DWD's Reviews

  Published in 2020 by Penguin Audio. Read by Stephen Mendel. Duration: 9 hours, 59 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Peter Ash is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. He served with the Marines and even though he is back at home - he is not. He wanders because he can't stay indoors due to PTSD manifesting as claustrophobia. As he wanders, he finds good people in trouble and he tries to get them out of trouble.  In the past he's been in Milwaukee, Oregon and Washington State, Colorado and Memphis. This time he's in Iceland.  Ash has been hired by a rich grandmother to find her son-in-law and her grandson. Police in Maryland believe that her son-in-law killed her daughter, kidnapped her grandson, and took him to his home country - Iceland. So, Peter Ash somehow braves an airplane trip and arrives in Iceland only to find that this case is way more complicated than he ever imagined... My Review: Despite the obvious plot hole of a man with SEVERE claustrophobia riding on a

  Originally published in serial form in Raw magazine from 1980-1991. Originally published in book form in 1991 by Pantheon Books. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Years ago, the high school where I used to teach had a daily silent reading time. We were encouraged to build a classroom library and I had a great one. Two stand alone shelves (one tall, one short) and a little rug in the corner with a chair. I had a lot of books from a lot of different genres but the star books were Of Mice and Men and the two volume paperback version of  Maus . Kids kept on stealing Of Mice and Men (If a kid likes it so much that he doesn't want to return it - fine by me) but so many students read Maus that the paperback binding broke and the pages fell out. It was held together with binder clips and big rubber bands.  What I remember about that book is that every student reverently took off that ridiculous clip and the big rubber band, spread the pages out and just read. Students who "ha

  Originally published in 2007. Published in 2010 by McFarland and Company, Inc. If you are a student of the Civil War, George B. McClellan is a conundrum at best. After the Frist Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) in July of 1861, the poorly trained Union Army had fled back to Washington, D.C. They were basically a semi-organized mob awaiting someone to take the lead. Lincoln looked around and felt that the leadership team that lost at Bull Run was not going to provide a credible lead general so he looked around the Eastern Theater for anyone else with the aura of success. George B. McClellan had a bit of success in Western Virginia and wrote a lot of reports that made him seem an even better General than he was so Lincoln looked to him to retrain and refit the Army of the Potomac (the main Union Army in the East.) Statue of McClellan outside of the city hall in Philadelphia. It was  dedicated in 1894.  I have no idea why they felt he deserved this honor. When I have talked with students a

  Originally published in 1995 by Brilliance Audio. Read by the author, Tom Bodett. Duration: 15 hours, 43 minutes. Unabridged. The author and narrator. I think Tom Bodett's End of the Road series of short stories is just one of the best audiobook experiences out there. Technically, this book is part of that series even though almost none of it takes places in that oddball community of End of the Road, Alaska (it earned its name by being, well, the place where the road ends.) Bodett is well-known as a frequent panelist on the NPR show Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!   but he is most well-known for his voiceovers for Motel 6 in which he promised in his folksy way, " We'll leave the light on for you ." I say all of this just to say that this book was a major disappointment.  Everything about this book seems like it should work. It has a grounding in his Alaska stories. It consists of a series of short stories - his area of expertise. But, there is just way too much goi

  Published by Amazon Original Stories in August of 2023. The author Actor and comedian and author Kevin Hart delivers a short book on how give yourself and all of those around you a break by giving up that feeling that you have to literally do everything yourself and it all has to be done your way. There was literally nothing wrong with Hart's advice - it's actually excellent advice - but for a 44 page book it was repetitive.  Hart frequently attempts to put a bit of humor in the book, but I found myself wishing that I was watching Hart deliver a TED Talk so that the humor and stories would actually work so much better.  Maybe if this had been an audiobook.... I rate this e-book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  IT WILL ALL WORK OUT: THE FREEDOM of LETTING GO (kindle) by Kevin Hart

