DWD's Reviews

Published December 2011 by GraphicAudio Multicast Performance Length: 52 minutes. Unabridged. This short audiobook was originally a short story in a larger collection but author Joseph Nassise has expanded on this story with several other books. GraphicAudio has adapted it to a radio drama format with multiple cast members and plenty of special effects. The Templar Chronicles: This Cleansing Fire features Captain Cade Williams, a member of the hidden Catholic order the Knights Templar. They are charged with fighting supernatural forces. One would think they might be a bunch of priests, but they are an elite commando unit carrying modern combat weapons and special swords. In this story, the team is sent out to find and destroy a group of Asian vampires. They are not Asians, per se, but this type of vampire originated in Asia. Another team was already sent in but they are not reporting back and Captain Williams and his team fear the worst. GraphicAudio's high production qu...

Written in 1919 and first published in All-Story Weekly magazine in 1921, The Efficiency Expert is a rare non-science fiction book for Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. I read it on my kindle but if it were a paper book it is estimated to have been about 130 pages. The Efficiency Expert features Jimmy Torrance, a talented young college student who is a great athlete and natural leader and all around great guy to have at a party but  does not take his studies seriously. When he is almost tossed out of college during his senior year for having no apparent hope of completing the curriculum in four years, Torrance buckles down and somehow passes. Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) Having turned over a new leaf, he turns down the opportunity to manage the family factory and decides that he will move to Chicago and make it on his own. Jimmy's expectation that the world will come knocking at his door because he has a college degree i...

Published in 2008 by Thomas Nelson Ted Dekker is a stalwart member of the Christian publishing world. He usually offers up a large helping of action, mystery and suspense with a Christian flavor. Dekker's strengths are maintaining a quick pace and the creation and development of interesting characters. In Adam  an FBI psychology expert named Daniel Clark is on the trail of a serial killer nicknamed "Eve" (he writes "Eve" on the walls above each of his victims) who kills twenty-something women every dark of the moon. He leaves no clues behind except that he drives a stolen white van, eats candy bars, drinks cherry Cokes, kidnaps his victims with an ether-like medicine that knocks them out. he kills with a form of meningitis and his rituals have strong religious overtones. He always leaves those clues and no others. Clark is obsessed by this case and it has wrecked his marriage and threatens his career. One night his team almost catches "Eve" bu...

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2012. Read by Joe Barrett Duration: 8 hours, 55 minutes . Unabridged James McPherson is undoubtedly the most popular living Civil War historian. He writes in a common, easy-to-understand style that flows nicely and does not dumb down the facts. His latest book, War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865 continues that tradition. Union Admiral David D. Porter - Leader of the Naval forces in the Vicksburg campaign. If you read a typical Civil War history you get a just a little bit of the information, usually in passing, about the war on the open sea, in the bays, harbors, up and down the rivers and even in the swamps. McPherson reverses that arrangement in this book and focuses on the strategies, personalities and challenges that faced both navies and mentions the land campaigns in passing. If you are a frequent reader of Civil War books, little of this material will be new. But, the special focus does make th...

Published by Bantam Audio Publishing in 1991. Multicast performance.  Duration: 1 hour, 4 minutes .   Louis L'Amour's famed Sackett family adventures continue with this full cast dramatization of of a short story about William Tell Sackett. Tell Sackett appears in seven L'Amour novels and two of his short stories. In Booty for a Badman , Tell Sackett is prospecting for gold and not finding anything. He is close to giving up completely when he is approached by one of his successful gold-mining neighbors with a proposal. The successful miners are piling up quite a stash of gold (50 pounds among the group) but they fear their claims will be jumped if they leave for town to deposit it in the bank for safekeeping. Even worse, they could be robbed and killed along the way - a fate that has struck other miners So, they want Tell Sackett to sneak their gold to the bank in exchange for a small cut of the gold. This way, their gold gets deposited, Sackett can make hi...

Published by HighBridge Audio Duration: about 2 hours. Every installment of HighBridge Audio's NPR Driveway Moments series is composed of collections of stories that aired on NPR. In this case, the common theme is cats.  The stories aired from 1984 to 2011 and cover everything from lions to mock youtube videos of a cat running for the Senate (Hank the Cat - see the video below) to the origins of the domestic house cat to cats being used in the fight against AIDS. But, the heart of the collection are the stories about the connection between every day house cats and the people they live with. There are travelling cats, vacationing cats, a cat that lives in a hotel and several stories memorializing cats who have passed on. All of the stories in the collection have first-rate production values but, as always happens in any collection, some stories are better than others. The cover of the audiobook promises "Radio stories that won't let you go" and some d...

