DWD's Reviews

  Originally Published in 1939. Audiobook version published in 2011 by Penguin Audio. Performed by Dylan Baker. Duration: 21 hours, 1 minute. Unabridged. Winner of the National Book Award. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Declared to be the best-selling book of 1939 by the New York Times. I last read The Grapes of Wrath when I was in high school, nearly 40 years ago. It was assigned reading for my English class and all I really remembered about it was a couple of scenes. I remembered the last scene, with the flood and starving man. And I remembered and early scene where the tractor operator is plowing up the farms, the farmyards and even intentionally damaging homes in Oklahoma. Besides that, I had nothing but a pervasive memory of sorrow and injustice. I've always thought of this book and Of Mice and Men as kind of a set of books about migrant farm workers during the Great Depression. I've read Of Mice and Men  5 or 6 times, though - a fact that I can one hundred percent attribu

  Originally published as a book in 1947. Graphic novel e-book edition published in 2018 by Pantheon. Adapted into a graphic novel by Ari Folman. The Diary of Anne Frank is certainly one of the most famous pieces of literature published in the last 100 years. The book the true diary of a young teen Jewish girl that was written as her family lived in a hidden apartment with two other families in an attempt to hide from the Nazi genocide. Before the war ended someone betrayed the families and Anne and almost everyone else in the apartment died in concentration camps shortly before the Nazi surrender. A page where Anne compares herself unfavorably to her sister. Ari Folman adapted the diary into a graphic novel. In the afterword he notes that this was harder than one might expect. This graphic novel is 160 pages, but if he had simply illustrated the entire text of the diary it would have ended up being more than 3,000 pages! The challenge was to maintain the spirit of the print book whil

  Published by Random House Audio in April of 2023. Read by the author, Jonathan Kennedy. Duration: 9 hours, 23 minutes. Unabridged. Kennedy presents a compelling argument that disease has had a profound impact on world history by just telling a history of Europe from the days of cavemen up until now. The first 45 minutes or so of this audiobook seemed to be wandering around and not going anywhere, but Kennedy was laying a strong foundation for the rest of the book. The book makes it painfully obvious that humanity has bounced from one biological disaster to another. Humanity has adapted (either by behavior - like building sanitation systems to deal with body waste to control cholera) or biologically by simply having a large body count until those with immunity can rebuild (the Black Plague is a prime example.) Kennedy persuasively argues that infection and disease helped the rise of Christianity, the rise of Islam, the end of feudalism, the rise of capitalism, and the European conques

  Published in 2018 by Hourly History. Hourly History is a publisher that specializes in short histories and biographies in e-book form that are designed to be read in about an hour. Sometimes, an hour is not long enough to explain a topic, but in this case an hour is just about right. Since the Cuban Missile Crisis is a pretty well known historical event, just let me say that this short e-book delivers a concise, well-paced history. It also manages to present a balanced history that spreads the blame for the crisis and somehow keep up a sense of tension even though the reader knows for a fact that the Cuban Missile Crisis did not actually cause a worldwide global thermonuclear war in 1962. I rate this e-book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History.

  Published by Christianaudio.com in 2021. Read by Sarah Zimmerman. Duration: 7 hours, 26 minutes. Unabridged. Beth Allison Barr is a professor of medieval and church history at Baylor University. She has written a lot about women in the medieval world. She is also an evangelical Christian and a youth pastor's wife. This puts her in a rather unique position to comment on the role of women in the evangelical church and topics like complementarianism in the more conservative churches. Complementarianism is a church teaching that men and women have very distinct roles in family life, marriage, and the church. These roles are distinct, but of equal value, but men are given leadership roles. In more conservative churches, women are never put into any sort of leadership roles over men. They will not be pastors. They will not lead a board. They won't even teach older boys or men in Sunday school. In some interpretations, they will not teach men or older boys any topic at all. The more

  Published in 2019 by Hourly History. Hourly History  publishes histories and biographies that you can read in about an hour. That can be a tough job for larger topics in history like "The Industrial Revolution" or "The Roman Empire" but it works out about right for this topic. This history goes all of the way back to the arrival of the  Mayflower in 1620. Turns out the Puritans brought hundreds of gallons of alcoholic beverages with them to the New World and immediately set up the means to produce even more. The book then goes on to show the ups and down of America's relationship with alcohol. When the reader gets to the temperance movement, there is a solid context to understand why the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1919 and why it was eventually abolished by the 21st Amendment a mere 14 years later. For a short read, this book provides a lot of good, basic information.  I rate this e-book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.c

