DWD's Reviews

Published in 2020 by ChristianAudio. Read by Neil Shah. Duration: 8 hours, 5 minutes. Unabridged. I heard about The Other Side of the Wall on The Holy Post podcast . I knew that there were Palestinian Christians in Gaza, but I hadn't given it much thought. Generally, I find the Palestinian/Israeli conflict too intractable to think about. It's not that I don't care, it's that simple solutions (or even insanely complicated solutions) don't even seem to be on the horizon at all and in a world with so many problems close at hand, it's easy not to think about problems half a world away. My bandwidth is just not that big. But, the interview was good - it came from an unexpected source in this conflict. The podcast host interviewed Munther Isaac, a Lutheran pastor and teacher. He is also a Palestinian from Gaza. There has been a continual Christian presence in Gaza as long as anyone can tell, although it is dwindling as Palestinian Christians opt out of the conflict z...

  Published in 2015 by Now What Media, LLC Synopsis: Set in Czechoslovakia during World War II, The Golem's Voice  is the story of a young Jewish mom and her two sons trying to escape relocation by the Nazis. This was in the time when the Nazis were still telling Jews that they were relocating them to alternate settlements rather than just taking them to work and death camps. As they are being loaded onto trains, the mom gets a bad feeling and tells her boys (Yoakim and Yakov) to just run. She does not join them because they are much faster than her and she just wants them to escape and live. Her boys run under the trains and, at first, things look good. But, soon enough, Nazi soldiers are in full pursuit and Yoakim is shot providing cover for his little brother. Yakov continues to run to the only place the knows - the Jewish ghetto neighborhood that he just came from. He hears a voice in his head calling him to the home of a long-dead rabbi named Yudah Loew . Legend has it th...

  Originally published in serial form in Raw magazine from 1980-1991. Originally published in book form in 1991 by Pantheon Books. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Years ago, the high school where I used to teach had a daily silent reading time. We were encouraged to build a classroom library and I had a great one. Two stand alone shelves (one tall, one short) and a little rug in the corner with a chair. I had a lot of books from a lot of different genres but the star books were Of Mice and Men and the two volume paperback version of  Maus . Kids kept on stealing Of Mice and Men (If a kid likes it so much that he doesn't want to return it - fine by me) but so many students read Maus that the paperback binding broke and the pages fell out. It was held together with binder clips and big rubber bands.  What I remember about that book is that every student reverently took off that ridiculous clip and the big rubber band, spread the pages out and just read. Students wh...

  Originally published as a book in 1947. Graphic novel e-book edition published in 2018 by Pantheon. Adapted into a graphic novel by Ari Folman. The Diary of Anne Frank is certainly one of the most famous pieces of literature published in the last 100 years. The book the true diary of a young teen Jewish girl that was written as her family lived in a hidden apartment with two other families in an attempt to hide from the Nazi genocide. Before the war ended someone betrayed the families and Anne and almost everyone else in the apartment died in concentration camps shortly before the Nazi surrender. A page where Anne compares herself unfavorably to her sister. Ari Folman adapted the diary into a graphic novel. In the afterword he notes that this was harder than one might expect. This graphic novel is 160 pages, but if he had simply illustrated the entire text of the diary it would have ended up being more than 3,000 pages! The challenge was to maintain the spirit of the print book ...

  Originally published in 1998 by Nan A. Talese/Anchor Books in 1998. The Gifts of the Jews is the second book in The Hinges of History Series by Thomas Cahill.  It is a series of histories that look at important long term movements in history that helped create Western Civilization.  I read this book when it was first published and I placed it on my shelf and did not touch it for more than 20 years. Over time, I remembered it as  remembered it as a dense tome and continued to keep it on my shelf  as more of a trophy to my ability to read through difficult books than for any desire to go back and consult it or even re-read it. That changed when we stuck at home during the pandemic quarantine and we came to realize that our extensive bookshelves were overwhelmed and a purge was in order. This book was "purged" from the shelves, but went in to my to-be-read pile after I leafed though it. I don't know why I remembered this book as hard to read. Cahill has a real g...

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...

Published in 2009 by Blackstone Audio. Read by the author, Tamim Ansary Duration: 17 hours, 28 minutes. Unabridged. Tamim Ansary has done something that is very hard to do - he has written a long history of a complicated topic without making it boring and after more than 17 hours of discussion, he left me wishing that it was even longer. Ansary makes the observation that most histories that people in the West (Western Europe and the Americas) read are written from a Western perspective. That makes sense. But, the history of the world is not just the history of Western Civilization. There are multiple civilizations on the planet. Mesoamerica (the Mayas, Aztecs, Toltecs, etc.) is a separate civilization. China is the historic center of another civilization. So is India. And between the West and India and China is another one. Westerners usually refer to it as the Middle East. This book is a history of that civilization from the beginning of recorded history (empires like Bablyon) to ...

