DWD's Reviews

  Published in 2022 by Zondervan. Read by the author, Andy Stanley. Duration: 5 hours, 11 minutes. Unabridged. Andy Stanley brings a warning to churches across the United States: Do not become involved in partisan politics. Jesus is not a Republican and he is not a Democrat. He did not come to rule this world and he did not make his church a government for this world. Nevertheless, Stanley has been criticized by church members he has known for years for not taking splashy political stands. . Stanley goes on to detail very practical reasons not to get involved in partisan politics, such as ticking off 40% of your potential mission field by endorsing a certain candidate and being known as a Democrat or Republican church.  The answer? Neither.  By identifying with a political candidate or a party, you are rejecting your fellow Christians who disagree with you by identifying with a party more than identifying with the body of Christ. This is literally a heresy. The body of Ch...

  Published in 2019 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Voice work by various historians hosted by David M. Rubinstein. Duration: 9 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged . David M. Rubinstein is an avid amateur historian and financial supporter of history-related projects. He organized a series of 16 interviews of historians by the Library of Congress with the intended audience to be actual members of Congress with invited guests.  He picked historians who have written popular and professionally respected histories and biographies of famous Americans such as Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton), David McCullough (Adams and Truman), Cokie Roberts (Abigail Adams) and Doris Kearns Goodwin (Lincoln) and just let them discuss the person they studied. Doris Kearns Goodwin The audiobook consists of the actual audio of these interviews with a little introduction The interviews were all solid, but could have been better if Rubinstein had not insisted on inserting himself in the middle of them so often. S...

  Published in 2021 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by Timothy Andres Pabon. Duration: 10 hours, 10 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: The famous expedition into Mexico led by "Black Jack" Pershing to punish Pancho Villa in 1916 and 1917 is the stated topic of this book. However, this book is much more than that. It is a look at the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and World War I (1914-1918) and America's rather aggressive foreign policy in Latin America. Within most Americans' living memory the United States had taken on the responsibilities of empire by defeating Spain in the Spanish-American War in 1898. The United States took the Philippines, Guam, Cuba and Puerto Rico and immediately got involved in a fight against Filipino insurgents and independence movements that lasted more than a decade. The concept of foreign intervention was not a new one and the impulse to intervene remained strong. With war in Europe looming, the Mexican Revolution made America nervous. An ...

  Published by HarperAudio in June of 2022. Read by Josh Bloomberg. Duration: 8 hours, 14 minutes. Unabridged. Tim Miller is a Republican political operative. He previously worked on the presidential campaigns for John McCain (2008), Jon Huntsman (2012) and Jeb Bush (2016), worked for the Republican party as a liaison to the Romney campaign (2012), created "gotcha" content for websites and traditional media, helped run a Political Action Committee (PAC) and writes regularly for Rolling Stone magazine and political websites. He's connected. He knows someone on every campaign. He knew people all over the Trump administration.  He is also a "Never Trumper". He once made a list compiled by the Washington Post of the top ten Never Trumpers. Miller talks about the motivations of people that joined the Trump White House after they swore that they never would because he was simply not an acceptable candidate or president. He talked with several people and he got the s...

  Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2003. Read by the author, Khaled Hosseni. Duration: 12 hours, 1 minute. Unabridged. This book was published about 20 years ago and I just got around to reading it. This is not an uncommon thing for me - I did the same with the   Harry Potte r  books and The Handmaid's Tale , also.  I was motivated to read this for the same reason I was motivated to read The Handmaid's Tale - it was permanently placed on a banned book list in Idaho  in May of 2022. There are three parts to the story. The first part is a long description of the life of Amir, a boy who is growing up in Afghanistan in the 1970s. Amir had his problems, but he had a pretty decent life. He and his father fled to the United States when the chaos think of as "Afghanistan" began - the Communist Revolution of 1978. The author, Khaled Hosseni The second part of the book is the story of how Amir and his father adapt to life in the United States, including the re-bu...