DWD's Reviews

  Published in 2016 by Top Shelf Productions Written by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin. Illustrated by Nate Powell. 2016 National Book Award Winner for Young People's Literature 2017 Printz Award Winner 2017 Coretta Scott King Author Award Winner 2017 Sibert Medal Winner 2017 YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Winner 2017 Walter Award Winner Congressman John Lewis (1940-2020) continues his life story in book three of the March series, focusing on his struggles in the Civil Rights Movement. The book starts with the 16th Street Birmingham Church Bombing in September of 1963 and ends with the signing of the Voting Rights Act in August of 1965. These were, by any account, much like the famous Charles Dickens line from A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the...

  Published in 2018 by Sourcebooks Young Readers. Illegal is the fictional story of two young brothers from Ghana: Ebo and Kwame. While it is fictional, it is based on lots and lots of true stories. Most Americans are very aware that immigrants/refugees are fleeing from their native countries and arriving at the border of the United States and are not aware that a similar thing is happening in Europe.  Europe has a similar refugee/immigrant situation. People are fleeing from the wars in Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. There are also refugees fleeing the brutal poverty and political situations in sub-Saharan Africa. Like in the United States, these immigrants/refugees depend on very shady people to move them closer to their goals. In this story, two young brothers named Ebo and Kwame live in a village in Ghana. They are orphaned and living with a useless, drunken uncle. They have an older sister that has already crossed the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea to look for work but...

  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 con...

Published in 2021 by Next Chapter Audio LTD. Read by Crawford B. Bunkley III. Duration: 4 hours, 34 minutes. Unabridged. I have no idea where I found this book. I think it was a freebie on Audible through Amazon's Prime Reading program. I know that I got it because I am a big reader of Civil War histories and fiction and this sounded like it was right up my alley. Synopsis: The description of this book is accurate, to a point. It is about a freed slave who joins the Union Army and then goes from job to job and place to place with a goal of settling in Africa. My Review: This book is basically a Forrest Gump type of story - one man goes on an epic journey and ends up going through a lot of the historical movements of the era. Warning: Lots of *********SPOILERS********all the way to the end of this review. This audiobook comes in at almost exactly 50% of the run time for FORREST GUMP   and covers maybe even more territory. Our hero (his name changes multiple times) begins as a slave...

Published by Recorded Books in 2012. Read by L.J. Ganser. Duration: 16 hours, 10 minutes. Unabridged. In 1783, at the end of the Revolutionary War, Loyalists (Americans who opposed the American Revolution and stayed loyal to Britain) had a choice to make - stay and ride out the anti-Loyalist bias in the United States or move somewhere else. In the two years between the last major engagement (Yorktown) and the official end of the war and withdrawal of British troops the British decided to evacuate any Loyalists that wanted to go to other parts of the British Empire. One of the biggest advocates of this position was Guy Carleton, the British commander in America after Yorktown who later went on to become the Governor-in-Chief of Canada. He had more to do with what happened in this history than any other single person. Guy Carleton (1724-1808) The British government made an effort to make things right for these Loyalists. Not many Loyalists were completely reimbursed, but the fact that an...

Published in 2010 by HarperAudio. Read by Paul Boehmer. Duration: 14 hours, 37 minutes. Unabridged. Stephen Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University. The purpose of God Is Not One is to inform the reader of the eight greatest world religions, their philosophies and their way of looking at the world. Prothero is very aware that choosing just eight religions is fraught with problems. How do you choose? Is it based on influence? Number of adherents? Importance of the countries it is in? He went through all of those questions again once again when he chose the order he would present the religions he picked. The religions he profiled are: Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Judaism, Yoruba religion, and Daoism. He spends about 90 minutes discussing each religion and includes nearly an hour on Atheism at the end, on the theory that militant Atheism (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens) behaves much like a religion, complete with evangelistic movements...

