DWD's Reviews

Published in October 2024 by Hourly History. Hourly History has published a large catalog of short histories and biographies. The idea is that each book can be read in about an hour. That's not enough to make the reader an expert, but it is enough to make the reader more knowledgeable than most people and it lets the reader know if this is a topic they want to delve into more deeply. I thought I was pretty well-informed on the topic of the Incas when I started Inca Empire: A History from Beginning to End . I am a Spanish and a history teacher, so I know way more than most people. However, that's not saying much. Let's face it, the average American hasn't heard of the Incas and the ones that have are likely to confuse them with the Aztecs or the Maya. A short history is not much of a problem when it comes to the Incas. Their Empire existed for only about 95 years before the Spanish Conquistadores arrived in 1532. The Spanish arrived with small numbers (less than 200 sol...

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...