DWD's Reviews

Lackluster characters hurt a very interesting premise Read by David Colacci Published by Tantor Media, November 2010. Duration: 9 hours, 56 minutes, Unabridged. Ultra-prolific author Alan Dean Foster introduces yet another series with The Human Blend , the first installment of a trilogy set in a relatively near-future Savannah, Georgia. In this interesting new world the direst predictions about global warming have come true. America’s southern states have become near-tropical. Flooding ocean waters have buried coastal cities, forced them to move onto stilts or have caused cities to move inland. Much of Florida is underwater, the Everglades have swallowed the rest. Political changes have swept the world as well. The United States is now part of a larger country called Namerica. Several countries in Asia are equal to, if not more important than Namerica. The moon, Mars and Jupiter’s moon Titan have been colonized as well. Alan Dean Foster But, the most important changes ar...

2000 years in 387 pages - A great effort but somewhat unsatisfying. Published in 1997. Don't get me wrong - I am came to The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years as a true fan of Bernard Lewis. His book The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror was one of the more thought-provoking books I read last year. However, this book is quite different than 'Crisis'. It's scope is massive, and it is a history book rather than a work of examination and informed conjecture. Lewis addresses these shortcomings in his introduction and admits that it will be a difficult undertaking to do it well. He acknowledges that whatever format he chooses to cover this history, it will be unsatisfying for some. I give him credit for doing it well, but not as great as the other books and articles of his that I've read. Bernard Lewis The book is broken up into three general sections. The first is a general overview of the Middle East over the last 2,...

Published in 2002. Beyond Suspicion is a quick-moving book and is a sequel to Grippando's first published novel 'The Pardon'. I read 'The Pardon' many years ago, but reading the first book is not a necessary requirement - Grippando sets the stage very well in this book so it can be a 'stand alone' novel. I shot through this book very quickly - the plot drags you in pretty well and Grippando's writing style keeps the book moving along at a quick pace. The main character is fairly average and his world is suddenly turned upside down by one case and its connections to the underworld. Murder, mayhem and one family crisis after another keep it interesting. Grippando fills this novel with a multitude on interesting characters, any one of which would be strong enough to be the main character in a book. A good solid read - a great summertime novel. This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Beyond Suspicion . I rate this book 4 stars out of...

So, what is a 'rawboned' mystery? My copy of  The Man Who Met the Train had a snippet from a review from the Chicago Sun-Times in which they said it was a 'rawboned' mystery. I was intrigued by that characterization and can now report to you what that means. It means that this mystery is sparsely written - no extravagant detail and most conversations aren't even fully fleshed out. It's a quick and dirty read about some quick and dirty crimes set in two small towns in Depression-era South Dakota. In style and setting it reminded me of a western. The hero, Carl Wilcox, comes upon a wrecked car. Inside are four dead adults and one survivor - a little girl. Wilcox is eventually hired on by local bigwigs to investigate the circumstances of the crime, seeing as how he has previous experience as a police officer. Wilcox starts to pull at the loose threads of this crime and starts to discover that some very prominent local names are being implica...

A great legal thriller Published in 2001. The oddly titled The Jury (it's not about the jury at all - they are barely mentioned) is a sharp, tight legal thriller that hums right along until the neat little twist at the end. Paul Madriani and his law partner Harry Hinds have are defending a murder suspect, a genetic researcher named David Crone. The book joins the trial already in progress. Madriani and Hinds have one big problem, though. The unflappable Crone keeps so many secrets - trade secrets, research secrets and vital information that he just didn't think was important enough to mention to his attorneys that they don't really know where they stand in any of this. Throw in a family friend with a genetic disorder that may be cured by Crone's research, you get a solid mixture of urgency, ambiguity and frustration that kept me glued until the end. I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. This book is found on Amazon.com here: The Jury by Steve Martini . Reviewed...

