DWD's Reviews

Published in 1976 by the Indiana State Museum Society. 1976 was the bicentennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence and if you were not alive in 1976, you have no idea how much went into that recognition. Every store had special decorations, every town had commemorations, everyone had red, white, and blue clothing and this went on for a long time - not just on the Fourth of July in 1976. Part of this ongoing celebration took place in museums. The Indiana State Museum had a 3 year exhibit on Indiana's role in the American Revolution. People remember the original thirteen colonies and correctly note that Indiana was not one of those colonies. None of Indiana's immediate neighbors were, either. But, the modern states of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois were on the front line of a different kind of war zone during the American Revolution. There were no great ships, no massed armies, and precious few soldiers even wearing an actual uniform - but there were...

Originally published by Knopf in 2009. Winston Groom will always be best known as the author of Forrest Gump , but he should be equally well known as the author of a series of well-told American histories. Included in those histories is a trilogy of Civil War histories that focus on the Western Theater of the war. Vicksburg 1863 is the second book in the trilogy, but it can be easily read as a stand-alone history. After a short introduction to the war itself, it follows Grant's campaign to take the Mississippi River away from the Confederacy, beginning with a mess of a battle in Missouri that proved nothing of any importance except that Grant was game to fight and push forward, even if the conditions were not perfect. That, it turns out, was pretty much the key to Grant's eventual success in this campaign and in the war. From there, we follow Grant through Kentucky, into Tennessee and the terrible Battle of Shiloh. Although ultimately successful, this marked a low point for Gra...

Published by Zondervan in April of 2024. Read by the author, Nancy French. Duration: 9 hours, 56 minutes. Unabridged. My synopsis: Ghosted is an autobiography of Nancy French. Nancy French had a career as a Conservative political columnist and ghost-writing for people in Conservative circles. She helped Conservative politicians write opinion pieces, helped them come up with clever lines for radio and TV interviews, and even books. She worked with such Conservative stars as Sarah Palin and Ben Sasse. She even worked with the Romney campaign.  The book starts with her childhood in Kentucky, including an awful story of sexual abuse at the hands of a manipulative youth pastor and how that sent her life into a spiral into she met her future husband while she was in college. Nancy French is married to David French, a well-known Conservative political columnist, commentator, and attorney. He worked for two organizations that defended the rights of Christian groups and Conservatives on co...

  Published by National Geographic in 2012. 443 pages. Winston Groom is best known as the author of the novel that inspired the classic Tom Hanks movie Forrest Gump . Most people don't know that Winston Groom wrote several histories, including three about the Civil War. ****Synopsis**** Shiloh, 1862 is, of course, about the Civil War Battle of Shiloh, sometimes known as Pittsburg Landing in southern Tennessee very close to where Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi touch.  The commanders were Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman and Don Carlos Buell for the Union and Albert Sidney Johnston, P.G.T. Beauregard and Braxton Bragg for the Confederacy.  Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) Grant was on a roll of sorts. He was the only winning Union commander, having won the Battles of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in Kentucky in the winter of 1861-62. These welcome victories not only buoyed the sagging morale of the Union after the loss of the first big battle of the war, Bull Run,...

Published in 2016. This little biography is part of an extensive series of short histories produced by Hourly History. The idea is to be a history or a biography that you can read in an hour. Amazon says that his particular biography is the equivalent to 48 pages long.  Some historians have asserted that there are more biographies written about Lincoln than anyone else in history, with the exception of Jesus. This is the 73rd book that I've reviewed that with the #tag of "Abraham Lincoln." What does this book have to offer that literally thousands of biographies and histories haven't already covered? To be honest - nothing. But, it is exactly the sort of biography that someone who hates history might pick to read because it is not an intimidating length and it is not written in highfalutin language.  There is nothing in this biography that is inaccurate, just a matter of what the Hourly History people decided to highlight and emphasize. I rate this kindle book 3 stars...

Published in 2019 by HarperAudio. Read by Eric Jason Martin and Jeff Harding. Duration: 2 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. The title says this is a short story, but the print version of Cleaning the Gold is 129 pages and I would call that a novella. Karin Slaughter's Will Trent character works with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He is working on a cold case murder based on the activities of the very first Jack Reacher novel, The Killing Floor . Trent is looking for Jack Reacher based on a 20 year old DNA sample. Reacher is working in Fort Knox and Trent assumes an undercover identity to Pallets of gold in Fort Knox - they are featured in the audiobook. find him... The book is all written in third person with Slaughter writing the Will Trent sections and Child writing the Reacher sections. Lee Child is one of my favorites, but Karin Slaughter is certainly not. In fact, she's one of the few authors I refuse to read any longer. Just to compare, including this review I have...

