DWD's Reviews

Published by HarperAudio in March of 2019. Read by Will Damron. Duration: 6 hours, 55 minutes. Unabridged. Arthur C. Brooks was the President of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute from 2008 to shortly after the publication of this book in 2019.  Brooks is deeply worried with the present level of political discourse in America. Debates where the candidates just insult one another. Derogatory comments rather than actual proposals. Look at your typical Facebook political argument. Anonymous posters with names like "Trump_2020_Forever" arguing with "Trumpsters_Suck" and using terms like "libtards" and "conservacunts" while they insist that the other side is nothing but a literal bunch of communists and Nazis. This is getting us nowhere. And that is his point in Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt . What we are showing each other is contempt. He quotes a couples' counselor ...

Published by Oasis Audio in 2013. Read by Dean Gallagher. Duration: 4 hours, 58 minutes. Unabridged. Brian Zahnd is an American pastor of a megachurch in Missouri. I had never heard of him before I ran across this book. I was intrigued by the topic because the election of President Trump has been an interesting experience for this lifelong member of a religiously conservative church. Over time, Zahnd has become convinced that pacifism is the way that Jesus would have us go. It is not a popular opinion, but Zahnd makes a strong argument for it. Zahnd's message is essentially that the church is at its best when it acts like the Old Testament prophet Nathan in 2nd Samuel chapter 12. Nathan comes to David to tell him he had done a great wrong and call him on it. Now, according to Zahnd, t he church went from being the accuser of wrong-doing - the one that holds it to a high standard - to being the defense attorney of the government. Zahnd describes it as  the church is the chapla...

Published in 2015 by Franciscan Media. Read by the author, Richard Rohr. Duration: 7 hours, 34  minutes. Unabridged. Richard Rohr is a Franciscan Friar from Kansas who comes at Christianity with a little bit of a different take than most. He would argue that it is a truly Franciscan take, and it might very well be. I would not know because I am not a Catholic - but I did find this work to be very intriguing. He does not approach the text from a purely Catholic point of view - he praises and criticizes typical interpretations from Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox perspectives. The audiobook In the Footsteps of St. Paul is actually a series of lectures given by Rohr as part of a tourist cruise of Greece. In reality, it should have been called "In the Footsteps of St. Paul and St. John" since they do make a stop at Patmos and see where St. John purportedly spent many years in exile. Nevertheless, Paul's writings and Rohr's take on them dominate the lectures. One of th...

Published in 2015 by DK Publishing. Originally published in 2008.  DK Publishing consistently publishes strong "coffee table" type books. Holocaust: The Events and Their Impact on Real People covers a more serious topic than most of their books, but it is immensely readable and compelling. The text tells the basic history of how the Nazi party took control of Germany, started to implement their anti-Semitic agenda and eventually invaded their neighbors to start World War II. It also tells the story of a series individual Jewish victims as the timeline unfolds. The book doesn't just cover the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but goes out of its way to include the other victims as well. The liberation of Dachau in April of 1945. This picture appears as a two-page spread in the book.  The pictures are excellent, the text mostly consists of captions for the pictures or a couple of paragraphs that go with the theme of the page. Considering how disjointed this approa...

Original edition published in 2000. Updated edition published by Hachette Audio in 2006. Read by the author, Malcolm Gladwell. Duration: 8 hours, 34 minutes. Unabridged.  Malcolm Gladwell's first book is about "tipping points" - that moment where an idea, a fad, a political candidate, a disease (or whatever) catches on and spreads like wildfire. Gladwell looks into the human factors that contributes to spread of all of the things I mentioned in the first paragraph boils it down to three types of people that are needed. He details those personality types, describes why they are important and provides real world examples of those personality types. For example, he goes into a lot of detail into why Paul Revere was absolutely necessary for the success of his midnight ride. There was another rider, but he achieved little. Paul Revere, on the other hand, was wildly successful for a number of reasons related to how well-connected he was. His ride resulted in the Minutemen com...

Published in 2006 by Random House Audio. Read by the author, Bill Bryson. Duration: 7 hours, 39 minutes. Unabridged. Bill Bryson's memoir of life in 1950's Des Moines, Iowa is a wonderful trip into another time and another place with a gifted storyteller. There is nothing particularly amazing about this story. It's not a coming-of-age story with a profound climax - it is just a heartwarming reminiscence of the way things used to be - the good and the bad. It is often laugh-out-loud funny and reminds me a lot of the works of Jean Shepherd , even though they are set 20 years later.  You know Jean Shepherd if you are a fan of the movie A Christmas Story . Downtown Des Moines in the 1950s.  The author, Bill Bryson read the story. His incongruous English accent is a bit weird for a boy from Des Moines. My understanding is that Bryson spent so many years in the United Kingdom that he lost his American accent. Nevertheless, he did a great job. Highly recommended. I rate t...

