DWD's Reviews

  Published by HarperAudio in 2019. Read by the author, Tia Torres. Duration: 5 hours, 50 minutes. Unabridged. Tia Torres is the director of the Villalobos Rescue Center, a dog rescue center featured on the Animal Planet TV show Pitbulls and Parolees . The rescue center used to be primarily for wolves and wolf hybrids but it morphed into pit bulls when police departments and city animal shelters would ask them to take in pit bulls on the theory that if you could handle a wolf you could handle a pit bull. Turns out, they were right. Now she runs one of the largest pit bull rescue centers in the country. This memoir talks about Torres' early life, her family and her early experiences with animals. But, the primary focus of the book are the special dogs that she and her family have had over the years.  The author and one of her dogs I have to confess to being a fan of the show. My wife started watching it and I was drawn in. Soon enough, we had marathoned through all 18 seasons of the

  Originally published in 2009. In 1960, a six year old little girl named Ruby Bridges was to be the first African-American student to integrate an elementary school in Louisiana. To say it did not go well would be an understatement. Parents pulled their children out. So many pulled their children out that Ruby was in a class by herself at first. There were so screaming, protesting mobs of parents. There were threats of violence. It was so bad that federal marshals were sent in to ensure her safety and to ensure that the desegregation order was enforced. ********** This book was written by Ruby Bridges and is published by Scholastic as a Level 2 early reader. That is pretty early for a student to read about this topic - Ruby Bridges was the same age as the children who would be reading this book. I normally don't review books for little children, but I decided to review this one when I saw that a group called Moms for Liberty called for it to be removed from a a school system in Te

  Published by Little, Brown and Company. Read by the author, Clint Smith. Duration: 10 hours, 6 minutes. Unabridged. Clint Smith decided to explore several key historical sites that have ties to American slavery and how the consequences of American slavery has echoed down throughout American history. He is looking for constant threads in American history from the perspective of African Americans. He visits Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, New Orleans, Angola Prison, a plantation in Louisiana that emphasizes the lives of the majority of the people that lived and worked there (the slaves and the Jim Crow era labor that was trapped there), a Confederate grave yard, the place were Juneteenth happened in Texas, New York City (a slave stronghold in the North for a surprisingly long time) and finally a fortress used as a slave market in Africa. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) and Sally Hemings (c. 1773-1835) This is a difficult book in many ways. Smith intentionally digs into difficult questi

Published in 2006 by Tantor Media. Read by Grover Gardner. Duration: 10 hours, 10 minutes. Unabridged. Winston Groom, best known as the author of Forrest Gump , is also a historian of sorts. He has written 14 non-fiction books, using his research skills he honed as a journalist to investigate a historical topic. In this case, the topic is the Battle of New Orleans. Most people know everything they know about the battle from the catchy Johnny Horton song: I n 1814 we took a little trip,  Along with Colonel Jackson down the might Mississip We took a little bacon and we took a little beans And we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans. I knew a little bit more, having read a little about the battle. I didn't know much, however, not really being a fan of the War of 1812 or Andrew Jackson. But, I am a fan of Winston Groom so I decided to give it a try. Groom is skilled at telling a narrative history and at the end, I had a much better idea of how the Battle of New Orl

A profound book. Well-written and tugs at the heart. In the Sanctuary of Outcasts is a memoir of a magazine and newspaper publisher who was sentenced to a minimum security prison for band fraud (he was "kiting" checks to make payroll, grow the business and buy fancy digs for the corporate offices). The prison he was sent to, however, is not your typical prison. Carville serves as both a minimum security prison and the last federal leper colony in the United States. In the Sanctuary of Outcasts is a title with a double-entendre. At one level it is a sanctuary where the outcasts are kept away from the outside. A sanctuary in which the victims of leprosy can receive treatment and not be "different" from everyone else. The author is literally staying in their physical sanctuary. But, in the case of the author, being in In t he Sanctuary of Outcasts is more than this. He is under the care of the lepers. He learns from them. They teach him humility and taking lif