Published by Broadside e-books on November 15, 2011 Sold by HarperCollins Publishers Estimated length in pages: 26 pages Obama: The Greatest President in the History of Everything is political satire from one end to the other. It is not subtle, but it is humorous. If you are easily offended by political criticism of President Obama, I do not recommend this book for you. Fleming has written this book as though he is a fawning sycophant of the President - everything is twisted to be something to praise about the president. I imagined the author reading in breathless awe of the man. Here is a sample: "When it was time for him to finally enter politics, he headed to the place best known for learning good values in government: Chicago. There he became a community organizer, one of the most important jobs known to man. As a result of his hard work, everyone in his community was alphabetized, placed within the Dewey Decimal, and color-coded. It was the most organized commu...

Perhaps the Beginning of a Beautiful Series? Published in 2011 by Baen So, David Weber decided to make a Young Adult (YA) series. Yes, a sci-fi author known best for his highly-descriptive military sci-fi works characterized by very long conversations is entering a field where too much violence and too much conversation are both problematic. Well, I thought, this should be interesting. Weber expanded a short story that first appeared in an short story collection More Than Honor from 1998 as part of the extensive Honor Harrington series. Eleven year old Stephanie Harrington is the main character in A Beautiful Friendship and she is an ancestor of Honor Harrington. Stephanie lives on the planet Sphinx, a fairly new colony that is part of a star kingdom called Manticore. Stephanie's family has moved to the planet because their skills are needed but Stephanie is bored by frontier life. However, she is intrigued by a mystery that is being reported across the planet - celery ...

An Over-The-Top Satire About College Published by  CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform in 2012. We all know that going to college is a major life event. Everything changes in a student's daily life - new place to live, new routines, new friends, new responsibilities and, of course, being exposed to new ideas.  But, those of us who have gone to college know that the happy brochures that prospective parents pore over with their teenagers are not quite reality. Despite the promises to support young academics in their quest for truth and knowledge, incompetent administration, petty professors and arbitrary decisions often act to make college less of a quest for knowledge and more a test of a young per son's ability to bend and twist to the whims of a bureaucratic system. Can you go along to get along? If so, step forward and get your diploma. David Stag's Bill Smith Goes to College is a satire, somewhat in the vein of Jonathan Swift's famed essay, A Mode...

Hard-boiled detective mysteries at their best Published by Highbridge Audio in 2012 Duration: 6 hours, 31 minutes. Narrated by Peter Ganim, Richard Ferrone, Jeff Gurner, David Ledoux Black Mask magazine was a classic of the era of the pulp magazines. It's specialty was detective stories. If you love the movies with the hard-boiled detective in a trench coat with a smart mouth, a quick gun and even quicker fists who gets hired by some "dame" then this is your series. Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) In the seventh release of the series, Highbridge Audio brings us five stories of varying lengths read by four different narrators. Every story begins with a short introduction to each author that includes a mini-biography of their career and of the characters featured. Many of these characters that made their way to the Hollywood big screen and the title story ( The Shrieking Skeleton ) is written by Charles M. Green, a pseudonym of Erle Stanley Gardner, a prolif...

Great Escapist Fiction . Published in 2012 by NAL (New American Library) Linwood Barclay. I came across him almost by accident about 3 years ago and he is one of my favorite authors to go looking for. He doesn't write series (at least not anymore) so you can just jump in and go for a ride. His books feature regular guys who get stuck in an extraordinary circumstance not of their making. Linwood Barclay In Trust Your Eyes two grown brothers are re-united due to the death of their father. One of the brothers (Ray) is  a political cartoonist. The other, Thomas, has some sort of schizophrenia that keeps him housebound. To be honest, he seemed more autistic to me (as a teacher I have ran across enough students on the autistic spectrum to readily identify the behaviors) but that is neither here nor there. Thomas has an obsession - maps. He hangs them on the wall, he studies them, he memorizes them and he cruises the internet everyday looking at Whirl360, a website that...