Originally published in 2001. The greatest argument among people who study the Civil War isn't who was the best general or what would have happened if Lincoln hadn't have been assassinated or even what would have happened if the Union had lost at Gettysburg. No, the greatest argument is this: What caused the Civil War? For the better part of the last century, the argument has been that the Confederacy seceded in order to protect "their rights". The counter-argument has always been to protect "the right to do what?" For me, the answer has always been a simple one - they fought for their right to own people and to keep African Americans at the bottom of the heap in Southern society. For the Confederate States of America, slavery was the reason to fight. For the Union army, maintaining the Union, with or without slavery, was the reason to fight - a goal claimed many times by Lincoln himself.  There will be arguments that claim that Confederate states secede...

Published in 2004 by Books on Tape. Read by Richard Allen. Duration: 9 hours, 39 minutes. Unabridged. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is most famous as a basketball player - in high school his team won 71 games in a row . He won three national championships in the three seasons he was allowed to play in college (freshmen had to play on a freshman team back then so his first season doesn't count). No one scored more career points in the NBA than Abdul-Jabbar. He is arguably the best basketball player ever. Turns out that he is also a thoughtful, active man with an interest in social justice and history. That's where this book comes in. The 761st Tank Battalion was brought to his attention because, it turns out, he knew one of its members growing up - he just didn't know his story. The problem is, no one really knew the story of these young men - and they should. That is why Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote Brothers In Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII's Forgotten Heroe...

Published by Listening Library in September of 2019. Read by the author, Akilah Hughes. Duration: 4 hours, 58 minutes. Unabridged.  To be fair to Akilah Hughes , I had never heard of her before I heard her interview on NPR promoting this book. The interview was good enough that I got the book. If you are not familiar with her, she is a comedy writer and YouTuber with a pretty good following. I really enjoyed the first half of Obviously - the part that talks about her early life. It was fun in tone and sometimes seriously funny, except for the story of her horrible 5th grade teacher. She tells her story in an episodic manner - by theme. Sometimes, the stories overlap and sometimes she (always confusingly, at first) tells them backwards, such as when she detailed her struggles with weight towards the end of the book. But, when she makes her move to New York, the story changes its tone. It becomes a lot more about name dropping and telling stories about people she is angry with (pers...

Published in 2008 by Indiana Historical Society Press. Most know that Abraham Lincoln came from Springfield, Illinois. But, a lot of people are not aware that at age 7, Lincoln and his family moved to Indiana from Kentucky. Lincoln and his family stayed in Indiana until just after his 21st birthday. In a four paragraph autobiographical sketch written in 1859, Lincoln devoted a little more than a paragraph to these years in Indiana, including this nice little sentence: "There I grew up." All of the stories of Lincoln's childhood (reading by firelight, the legend of the rail splitter, his aversion to shedding blood of any sort, his kindness to animals and more) took place in Indiana. Hoosiers are happy to claim him. The author, William E. Bartelt, worked for fifteen summers at the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial as a ranger and historian and was the vice chair of the Indiana Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. There I Grew Up: Remembering Abraham Lincoln's Indi...

Published in 2018 by Penguin Audio. Read by Ari Fliakos. Duration: 13 hours, 40 minutes. Unabridged. Simply described, The War Before the War is an in-depth look at the slavery controversy in the United States from its very beginnings through the Civil War. I am an avid reader of books that explore American slavery and the Civil War. Anyone that denies that slavery wasn't THE issue that pushed America to Civil War is deluding themselves and simply has not read the statements that five of the seceding states (Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia) issued in 1860 and 1861. Slavery was the most discussed item in four of the five declarations (Virginia's brief declaration does not mention many specifics but does refer to "the oppression of Southern Slaveholding states"). As the reader goes through this book it is easy to see that slavery was always a difficult problem for every generation of Americans to deal with. The Founders wrestled with it and...

Published in 1993 by Scholastic. Get on Board is an introduction to the Underground Railroad aimed at grades 4-7. It is a solid little history of the origins of the abolitionist movement, the Underground Railroad and slavery. It mostly focuses on the heroes of the abolitionist movement, but it does its best to try to work in a lot of individual stories of the Underground Railroad. For example, I enjoyed the letter that Jermain Wesley Loguen wrote to his former owner (he had run away) when she demanded that he pay for himself. It was the perfect blend of snark and indignant refusal. The longest biography in the book goes to Harriet Tubman with Frederick Douglass coming in a close second. That is appropriate since their stories are extraordinary. Haskins does a real solid job of introducing the two real-life people that the most famous African American characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin are based on and then reminding the reader of them when he discusses the novel and its impact. How...