Published in 2015 by DK Publishing. Originally published in 2008.  DK Publishing consistently publishes strong "coffee table" type books. Holocaust: The Events and Their Impact on Real People covers a more serious topic than most of their books, but it is immensely readable and compelling. The text tells the basic history of how the Nazi party took control of Germany, started to implement their anti-Semitic agenda and eventually invaded their neighbors to start World War II. It also tells the story of a series individual Jewish victims as the timeline unfolds. The book doesn't just cover the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but goes out of its way to include the other victims as well. The liberation of Dachau in April of 1945. This picture appears as a two-page spread in the book.  The pictures are excellent, the text mostly consists of captions for the pictures or a couple of paragraphs that go with the theme of the page. Considering how disjointed this approa...

Originally published in 1960. New translation published in 2006. Read by George Guidall. Duration: 4 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel's famed book Night is a standard, perhaps THE standard, that all Holocaust literature is judged by. Originally, this was written as an immense memoir in Yiddish, but during the process of translating the book to French, it was pared down to about one-fifth of its original size. The paring down resulted in a more literary work - a work that feels almost fictional because it is so selective as it tells the true story of how Elie Wiesel's childhood, his family, his community and his religious faith was destroyed by the Nazis. Slave Laborers liberated by U.S. Army soldiers under the command of General Patton. Photo taken by Private H. Miller. Wiesel is in the picture. He is on the second row from the floor, the seventh prisoner from the left (by the post) The book begins with his little Jewish neighborhoo...

Published in 2015 by Brilliance Audio. Read by the author, Karen Armstrong. Duration: 5 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged. Karen Armstrong is a multiple award-winning author of more than 25 books, the great majority of them exploring religion. She is particularly interested in Islam, Christianity and Judaism.  Born c. AD 5. Died c. AD 64-67 This book is aimed at the informed layman - not at other historians or religious experts. I read A LOT of history and have gone to church my entire life, but I can get lost in the weeds pretty quickly if too much professional jargon is used. Armstrong assumes a basic knowledge of the Christianity and of the New Testament. Nothing too complicated or deep and most of my Bible knowledge comes from Sunday school and small group Bible studies led by layman with a workbook. Armstrong takes care to explain things along the way because she is not out to impress the intellectuals - she has written a history for regular folks. Paul has always be...

Published by Tantor Audio in 2016. Read by Guy Bethell. Duration: 7 hours, 20 minutes. Unabridged. The entire history of the world is less than 7 and 1/2 hours? Yep, that's what Christopher Lascelles purports to offer in his A Short History of the World . He acknowledges that this is not a complete history - he never intended it to be. Instead, his aim is to connect some of the dots that the average reader may have picked up in history class, movies and History Channel documentaries (and hopefully spark a bit more interest). Lascelles does succeed in hitting many of the high points and certainly does a better job at not being as Eurocentric as other short world histories have been, such as A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich. Lascelles spends quite a bit of time discussing China, Japan, India and Mongolia. All that being said, there are entire civilizations that are ignored or get nothing more than a passing nod. That is always the problem when writing a history o...

Published in 2015 by MacMillan Audio. Read by Peter Larkin. Duration: 7 hours, 55 minutes. Unabridged. This is not a deep book theologically, but it does take a balanced look at 6 things that are associated with Jesus and a few related topics and is respectful of the faithful while doing its exploration. If you are expecting a book that is out to burst religious bubbles, this is not your book. The topics are: 1) John the Baptist. Who was he? Is he in the historical record? Are the relics of John the Baptist in scattered across Europe actually him? The James Ossuary. 2) James, the brother of Jesus. Who was he? Was he Jesus' half brother through Mary or a step-brother from a previous marriage of Joseph? Is the James Ossuary (a casket to hold bones) that was discovered a few years ago real? 3) Mary Magdalene. Who was she? Was she a disciple or simply a follower of Jesus? Why is she not mentioned after the four gospels? Was she the wife of Jesus? Was she really a reformed ...

Brilliant! Published in 2012 by Hachette Book Group Seth Grahame-Smith is, perhaps, most famous for his books  Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Pride, Prejudice and Zombies , two books that I have never read and probably never will because I care not one wit for vampire or zombie tales. But, this book intrigued me and I am very glad that I read it. As in the other books I mentioned, Seth Grahame-Smith has a talent to take an existing story and put a twist to it. Unholy Night takes the traditional Christmas nativity story and makes this little change : What if the Three Wise Men were actually not three learned scholars but three criminals posing as three learned scholars? That's it - that's the heart of the book. But, what a twist! Here is all anyone really knows about the the Three Wise Men from the Biblical account, from Matthew 2, verses 1-12: In the time of  King Herod , after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, aski...

A Review of the Audiobook Published in 2015 by Simon and Schuster Audio Read by Arthur Morey Duration: 21 Hours, 10 minutes Unabridged Josef Stalin (1878-1953), FDR (1882-1945) and Winston Churchill (1874-1965) at the Tehran Conference in 1943. The premise of 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History is that 1944 is the most important year of World War II - the year that the Allies grew certain that they were going to win the war, the year that post-War plans were laid out, the year of the D-Day invasion and more. This effort by Jay Winik is very readable and was an informative and entertaining listen. There are times when he creates fabulous images in the listener's mind that are worthy of any novelist. His description of the extent of anti-Jewish operations throughout Europe and particularly in Auschwitz and other death camps are so vivid and so striking that I can readily recommend this book as a good place to start for anyone who wants a serious look. The ...

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2006 Translated by Caroline Mustill and E.H. Gombrich Narrated by Ralph Cosham Duration: 9 hours, 14 minutes Unabridged E.H. Gombrich (1909-2001) As the title states A Little History of the World is a small history of, well, everything. Sort of. This history was originally written in 1935. The author was an unemployed art historian and was asked to write a history of the world for children for an Austrian publisher. The first edition was written in six weeks and it sold well and has sold consistently ever since. Gombrich retained the rights and after World War II set out to keep it updated and translated it into multiple languages. He was working on translating it into English when he died in 2001 at the age of 92. The work was finished by others and no one is quite sure how exactly he was planning on ending it. The chapter on early man is quite memorable in that it gives early men and women a lot of credit for figuring out a lot of importa...

Humor, Like Food, Is Highly Subjective Published by Symphony Space in October of 2010 Multi-cast performance Duration: 3 hours, 6 minutes Here is the premise behind Selected Shorts: Even More Laughs - get a collection of funny short stories and have them be read by great performers such as Stephen Colbert and Alec Baldwin. There are eight stories of varying quality. As I noted in the title of this review, humor is very subjective. What I can really tell you is that this set is designed to appeal to a wide variety of tastes - not by being middle of the road but by bringing a true eclectic mix to the production. That is certain to guarantee that the listener will not enjoy everything. Stephen Colbert begins the collection with "The Lie",  the story Jerry Zaks (b. 1946), one of the performers in this collection. of a man who is just overwhelmed with being the father of a new baby. In fact, he is overwhelmed with everything - his dead end job, his wife's new confiden...

Published by Blackstone Audio in December of 2014 Read by Stephen E. Thorne Duration: 10 hours, 5 minutes Kenneth E. Bailey spent more than forty years teaching theology in Egypt, Lebanon, Jerusalem and Cyprus and along the way he developed a natural curiosity about shepherds. This is natural, considering how often shepherds are mentioned and that many of the main figures of the Old Testament were shepherds at one point or another (Abraham, Moses and David to name a few) and that Jesus refers to himself as both a shepherd and a lamb.  Combine that natural curiosity with a willingness to research and the ability to see the stories from a different cultural perspective and you have something new, at least new for those of us in the West.  What Bailey has delivered here is a very readable (or in my case, listenable) overview of the major passages about shepherds in the Old and New Testaments and how they relate to one another and the cultural meanings of these texts an...

Published by W. W. Norton in 2007 Susan Wise Bauer is well-known in the home school community for her well-written histories. I am not a home school parent but I do recommend this book for history buffs who would like a long-term general overview of history. Bauer mines lots of types of sources to build a view of the earliest cities and their beliefs. Bauer's history focuses on political leaders and religious/philosophical beliefs of different civilizations. One thing that I really like was her ability to take myths and legends (like Gilgamesh) and tie them into actual history and demonstrate why those myths and legends mattered to those ancient peoples and give the modern reader a way to have a better understanding of these ancient peoples.  The book starts with a focus on four major civilizations: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus River Valley (India) and the Yellow River Valley (China). As these groups grow, other areas are added (such as Ancient Greece and Rome).   T...