DWD's Reviews

Illustrated by L. Fury and Nate Powell. Published by Harry N. Abrams in 2021. This spring I read the MARCH , the three volume graphic novel series about Congressman  John Lewis  (1940-2020) and the Civil Rights movement. When I finished the series, I thought to myself that it would be interesting to see how John Lewis ran for Congress and the struggles he encountered in an era where the KKK still openly marched. My Synopsis: The graphic novel RUN picks up right where MARCH  trilogy left off. At the end of the  MARCH trilogy, there was a celebration of the passage of the Civil Rights bills - a moment of success. There was also the murder of a volunteer who was helping with the celebration by anti-Civil Rights forces. RUN explores what happened after the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had it first taste of success.  At the end of  MARCH , there was a celebration of the passage of the Civil Rights bills. With that, a long-term goal achiev...

  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 2013 by Top Shelf Productions. Written by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin. Illustrated by Nate Powell. Congressman John Lewis (1940-2020) continues his life story in book two of the March series, focusing on his struggles in the Civil Rights Movement. The book starts in November of 1960 and ends with the 16th Street Birmingham Church Bombing in September of 1963. The story includes some very harsh responses to attempts to integrate restaurants in Tennessee, the freedom riders (young African Americans were attempting to desegregate bus lines after a court ordered them to be desegregated), and the bus boycott campaign in Birmingham.  The violent response is horrible and shocking Infamous segregationist lawman Bull Connor of Birmingham figures prominently throughout the middle of the book. I am pretty well-versed in the major points of the Civil Rights Movement but I was still moved by the portrayal of the Children's Crusade. The book includes all of the negotiations,...

Published in 2013 by Top Shelf Productions. Written by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin. Illustrated by Nate Powell. Winner: National Book Award Winner: Will Eisner Comic Industry Award Winner: Coretta Scott King Book Award Winner: ALA Notable Books Winner: Reader's Digest Graphic Novels Every Grown-Up Should Read Congressman John Lewis (1940-2020) tells his life story in this graphic novel, focusing on his struggles in the Civil Rights Movement. This is the first book in a trilogy, covering the first 20 years of his life. Lewis is interested in three things as a young man - education, preaching, and the Civil Rights movement. Lewis listens to the traditional African American leaders and he hears talk of moderation (or, even worse, nothing at all about Civil Rights.) He doesn't know what to do, but he knows this is not the way forward.  Lewis's growing frustration and the moment when Lewis hears MLK . One day, he hears Martin Luther King, Jr. speak over the radio and he knows t...

  Published in 2021 by Pushkin Industries. Read by the author, Malcolm Gladwell. Duration: 5 hours, 14 minutes. Unabridged. Before there was a U.S. Air Force, there was the U.S. Army Air Corps. Before the Army Air Corps (re-organized as the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1942) built the largest collection of flying fighting machines to relentlessly bomb the Axis Powers in World War II, they had a tiny budget and a few air bases. One of these was Maxwell Field, a training facility in Alabama. That facility became the intellectual home of a group of pilots who espoused the concept of precision bombing. They were known as The Bomber Mafia. Precision bombing is the theory that teaches that you don't have to blow an enemy's entire military to pieces, you can just hit certain key industries and choke out their ability to produce more weapons/feed their people/move soldiers and so on. This was intended to be a more humane way to wage war - an antidote to the mass slaughter the world saw in W...

The author won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Originally published in 1970. This audiobook version was published in 2011 by Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. Read by the author, Toni Morrison. Duration: 7 hours, 6 minutes Unabridged. Synopsis: This is a story of a girl named Pecola who lives in Ohio in the 1940's. She is sexually abused by her father and only knows her mother by the name Mrs. Breedlove. Sometimes she lives with other families as her family struggles. Pecola is universally considered an ugly child. Pecola wants nothing more than to have blue eyes like Shirley Temple because she is convinced that blue eyes would make her pretty. The narrative goes round and round and moves back and forth in time, often re-telling certain aspects of the story from different perspectives that fill in the gaps as the reader proceeds.  In the end, it is not a complicated story, but it is told in a complicated manner. My review: Undoubtedly, my take on this book is over...

  Published in 2020 by Workman Publishing. Read by Geoffrey Cantor. Duration: 7 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. Connor Towne O'Neill was attending the 50th anniversary recognition of the Selma to Montgomery March when he discovered something unexpected. The Selma to Montgomery march ended when Alabama State Troopers joined local deputies at the Edmund Pettus bridge and beat them until they retreated. The bridge is named for a Confederate General and a Grand Dragon of the Alabama KKK. O'Neill was looking for a place to park and drove into a graveyard. In the graveyard, he discovered a group prepping a part of the graveyard for the re-installation of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest (the original had been stolen) in the graveyard. It was on a piece of property owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the middle of the graveyard. O'Neill sensed that this was the more powerful story, no matter how dramatic that moment on the bridge had been 50 years earlier. He decide...