Published in 2009 by Blackstone Audio. Read by the author, Tamim Ansary Duration: 17 hours, 28 minutes. Unabridged. Tamim Ansary has done something that is very hard to do - he has written a long history of a complicated topic without making it boring and after more than 17 hours of discussion, he left me wishing that it was even longer. Ansary makes the observation that most histories that people in the West (Western Europe and the Americas) read are written from a Western perspective. That makes sense. But, the history of the world is not just the history of Western Civilization. There are multiple civilizations on the planet. Mesoamerica (the Mayas, Aztecs, Toltecs, etc.) is a separate civilization. China is the historic center of another civilization. So is India. And between the West and India and China is another one. Westerners usually refer to it as the Middle East. This book is a history of that civilization from the beginning of recorded history (empires like Bablyon) to ...

Originally published in 1958. Published in 2001 by ibooks. Howard Fast (1914-2003) was a prolific author of all sorts of works - poetry, plays, screenplays, essays, short stories, science fiction, fiction, articles for various publication and historical fiction. He literally worked as a professional author for his entire life, publishing his first book at age 18 and his last book at age 85. I've decided to make a commitment to reading a Howard Fast historical fiction book from time to time after I read his novel about the Battle of Lexington and Concord, April Morning , this past summer. It was easily one of the better books I read last year. Moses is the story of the towering figure of the Old Testament. It was intended to be a two part story, but as Fast notes in a forward to this 2001 reprint, he literally ran out of time to write the second half of the story. This novel covers Moses life up until the time when he kills the Egyptian beating the Hebrew slave and then flees ...

Published in 2011 by Gildan Media, LLC. Read by Grover Gardner. Duration: 14 hours, 9 minutes. Unabridged. Carthage has forever been relegated to the second fiddle of the Ancient Mediterranean world - the last power to offer the Roman Republic any sort of serious threat. The also-ran that could have been what Rome became...if only. But, unlike Rome, no one seems to know much about Carthage except for that they were a sea power, they had battle elephants and Hannibal crossed the Alps leading them in a war against Rome. Dr. Miles' effort is a bit hamstrung from the lack of original sources from Carthage itself - it was looted and destroyed at the end of the Third Punic War. But, he is able to reconstruct a history based on the writings of other countries, including such sources as the Bible, Greek and Roman histories, temples, changes in religious thought architecture and coinage.  I do appreciate how difficult this must have been, but this book often gets bogged down in mul...

Published by Basic Books in 2018. Zoologist Lucy Cooke explores some of the offbeat bits of the animal world in The Truth About Animals - a book that shows us that most of us think we know a lot about the animal world, but we really don't. None of the animals featured are obscure - they are all well-known, with the possible exception of the eel (at least in the United States).  The animals featured in the book are: eels, beavers, sloths, hyenas, vultures, bats, frogs, storks, hippos, moose, pandas, penguins and chimpanzees. Cooke usually begins with a look at the animal in question in historical texts so that we can see that these misunderstandings have been going on for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. For example, bats have been misunderstood and mis-classified since...well, forever. The struggle to figure out how exactly bats travel at night was especially gruesome, featuring scientists blinding live bats, plugging up their noses and coating their bodies with l...

Published in 2015 by Marble Arch Press Going into this book, I knew that I would have a bone to pick with almost every one of the author's choices. After all, there are 5,000 years of recorded history and every last one of them is filled with tragedy. How can you pick and choose the actual worst 10 years? Wilson, a British historian, focuses in this book on a Western point of view and the earliest date is 541 A.D. So, if you are making a pitch for the 10 worst years in the West in the last 1500 years, his choices are pretty solid. The years he picks are: 541-542: The first outbreak of the Bubonic Plague weakens the nascent Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire, killing millions. 1241-1242: The Mongols invade Eastern Europe. 1572: The Spanish Inquisition and everything that came with it. 1631-1632: The worst year of the Thirty Years War. 1709: The Great Freeze 1848: The "Year of Revolutions" in Europe 1865-1866: The assassination of Abraham Lincoln and th...

