DWD's Reviews

  Published in 2017 by Hourly History. I am an avid reader of history, but I have areas of weakness that I am perfectly willing to shore up a bit, but I don't want to invest a ton of time in. Francisco Franco  was one of those people for me.  I came into this biography knowing only the barest of facts about the long-time dictator of Spain. Franco ruled from 1939 until his death in 1975. This biography spends little time on his early life and could have expanded on the Spanish Civil War that brought him to power. For example, the most famous image of the war is the painting Guernica .  Guernica by Pablo Picasso (1937) Guernica is one of the most famous paintings of the 20th century. It depicts the chaos of an attack by the German air force on the city of Guernica. Guernica was holding out against Franco's forces and Franco enlisted German help to deal with the city. German and Italian bomber planes tried out the relatively new technology in real life. Pablo Picasso ...

  Published in 2022 by Simon and Schuster Audio Read by Lorelei King Duration: 7 hours, 26 minutes. Unabridged. Janet Evanovich's The Recovery Agent features Gabriela Rose. Recovery agents can be another term for bounty hunters who look for fugitives, but Gabriela Rose is not a bounty hunter. She searches for missing property. Sometimes it's insurance fraud, sometimes it's stolen property and sometimes it's just looking for something rare for a wealthy client. She is based in New York City, is quite successful and flies all over the world recovering items.  Gabriela Rose is dismayed to hear that her hometown in North Carolina has suffered a direct hit from a hurricane and (somehow) won't get any help from FEMA or any other government recovery program. The town is dying but Gabriela's grandmother knows where a fortune might be found. She was somehow told about the fortune by the ghost of her dead grandmother. In that fortune there is a ring called the Seal of So...

  Published in 2019 by Macmillan Audio. Read by Anne-Marie Gaillard, Duration: 5 hours, 33 minutes. Unabridged. Set in a dystopian future in Ireland, Last Ones Left Alive is the story of Orpen, a teenage girl. The world is overrun by "skrakes". The reader is never exactly told what skrakes are, but it is useful to just think of them as a sort of zombie. Skrakes hunt humans and when a human is bitten by a skrake, the human gets an infection and becomes a skrake.  Orpen grew up on an island off of the coast of Ireland. There are three of them - Orpen, her mother and another woman named Maeve, The skrakes never come to the island, but from time to time her mother and Maeve must leave the island to scrounge for supplies and hunt. The story is told in chapters that alternate between the present and flashbacks to Orpen's childhood. There  are hints as to what Maeve and her mother did before they came to the island. It is clear is that they have extraordinary hand-to-hand comba...

  Published in 2021 by Harper Horizon. Read by co-author Turk Pipkin Duration: 3 hours, 6 minutes. Unabridged. During the Covid-19 lockdowns Willie Nelson decided to write a book. This is not an unusual thing for Willie - he has written a handful of memoirs focusing on various parts of his almost 80 years as a professional musician (he was paid to play in a local band at the age of 10) and this book almost certainly overlaps with other books.  The format of Willie Nelson's Letters to America is that Willie is writing thank you letters to various people, places and things that influenced his life and his career. He has a letter to his hometown, his grandparents, his sister, various members of his band over the years, his ex-wives, his wife, his kids, the fellow members of the supergroup The Highwaymen, among others. Nelson's guitar, Trigger There is also a letter to his guitar, Trigger. Nelson bought Trigger, sight unseen, in 1969 because he needed a new guitar after someone a...

  Published in January of 2022 by Random House Audio. Read by Beth Hicks. Duration: 7 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. The author of How Civil Wars Start has an extensive background in studying exactly why some countries collapse into Civil War and other countries don't, even when everyone thinks they will, like South Africa after Apartheid. The first half of the book is a look at countries that slid into Civil War and specific characteristics that tend to make Civil War more likely. Her team has come up with a scale and they get concerned when societies move quickly on that scale. It doesn't matter if they move quickly away from democracy or towards it - generally speaking moving quickly means that groups in power lose power and they don't like it and they lash out. A classic example of this is Iraq. The Sunni had almost all of the power under the dictatorship Sadam Hussein, but once he was overthrown the Shia majority took power and decided that it was time to get even - d...

  Published in 2009 by Candlewick. Illustrated by John Lawrence Sea Horse: The Shyest Fish in the Sea is an early reader picture book aimed at children aged 4-8. It tells the story of a male sea horse named Sea Horse. It describes his daily routine and introduces his mate. Along the way, they have babies. The entire book is read on this 8 minute long YouTube video . Link to this Tweet on Twitter Yes, they misspelled Santa Claus. Perhaps they should read more...😉 I normally don't review books aimed at small children but this summer I have been reading a lot of books that have been included on various book ban lists. This one was on a list in Tennessee because of a group called Moms for Liberty . They thought that the sea horses in the book were too sexy. Also, they argued that this book was a sneaky argument in favor of transgenderism (see attached picture - yes, it's a real Tweet - see the link underneath it to go to the actual Tweet).  Here are more links to stories about t...