Published in 2006 by Tantor Media. Read by Grover Gardner. Duration: 10 hours, 10 minutes. Unabridged. Winston Groom, best known as the author of Forrest Gump , is also a historian of sorts. He has written 14 non-fiction books, using his research skills he honed as a journalist to investigate a historical topic. In this case, the topic is the Battle of New Orleans. Most people know everything they know about the battle from the catchy Johnny Horton song: I n 1814 we took a little trip,  Along with Colonel Jackson down the might Mississip We took a little bacon and we took a little beans And we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans. I knew a little bit more, having read a little about the battle. I didn't know much, however, not really being a fan of the War of 1812 or Andrew Jackson. But, I am a fan of Winston Groom so I decided to give it a try. Groom is skilled at telling a narrative history and at the end, I had a much better idea of how the Battle of New Orl...

Originally published in 2001. The greatest argument among people who study the Civil War isn't who was the best general or what would have happened if Lincoln hadn't have been assassinated or even what would have happened if the Union had lost at Gettysburg. No, the greatest argument is this: What caused the Civil War? For the better part of the last century, the argument has been that the Confederacy seceded in order to protect "their rights". The counter-argument has always been to protect "the right to do what?" For me, the answer has always been a simple one - they fought for their right to own people and to keep African Americans at the bottom of the heap in Southern society. For the Confederate States of America, slavery was the reason to fight. For the Union army, maintaining the Union, with or without slavery, was the reason to fight - a goal claimed many times by Lincoln himself.  There will be arguments that claim that Confederate states secede...

Originally published in 2002. As the title states, in Bull's-Eyes and Misfires: 50 People Whose Obscure Efforts Shaped the American Civil War , Clint Johnson has found 50 people from the Civil War (25 from each side) who played an important role, but are generally speaking, not big names. So, you won't find Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, William T. Sherman or Stonewall Jackson in this book, except in passing.  All of those men would have admitted that they didn't win (or lose) the war by themselves. It was a big war and it involved literally millions of people inside and outside of the military and even outside of the government. Some of those were very helpful and are labeled as "bull's-eyes". Some people, though, got in the way more than they helped. They are the "misfires". Some of the misfires and bull's-eyes that Johnson lists are clearly misfires or bull's-eyes. For example, the first person listed in the book is Union Major Willi...

Published in 2014 by Random House Audio Read by the author, Bryan Stevenson. Duration: 11 hours, 11 minutes Unabridged. "...if he just had the money for a decent lawyer." Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer who has spent his entire career working with people who have been wrongfully convicted and unfairly sentenced. He works through the Equal Justice Initiative with a lot of death row inmates in Alabama. He has succeeded in getting over 100 re-trials and/or re-sentencing hearings for people on death row. He has had multiple convictions completely overturned. Stevenson does a lot of work in Alabama because Alabama doesn't do much to subsidize the defense in death row cases. How much does the state spend for the entire case, including appeals? Just $1,000. Some counties help with that amount, but more than 70% of Alabama's death row inmates were represented by $1,000 lawyers. Considering that the average cost of a simple will is $375 , you can see that a $1,000 worth o...

Published in 2015 by HarperAudio in 2015 Read by Reese Witherspoon. Duration: 6 hours, 57 minutes Unabridged I waited for a while to take a chance with Go Set a Watchman . The blowback when it was released was formidable, so I decided to let it sit for a while and in the meantime stop reading the reviews. Warning: spoilers ahead. This book is set about 20 years after the events of To Kill a Mockingbird , in the 1950s. Jean Louise Finch (Scout) has come home to Maycomb, Alabama from New York City for a long visit.  When she first arrives she falls into the familiar rhythms of a small town where she seems to know most everyone. She rekindles a romance with her father's young protege and soon enough returns to scandalizing her aunt with her forward ways. Atticus Finch has become a physically frailer man, but his mind is still spry. Harper Lee (1926-2016) Everything about the trip seems to be going well until Jean Louise discovers a racist pamphlet among some papers of ...

Solid history for grade 5 and above. Published in 1991 by Silver Burdett Press 119 pages of text. 9 pages of timelines, sources and and index at the end. David Farragut and the Great Naval Blockade is part of a larger series (The History of the Civil War Series). It is very readable with a good balance of national history versus the biography of David Farragut. Farragut joined the United States Navy at age 9 in 1810, fought against the Barbary Pirates and in the War of 1812. Until the Civil War, Farragut was known as an great officer, the kind of officer that sailors were glad to work under, but also the kind of officer that just missed doing something great. He was not sent to "open" Japan with Matthew Perry. He tried to get involved in the Mexican War but the fighting in Veracruz was over by the time his ship arrived. When the Civil War began, it was assumed that Farragut would go with the Confederacy. After all, he was born in Tennessee, he lived in Norfolk, Virgi...