Published in 2006 by Brilliance Audio, Inc. Read by J. Charles. Duration: 12 hours, 43 minutes. Unabridged audio edition. Jack Du Brul's Havoc is a techno-thriller that races from the Hindenburg disaster to Africa to Washington, D.C to Atlantic City to Niagara Falls to Russia and back to Africa with hardly any time to take a breath.  The book features Philip Mercer, a geologist by training that often troubleshoots for the White House. This is the seventh book featuring Mercer, a fact that was not on the audiobook label. However, Du Brul does a great job of catching the reader up on what has been going on - I assumed it was the first book in the series as I was listening to it.  The Hindenburg disaster on May 6, 1937. The action starts with a traveler on the infamous Hindenburg as it flies to its fate with destiny in Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937. A crazed man is hiding a secret in a safe in his room and he is afraid that the Nazis know he has it and are plot...

Published in 2014 by HighBridge Audio Hosted by Desmond Tutu Commentary by Nelson Mandela Duration: 1 hour, 15 minutes. Winner of the Audie Award - Audiobook of the Year for 2015. Considering that Mandela: An Audio History is the history of the entire apartheid era of South Africa in 75 minutes, this short history is surprisingly thorough and very compelling.  The audiobook tells the story of apartheid through the story of Nelson Mandela - why he decided to fight against it, how he decided to fight against it, his trial for treason, his time in prison, how the struggle continued with him as the symbol of hope and resistance, the collapse of the apartheid system and it ends with the election of Mandela as president. Each chapter begins with a short introduction by Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu (also a large voice against apartheid ). Nelson Mandela  (1918-2013) casting his vote in the 1994 election. The story is mostly told through interviews with Mandela and doze...

An important tale to be told - unfortunately this one fails to tell it well enough Published by First Second in 2006. Deogratias is the name of a young man from Rwanda. The story dances back and forth between pre- and post-1994 massacre Rwanda. Pre-massacre Deogratias is a likeable young man. Post-massacre Deogratias is insane. As one reads this graphic novel one finds out what drove him insane - in a climax that is not all that surprising or shocking (just sad), especially if one knows any of the detail of the Rwanda massacre. An image from the graphic novel Great works take the story of one person or group of people in a tragic situation and somehow make their story universal. For example, the Civil War movie Glory is the story of the first all-Black Federal regiment in the Civil War - it is also the story of every soldier - black or white, Union or Confederate. In Saving Private Ryan , the Tom Hanks character epitomizes the average man stuck in a terrible situa...

Michener's take on South Africa James Michener (1907-1997) Michener's true epics are always worth the time to read. The Covenant is no exception. Michener's take on South Africa and its history is an honest attempt to give some perspective on one of the more complex histories that this history teacher has encountered. The book starts out strong (my edition was the two-volume hardback). The first volume was vintage Michener, but the second one dragged. Perhaps it was because the subject matter became more and more depressing. With the final 200 pages or so being about Apartheid, it's hard to find something to cheer about. In a way, Michener's book seems incomplete - he hints that Apartheid could no longer stand - he gives a prediction that it would end by about the year 2000. Turns out, he was just about right, but the book feels like it does not have a proper ending. If you are pondering a Michener book and have not read them all (person...

This made for school DVD highlights an important and oft-ignored facet of history Any teacher of world history knows that some subjects have plenty of supplemental resources available. For example, the Ancient Romans and Greeks have literally thousands of DVDs, books, workbooks, programs, units, games and activities available as supplements, including whole weeks of programming on the History Channel. Equally influential eras, such as the Arab Trade Routes are often ignored or have scant materials available even though these trade routes were the source of medieval Islam's strength, wealth and intellectual flowering. The DVD Ancient Trade Routes of the Arab World  does address this topic, but only in a 3-star (ok, but not great) way. The DVD features three short films (12 minutes or so for a total of 38 minutes) about three trading hubs - Zanzibar in East Africa, Dhofar in the Arabian Peninsula and Ghadames in the Sahara. The movies show the modern-day versions ...