DWD's Reviews

  Published by Recorded Books in 2020. Read by Susan Bennett. Duration: 6 hours, 32 minutes. Unabridged. Sometimes I fall asleep listening to the news on my local NPR station. One morning I woke up to PBS's Rick Steves (the guy who does all of the European travel shows) interviewing Mary Morris about this book. Turns out he has a travel-themed NPR radio show and they discussed her travels around the world. They discussed where she went in India and why she went (to see a tiger in the wild) and I immediately looked it up on my audiobook up and requested it. But, I was unpleasantly surprised to find out that this book was not the book I heard described in the interview. I heard a great discussion about a travelogue book to India. I am always interested in hearing about India because it is an ancient society, it is a democracy and it is an up-and-coming economic power. Also, I am a sucker for travelogue books. I have read a book by a man who hiked across America following an oil pipel...

  Published by Hourly History in 2020. I am an avid reader of history, but I have areas of weakness that I am perfectly willing to shore up a bit, but I don't want to invest a ton of time in. The long history of India is just one of those areas for me. I know more than most people, but I can see the glaringly empty areas of ignorance. Subhas Chandra Bose was one of those people for me. I had heard of him, but only described as sort of an "anti-Ghandi". He wanted independence as much as Ghandi did, but thought the non-violent protests were a waste of time. Subhas Chandra Bose was not only willing to fight - he thought it was the only way India would be free of English rule. Bose was born in India but formally educated in England. He was poised to take his place in the bureaucracy of colonial India. But, he rejected that offer and became active in the independence movement.  As World War II loomed, Bose saw it as an opportunity to free India. He approached the Fascist powe...

  Published in 2016 by Macmillan Audio. Read by the author, Giles Milton. Duration: 4 hours, 53 minutes. Unabridged. Giles Milton is a prolific British writer of histories and historical fiction. This is a collection of odd stories of history that he has run across doing his research. Lenin, preserved in his tomb.  He has gone from being an  object of reverence to a tourist attraction. There are the two stories mentioned in the title - Hitler using stimulants and Lenin's odd burial, but there are a lot more from several different time periods. The problem is that there were a lot of similar stories and some weren't really from "unknown" chapters. Lots of Nazi-related stories and three separate stories of cannibalism (a plane crash, a sailing ship caught in the duldrums and a prison escape in an isolated area). That's a lot of Nazis and cannibals for a 5 hour audiobook. I found this stories to be neither great nor bad and often repetitive. I rate it 3 stars out of...

  Published by The Great Courses in 2014. Lectures delivered by the author, Gregory S. Aldrete. Duration: 18 hours, 29 minutes. Unabridged. As long as there has been war, there has been discussions about which battles were the most important, the most pivotal. This takes some analysis, since the temptation might be to simply discuss the battle that finally ended a long conflict, like Appomattox was the functional end to the American Civil War.  The temptation might also be to collect a list of the biggest battles of history, but that would exclude Aldrete's tiniest choice - the Battle of San Jacinto. While that battle had less than 2,500 soldiers, he persuasively argues that the battle not only made Texas independent from Mexico, it also set off a chain of events that led directly the the American Civil War, Reconstruction and more. In The Decisive Battles of World History , Adlrete presents the battles in chronological order and spends at least as much time on the background ...

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...

Winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize Published in 2008. Aravind Adiga 's The White Tiger: A Novel is many things. It is a fascinating look at modern India and how it is still stuck in a sort of feudalistic state combined with the very modern world of democracy, high technology and international influences. It is also the story of corruption and how one young man rose above the masses to become an entrepreneur by using that corrupt system for himself. It is the story of how a young man who has lost his moral compass can make it through tricks, hard work and murder. Most importantly, it is very, very readable - a well-written story that pulls the reader into its world.  For many, this look at the third world - with its rampant corruption, absolute poverty and, sadly, a strong sentiment of "life is cheap" will come as a surprise. This is not the sanitized travelogue view of India. The characters are between cultures - they are old India and new India at the same time - an...