DWD's Reviews

Published by Brilliance Audio in 2025. Read by Luke Daniels. Duration: 8 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. My synopsis: Elvis Cole is back on the case in The Big Empty . This time around he is working for a social media personality that specializes in making muffins and making people who watch the videos feel included, like they are talking to the girl next door.  This social media star wants to hire Cole to figure out why her dad went missing about 10 years before. She hired an quality Private Investigations firm earlier, but the results were inconclusive. Her handlers are not enthused about reopening old wounds, but she overrules them. Cole heads out to the small town (by L.A. standards) where her father disappeared and finds lots of stuff - including people who are determined to keep the secrets of the past buried in the past... My review: This was a complicated mystery with an ending that leaves a lot of moral questions about what is best for just a few people vs. what is best for...

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 2024 by 3 Girls Jumping. Read by the author, Michael Jamin. Duration: 9 hours, 39 minutes. Unabridged. Michael Jamin is a professional Hollywood screenplay writer. He works in television, working on comedy shows like King of the Hill, Just Shoot Me, and Tacoma FD . In the afterword he talked about his desire to write something more than TV shows. He wasn't unhappy with writing screenplays, but he wanted to branch out.  The stories in A Paper Orchestra are from Jamin's life. Some are funny, some wistful, some very sad. As a group, they all have the feel of NPR's Moth Radio Hour  - but instead of having a variety of performers, it is all from the same man. Jamin read the audiobook. In the afterword, he and his wife talked about how they worked together so that he could perform these stories live on stage. She is an actress and she helped him with presentation style - and I think she was successful at it. I worked my way through this audiobook rather slowly. At ...

Published in 2020 by Hourly History Hourly History specializes in one hour reads about a historical topic. Giant events in history don't fare to well in this series, but a war that lasted 2 and 1/2 months is perfect for this format. This little history tells the history of the Falklands (it keeps switching hands between the U.K., Argentina, and France with occasional periods pf complete abandonment) and continues on to detail the political situations in Argentina and the U.K. leading up to the war. I was 14 years old during this war and one of my friends was very interested in this war while it was going on so I heard about it a lot. But, it turns out that I was about half right about everything I remembered. Surprise! 14 year old misses a lot of things! I thought this was an excellent little history. I rate this e-book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Falklands War: A History from Beginning to End . 

To be published by Amazon Original Stories in February of 2025. If you have Amazon Prime, you get to choose from a limited selection of soon-to-be-published e-books every month. I am a big fan of Lee Child's Jack Reacher books, so I jumped at the chance to get this short story by Lee Child. I believe I have read every book and every short story that Lee Child has written about Jack Reacher, but I don't think I've read anything he's written that didn't feature Reacher. In fact, I didn't know he wrote about any character but Reacher. This is the story of a mathematician - a college professor. He's kind of a nobody, except that he has a specialty, some would say a gift, in an obscure little corner of mathematics. Not many people have even heard of it, let alone know anything about it.  Then, one day, he gets a call from the White House... My review: This was a quick story. It is well-written and takes several twists and turns that I did not see coming.  It'...

  Published in 2011 by Melville House. The Last Interview Series is a collection of 42 books that collect interviews with various artists, celebrities, and political figures. The book includes the last interview given by the featured person. In the case of Vonnegut, his last interview is very short because he was ill at the time so he cut it short. There are six interviews here. The best is a co-interview with fellow author Joseph Heller (best known for Catch-22 ) from Playboy (turns out their interviews were a good reason to buy the magazine!) Heller helps Vonnegut focus a bit - he tends to go off on riffs and some interviewers don't know what to do with that (the first one seemed annoyed by this tendency.) If you like Vonnegut's essays, you will enjoy these interviews. I love his collections of essays so I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Kurt Vonnegut: The Last Interview and Other Conversations .

Published by Hourly History in November of 2024. Hourly History offers free e-books every week. Each of the books take about an hour to read and the smaller topics are really quite good. The series is good for things you want to know more about, but you don't want to read a 400 page book on the topic. There is probably a large book about Wild Bill Hickock (1839-1876), but I don't want to read it. This length made for a perfectly enjoyable and interesting read. Hickock started out fighting in the pre-Civil War Bleeding Kansas conflict on the anti-slavery side, worked as a guide, a hunter, a sheriff, and eventually ended up being shut in the back of the head while playing poker in Deadwood in the Dakota Territory by a man who was too afraid to fight Hickock in a duel. I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Wild Bill Hickock: A Life from Beginning to End . 

Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 1, 2024. Synopsis: In Ushers , Martin Lorensen is being questioned by two federal agents that have noticed that he almost died twice in two mass casualty incidents. One was a school shooting that primarily took place in the classroom he shared with the shooter when he was in high school. He got to school that day, but turned around and went home when he got to the front doors - just a few minutes before the shooting started. The other was a tremendous train crash - he almost got onto the train - he was at the station with ticket in hand and walked away after telling a girl and her mom to not get on the train. The federal agents are curious. Is he some sort of terrorist that sets up mass casualty events? Or, is he the luckiest man on the East Coast? My review: This is a well-told short story with an ending  that would have been a welcome addition to the Rod Serling's old Twilight Zone series. I rate this story 5 stars out of 5. It can...

Published in October of 2024 by Worthy Books. Read by the author, April Ajoy. Duration: 8 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. Star-Spangled Jesus is the story of April Ajoy and her spiritual evolution since the political appearance of Donald Trump in 2015-2016.  Is it weird that a politician caused a spiritual evolution?  No, not in a world of Christian Nationalism. For the most basic definition, I am going to say that it is a belief that a person can't truly be an American if they aren't Christian and their rights as an American should reflect that. Also, this is precisely what happened to me, so I get it. Trump shocked me out of the Republican = Good Christian mindset because of the simple reason that he is so overtly antithetical to so many Christian ideals and is proud of it. If the previous paragraph offends or confuses you, you will hate this book.  Ajoy's pre-2015 Christian experience was much more conservative than mine and more intense. Her father was a conservative p...

Winner of Will Eisner Comic Industry Award, 2021. Winner of Harvey Award for Best Children or Young Adult Book. Published by DC Comics in 2020. Story by Gene Luen Yang. Art by Gurihiru. Superman Smashes the Klan is a graphic novel interpretation of a story arc from the old Superman radio show. At that time, Superman was the most popular radio show for children in the United States and the show's writers wanted to address racism with their young listeners. They wrote six 15 minute episodes with Superman opposing the racists of the Clan of the Fiery Cross. This was a big risk. They were worried that it would turn off their fans since 1946 America was a very racist place. The actual Klan was experiencing a moment of resurgence. Superman had only been published for 8 years at the time - he was very new and his young fans and their families could reject this move into current day politics. Turns out that the kids loved it. Ratings increased! Follow this link for another review on this...

Published in October of 2024 by Little, Brown, and Company. Read by Christine Lakin, Titus Welliver, and Madison Lintz. Duration: 10 hours, 50 minutes. Unabridged. LAPD Detective Harry Bosch first showed up in a novel in 1992. The Waiting is the 25th book in the series, but he has appeared in more than 30 books and short stories. Bosch is aging. He has aged right along with the series. He would be about 74 years old in this book and he is no longer the detective that goes out and finds the bad guys, but he does contribute from time to time. His protégé Renee Ballard is in charge of the cold case unit of LAPD.  Her unit is almost entirely made up of volunteers and they go through unsolved serious crimes and see if modern technology (like DNA comparison) can help to solve them. This book is mostly a Ballard novel, but Bosch does play a critical role in one of the three mysteries that are dealt with in this novel. I have a feeling that the "Bosch" in the Ballard and Bosch books...

Published in 2024 by Nine Innings Press. Cost of Malice is the third novel featuring attorney Jake Clearwater. Jake is an on-again off-again law professor who is often tempted to trade the classroom for the courtroom.   Clearwater is offered a chance to sit on an informal council of leaders in the prosecutor's office. Cases that may be tough to win are brought to this council and they brainstorm possible strategies and determine if they are even worth the effort. The book deals with three of these cases.  Case one is a murder case in which the two primary witnesses are jailhouse snitches. Case two is a horrific child abuse case in which one spouse literally beat a child to death at the direction of the other spouse. Clearwater wants to convict them both equally despite the fact that one of them literally never laid a finger on the victim. Case three is a school shooting case modeled heavily on the Oxford, Michigan case that ended in April of 2024. It feels right that Cl...

  Highly Recommended Originally published in 1980. A mutual friend in publishing approached artist/graphic designer Ivan Chermayeff and author Kurt Vonnegut with a proposal. He wanted them to work together on a book. His proposal was that Chermayeff work up some illustrations and present them to Vonnegut and then Vonnegut would write a book based on those illustrations. Vonnegut, even then, was an internationally celebrated author. Chermayeff created many of the images Americans see every day - the corporate logos for such companies as Chase Bank, National Geographic, Scholastic Books, Univision, NBC, PBS, and more. Chermayeff presented Vonnegut with a series of simple, childlike paintings of the moon, star, and the sun. They came with no explanation. There is also a diagram of an eyeball. I do not know if that was part of Chermayeff's art or if Vonnegut added it, but I would imagine that Vonnegut added it. Vonnegut took the drawings and made Sun Moon Star , a beautiful children...