Published by Tantor Audio in 2010. Book originally published in 1981 by Ballantine Books. Read by David Drummond. Duration: 16 hours, 10 minutes. Unabridged. As the American frontier pushed ever-Westward during the Colonial Era, there were multiple major conflicts between the new White settlers and the various Indian groups. The last, and the biggest, was the war that Americans know as the French and Indian War (1754-1763). It was truly a global war involving not only France and England, but also a variety of countries around the world such as Prussia, Austria, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Russia and the Mughal Empire in India. The war began as a power struggle between French and English colonists along with their Native American allies. Technically, a young Virginia militia leader named George Washington started the war when he tried to remove French Canadians who were building a trading post in what is now western Pennsylvania. The entire frontier was soon at war and little settlem...

Published in 2016 by HarperAudio. Read by the author, J.D. Vance. Duration: 6 hours, 49 minutes. Unabridged . Sometimes, I find it hard to write a review of an audiobook, especially an audiobook like this one. I find it hard - not because it is a bad book but because it is so good and I don't know how to convey my thoughts without giving a blow-by-blow book report of the book. So, in short, J.D. Vance tells the story of his upbringing in Hillbilly Elegy . He calls his family hillbillies but also calls that same group rednecks or poor white trash. When I was a kid in southern Indiana, we called them poor white trash. His family came from eastern Kentucky (as did part of my own a hundred years ago) and was part of an exodus from the area in the 1950s. These hillbillies brought their culture with them and Vance spends the rest of the book telling a dual story - the story of his family and the story of how this Appalachian culture is struggling in modern America. The title of the ...

A flawed biography of a man who is often overlooked Published in 1981 by Fairfax Press. J efferson Davis (1808-1889) is an oft-overlooked figure in American history, especially when compared to his presidential counterpart in the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln. This biography is not recommended as a place to start by this history teacher, though. It has too many flaws. First, there are strong points: 1. The basics of Davis's life are correct. 2. Lots of good pictures and maps. Weak points: The Iron Will of Jefferson Davis The Iron Will of Jefferson Davis is replete with factual errors, such as claiming that Lexington, KY was "in the East" (pg. 8) in 1823, when this was clearly considered the "West" by Americans of the time. He claims that Southern slave plantation farming was more productive than Northern agriculture - this has been proving to be untrue, unless you consider that you can get extended growing seasons and get multiple crops in Deep...

A rather depressing tale Published in 2008 by First Second. Slow Storm is a rather depressing tale of a sexually-harrassed female firefighter with family issues in Kentucky that encounters an illegal alien named Rafi during a thunderstorm that has spawned tornadoes. Rafi's home gets burned due to a lightning strike. That's about it for the plot with the exception of some clever writing comparing sneaking across the border to climbing over the "pearly gates" to get into heaven, this is an entirely forgettable graphic novel. I rate this graphic novel 2 stars out of 5. This graphic novel can be found on Amazon.com here: Slow Storm . Reviewed on October 5, 2008.

Not your traditional piece of historical fiction Originally Published in 1973. Nominated for seven Pulitzer Prizes in literature over his career, Allan W. Eckert brings us the little-known true story of Daniel Boone's court martial in Kentucky during the American Revolution. The bare facts are that Boone and a great portion of the fighting men from Boonesborough were captured by Shawnee raiders who took all of them back into modern day Ohio and eventually some were taken to Detroit to meet with the British Lt. Governor Henry Hamilton, known as the "Hair Buyer" for his policy of buying scalps of settlers. Boone behaved so strangely during this entire episode that when he finally escaped the Shawnee he was brought up on charges and court-martialed. Daniel Boone (1734-1820) The Court-Martial of Daniel Boone narrates the court martial and not the actual events. Eckert tells the story much like a modern courtroom drama. Boone had an unorthodox defense st...

Good summer fun! Originally published in 1994. Flintlock is the frontier nickname of Nathaniel Jones, a deadeye shot on the Kentucky frontier. The book is ostensibly about Aaron Burr and his attempt to break the American West away from the rest of the United States in the early 1800s. For those of you not familiar with Burr, he was the former Vice President (Jefferson's first term) who killed America's first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton (the guy on your $10 bill) in a duel. This ruined his political career and he was accused of conspiring to turn the US territory East of the Mississippi and west of the Appalachians into a personal dictatorship. Aaron Burr (1756-1836) The book has a rather large prologue (almost 1/2 of the book) that concerns young Flintlock's exploits as a teen in the Revolutionary War on the Virginia/Kentucky frontier. To be honest, that is the only complaint that I have with the book - its back cover does not accurately describe ...