  Originally published in 1993. Published by HarperAudio in 2010. Read by Alexander Adams. Duration: 5 hours, 54 minutes. Unabridged. I am a big fan of the TV series Justified which features a character named Raylan Givens. I stumbled across this audiobook and was pleased to see that Elmore Leonard had done more than create a character for a TV show - he had written a whole series of books about that character. Synopsis: Pronto starts out in Miami and is mostly about Harry Arno, a man who runs an illegal bookkeeping operation (just to be clear, he takes illegal bets, he does do illegal accounting). Harry is ready to retire but is unclear how he will extract himself from the organized crime syndicate that "protects" his operation and likes their 50% take. Or...maybe it's less than that. Turns out Harry has been cooking the books for years and has been taking a cut out of the mob boss's cut for years, maybe even decades. A U.S. Attorney has decided to take down the or...

  Published in April of 2022 by Macmillan Audio. Read by Christina Delaine. Duration: 7 hours, 1 minute. Unabridged. As the title says, THE LAST DAYS of the DINOSAURS: AN ASTEROID, EXTINCTION, and the BEGINNING of OUR WORLD is about the asteroid that all but wiped out the dinosaurs and the world they lived in. Technically, very little of the book is about the asteroid itself but hopefully you get the idea. Riley Black does an excellent job of describing the presumed daily lives of the creatures that we know about before and after the fateful asteroid impact. The author starts out with the most famous dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops, but also includes less famous dinosaurs, insects, plants and mammals. The primary focus is the American West (Wyoming, Utah, the Dakotas, etc.)  one the most fossil-rich area in the world. But, other areas of the world are looked at as well. The step-by-step description of what scientists think happened in the seconds, minutes, ...

The author won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Originally published in 1970. This audiobook version was published in 2011 by Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. Read by the author, Toni Morrison. Duration: 7 hours, 6 minutes Unabridged. Synopsis: This is a story of a girl named Pecola who lives in Ohio in the 1940's. She is sexually abused by her father and only knows her mother by the name Mrs. Breedlove. Sometimes she lives with other families as her family struggles. Pecola is universally considered an ugly child. Pecola wants nothing more than to have blue eyes like Shirley Temple because she is convinced that blue eyes would make her pretty. The narrative goes round and round and moves back and forth in time, often re-telling certain aspects of the story from different perspectives that fill in the gaps as the reader proceeds.  In the end, it is not a complicated story, but it is told in a complicated manner. My review: Undoubtedly, my take on this book is over...

  Published in 1988 by Recorded Books. Paper book originally published in 1985. Read by Betty Harris. Duration: 11 hours, 20 minutes. Unabridged. Note: A newer audiobook version read by Clair Danes was published in 2012. I am very late to The Handmaid's Tale - more than 35 years after the original publication date.  The plot is fairly well known so I am not going to go into extreme details. The story is set in a dystopian future America after a violent coup took out the Congress and the Executive Branch. Pollution and constant warfare have lowered the birth rate to an alarmingly low rate and the upper classes have instituted a religion-based system of surrogate motherhood. The upper classes were inspired by the Biblical story of Jacob and Rachel  from the book of Genesis and how Rachel resolved the fact that she was unable to have children by having her handmaid sleep with Jacob and Rachel would keep any children as her own. The red robes and the white headpiece are the o...

Published in 2017 by Hourly History. I am an avid reader of history, but I have areas of weakness that I am perfectly willing to shore up a bit, but I don't want to invest a ton of time. I want to know a bit more, not become an expert. The Russian Revolution one of those areas for me. I know a lot more than most people, but I can clearly see the that there is a lot that I don't know. Rasputin is, of course, an iconic, almost mythical personality of the Russian Revolution. This series specializes in short biographies and histories that will take the average reader about an hour to read. There are plenty of people and historic events that I would like to know a little more about, but not necessarily commit to reading a 500 page biography or history.  Rasputin is one of those people for me - interesting but not really worth that much of an investment of my time. I've read a few biographies from Hourly History and, without a doubt, this was the best of the lot so far. Rasputin ...

  Published by Listening Library in 2019. Read by Imani Parks. Duration: 6 hours, 35 minutes. Unabridged. Winner of more than 15 awards, including "A 2020 ALA Notable Middle-Grade Novel" and "A Bank Street Best Book of the Year" Makeda and her family are moving from Maryland to New Mexico. Her father got a position in a symphony in New Mexico. Her mother doesn't have a job right now, but she used to tour the world playing the violin before she had a family. The author, Mariama J. Lockington Makeda is loved by her mother, her father and her older sister, but she is different. They are white and she is black. Her family never makes her doubt their love, but strangers make her keenly aware of the differences when they ask where her parents are in stores or when they stare at her getting out of the car with the rest of the family until they finally figure out their relationship with one another. The older she gets, the more she wonders about her own roots. While the...