Highly Recommended. Published in 2021 by HarperAudio. Read by Ron Howard, Clint Howard, and Bryce Dallas Howard. Duration: 13 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged. Ron Howard and his brother Clint Howard practically grew up on America's television screens. Ron Howard starred in the  The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days for a combined 15 years of his early life. Ron has since gone on to become a prolific director. His credits include Cocoon , Willow , Cinderella Man , and Solo: A Star Wars Movie . His movies have won 9 Academy Awards. Clint Howard starred in the TV show Gentle Ben when was a little kid and has since gone on to become the quintessential model of a working actor. He has more than 200 acting credits, including the original Star Trek series, Austin Powers , The Waterboy , and a recurring role on the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful . The Howard brothers are the sons of a working Hollywood actor named Rance Howard. Rance's credits look a lot like his son Clint'...

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...

Originally published in 1967. Audiobook published in 2004 by Listening Library. Read by Jim Fyfe, Duration: 5 hours, 9 minutes. Unabridged. Listed on BBC's list of 100 Most Inspiring Novels in 2019 . Author is the winner of the inaugural Margaret A. Edwards Award for YA  My synopsis: This is a true YA classic. Some consider this to be the book that invented the YA genre. Written by a high school student in the 1960's, The Outsiders is the story of a group of "greasers" in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  Greasers are poor teens who grow up on the tough side of town. Adult supervision is pretty lax and they spend their days smoking, flirting with girls, and working. They join loose gangs and fight among themselves, but they all unite when their biggest enemies come around. Their biggest enemies are the rich kids who cruise the poor side of town looking for a fight. The main character is the oddly-named Ponyboy. Ponyboy's deceased parents like to give their children odd names. Po...

Published in 2014 by WordFire Press My Synopsis: Veteran (and prolific) author Kevin J. Anderson delivers a compelling short story/novella in the tradition of the golden age of sci-fi with Comrades in Arms .  Humanity is at war with an insectoid race that uses psychic energy to create weapons and even peer into the future.  The story is set in an asteroid belt way out in the middle of nowhere. Some of the asteroids have breathable atmospheres, but they're not comfortable for either race to live on for long.  Even though the asteroids have limited value, there is no way either side will give them up so the war has ground itself into a stalemate of sorts.  However, humanity has developed a new weapon that is starting to turn the tide. Mortally wounded humans are brought back to the base and given the Robocop treatment. Their bodies are refitted with armored limbs, organs are replaced, and a "werewolf trigger" is installed deep in the brain. The werewolf trigger sets th...

Book version originally published in 2023. Audiobook published in July of 2024 by My Story Productions. Read by Shamaan Casey. Duration: 12 hours, 7 minutes. Unabridged. Wings of Redemption is the final installment of the Forgotten Fleet Trilogy . This sci-fi series is about a future war between humanity and an insectoid species. The series focuses on a squadron of space carrier-based fighter pilots on the front lines. The fact that it is focused on this relatively small group of people is the real strength of this trilogy. It doesn't get caught up in tales of political intrigue at the macro level, instead it follows these pilots on the bleeding edge of the front lines. There are successes and very tough losses. The risks are personal and also galaxy-wide. If these pilots can't help turn the tide, the war will be lost for everyone. Each book of the trilogy has a distinct feel. The first book ( Wings of Honor ) focused on the recruitment and training of these pilots against the...

Published in 2017 by Blackstone Audio, Inc. Read by Bahni Turpin. Duration: 5 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. My Synopsis Ban This Book is the story of Amy Anne Ollinger, a fourth grade girl who is shocked when she gets to the library and finds out that her favorite book, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler , has been removed from the shelves as part of a book ban. Amy Anne reads all sorts of books (except Captain Underpants books - they're kind of silly) but she loves this book and comes back to it often. She has read it 13 times and wanted to read it again.  Amy Anne is told that a parent has complained to the school board about several books and they skipped the established plan to deal with these sorts of complaints and simply voted to remove them.  Amy Anne's parents buy her a copy of the book and she takes it to school to read when she can during the day. Her friends find out about the book ban, see that she has a copy and ask to read it. In return, they...