DWD's Reviews

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...

I Blasted Through this Audiobook. Published by Random House Audio in 2010. Read by the author, Wes Moore. Duration: 6 hours, 12 minutes Unabridged Wes Moore, the author of The Other Wes Moore , is originally from a tough Baltimore neighborhood. His family struggled with loss, poverty, his neglect of his own education and rebellious flirtation with crime. But, he "made it", eventually becoming a Rhodes Scholar, have a career in international finance (which was interrupted when he volunteered to serve as a paratrooper in Afghanistan), and now heads two educational foundations, writes articles and makes political commentary. One day, Moore was sent an article about another young man from Baltimore also named Wes Moore. The other Wes Moore is a convicted murderer and is serving time in prison. This prompted the author to reach out to the other Wes Moore and eventually write this dual biography about how they both ended up in two very different places. It is not a judgment...

Published by Random House Audio in 2009 Read by Don Leslie Duration: 13 hours Unabridged I am an avid reader of Civil War era histories (I own more than 100 and who knows how many that I have read from the library) and it is rare for me to find a book that covers new territory for me. This book did. I knew as an abstract fact that there were thousands of white Union soldiers that came from the Confederacy. They are mentioned in many histories, but they are rarely a focus. The State of Jones focuses on the family of Newton Knight, an unwilling Confederate soldier who was forcibly drafted, fought in multiple battles and eventually went AWOL.  Newton Knight was not afraid to fight and kill for what he believed in. When the government tried to force him back into the military he  started an anti-Confederate insurgency movement centered in Jones County, Mississippi. Those renegades tied up Confederate military assets and virtually stopped in-kind tax collections that were ne...

Originally published in 1964. Why We Can't Wait is Martin Luther King's (1929-1968) well-written defense of the Civil Rights Movement. As the title suggests, it is the argument detailing why African-Americans could no longer wait for the rights that they were guaranteed by the Constitution to be eventually given to them and the best way to do that was the application of nonviolent direct action.  The strongest part of the argument is the middle third - the entire text of his famed Letter from Birmingham Jail .  I think Letter from Birmingham Jail is one of the most profound documents in American history. Its arguments pull from multiple points and authors in history, the very documents and history that white Americans prided themselves as the roots of their own country while King sat in a jail - and shows that those roots were being ignored in defense of the indefensible when it came to African-Americans. It is truly a brilliant piece of writing because it is shows Americ...

Published in 2014 by Clarion Books. Behind Rebel Lines is the story of a real-life Civil War hero. Despite technically not being able to join the army at all because she was a woman, Emma Edmonds crossed the American-Canadian border in order to join the Union army for all of the action and adventure. She knew full well that she could keep up with the men because she grew up helping on her family farm. But, she never expected the adventures she experienced during the war. Emma Edmonds (1841-1898) Seymour Reit tells a fictionalized version of this true story (the events are real, the details, like conversations, are made into a story) that starts out working in an army hospital but soon ends up dressing up in different outfits and crossing the enemy lines to act as a spy and had all sorts of close calls while generating plenty of usable information. This is an immensely readable book. My fifth grader chose it to read for a school project and her enthusiasm for the book inspired ...

Published in 2013 by Blackstone Audio. Read by William Hughes Duration: 11 hours, 42 minutes. Unabridged Thomas Fleming readily admits that he mostly writes about the era of the American Revolution (such as his excellent book Liberty! The American Revolution ) but he felt compelled to make a long commentary on the origins of the Civil War by writing A Disease in the Public Mind . Fleming's take on the causes of the war are based on a comment from James Buchanan's that the furor over slavery was a "disease in the public mind." Fleming is quite confident that this disease was mostly caused by the North. Shelby Foote alludes to this, in a way, in the Ken Burns Civil War documentary when he notes that there was a war "because we failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise...our whole government's founded on it and it failed." An exhibit at the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois. Photo by DWD Foote meant that both ...

Published in January of 2015 by HighBridge Read by J. D. Jackson Duration: 9 hours, 3 minutes Unabridged I am torn by this audiobook. On the one hand, I am absolutely fascinated by Civil War, including all of the controversies leading up to it. On the other hand, this audiobook has real issues, including some stretches of tedious writing and stumbles from the reader. Perhaps the most annoying thing about this book is the way that the title of the book does not really describe the book. The title, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad , implies it is about the Underground Railroad across the country. Instead, this book is exclusively about the Underground Railroad's activity in New York City. Other locations are mentioned only in relation to how they tie in to the story of the Underground Railroad in New York City. His decision to make the title so inclusive while making the actual book so exclusive is either a clever ruse by the marketing t...