The Past and Present parts were very well done but... ...the future part was a different story. More on that later. Van Doren's A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future is a truly remarkable book. He breaks down a number of key philosophies and religions and makes them palatable to the reader and also demonstrates their influence over time. It is a very well written book - very enjoyable to read. He is particularly good at succintly describing why the end of the Roman Empire was such a disaster for knowledge and explaining why the Church was afraid of the astronomy discoveries of the Renaissance. Problem areas: -He almost exclusively focuses on Western Thought. Very little Asian philosophy, except for Confucius. How can it be a History of Knowledge when it leaves out most Asian thought? -Sometimes he blithely labels things as fact. For example, he claims that Jesus was born on December 25th while every Christian church body on the planet merely cla...

Very good, wonderful historical detail Hernan Cortes (1485-1547) In my mind, the Aztecs have been short-changed by modern authors. There has not been enough attention to them and their interesting story. And Cortes! If ever anyone should get high marks for having ambition and bravery in spades, it's him. Anyway, the historical details are well done in the book. Falconer almost makes you feel like you are there with the Spanish as the arrive at the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. He has created a multi-dimensional Cortes, rather than the stereotypical 'evil conqueror' Cortes (although, at the end I lost the feel for Cortes - I don't know if Falconer lost interest or he also lost his feel for the man). In most books and texts Cortes is portrayed as a gold-crazed, land-crazed conqueror - but his motivations are far more complex - including a complete disgust with the Mesoamerica's fascination with human sacrifice and the cannibalistic consumption of t...

Pretty good small budget movie While not the best movie I've ever seen, this movie does what it sets out to do - draw the viewer in for some thriller action. 2 friends and a little brother have travelled to Wisconsin for an evening of booze and girls at a backwoods bar in the winter. After a barroom brawl a 1950s Cadillac menaces them and eventually persues them - but our 3 protagonists have no idea why. Randy Quaid as the local yokel good ol' boy sheriff is the only actor you're likely to recognize but, in my mind, young, pez-consuming Josh Hammond steals the show The guys in the cadillac I am unwilling to be a spoilersport, so I won't go into great details, but you can imagine the tension that develops with car chases in the winter on twisty country roads, a hitchhiking sheriff in the backseat spouting off platitudes and asking pointed questions and a general feeling that things are spinning out of control make the movie work. The DVD commentary is intere...

A piece of history, yet still accessible I should note that I am a lifelong Lutheran and Martin Luther is one of my personal heroes, despite his numerous and many flaws. An Open Letter on Translating is a September, 1530 letter to Luther's critics concerning his translation of the Bible from Latin into German. This was very controversial at the time and it led to a lot of disagreement (even wars) over who should be allowed to read the Bible and who should interpret its meaning. Martin Luther (1483-1546) Luther defends his translation in his very best combative style. He correctly notes that not all turns of phrases translate literally from one language to another. He notes, along with a liberal dose of insulting names for his opponents, that he and his team of translators did a lot of research and took great care to make his translation accessible and accurate. What is perhaps most amazing is that this document is amazingly readable for anyone conversant with the iss...

Story of a trip by Mark Twain to Bermuda - starts fairly weak and ends strong Mark Twain (1835-1910) The title of this essay has it right - these are just a series of stories about a trip that Twain and some friends took to Bermuda from New York City. Twain wrote this for "The Atlantic" in 1877 and his wry style makes him an excellent travel companion. In reality, Twain's story of the trip is the story of the people he meets along the way. Most of the stories are humorous, some are duds and about an equal number are quite funny. I won't forget the story about the town with the cat situation for quite a while. Twain on Bermuda: " We never met a man, or woman, or child anywhere in this sunny island who seemed to be unprosperous, or discontented, or sorry about anything. This sort of monotony became very tiresome presently, and even something worse. The spectacle of an entire nation groveling in contentment is an infuriating thing ....

