DWD's Reviews

Published in 2023 by Hourly History. Aretha Franklin (1942-2018) was a true music legend. Nicknamed the Queen of Soul, she dominated the charts in the late 1960s and early 1970s and popped in and out of the charts for the rest of her life. She appeared on television, in movies, and, of course, in concert. Hourly History specializes in short biographies and histories that most readers can complete in about an hour. The reader is not going to get a super-detailed biography, but the reader will get a decent overview. Some of these biographies are quite good, some read like a well-written Wikipedia page. This book was much more like the latter than the former. It went through the Franklin's life and told all of the details, but you never get a sense of what she was like as a person.  I was pleased to see that they mentioned her small but outstanding role in The Blues Brothers . I think it is one of the major highlights in a movie full of highlights. I rate this e-book 3 stars out of 5

Published in 2020 by ChristianAudio. Read by Neil Shah. Duration: 8 hours, 5 minutes. Unabridged. I heard about The Other Side of the Wall on The Holy Post podcast . I knew that there were Palestinian Christians in Gaza, but I hadn't given it much thought. Generally, I find the Palestinian/Israeli conflict too intractable to think about. It's not that I don't care, it's that simple solutions (or even insanely complicated solutions) don't even seem to be on the horizon at all and in a world with so many problems close at hand, it's easy not to think about problems half a world away. My bandwidth is just not that big. But, the interview was good - it came from an unexpected source in this conflict. The podcast host interviewed Munther Isaac, a Lutheran pastor and teacher. He is also a Palestinian from Gaza. There has been a continual Christian presence in Gaza as long as anyone can tell, although it is dwindling as Palestinian Christians opt out of the conflict z