Published in 2015 by Random House Audio Read by Paul Michael Duration: 25 hours, 30 minutes Unabridged The fourth book in what started out as a trilogy, The Fateful Lightning concludes Jeff Shaara's story of the Civil War's Western Theater with Sherman's March to the Sea and the eventual surrender of the Joseph E. Johnston's army in North Carolina.  But, the story is more than that. It is also the story of newly freed slaves discovering what freedom truly means. It is the story of a way of life being destroyed and the hope that a new, more equitable society can rise up in its place. It is the story of a legendary commander whose self-doubts constantly plague him. It is the story of an army that knows deep down that it is going to lose but still tries to survive - for pride if for no other reason.  Confederate Lt. General William J. Hardee (1815-1873) The story focuses on two generals - Union General William T. Sherman and Confederate General William J. Har...

Published in 2014 by Penguin Press Famed Civil War historian James M. McPherson aims to fill in an historical gap by providing a biography of Jefferson Davis's Civil War years. He notes in his opening to Embattled Rebel that it is natural to make comparisons between Lincoln and Davis but those comparisons are often lopsided due to a lack of information. There are enough different Lincoln biographies to easily fill a truck. But, Davis is often a caricature - a difficult man who thought he could be general and commander-in-chief due to previous military experience - a man who refused to remove his friends from important military posts and also a man who carried a grudge. That thumbnail sketch is largely true, but also incomplete. Thanks to the mass of information on Lincoln we are able to detect a sense of nuance.  A lot of source material on Davis never survived the Fall of Richmond. Even worse, many people who worked with him were unwilling to talk about it after the war - they ...

Published in 1993 by Chronicle Books Designed to be a "coffee table book" rather than a thorough re-telling of the war, this history of the American Civil War is quite enjoyable. The strength of My Brother's Face is immediately obvious - the gorgeous, large photographs of soldiers, sailors, spies and other participants in the events of the Civil War. I find that as I get older I catch myself looking at the faces of these people and wondering what life was like for them. Some of them look stiff and fake, but some, including a lot in this collection, imbue a sense of vitality, a sense that these were living, breathing people. Sometimes it is a smirk, or perhaps a look of unease. I simply love a picture that is used in this book of the 4th U.S. Colored Troops on p. 121. This is a close-up of the picture from the book. These men all have a look of confidence, determination and even distrust that speaks to us even more than 150 years later and exemplifies what a well-chosen ...

Published in 2009 by Indiana Historical Society Press. Set in Eastern Indiana in 1842, By Freedom's Light is a short that novel does a great job of talking about slavery for a grades 4-6 audience. The Caldwell family has recently moved to Indiana from North Carolina. They are Quakers. Nowadays, Quakers are famous for their anti-slavery stand and participation in the Underground Railroad in the 1800s. But, in reality, the Quakers are split in two groups. All are anti-slavery but some believe that you should not break the law by helping runaway slaves. Others believe that helping people in need trumps the law. The Caldwell family embodies this split. Sarah, age 13, is anti-abolitionist and is quite sure her father is as well. However, her new young stepmother is certainly an abolitionist. She is close with Levi and Catharine Coffin, two of the most famous members of the Underground Railroad network who live in Newport, Indiana (now called Fountain City) and Sarah witnesses her hel...

Originally printed in 1966 As you can tell by the title, Jim Beckwourth: Negro Mountain Man  has a hopelessly out-of-date title. When it was written in 1966, the term "negro" was still considered to be acceptable, of course. Jim Beckwourth (1798-1866) was born in Virginia and moved out to the frontier, roughly in the St. Louis area, before he moved out on his own. He apprenticed as a blacksmith but didn't really pursue that career. Instead, he set off as part of larger expeditions and quickly earned a reputation for being tough, fair and honest. And, perhaps most important, he was considered to be dependable in an environment where almost nothing was dependable. Beckwourth's skin color did not seem to hurt him any as he trapped beaver, scouted for military expeditions and explored the American West. He even served in the Second Seminole War in Florida. It seems that real talent was valued a lot more than a man's race. But, the bulk of this book deals with B...

