DWD's Reviews

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2024. Read by Kevin R. Free. Duration: 14 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. In Life After Power Presidential historian Jared Cohen looks into the post-Presidential lives of seven Presidents and their quests for some sort of meaning after having one of the most important jobs you can have. Some Presidents fade away due to health reasons, like Reagan. Others are eager to resume their former lives, like Washington. But, others still feel like they have something more to offer or have unfulfilled goals. The seven Presidents he looked at are: Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush. I have enjoyed hearing about John Quincy Adams' post-Presidential life ever since I first read John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage  30+ years ago. I've read more than one book about him and this re-telling is quite good.  A photo of John Quincy Adams  taken in 1844. Jimmy Car...

Published in 2007 by W.W. Norton and Company. First a bit of traditional blogging. I was going through some old receipts because I had plenty of time on my hands thanks to the Coronavirus lockdowns. This pile of receipts was 12 years old. It included some golden oldies like a Blockbuster receipt. I also found a receipt for this book. I had gotten a great deal on For Liberty and Glory - and it sat in my To-Be-Read pile for 12 years. I had no idea it was in that pile for that long. If you had asked me before I found the receipt, I would guess it had been 4 or 5 years at most. At that moment, this book moved to the top of my To-Be-Read pile. I should have read it long before now - it was an excellent read. Originally, I picked up this book because I simply didn't know much about Lafayette. I've read plenty of biographies of Washington and histories of the American Revolution. Lafayette always comes into the story somewhere in the middle. There's always a build up, with the ...

A Review of the Audiobook Winner of the 1957 Pulitzer Prize Originally Published in 1955 Published by HarperAudio Duration: 3 hours, 10 minutes Read by John F. Kennedy, Jr. Abridged President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) If you have not read Profiles in Courage , it is comprised of 8 short biographies of Senators that JFK found to be inspirational in some way or another. Those Senators are: John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Thomas Hart Benton, Sam Houston, Edmund G. Ross, Lucius Lamar, George Norris and Robert A. Taft. Each of these men's stories were very well done, even if some of them, like John Quincy Adams' biography, actually seemed very short compared to what these men actually accomplished. But, then again, this is just a look at one point in time, not a complete list of each man's accomplishments and an abridged version of that short look on top of that. This audiobook version of JFK's classic work is read by the President's son, John F. ...

Published by Gildan Media, LLC in 2012 Read by Sean Pratt Duration: 18 hours, 54 minutes Unabridged James Oakes takes a unique look at the Civil War in this history - through the lens of the anti-slavery movement. I have read more than 200 Civil War histories and almost all of them cover this part of the story - but, just in bits and pieces. Oakes looks at the anti-slavery movement from its roots in the Revolutionary War era and moves forward with the different Abolitionist arguments until they finally stumbled upon the concept of "freedom national". The argument is over the standard, default setting of the slavery issue. Was slavery legal everywhere, except where it was specifically abolished, or was it illegal everywhere, except for where it was specifically made legal? Or, in shorthand - was it "freedom national" or "slavery national"? This book puts the lie to the idea that the Civil War was over taxes, tariffs or anything else but slavery. Th...

Originally published in hardback book form in 1991. Published by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, David McCullough Duration: 11 hours, 19 minutes Unabridged Brave Companions: Portraits in History  is a collection of previously published articles and speeches. It's a smattering of this and that - sometimes it's about art, sometimes about scientists, sometimes about politicians and sometimes it's just some musings from McCullough about history. It doesn't matter, almost all of it is interesting and well-told. McCullough understands the value of telling history as a story - as always he is very approachable. My favorite entry was the story of the railroad that preceded the Panama Canal. It was an amazing story of the power of human will against nature. McCullough reads this audiobook, which is great because McCullough has a fantastic speaking voice and is well known for his voice work. I envy both his writing ability and his talents as a speaker. My fav...

Published in April of 2017 by Simon and Schuster Read by the author, David McCullough Duration: 4 hours, 13 minutes Unabridged The American Spirit is a collection of speeches delivered by the two time Pulitzer Prize winning author. The topics vary in length and topic but are all bound by two common themes: American history and the importance of knowing that history. I listened to this collection as an audiobook over a period of about a week and found it to be quite enjoyable as I walked the dog every evening. The speeches are usually not too long and not too short, informative, interesting. McCullough has re-recorded these speeches for this audiobook and his voice does show a little age, but it is still a wonderful voice to listen to and his delivery, combined with his words help make this an enjoyable audiobook.  I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The American Spirit .

Published in 2013 by Penguin Audio Read by Chris Sorensen Duration: 12 hours, 58 minutes Unabridged Nathaniel Philbrick's Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution is mis-named. While the battle is in the book, it is only a part of the story. In reality, this book is a history of Boston from the 1750s and 1760s right up to the Declaration of Independence. In a lot of ways this book is much more of a biography of Dr. Joseph Warren, one of the leaders of the Sons of Liberty movement, along with Samuel Adams, John Adams and John Hancock. Warren is often overlooked nowadays because he died at Bunker Hill (which was really mostly fought on Breed's Hill). The excessive focus on Warren was, in my mind, one of the great weaknesses of the book. Philbrick spent too much time worrying over Warren's alleged personal failures and not enough time getting on with the story. It just bogged things down. Philbrick does not gloss over the warts of our Founding Fathers, noting tha...

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 May of 2016 The 2016 Presidential election cycle has been wild, to say the least. A rookie politician with an unstoppable mouth and a veteran politician with a long, checkered past are an unlikely pairing. Throw in a couple of strong third party candidates and the fact that these are the two most hated candidates in a generation and you may very well have an election in which no one wins a majority of the votes in the electoral college. What would happen in no one actually wins, or if it is too close to call? Aaron Burr (1756-1836) Veteran White House correspondent Fred Lucas gives us some insight as he tells the story of six troubled Presidential elections: 1800, 1824, 1876, 1888, 1960 and 2000. With each election Lucas describes the political environment of the time, the major players in the election and the reasons why it became a disputed election. He details how it finally worked out and then offers informed speculation as to what would have happened if the...

I have found a new hero from history I've known about John Quincy Adams's post-Presidential career ever since I read Profiles In Courage  by JFK many, many years ago. However, what I most remember about that description of him was that that he argued against slavery in the Congress when he could have just coasted along in a comfortable political semi-retirement. Joseph Wheelan does us all a favor by elaborating on John Quincy Adams's amazing career in this well-written, informative book. Wheelan briefly covers John Quincy Adams's early career in the first 65 pages. As a teenager, John Quincy Adams was an assistant to his father while he was an ambassador to Europe during the Revolutionary War. He served as ambassador to several European countries after the War and also as Secretary of State (the Monroe Doctrine is as much his as Monroe's) and finally President. Oddly enough, that amazing career was only a prelude to his final post - Representative from Massa...