Pretty good thriller I feel silly, but it wasn't until I was 85% done with The Night Watchman that I actually read the entire description on the back of this book. In my defense, it is rather wordy.... Anyway, it was not until that point that I realized that this was actually a "Christian" cop book. That doesn't bother me since I'm a Christian. But, my experiences with Christian fiction have been mostly negative. A lot of it is clumsy, to say the least. So, I guess this is a long way to say that this one was not clumsy. Instead, it was different. It is a "Christian" detective story in which the main character is not Christian. Not even searching. Not even close. He carries a big gun and he uses it lots of times. He lies. He cheats. Praying bothers him. He suspects that church-going people are weak and does not believe that God can change a person's life. Mary Mynheir So, on to the book. The main character is Ray Quinn, a h...

An entertaining, historically solid introduction to the Civil War for 4th graders and over I just discovered this series and I've been reading a few of them for fun this summer. You Wouldn't Want to Be a Civil War Soldier is entertaining and it contains solid, accurate history presented in a visually interesting format. While I've been looking a few of these over for my own personal entertainment, my almost 4th grade daughter has been sneaking them out of the stack and reading them without any encouragement from me. Imagine! Kids surreptitiously reading history! The only complaint I have about the back is the total lack of African American faces in the drawings. The book notes that 179,000 African American soldiers served in the war, which is good but fails to include a single African American in the drawings. While it mostly makes sense due to the strict segregation of the army (the book follows one soldier from Connecticut who joins before the First Bat...

ALA Notable Children’s Book Award Winner. Winner of the Book Sense Book of the Year Children's Literature Award. Published in 2003. I saw the ads for the Inkheart movie and decided to read the book first because, as everyone knows, the book is almost always better than the movie. Anyway, the Inkheart book in built upon a interesting premise - the people and characters from a fantasy novel come to life.  I do not give the book 5 stars. The book is a dark piece of fiction - relentlessly so. The mood is nearly always somber and I found the book compelling but often depressing. The plot is fairly simple and the bad men in the book do a lot more threatening than real evil, but they do evil things - mutilations, burning people out of their homes, kidnappings, blackmail, and so on. I have no problem with books that depict that evil exists in the world. As C.S. Lewis noted: "Those who say that children must not be frightened may mean two things. They may mean (1) ...

A change of pace for Morrell Originally Published in 1977. David Morrell is one of my favorite authors. The only problem with being a Morrell fan is that he's not a big name author like King, Koontz or Grisham. You have to explain who he is to author book people and they usually get turned off when you mention one of the most famous characters in fiction: Rambo. Too bad because Morrell writes multiple genres - suspense, historical fiction, horror - and he does them well and he is definitely should be known more as the creator of the cartoonish image most people have of Rambo. Anyway, I'm slowly working my way through his older books and enjoying myself. David Morrell Last Reveille is Morrell's first foray into historical fiction. First published in 1977, the 1994 edition has an eight page introduction to the book that sets the book up quite well. He notes that it is similar to the John Wayne movie The Shootist in that there is an aging character that bec...

A great introduction to a terrifically important writer For most people, including this reviewer, C.S. Lewis was the gateway to G.K. Chesterton. Lewis, of course, is famous for being THE Christian apologist for his generation - a man who did not believe but then, after his conversion, was able to voice the thoughts and beliefs for millions with such landmark books as Mere Christianity . When I found out that it was the writings of G.K. Chesterton that helped to convert Lewis I had to start to looking into Chesterton (fortunately I have a Kindle - they have more than 2 dozen Chesterton books and essays for free, so I was able to get my feet wet in the ocean of writing that Chesterton produced without any worries). That being said, I am a relative newbie to Chesterton so this biography was a welcome addition to my on again off again studies of the man. Rather than give a blow by blow book report of this biography, I'll outline its general st...