Published by the National Park Service in 1996 The format of this small book  (88 pages) is much like a small old-style National Geographic with three wide-ranging informative  essays by Larry Gara, Brenda E. Stevenson and C. Peter Ripley.  The pictures are excellent in that they are reproduced wonderfully and well-shot. Most importantly, these three essays are an excellent introduction to the topics of slavery, the slave trade (not just to the United States but also to the Caribbean and Brazil) and the contradictions of some of the Founding Fathers fighting for their personal freedom while owning other people. But, the heart of the book is the fight against slavery - both political and practical. After all, it is one thing to say you are against slavery and it quite another to help a runaway slave that comes to your door and help her move on to another safe place. A notice from 1851. The book documents the different strains of Abolitionism (Do you help fund the fight ...

Published in 2015 by Macmillan Audio Read by Tom Wopat Duration: 8 hours, 49 minutes Unabridged As of late, Bill O'Reilly has become quite the writer of history books. His " Killing... " series has garnered quite a bit of attention but Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies: The Real West is different than those.  For one thing, it is not focused on the death of an historical figure. Also, this book was actually not written by O'Reilly. O'Reilly writes the introduction of the book and mentions that he used to talk about all of these historical figures and tell their true stories when he taught history in a classroom long ago. I can only assume that David Fisher and Bill O'Reilly sat down and discussed who to include in the book and the general tone of each entry. The topics are as follows: Billy the Kid (1859-1881) -Daniel Boone; -Davey Crocket; -Kit Carson; -Black Bart (Charles E. Bowles); -Dime Novels and their influence on our perception...

Published in 2007 by HarperCollins Publishers The Civil War was, in many ways, the world's first modern war. The submarine was invented, the machine gun was introduced, aerial reconnaissance was used and metal warships ruled the seas. It was also a war that featured all aspects of the media of the day. Propaganda songs like "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" were written, speeches were given all over the country, those same speeches were re-read in newspapers. Those newspapers were openly partisan on every issue of the day. And, one of the best ways to express these partisan opinions was political cartoons. This book is filled with political cartoons describing the issues that brought on the war, cartoons inspired by the people and fighting in the war and a light discussion of the end of the war. Almost all of the cartoons are excellent and they provide a jumping off point for discussion of the events as they are portrayed in chronological order.  Below is a carto...

A Fascinating Story. Published by University Press Audiobooks in 2015 Read by Andrew L. Barnes Duration: 6 hours, 36 minutes Unabridged In 1928 a sports promoter named Charles C. Pyle had an interesting idea: a footrace across America - from Los Angeles to New York City. This race would be run in timed stages (like the Tour de France) with pre-planned stops along the way. The winner would get $10,000 and the first two-thirds of the race would highlight Route 66. Pyle brought in legendary football player Red Grange as a celebrity promoter and made grand plans for each stop, including a travelling carnival.  199 men paid the $100 entrance fee and started the race. 55 made it to the end. Along the way they ran, walked and even crawled through searing heat, snow, rain, dust storms, sleet and more. They also faced dog attacks, surges of crowds and the African-American runners faced racist threats in some states. A surprising number of runners were struck by cars.  I wa...

Originally published in 1947. In the 1930's, the "Childhood of Famous Americans" series was started with a simple biography of Abraham Lincoln's childhood. Eventually, there were dozens of books in this series. In my childhood I remember my small town library had a shelf full of these books and I read them all. Nowadays, this series has been picked up by Simon and Schuster. This book focuses on the childhood of Martha Washington (1731-1802), or Martha Dandridge, nicknamed Patsy. There is not really an over-arching story here. Rather, this is mostly a series of scenes from her childhood including having a bear cub as a pet, posing for a portrait and learning to ride a pony. There are also visits from local Native tribes. This book could be read not just as a biography of Martha Washington but also as a sample of what life on a plantation would be like for the family that owns the plantation. That being said, it doesn't really address the issue of slavery, pre...

Published by Random House Audio in 2013 Narrated by Paul Michael Duration: 22 hours, 5 minutes Unabridged. Just to establish where I am coming from - I am a huge Civil War buff. I have over 100 books on my shelf. Although I live in Indiana, I have managed to make it to three Civil War battlefields in the last two years (Murfreesboro, Fort Donelson and Chickamauga) and I just bought my father the original Shaara Civil War trilogy (the one based around The Killer Angels ) for Christmas. I own Shaara's World War I and World War II series as well as his original Civil War series and his Mexican War book. I am a fan. Confederate Lt. General John C. Pemberton (1814-1881) But, I am not a fan of A Chain of Thunder . I have no problem with the authenticity of the book and there are parts that are amazing, intense and just about perfect. But, the first half of this book feels like it is trying to be "The Great American Novel" and failing at the attempt. There is so much r...