Originally published in 1985 as part of the short story collection Skeleton Crew .  Published in 2017 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by Will Patton. Duration: 5 hours, 19 minutes. Unabridged. This is technically a re-read for me - I read The Mist when it was originally published 30+ years ago. It is such a vivid, tightly written story that it has always stuck with me. In my mind, this is one of Stephen King's better works, even if it is one of his shorter ones. The story focuses on David Drayton, his wife and his son. Drayton has made a pretty good living as a commercial artist and is able to afford a home on a lake in Maine. A particularly nasty summer storm has come through Maine in the middle of the night. Trees are down everywhere and, as a consequence, power lines and phone lines are down everywhere. It is important to note that this was written a long time before cell phones. The radio stations are also down - especially those that broadcast from the direction of a...

Originally published in 1937. Penguin Audio edition published in 2011. Read by Gary Sinise. Duration: 3 hours, 11 minutes. Unabridged.  The narrator, Gary Sinise, as the character George in the 1992 film version of this novel.  This is probably the 5th or 6th time that I have read this book. I reviewed it as a print book 10 years ago (click here to see that review ). Gary Sinise read this book and did a fabulous job, especially with the voices of Lennie and Crooks. He played George in one of the many movie adaptations of this novel in 1992. This was my first time hearing this book as an audiobook and I was very impressed that it was an even more effective book when read aloud than in print. This review of one of the most-read, most-celebrated novels in the English-speaking world will not include a plot synopsis - what's the point? Instead, let me say that this short novel has an amazingly tight plot. In this 3 hour and 11 minute story, nearly every scene, and most li...

Museums, parking duty, and the point of it all. This book was originally published in 2017 by Abingdon Press. I had a week off of school for fall break last week. During that week I had three experiences of a religious bent (beyond my weekly church attendance): 1) I read Living for Another: More of Others, Less of You , 2) I helped park cars for my church's annual "Trunk or Treat" that we host for the community, 3) I visited the Creation Museum in Kentucky. I listed the activities in this order because that is the order of importance on a spiritual level. The Creation Museum is an impressive and beautiful 75,000 square foot facility that, to me, is just the wrong approach to Christianity. It is so bent on proving that every little sentence fragment in Genesis is accurate that it almost entirely misses the point of Christianity. I felt no love or comfort there. It reminded me of the passage from 1 Kings Chapter 19: " 11-12  Then he was told, “Go, stand on the mou...

Published by Dreamscape Media in 2014. Read by George Newbern. Duration: 9 hours, 9 minutes. Unabridged. Ove (pronounced ooo-vah) is a 59 year old grump in Sweden. His wife has passed away, he has no children, no pets and no job since he has been forced to retire. He keeps himself busy by keeping an eye on the neighborhood - he yells at the neighbor lady that lets her dog pee in front of his house, he yells at people who drive through the neighborhood (it has a parking area so that the entire area is pedestrian friendly), he yells at bureaucrats, bad drivers, hipsters, immigrants and...well, he just yells. Ove has determined that the best thing about his life left when his wife passed away. He was filling in that hole in his life, at least a bit, with his work. But, since his forced retirement, he has nothing. So, he is planning his suicide to join his wife. Then, a tough old homeless cat shows up. After that, a hipster father with an immigrant wife and two little girls moves in acr...

Originally published in 1960. New translation published in 2006. Read by George Guidall. Duration: 4 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel's famed book Night is a standard, perhaps THE standard, that all Holocaust literature is judged by. Originally, this was written as an immense memoir in Yiddish, but during the process of translating the book to French, it was pared down to about one-fifth of its original size. The paring down resulted in a more literary work - a work that feels almost fictional because it is so selective as it tells the true story of how Elie Wiesel's childhood, his family, his community and his religious faith was destroyed by the Nazis. Slave Laborers liberated by U.S. Army soldiers under the command of General Patton. Photo taken by Private H. Miller. Wiesel is in the picture. He is on the second row from the floor, the seventh prisoner from the left (by the post) The book begins with his little Jewish neighborhood ...

Published by Disney in 2018. Read by Tom Taylorson. Duration: 10 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. Thanos: Titan Consumed is a prequel to the record-breaking  Marvel Cinematic Universe's Infinity War  movies, telling the early life story of the villain - Thanos. The story starts with the birth of Thanos on the planet Titan. Thanos is born deformed. His face is deformed, he is freakishly large and he is purple on a planet where people are born all sorts of colors, but not purple. Purple is the color of death. And so starts the tragic story of Thanos... Well, it's sort of tragic. Thanos has a horrible early life but he is pretty horrible in his own ways, even without external prompting. The author, Barry Lyga does a commendable job of breathing life into this story and making Thanos a character that the reader alternately hates and pities. The journey from Thanos: the scorned child to Thanos: the Mad Titan and Destroyer of Worlds makes sense in this telling. I found myself wishi...