A question of who will find whom first.  Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2012. Read by Armand Schultz Duration: 12 hours, 3 minutes. Brad Thor changes things up a bit for his long-running character Scot Harvath in this installment. Usually, Harvath is out in the world at large fighting international terrorists. Harvath's unique talents and dogged determination make him a very powerful weapon in the world of counter-terrorism. In Black List , Harvath and a member of the Athena team (the all female Delta Force-type unit) are attacked when entering a safe house in Paris, France. She dies and Harvath barely escapes. He uses his extensive contacts to work his way to safety and try to figure out how the safe house was compromised. As he tries to re-connect to his employer it dawns on him that his entire network of operatives is under attack - and this time the enemy is not a terrorist network. This time, the enemy is an American enemy and Harvath is coming home to ...

A Worthy (and Very Different) Follow-Up to Goldberg's Liberal Fascism Published by Sentinel HC in 2012 . Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism  is one of the most profound political books that I have read in my entire life. It changed my view of politics and made me focus a lot of thinking that I had been doing about the actions of government in our daily lives. So, four years later, I was pleased to hear that Goldberg had written another book. The Tyranny of Clichés is not as serious as Liberal Fascism , but it does a worthy job of going after lazy thinking in our political discourse. The book goes after shorthand, cliched arguments that people use to try to win (or not lose) political arguments. Take the phrase "Violence never solved anything." This is said by any number of people to protest a war or people having guns or things of that nature. I have a personal history of that story. I used to teach in a small high school with a very liberal English teacher wh...

A Trip Down Memory Lane Published in 1961 by The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc Intended for upper elementary students. Thirty-five years ago books like Lew Wallace: Boy Writer filled my library's book shelves in Hope, Indiana and I went through them like a hot knife through butter. I am sure they are a big reason why I enjoy history so much today. I remember enthusiastically reading about the adventures of young Daniel Boone, Abraham Lincoln and even about Martha Washington and other "yucky" girls as I worked my way down the shelf. Union Major General Lew Wallace (1827-1905) I have next to my computer a 1961 hardback copy of Lew Wallace: Boy Writer, part of the Childhood of Famous Americans series .  As suggested by the series title Lew Wallace: Boy Writer focuses on the childhood of future the Civil War general, territorial governor of New Mexico (during the days of Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War) and author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ . It featur...

A Dual Biography of Sorts Published by National Geographic in 2012. Note: This is a YA book aimed at 5th graders and above. This adult enjoyed the book also. From time to time the dual biography comes back into vogue. Dual biographies are a great way to compare and contrast two people's lives and, in this case, this style is used to compare and contrast two different organizations: The Ku Klux Klan and Superman, Inc. and see how these two radically different groups interacted. There is, of course, so such thing as Superman, Inc. - I made that up. Superman is owned by D.C. Comics, but there are people who make all sorts of decisions on how to present Superman. What will he stand for and stand against? What will the next comic be like? How about the next movie? Superman Versus the Ku Klux Klan   tells the story of the creation of Superman (and the two young Jewish boys from Ohio who created him) and how Superman quickly caught on once a publisher finally took him on in 1938. ...

Three stories in one: A biography, a mystery and an adventure Published in 2012 by Regnery History The USS Grunion was a top of the line submarine for the U.S. Navy in 1942. Literally, the fastest submarine in the fleet and outfitted with the latest in torpedo technology (magnet activated designed to go off near ships) and led by the highly-respected Lieutenant Commander Jim Abele, the USS Grunion was sent to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska to harass Japanese supply ships (for those who did not know, Japanese forces held parts of the Aleutian Islands for a little more than in a year from 1942 to 1943). The USS Grunion performed well, sinking two Japanese submarines and damaging a freighter despite problems with the torpedoes. What the crew of the USS Grunion did not know was that these advanced torpedoes did not work like they were supposed to. They did not track well towards their targets (although the magnetic trigger, called a magnetic pistol, was sup...

Lots of plot threads eventually tie together Published by HarperAudio in 2012. Performed by Jonathan Davis. Duration: 9 hours, 38 minutes. I have been a Phillip Margolin fan since I read his book The Burning Man nearly 15 years ago. I worked at a used book store at the time and I remember turning a couple of people on to Margolin's stuff. I must admit that I have not read some of his more recent books, not out of lack of interest, but mostly due to the pressure of a massive To-Be-Read pile (do you REALLY need to add yet another book to the pile?). Phillip Margolin So, when I came across a Margolin audiobook, I knew that this was a good chance to catch up while not adding to the To-Be-Read pile, since I usually listen while doing things like driving. So, what did I think of Capitol Murder ? First, this book is at least the third book in a series following the adventures of Brad Miller and Dana Cutler. This is not really a problem because Margolin sets up things e...