  Published in 2019 by Penguin Audio. Read by Stephen Mendel. Duration: 11 hours. Unabridged. Synopsis: Peter Ash served multiple tours of duty with the Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. When he left the service, he wandered the roads of America - partly because he could not find a place to settle down and partly because he suffers from claustrophobia as a form of PTSD. He can't sleep indoors. He has a very tough team being inside unless it's a spacious room or has lots and lots of windows.  The author, Nick Petrie. Peter has been living with his very serious (and very rich) girlfriend helping maintain her compound and recuperating from the misadventures of the last book. But...he's getting bored. His girlfriend gets word from a friend named Wanda in Memphis that people are threatening her in her new house that she bought in a tax auction. They are throwing bricks through windows and the like. Peter drives across the country in his restored work truck to help keep an eye out

  Published by Listening Library in 2017. Read by Dion Graham, Duration: 4 hours, 32 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Justyce is a African-American scholarship boarding school student originally from a rough neighborhood.  He attends an elite, almost entirely white prep school in Atlanta. He is a senior and a fantastic student who is clearly headed to a top university once he graduates. Everything isn't perfect, but it is going very, very well. One evening Justyce gets a phone call from an on-again-off-again girlfriend. She is clearly drunk and is talking about driving home. She's not too far away so he walks to her car, gets into an argument with her and struggles with her a bit for the keys while maneuvering her into the backseat where she pukes and passes out. While he is buckling her in to take her home a police officer pulls up and completely misinterprets the scene for a carjacking and a kidnapping.  From the officer's point of view, it looks suspicious if you go with a

  Published in 2023 by Hourly History . In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in an effort to stabilize their neighbor. In theory, Afghanistan had a communist government and the USSR had a policy of not letting any communist government fall.  Soviet troops leaving Afghanistan in 1989 via a bridge that was special built for the purpose of letting the USSR withdraw from Afghanistan even quicker. In 1989, the Soviet Union finished withdrawing its armed forces from Afghanistan. On paper they had negotiated a stable pro-Soviet government to lead Afghanistan after 10 years of frustrating fighting an elusive enemy that specialized in hitting the much better equipped Soviet army within guerilla hit-and-run tactics.  Within 3 years both the government of Afghanistan and the government of the USSR had collapsed and Afghanistan became a haven for international Muslim terrorists like Osama bin Laden . As I read about the difficulties that the Soviets had in fighting against the mujahedeen

  Published by Hourly History in 2021. Hourly History  publishes histories and biographies that you can read in about an hour. That can be a tough job for larger topics in history like "The Industrial Revolution" or "The Roman Empire" but it works out about right for this short war (1763-1766.) The war arose directly from unaddressed issues as a consequence of the French and Indian War (1754-1763.) In the French and Indian War, the American frontier became a battlefield. American settlements were wiped out, Native American villages were destroyed. French and English soldiers participated and ultimately agreed to a settlement that ignored the realities of the vast borderlands between the colonies and the Native Americans. The biggest issue was constant push westward from European (American) settlers into areas that were already inhabited by Native Americans. The colonies were all for this westward push, even if the British government was ambivalent or even against t

  Published in May of 2023. Winner of a 2024 Webby Award The author of this short book (129 pages) makes it clear that he has no particular grudge against South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. Lindsey Graham serves as a stand-in for the Republican Party in general. He is a particularly good stand-in because he was there from the very beginning of the Donald Trump phenomenon because he was one of the many candidates for the 2016 Republican nomination.  President Donald J. Trump and Senator Lindsey Graham Graham is also an amazingly frequent guest on the Sunday morning political talk shows, the evening shows on Fox, local TV, and talk radio. Graham loves to talk into microphones and because of that it is very easy to track his gradual moves from being a loudly outspoken opponent of Trump to the most vociferous defender of and apologist for the former president.  Saletan thoroughly documents this transition and backs up each of these subtle changes with hundreds of actual links to videos

  Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2019. Read by Arthur Morey. Duration: 12 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged. Barry Strauss is a professor of the history of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. As the title clearly says, Strauss tells his reader/listeners about what he judges to be the ten most important Roman emperors and ends up telling a decent political history of the Roman Empire along the way. Bronze statue erected c.175 AD of  Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD), one of the Roman Emperors featured in  this book. When I say he chose the ten most important emperors, that doesn't mean he chose the ten best emperors. He has more than one emperor that demonstrates how a bad leader can abuse the political consensus, damage the political system, and leave a lot of confusion in his/her wake. But, change is not necessarily a bad thing - especially when handled by talented leaders like Augustus and Constantine.  This was an interesting listen and well-read by Arthur Morey. I did enjoy how

  Published in 2015 by Penguin Audio. Read by the author, Dan Jones. Duration: 7 hours, 12 minutes. Unabridged. The Magna Carta is commonly considered to be the founding document of Western Democracy. Many believe that there is a direct line goes from the Magna Carta to the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries) to the Declaration of Independence (1776) to the Bill of Rights in the American Constitution (1791)  to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1791) to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Jones believes that there is a whole lot of truth to this. but he spends a lot time explaining why the "direct line" is not as straight as many think. King John (1166-1216) signing the Magna  Carta in 1215.  Jones does an excellent job of explaining the political situation in England that led to the Magna Carta in 1215 in reasonable, layman terms. Once the reader understands how the system was supposed to work, Jones demonstrates that King John abused th

Originally published in 2016. English translation published in 2018 by Penguin Press. Before reading this massive 421 page graphic novel, I knew relatively little about Che Guevara (1928-1967.) I knew that he was from South America, he was famous for his part in the Cuban Revolution and that he died trying to lead a revolution in Bolivia. And, of course, I knew him from the famous picture. This graphic novel filled in a lot of blanks for me. It is a friendly biography of Che but doesn't glorify him. When I got to the end I was struck by how much of a failure Che actually was after he left Cuba. He tried to replicate the success of the Cuban Revolution but he could not. It's hard to tell if counter-revolutionary measures from the governments he was trying to overthrow (and the U.S.) were simply more successful than Batista had been in Cuba or if they were missing an additional spark like the Castro brothers had provided. The graphic novel was put together well. It had no confusi

Published in September of 2022 by Blackstone Publishing. Read by the author, Richard V. Reeves. Duration: 6 hours, 55 minutes. Unabridged. Men, as a group, are struggling in today's economy. The average male's income has falling in inflation-adjusted terms, especially so when you factor out upper class and upper middle class men. Men are more likely to be arrested, be addicts, be homeless, and more likely to succeed at killing themselves. Boys are struggling in today's educational system. They are far more likely to be suspended, expelled or placed in a special education program. They are far less likely to graduate from high school. They far less likely to attempt any sort of post-secondary education (a majority of all college students are female) or training and far less likely to complete that training or degree - even in the rare situations where the post-secondary training and/or education are essentially free. Reeves, an economist with the Brookings Institutions, sees

  Published in 2022 by Hourly History. The short histories produced by Hourly History are designed to read in about an hour. In some cases the size limit makes for a very incomplete history. In this case, I thought that topic and the size limit matched up pretty well. This e-book details from the beginning (spoiler alert: John Sutter of Sutter's Mill fame was clearly not a good guy) and details the good as well as the bad of the Gold Rush. Turns out there was a lot of bad, such as environmental destruction on an unprecedented level (they used mining techniques that were outlawed just a few years later. How obviously bad were they if people who let children into mines said that these techniques are clearly out of bounds?!??)  The white miners also used genocidal techniques to wipe out the local Native American populations, killed Chinese immigrants that came across the Pacific to find gold and, of course, jumped the claims of other white miners and killed them. All of the gold and

  E-book published by Hourly History in 2020. Hourly History specializes in histories and biographies that take about an hour to read. In the case of the Crimean War (1853-1856), I think that's about right. The war was the result of European alliance politics. Russia was looking to push into Ottoman territory. The Ottomans were considered to be pretty weak and certainly on the decline after centuries of being a major power. The Austrian Empire was a traditional ally to the Russians, but decided to stay neutral. The Prussians were just starting out so no one really cared what they did. Even though they had been traditional rivals for centuries, England and France decided that they had to intervene on behalf of the Ottoman Empire in order to stop Russia from becoming too powerful.  The French and the English sent troops all of the way to the Ottoman Empire and then up into the Black Sea and landed troops on the Crimean Peninsula and the war was on. The war itself is worthy of note f