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in July of 2019. Read by Kristin Millward. Duration: 7 hours, 15 minutes. Unabridged. Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, a Norwegian ecologist, specializing in insects, has written an interesting, often funny and thought-provoking introduction to the world of insects with Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects . She gives the reader lots of interesting trivia, such as the story of male bugs that die at the climactic moment of mating due to their genitals exploding. She also tells of plants that trick dung beetles into planting their stinky seeds for them, the importance of wood beetles to keeping soil nitrogen-rich and the super-long (and boring) lives of the 17-year cicada. None of these insects gets an in-depth look because this book is an introduction because you can't seriously expect any book to cover the hundreds of thousands of species of insects in any sort of depth She looks at how insects could be helpful in the fight against pollution and cou...

Published in 2018 by Simon and Schuster Audio Read by Beau Bridges. David Morse, Richard Thomas, Jay O. Sanders and the author. Duration: 18 hours, 5 minutes. Unabridged. Doris Kearns Goodwin often is labeled with the title "presidential historian" and, really, that is a pretty accurate term for her. As a young historian, she worked personally with Lyndon Johnson on his presidential memoirs. She has written about both Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Her book Team of Rivals is a modern classic and has redefined the popular image of the Lincoln administration. In Leadership: In Turbulent Times , she looks at various qualities of leadership that each of these very different men exhibited. She begins with interesting pre-presidential biographies of each of these men. She focuses on Lincoln's expressed desire to become a person that was worthy of the esteem of his community. Theodore Roosevelt's ceaseless energy and desire to experience new things le...

Published by Indiana University Press in 2000. Russell F. Weigley (1930-2004) was a professor of military history at Temple University for 36 years. He wrote a whole bookshelf full of military histories, but only one book that focused exclusively on the Civil War (however, he was working on a multi-volume study of Gettysburg when he passed away).  A Great Civil War is an excellent single volume history of the Civil War saddled with an unfortunate piece of art done in American primitive style that makes it look like it was illustrated by the author's elementary school-aged great-grandchild. I know you aren't supposed to judge a book by its cover, but this cover makes the book look like a children's book. This is far from a children's book.  No more than a page or two is spent on the issues that brought on the war and no more than a page is spent of Reconstruction, but t his is a Civil War history for people who have read a lot of Civil War histories. It tells the s...

Published by Brilliance Audio in 2015. Read by James Patrick Cronin. Duration: 11 hours, 54 minutes. Unabridged. Gibson Vaughn is an unemployed computer whiz. This former Marine was a world-class hacker before he went into the Marine Corps. It would be more accurate to say that he was forced into the Marine Corps because he hacked into a Senator's computer and found documents showing that he was stealing his own campaign funds. But, it turns out that he wasn't and Vaughn was giving the choice of prison or the Marines. The problem is, now that Vaughn is back in the civilian world the former Senator (now Vice President and leading candidate for President) has blacklisted him. Vaughn gets a job offer that he can't turn down - a chance to use his computer skills to act on a new clue to find a girl who was abducted 10 years ago. But, there is a complication - this girl is the daughter of the Senator that he hacked... The Short Drop has a complicated plot, but it flows well a...

Originally published in 1961. Howard Fast (1914-2003) was a prolific writer (more than 60 novels, plus scores of short stories, plays, articles and histories). He is most famous work is  Spartacus , the novel that inspired the iconic movie by Stanley Kubrick. April Morning is my second Howard Fast novel and if you throw in Spartacus you see a trend in Howard Fast's books - he likes to tell the story of the underdog who fights back. In this novel, the underdogs are the colonists of Massachusetts. The April morning in the title is the day that the British army moved on the stores of gunpowder in Concord, Massachusetts. This is when Paul Revere makes his famous ride. This action is now known as The Battles of Lexington and Concord. The book takes place in and around Lexington. Adam Cooper is a fifteen year old boy in 1775 and the troubles of Boston with the British Redcoats seems a world away. His father is deeply involved with the committees that try to workout a common response to...

Published in 2015. Packard and Hope set out to investigate why formerly active members of Christian churches (all denominations) leave and don't come back to any church at all. These are not members that leave and go to a new church - these are members that completely walk away from any church. He calls them "dechurched" or "dones", as in they are completely done with church. Every year, churches across the country lose active members. In this case, Packard and Hope are not talking about merely regularly attending members - they are talking about members who lead committees, music directors and even former clergy. These are part of the leadership of the church - the people that are committed enough to get things done. Packard and Hope assumed that these folks were simply "burnout" cases - people that just were tired and dropped out altogether.  "Instead, the dechurched are walking away from church work, but not the work of the church. They're ...