DWD's Reviews

Originally Published in 2020. Published by Oxford Press in 2022. Historian Heather Cox Richardson has made herself into a name brand historian with her near-daily first drafts of history in which she writes up the day's political news and ties in similar historic themes or long-running trends.  How the South Won the Civil War follows along those lines.  The book looks at two long-standing trends in American points of view in American history that are in constant tension with one another. This quote from page xv of the introduction gets the thesis of the book pretty well: America began with a great paradox: the same men who came up with the radical idea of constructing a nation on the principle of equality also owned slaves, thought Indians were savages, and considered women inferior. This apparent contradiction was not a flaw, though; it was a key feature of the new democratic republic. For the Founders, the concept that "all men are created equal" depended on the idea t

The premise of this book is not particularly original, but it still enjoyable. Originally published in book form in 2021 by My Story Productions. Audiobook published in March of 2024 by My Story Productions. Read by Shamaan Casey. Duration: 9 hours, 16 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: In Wings of Honor , humanity is at war with an alien insectoid species, much like in the book Ender's Game , the movie version of Starship Troopers , and the 1990's Fox Tv show Space Above and Beyond . In this novel, the bad guys (the bugs) are called the Baranyk.  The fight ebbs and flows - sometimes humanity is winning, but currently humanity is losing. Humans used to use a fighter/carrier system in which fighter space ships launch from carrier space ships to engage the enemy - much like another classic show and its reboot,  Battlestar Galactica . The death rate for fighter pilots were atrocious so the fleet developed a sophisticated fleet of drone fighter ships. If the drone ship gets destroyed t

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2024. Read by Kevin R. Free. Duration: 14 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. In Life After Power Presidential historian Jared Cohen looks into the post-Presidential lives of seven Presidents and their quests for some sort of meaning after having one of the most important jobs you can have. Some Presidents fade away due to health reasons, like Reagan. Others are eager to resume their former lives, like Washington. But, others still feel like they have something more to offer or have unfulfilled goals. The seven Presidents he looked at are: Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush. I have enjoyed hearing about John Quincy Adams' post-Presidential life ever since I first read John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage  30+ years ago. I've read more than one book about him and this re-telling is quite good.  A photo of John Quincy Adams  taken in 1844. Jimmy Carte