DWD's Reviews

Published by Hourly History in 2024. Brian Epstein was a record store owner from Liverpool that heard the Beatles play in a local club and decided that they were going to be really big and he knew how to make that happen. He asked for a meeting to discuss being their manager and about two months later they had an official deal. The young Beatles were impressed by Epstein. He dressed well, had polished mannerisms, drove a nice car, and had the most successful record store in Liverpool.  Not much about Epstein's earlier ventures would have indicated that Epstein would have had any success at managing the Beatles. He was a college dropout and had bounced around from one thing to another until his father let him use part of the family store to sell records. He parlayed that into a stand-alone store and became well-known in the Liverpool music scene.  To be fair, this was a different music scene than what followed from the 1970s. It was very much a bottom up industry - a band could...

Originally published by Knopf in 2009. Winston Groom will always be best known as the author of Forrest Gump , but he should be equally well known as the author of a series of well-told American histories. Included in those histories is a trilogy of Civil War histories that focus on the Western Theater of the war. Vicksburg 1863 is the second book in the trilogy, but it can be easily read as a stand-alone history. After a short introduction to the war itself, it follows Grant's campaign to take the Mississippi River away from the Confederacy, beginning with a mess of a battle in Missouri that proved nothing of any importance except that Grant was game to fight and push forward, even if the conditions were not perfect. That, it turns out, was pretty much the key to Grant's eventual success in this campaign and in the war. From there, we follow Grant through Kentucky, into Tennessee and the terrible Battle of Shiloh. Although ultimately successful, this marked a low point for Gra...

Published in January of 2025 by Hourly History. Hourly History specializes in biographies and histories that take about an hour to read.  In this case, Hourly History has a history of a favorite in my household as I grew up - John Denver. The book gives a good accounting of his early life, his early struggles as a musician, and his impressive drive that just kept pushing him forward until he made it. Once he made it, there was no one bigger than John Denver - He had a series of number one songs, number one albums, multiple awards, and movies and TV show appearances. But, it all seemed to come at the expense of his personal life. This little biography covers the timeline of his life pretty well, but skimps on any sort of analysis on his uneasy position as a Country Music artist. For example, he won their official awards, but many mainstay country music artists considered him an interloper - a folk artist who was sort of assigned the title of "country artist." Still, this was a...

Published by Hachette Audio in 2007. Read by Robert Petkoff. Duration: 6 hours, 49 minutes. Unabridged . The premise of this book is very strong - what if a mafia hitman goes into witness protection, becomes a doctor in a hospital, and then runs into a former mafia colleague who has come to the hospital for a serious surgery. They recognize each other and deadly hijinks ensue. Sounds good, but the follow through leaves a lot to be desired. The main character is unlikeable almost all of the time - deeply unlikeable. The more you learn about him, the worse he gets. On top of that, the parade of horrible events that happened to him is simply ridiculous - literally stuff stolen from a Timothy Dalton James Bond movie, except even more over the top. The audiobook reader is great, but the text of the book - not so much. I rate this book 1 star out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell .