DWD's Reviews

Published in in 2009 by MacMillan Audio Read by William Dufris, Callista Gingrich and Eric Conger Duration: 12 hours, 23 minutes Unabridged To Try Men's Souls is a powerful piece of historical fiction that focuses on three men in the American army at its lowest point in the Revolutionary War - right before the famed surprise attack on the Hessians at Trenton. The story follows three men - one is a New Jersey private with family on both sides of the war, the other two are George Washington and Thomas Paine. The book is fairly complicated in its structure with lots of flashbacks and intertwining story lines. Through George Washington the reader learns the long sad story of the shrinking American Army's numerous retreats throughout the summer and fall of 1776 and how Washington gambled it all on a surprise raid to raise American morale. Thomas Paine's character was a bit more complicated. These are the months just after the success of his tract Common Sense  that

Disappointing Published by HarperAudio in 2007 Read by Sam Tsoutsouvas Duration: 12 hours, 56 minutes Jay Winik's April 1865 is one of my favorite Civil War histories - it holds a very safe place on a shelf that has to be purged on a regular basis to make room for new books because it is a brilliant history.  Before I go on with this review I must note that I listened to the abridged audiobook version of this book (so far as I can determine, there is no unabridged version). Despite the abridgment, this book still clocks in at nearly 13 hours. Some of my criticisms are undoubtedly due to the abridgment. Winik's thesis in this book is that the time period from 1788 to 1800 was a time of revolutionary ardor and that most of the great European powers were affected. Victor Hugo wrote:  “One can resist the invasion of armies;  one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.” Winik looks at how the ideas of America's Founding Fathers and the French philosophes affected t

Published in 2013 by Harper Audio Read by the author, Simon Winchester Duration: 13 hours, 33 minutes Simon Winchester's sprawling book, The Men Who United the States , tells a history of the United States organized around five themes: Wood, Earth, Water, Fire and Metal. To be honest, I largely ignored the themes and just enjoyed listening to this magnificent, chaotic, rambling history. Starting roughly with Lewis and Clark (Winchester backtracks a lot), the story of America is told through the tales of the people that made America a more perfect union through their explorations or their inventions. The reader (or listener if you are enjoying the audiobook) is told about Lewis and Clark and the Pony Express and the invention of the telegraph, the first transcontinental rail line, the exploration of the Grand Canyon, the role of New Harmony (Indiana) in the study of American geography,  a con game involving jewels, how George Washington toured the Frontier before he b

Published in 2009 by William Morrow (HarperCollins) I love the premise of America's Prophet - that America has a special connection with the story of Moses beginning with the Puritans and going right up through Martin Luther King, Jr. He lays out the correlations with some skill but, in the end it just started to drag. This review (and the book, to a lesser extent) is helped by a basic knowledge of the story of Moses. Feiler provides the necessary background on Moses and then proceeds to make comparisons. For example, the Puritans saw themselves as fleeing a domineering power (England) and taking refuge in the wilderness (New England) like the Children of Israel fled the Pharaoh and went into the Sinai. The Puritans took comfort in the story of Moses because they believed that they would also be led by God. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the "March on Washington" A slight change in interpretation and Moses becomes an inspiring symbol for the Americans in the

Published in 2012 by Houghton Miffllin Harcourt Publishing Company I have had Scott Weidensaul's The First Frontier for longer than a year, buried in my legendary pile of books (actually, I am more organized than that, they are all in 4 milk crates) but when I heard an interview with Wiedensaul on the John Batchelor radio show I was reminded to dig it out. Weidensaul is to be commended for a very thorough job of researching the history of the relationship between the natives and the European colonists. The records are scant, the spelling is haphazard and so much of it is buried in myth and politics. He starts with the disposition of the American Indian population prior to the arrival of Europeans. The limited history of pre-Colombian contact is discussed (with the Vikings and various fishing fleets) and the discussion of the similarities of differences of the various American Indians arrayed along the Atlantic coastline is quite interesting. But, as Weidensaul's

Published by HighBridge Company in 2012 Read by Brian Holsopple Duration: 11 hours, 5 minutes. Unabridged I am a history teacher. My favorite area of study is the American Civil War but the American Revolution comes in at a close second. I cannot even count the number of books that I have read about the Revolutionary Era and I thought that I had a pretty solid handle on Jefferson - until I read this book. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) I had always pictured Jefferson as a Unitarian (who was willing to go "more" religious for political reasons) who wrote eloquently about freedom and tyranny but somehow compartmentalized this in his own life when it came to slavery. Or, was unable to free his slaves due to crushing debts incurred because he was a philosopher and not a businessman. The debts are always mentioned, usually in conjunction with the renovations to Monticello, reinforcing the impression that the philosopher was happily spending his way to oblivion for th

Another great history from McCullough David McCullough's 1776 is yet another well-written history from David McCullough, the two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and two-time winner of the National Book Award. David McCullough Many academic historians discount McCullough's work as being too "popular" - a complaint that I think is pure bunk. McCullough's works are popular because he is a good writer, not because he is chasing popular topics. He is not skimping on these topics or slanting them a particular way. 1776 is a perfect example of this. McCullough does not paint a picture of George Washington, the perfect general. Rather, Washington is portrayed as the man who is quite a bit over his head, but still the best man for the job because he understands the larger goals of the colonies and is finally beginning to understand the tactics and strategies required for a ragtag army supplemented with local militia to take on a British army with superior tra

A fun read. Not real deep, but fun. Good vacation read for history buffs. Richard Brookhiser got the idea for What Would the Founders Do?: Our Questions, Their Answers from the questions from his audiences when he would give a public lecture on the founders. "Richard, what would the founding fathers have said about...(illegal immigration, marijuana, the war in Iraq, etc.)? So, he collected a number of those questions, did a little research and wrote this fun little book. Richard Brookhiser is the writer of the best overall biography of George Washington that I have read, Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington . This one is not the same quality, although I am giving them both the same score: 4 stars. Gouverneur Morris Why? A book of this sort is just different creature than a biography. By its very nature it is a series of starts and stops (the question and answer format). This inhibits the flow of the book in many ways, but does make it good for t

John Paul Jones (1747-1792) A look at the Revolutionary War generation Nelsen and co-author Doug Wead's What Price Freedom: The Adventures of Early American Heroes is a series of short biographies of 9 men and 1 woman of the Revolutionary War generation. None of the biographies is too detailed (vary from 7-17 pages) and none focus on the more controversial parts of their lives (like Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, for example). Nevertheless, the book is pretty well done and chock full of good quotes. The biographies included are: Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Greene Alexander Hamilton, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, John Paul Jones, Francis Marion, Deborah Sampson, George Washington. John Adams is left out, but then again, when this book was written, Adams was not as popular as he is today. If you are an Adams fan, he is quoted extensively in the book, which is one of the reasons I was surprised he was left out. I give this book a 4 s

The "Forgotten" Founding Father Samuel Adams (1722-1803) George Washington. Thomas Jefferson. Benjamin Franklin. John Adams. All there at the founding of our country. All recognized for their unique contributions to the revolution. Author Gary Wills noted that Adams was "the most influential man at the first two Congresses." He was on the committees of correspondence that tied the colonies together in the first place and no one was on more committees in the Continental Congress. It is easily argued that Samuel Adams had as great a role, if not greater than any other member of the Congress. He had such an integral part to play that a local newspaper noted in his obituary that "to give his history at full length, would be to to give an history of the American Revolution." In Samuel Adams: A Life,  Ira Stoll tells the story of Samuel Adams. Called by some the Last of the Puritans for his strong religious faith and willingness to express it openly, A

  T he Glorious Cause is the second in Shaara's two volume piece historical fiction concerning the Revolutionary War. Rise to Rebellion was the first, and I believe the superior of the two, but The Glorious Cause is an excellent novel as well. Rise to Rebellion is the superior of the two novels due to the changes of heart that the readers sees in John Adams and Benjamin Franklin concerning the issue of independence from England. The Glorious Cause has little of that type deep soul-searching. However, it is a fantastic portrayal of the difficulties encountered by the Continental Army and George Washington, in particular. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) If I were to have my druthers, I would have preferred that Shaara had broken the second 600+ page novel into two novels  to make it a trilogy and expanded them both by delving more into the politics of the day and the difficulties of fighting a war with the governmental structures and restrictions that the C

So, what do you get when Oscar Award Winner and a Hugo Award Winner get together? A pretty good book, actually. The premise is that the United States was never formed. The British government dealt fairly with the colonies in the 1760s and the independence movement was stillborn. Instead, what are now the USA and Canada is called the North American Union and are an integral part of the United Kingdom. The UK is a vast world-wide empire led by the King-Emperor. This union is symbolized by the painting "The Two Georges" which depicts colonial representative George Washington bowing before King George III before an assembly of British and American dignitaries. This moment encapsulates the agreements that kept the American colonies a part of the British Empire. At the beginning of the book the painting is stolen in 1996 by The Sons of Liberty, a North American pro-independence movement. The story follows two detectives and an art curator who are searching for the painting be

An interesting biography, a valuable perspective Founding Father is not a long biography (199 pages), but it is an interesting piece of writing. It is split into 3 areas - about one-half of the book is straight biography, about one-third is an analysis of the character of our first president and the balance is an analysis of what it means to be a founding father, how Washington measures up to that ideal and what kind of "father" he was. Richard Brookhiser The biography section is great - straightforward and written in an engaging and lively style. The character portion bogs down quite a bit and the founding father section is interesting (it asserts that he was the kind of father who was most concerned with preparing his children for life outside of his home - life on their own. He encourage other people to step into leadership roles to fill the vacuum that would be there when he walked away from the national spotlight.) One quote, above all, highlights the best