours, 35 minutes. Unabridged. Set in the time between Star Wars: A New Hope (Episode IV) and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Episode V) , Doctor Aphra is the story of a rogue archaeologist who specializes in weapons of the past. It is based on a comic series. She doesn't collect them to stick them in a museum, she collects them to use them. She thinks an ancient weapon unused is a travesty, like an ancient symphony left unplayed. So, she specializes in tracking down weapons that were locked away and hidden so no one could get their hands on them. Her other skill is modifying ships and droids to make them effective weapons. While Dr. Aphra is looking for the operating system of a murderous protocol droid (he hates "organics" and loves to torture), she is captured by Darth Vader. Vader doesn't care about the droid software, but he does want to use Dr. Aphra's skills to ...

  Published in 2015 by Tantor Audio. Read by Joe Barrett. Duration: 8 hours, 36 minutes. Unabridged. Garbology is the study of garbage. Archaeologists use garbology to learn all about ancient societies - what they ate, their tools, their clothing, their toys, their technology, etc. You can also apply garbology to modern garbage dumps and Humes uses this as an entrance to discussing all sorts of issues about our modern world and our problem with waste. Humes figures that the average American is on pace to create more than one hundred tons of garbage per person per lifetime. This is higher than the estimates you usually find because those estimates don't include the waste created on your behalf by manufacturers and service providers. Garbology starts out very strong with a look at how landfills and trash removal have evolved over time. Sounds boring but I found it to be very interesting. Later, he moved on to pollution, especially ocean pollution and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch ...

  Published in 2021 by Grand Central Publishing. Read by the authors, Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar Duration: 5 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged. Amber Ruffin is a writer for Seth Meyers' late night show and she has a show on the Peacock streaming service. I have never watched her show (nothing against her - I just can't keep up with all of the platforms out there) but I have run across video clips on social media. Ruffin's style is very quick and very clever. In this book, she doesn't get into sexual topics or anything that a lot of people would find objectionable. Except for the racism. There is a lot of racism. Just tons of it. Amber Ruffin (left) and Lacey Lamar (right) Lamar and Ruffin are sisters. They grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. And, they are African Americans. Ruffin moved away to New York City and has made a living in comedy. Lamar stayed in Omaha and has worked in health care.  The premise of the book comes from Lacey Lamar's habit of texting Ruffin when she r...

  Published in 2020 by Random House Audio. Read by multiple readers (see text of review). Duration: 9 hours, 50 minutes. Unabridged. The premise for the novel Devolution is that a leader in the tech industry has built a completely new type of housing development in rural Washington state.  They are designed to use as little energy as possible, recycle the human waste and run on solar panels. The community is small and isolated - just a few homes in order to lessen the overall environmental impact. If you are old enough to remember the Mt. St. Helen eruption in 1980, in this novel, the same thing happens to Mt. Ranier. This is a complete possibility in real life and it is generally believed that the consequences would be much, much worse with Mt. Ranier. When Ranier erupts, this community is completely isolated by the chaos that follows. The government is doing the best it can, but this is a full-blown crisis and a few missing people in the woods (even if they are rich and con...