Entertaining, but not his best work. Fitzhugh specializes in filling his books with absurd characters in absurd situations. This is my third Fitzhugh book and I have to rank it in second. It is funny, but at times his characterization of New Yorkers as oblivious and callous to the violence that can be inherent in that city is even a bit much for me. Bill Fitzhugh The premise of Pest Control is that a down and out exterminator who has come up with an entirely new way to control pests is confused for a professional hit man - a top level hit man. Soon, other top level hit men are swarming after the exterminator in an effort to eliminate the newest "star" in the hit man world. The overall premise is funny but the book somehow fails to hit the high level of promise that this reader anticipated. That said, this would be a heck of a good movie if you get the right actors involved. If you've never read a Fitzhugh novel, I'd recommend Cross Dressing ...

For fans of Kuralt, this will be a treat! Originally published by Audioworks in 1997 Read by the author, Charles Kuralt Duration: 1 hour, 9 minutes Abridged I hadn't thought about Charles Kuralt for years - until I ran into Charles Kuralt's Summer . Kuralt pulls summer-based items from his reports from CBS News and reminds us (this listener anyway) that we've missed his folksy approach on the reporting on everyday life in America since his passing a few years ago. Kuralt lays it on a bit thick from time to time but he avoids being too schmaltzy as he reports to us about Maypole dances in Minnesota and tubin' down the Apple River in Wisconsin. The best reports are on side two, where he focuses on the Fourth of July. He travels to Gettysburg and Independence Hall, New York City and Brazil and takes us along for an emotional ride. Although he takes a lot of his audio from his actual television reports, only once or twice did this listener feel that he was missi...

Fun story, but not completely resolved Published in 2008 by Rodale Books. Mark Milhone's memoir is about his self-described "Year from Hell," which included marriage troubles, a reconciliation with his dad and a road trip to pick up a used BMW he purchased on E-Bay (who does that?) is a fun, sad read. Millhone tells his story about the death of his mother, the death of his first dog, the near-death of his newborn son, the dog bite his oldest son suffers and the deterioration of his marriage. So, does he resolve these issues? Not really. He tells his story in an entertaining manner. His relationship with his father is strengthened (as a kid, his father sent his number one man from the office to take him to see The Empire Strikes Back because he has no time for his family) but the other issues are not fixed, there is just a renewed resolve to work on them. Nonetheless, it's still a fun read - good for a summer trip. Lots of parts to read and discuss w...

My first Elvis Cole novel - not my last Originally published in 1995. I heard Voodoo River   as an audiobook way back in 2005 - it was not my first choice but I gave it a shot and I was very pleased. The story was convoluted but had a real feel to it. Elvis is tough, but not Superman. The situation was complicated but not impossible. I seem destined to be perpetually out of sync with Elvis and the real order of his series. Voodoo River is #5 in the Elvis Cole series. In Voodoo River , Elvis leaves Los Angeles for the Louisiana bayou country in search of the birth parents of a Hollywood starlet who is in need of some medical information. Soon enough, Cole finds himself in trouble with the local crime boss who has a special use for alligators.  If you are familiar with the series (as I now am) this book is pivotal as it is where Cole meets Lucy . For Crais (the author) this is a homecoming of sorts since he was raised in Louisiana.The audiobook was well-read and the reade...

A good read, not Morrell's best work. Originally published in 1993. No one writes better than Morrell when it comes to the "fugitive" novel - one man hunted by many in a cross-country chase. David Morrell In Assumed Identity , a military intelligence deep cover operative has been accidentally exposed and an operation goes sour. Soon, the operative is being blackmailed and chased by an attractive reporter and the unwanted attention causes the operative's handlers to "terminate" a number of people and the operative comes to believe that his own life is in danger as well. Throw in a damsel in distress (actually two) and a James Bond-esque villain and the chase is on! Unfortunately, a great story is slightly marred by the protagonist's constant internal psychobabble about who he really is (he confuses himself with the various personas he's become over the years). An even bigger problem is the ultra-rich villain. He's a parody of the...