DWD's Reviews

Published in 2024 by HarperAudio. Read by the author, Bakari Sellers. Duration: 4 hours, 33 minutes. Unabridged. The Moment that Bakari Sellers refers to in his book is the so-called moment of racial reckoning that came with the murder of George Floyd and the protests all around the country that followed. Sellers discusses a lot of relevant things that lead up to this moment including the murder of 9 African Americans by a young White supremacist in Charleston in 2015 and Covid-19. But, events like the Buffalo shooting  of 2022, continued questionable acts of  and media and political-types discussing the Great Replacement Theory from 2017 until the present day have shown that moment of reckoning was not a big a moment that people supposed it was. Or, it demonstrates that the racist elements in America are pushing back hard. I have run across Sellers as a guest on a couple of different podcasts that I follow and have always found him to be thoughtful and engaging. I have to admit, ho

Published in 2024 by Random House Audio. Read by Ray Porter. Duration: 11 hours, 2 minutes. Unabridged. White Rural Rage is a look at the rural/urban divide in the United States in politics as personified in the MAGA movement.  The book is broken up into multiple chapters, each with a theme about how rural America is advantaged even though they claim they are put upon by urban elites. Sometimes, the authors have a point, sometimes they are just grinding their axes for no particular reason (like in the pickup truck chapter.) The book has some excellent points, but it clearly written like an extended opinion hit piece rather than an extended informational piece and that did nothing but hurt the audiobook in my opinion.  I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: WHITE RURAL RAGE: THE THREAT to AMERICAN DEMOCRACY by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman.

Published in 2018 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR) NOTE: Also published under the title UNBEATABLE! Attucks!  appears to be just a story about a 1950's era basketball team, but it is much more than that. it is the story of Jim Crow style racism in a northern state. It is the story of an underdog school getting its chance to compete at the highest level. It is the story of one amazing player, a great coach, and Indiana's famous single class basketball system. First - the single class basketball system. Back in the 1900's, Indiana had a single class basketball system. This means that every team was in the same playoff system together - no matter how big or how small. This was highlighted in the based-on-a-true-story movie Hoosiers. The true story had Milan High School (161 students) beating Muncie Central (1600+ students) in 1954. Usually, it wasn't that dramatic of a disparity, but small town schools did very well from 1911-1954. The biggest city in the state, Indianap

Book version originally published by My Story Productions in 2021. Audiobook published by My Story Productions in 2024. Read by Shamaan Casey . Duration: 10 hours, 32 minutes. Unabridged. My Synopsis Wings of Mourning is the 2nd book in a trilogy about a future war between humanity and an insectoid species. While not a particularly original sci-fi concept, the first book was still entertaining and hinted at all sorts of possibilities.  Humanity had been winning the war in space by using drone fighter based on carrier ships. The drones were so effective because the pilots would not die if the drone was shot down - they pilot could just switch to a new drone and rejoin the fight. This was all well and good until the insectoid race (the Baranyk) developed an undetectable way to jam transmissions to the drone fighter ships, leaving the carriers vulnerable to attack. The tide of the war turned against humanity until a retired fighter pilot suggested pulling the old pre-drone fighter ships

Published in April of 2024 by Little, Brown, and Company. Read by Will Damron. Duration: 8 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged. Finish What We Started is a look at the MAGA/Trump movement from a different perspective. There are lots of books about Trump, his children, Roger Stone, Stephen Miller, Bill Barr, Mike Pence, or any of the other big players in the Trump Administration.  This book is different. It looks at regular people caught up in the movement in official positions and how they reacted. There is a guy who wrote a kindle e-book about the real power of political parties - the local precinct committee person in numbers. The theory is that if you get enough like-minded people in charge of the local precincts, you will control the party. That author gets the attention of Steve Bannon and his popular podcast and people start buying the book and putting its principles in action. Bannon is the only famous person featured in the book.  The book chronicles the transition from traditional

Published in 2019 by Top Shelf Productions. Illustrated by Harmony Becker. Winner of the 2020 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. Winner of the 2020 American Book Award. George Takei is most famous for his part in the the original Star Trek series and the subsequent movies. But, over the last 20 years or so, Takei has been on a personal crusade to make sure that the  Japanese Internment Camps are not forgotten.  President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order in February of 1942 to place all of the Japanese on the west coast of the United States into camps because they could not be trusted not to help the Empire of Japan. This order applied to all Japanese, even if there was absolutely no reason to suspect them of doing anything at all to help Japan. Takei's family was included in this round up and this graphic novel is that story. The graphic novel format is ideal for the story of a young man caught up in a situation he cannot possibly understand. Takei does a goo

  Published in 2020 by Hourly History. Hourly History specializes in e-book biographies and histories that take most readers about an hour to read. In some cases, an hour to cover a topic seems about right. For example, I really enjoyed their book on the  Cuban Missile Crisis .  Of course there is a massive difference in the time involved with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Mayan Civilization - one lasted for weeks, the other for centuries. That makes a big difference with what can be dealt with the series' self-imposed one hour time constraint and that difference really hurt this e-book. I have zero problems with the facts presented in this book, but I do have a problem with the way they were presented.  I found this book to be oddly written. My pet theory as I was reading it was that it was an early experiment with an AI author program - but there is an actual name attached to my kindle e-book - Henry Freeman. Oddly, the Amazon website does not list Freeman as the author.   I r

Finalist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Named to Time Magazine's 100 Best YA Books of All Time. Published by Listening Library in 2017. Read by Kyla Garcia. Duration: 9 hours, 41 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Julia is the daughter of Mexican immigrants to the United States. They live in pretty run down neighborhood in Chicago. She is in high school. Her family doesn't really understand her (basic YA fare) and she really loves writing. She is looking forward to moving on to college - like so many kids she wants nothing more than to get far, far away from where she grew up. There is one presence that looms over everything - her dead sister Olga. Olga was older than Julia and has recently died in a bizarre accident - she stepped off of a city bus and was hit by a semi-truck. Her family is traumatized, of course. To make matters worse, Julia is constantly being compared to Olga - the perfect daughter who only gets more perfect in memory. Julia digs

Published in 2021 by Penguin Audio. Read by the author, Nathaniel Philbrick. Duration: 9 hours, 34 minutes. Unabridged. George Washington looked at the newly formed United States of America and saw what it had always been - 13 disunited states with nothing to bind them together. Washington may not have been the deepest-thinking founding father, but some things he just "knew" deep in his bones. What did he know in this case? He knew that they actually all did have something in common. They all had George Washington in common. So, George went on a series of extended trips around the states until he had visited all 13 of them and he gave them a visible introduction/reminder (it depended on the state and the citizens) of what the new United States of America was all about. Travels with George is the story of those tours. Each state had its own issues. For example, Rhode Island wasn't even a state when the started traveling - it was holding out. The Southern states, especiall