Published in 2001 by Books In Motion. Read by Rusty Nelson. Duration: 11 hours, 59 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Sheriff Bill Gastner is coming to the end of his appointed term as Sheriff of Posadas County - a border county in southern New Mexico. Bill has been in the department in one form of another for 31 years and he is looking forward to a well-deserved retirement with no real plans for how to fill his days. Bill Gastner has got a wild last few days as Sheriff  - he has a drunken teen driver with a fake driver's license issue by the department of motor vehicles, two damaged police cars, two other teens in the hospital, and more. My Review: I am a big fan of this series. I love old Bill Gastner - he has insomnia, happily eats the same pepper-filled burrito at the same restaurant 2 or even 3 meals per day, and relies on experience more than the speed an agility of younger officers. But, this book was padded with a whole lot of nothing. We meet Gastner's son and grandson who

  Published in 2016 by Hachette Audio. Read by William DeMerritt. Duration: 9 hours, 28 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Underground Airlines is set in the year 2015 in an alternate historical timeline. This is a world where the American Civil War almost happened but did not. In the real historical timeline, an amendment to the Constitution called the Crittenden Compromise was proposed in December of 1860 as the first Confederate states were seceding. It preserved slavery, limited its spread and clarified the role of the federal government in returning runaway slaves. The Crittenden Compromise was not taken seriously by most people and it failed. In this alternate history, it was taking seriously because President-elect Lincoln was assassinated in Indianapolis as he was traveling to his inauguration in Washington, D.C. The shock of the assassination brought all of the states back together to negotiate and a version of the Crittenden Compromise passed. There was no Civil War and American

  Originally Published in 1939. Audiobook version published in 2011 by Penguin Audio. Performed by Dylan Baker. Duration: 21 hours, 1 minute. Unabridged. Winner of the National Book Award. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Declared to be the best-selling book of 1939 by the New York Times. I last read The Grapes of Wrath when I was in high school, nearly 40 years ago. It was assigned reading for my English class and all I really remembered about it was a couple of scenes. I remembered the last scene, with the flood and starving man. And I remembered and early scene where the tractor operator is plowing up the farms, the farmyards and even intentionally damaging homes in Oklahoma. Besides that, I had nothing but a pervasive memory of sorrow and injustice. I've always thought of this book and Of Mice and Men as kind of a set of books about migrant farm workers during the Great Depression. I've read Of Mice and Men  5 or 6 times, though - a fact that I can one hundred percent attribu

  Originally published as a book in 1947. Graphic novel e-book edition published in 2018 by Pantheon. Adapted into a graphic novel by Ari Folman. The Diary of Anne Frank is certainly one of the most famous pieces of literature published in the last 100 years. The book the true diary of a young teen Jewish girl that was written as her family lived in a hidden apartment with two other families in an attempt to hide from the Nazi genocide. Before the war ended someone betrayed the families and Anne and almost everyone else in the apartment died in concentration camps shortly before the Nazi surrender. A page where Anne compares herself unfavorably to her sister. Ari Folman adapted the diary into a graphic novel. In the afterword he notes that this was harder than one might expect. This graphic novel is 160 pages, but if he had simply illustrated the entire text of the diary it would have ended up being more than 3,000 pages! The challenge was to maintain the spirit of the print book whil

  Published by Random House Audio in April of 2023. Read by the author, Jonathan Kennedy. Duration: 9 hours, 23 minutes. Unabridged. Kennedy presents a compelling argument that disease has had a profound impact on world history by just telling a history of Europe from the days of cavemen up until now. The first 45 minutes or so of this audiobook seemed to be wandering around and not going anywhere, but Kennedy was laying a strong foundation for the rest of the book. The book makes it painfully obvious that humanity has bounced from one biological disaster to another. Humanity has adapted (either by behavior - like building sanitation systems to deal with body waste to control cholera) or biologically by simply having a large body count until those with immunity can rebuild (the Black Plague is a prime example.) Kennedy persuasively argues that infection and disease helped the rise of Christianity, the rise of Islam, the end of feudalism, the rise of capitalism, and the European conques