DWD's Reviews

  Published in 2020 by Penguin Audio. Read by Stephen Mendel. Duration: 9 hours, 59 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Peter Ash is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. He served with the Marines and even though he is back at home - he is not. He wanders because he can't stay indoors due to PTSD manifesting as claustrophobia. As he wanders, he finds good people in trouble and he tries to get them out of trouble.  In the past he's been in Milwaukee, Oregon and Washington State, Colorado and Memphis. This time he's in Iceland.  Ash has been hired by a rich grandmother to find her son-in-law and her grandson. Police in Maryland believe that her son-in-law killed her daughter, kidnapped her grandson, and took him to his home country - Iceland. So, Peter Ash somehow braves an airplane trip and arrives in Iceland only to find that this case is way more complicated than he ever imagined... My Review: Despite the obvious plot hole of a man with SEVERE claustrophobia riding on ...

  Originally published in 2007. Published in 2010 by McFarland and Company, Inc. If you are a student of the Civil War, George B. McClellan is a conundrum at best. After the Frist Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) in July of 1861, the poorly trained Union Army had fled back to Washington, D.C. They were basically a semi-organized mob awaiting someone to take the lead. Lincoln looked around and felt that the leadership team that lost at Bull Run was not going to provide a credible lead general so he looked around the Eastern Theater for anyone else with the aura of success. George B. McClellan had a bit of success in Western Virginia and wrote a lot of reports that made him seem an even better General than he was so Lincoln looked to him to retrain and refit the Army of the Potomac (the main Union Army in the East.) Statue of McClellan outside of the city hall in Philadelphia. It was  dedicated in 1894.  I have no idea why they felt he deserved this honor. When I have talked w...

  Published in February of 2022 by Brilliance Audio. Read by Seth Podowitz. Duration: 10 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Devin Gray is a retired military operator working for a high-end private security contractor. He is on assignment that goes a little sideways in the D.C. metro area and he is sent away to let things cool off. While packing up to go, he is contacted about his mother. She is estranged from the rest of the family because she is always off researching a conspiracy theory, which is kind of ironic because she works in a government intelligence agency that looks for conspiracies. She is dead after some short of shoot out in Tennessee and everyone is keeping it quiet. Gray discovers a note from his mother to him with instructions. It turns out to lead to her evidence that proves the conspiracy and he finds it to be plausible enough to reach out to others. Once they start digging, they find more than it is worse than they ever imagined... My review:  I was e...

Published in 2019 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by Robon Miles. Duration: 5 hours, 53 minutes. Unabridged.   Erica Armstrong Dunbar brings us an accessible biography of one of the true heroes of American history - Harriet Tubman. She Came to Slay is long enough to give a decent picture of her life but short enough that it doesn't intimidate potential readers. A traveling statue named honoring Harriet Tubman named "Journey to Freedom" I am not going to go through the entire biography of her life, but this book covers all of the major points of her life such as:  -Her escape from slavery;  -Her multiple trips back to Maryland to free family, friends and anyone that would go; -Her work in anti-slavery societies where she met and worked with people like Frederick Douglass, William Seward and John Brown; -The communities she helped start in New York and Canada; -Her work with women's rights groups and her struggles to get white women to include black women in their fi...

  Published in 1998 by Sergeant Kirkland's Museum and Historical Society, Inc. Bonekemper lived the dream of most students of the Civil War - once he retired as an attorney, he created a second career as a Civil War author, college lecturer and a frequent guest on C-SPAN to talk about leadership in the Civil War. He also gave 10 lectures at the Smithsonian! Bonekemper is an unabashed fan of the Union side in the war, especially General Grant. I reviewed a book he wrote about Grant here . As Bonekemper loves to point out, only 4 armies were captured during the Civil War and Grant captured 3 of them Grant's subordinate Sherman captured the fourth after Lee had already surrendered his army to Grant. The only general on the Confederate side that can compare to Grant is, of Course, Robert E. Lee. Lee is generally celebrated as the best general in the war and Bonekemper dedicates How Robert E. Lee Lost the Civil War to proving that wrong.  Bonekemper ignores the easiest place to go...

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 November of 2013 Legacy Publishing Echoes of War Drums: The Civil War in Mountain Maryland is a collection of newspaper and magazine articles written by the author. This sort of collection is, like most things, a good thing and a bad thing. What's good about it is the short format makes it an easy to book to pick up and read for a few minutes with the knowledge that you can walk away for a while and not have to remember any important people or plot points. But, there is a lot of overlap among the articles so the book can be repetitive if you are reading it straight through. I am not a native of Maryland. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I've never been to the region of Maryland that is featured in this book. But, I am an avid student of the Civil War so I read it to find out about an area of the country that had a front-row seat to many of the major battles of the Eastern Theater. It turns out this area had more value than just proximity. It was also a major s...

This Civil War buff thoroughly enjoyed it Originally Published in 2004 by William Morrow To Make Men Free , like an epic feature from the 1950s, features a cast of thousands which is both its strength and weakness. A lot of reviewers complain about the lack of depth in the characters, which is fair to say about the book. Unlike Shaara's The Killer Angels , the gold standard of Civil War fiction, there is not much character development. But, to be fair, Shaara focuses on precious few personalities of the War while Croker includes Lincoln, many cabinet members, Lee, McClellan and at least a dozen of the generals, not to mention colonels, sergeants and even a couple of privates. George B. McClellan  (1826-1885) The inclusion of so many characters does contribute to a lack of character exploration but it also contributes to a wide view of the mayhem of the battlefield. Croker also delves into political intrigues that went hand in hand with this bloodiest day in Am...

An excellent introduction to the topics of slavery and the Underground Railroad. Published by Clarion Books in 2000. While Bound for the North Star: True Stories of Fugitive Slaves is obviously aimed for the "young adult" crowd, it would serve as an excellent primer for ANYONE interested in learning more about that sad, sad topic in America's history: slavery . Harriet Tubman The author includes 12 stories about slaves who escaped north, mostly with the help of the Underground Railroad. Each story describes a different type of escape or incident - varying from the case of Solomon Northrup - a free black man who was drugged and sold into slavery while he was working in Washington, D.C. to John "Fed" Brown, a field slave who traveled a roundabout trip to freedom covering thousands of miles to John Price - an escaped slave who was captured in Ohio, but was eventually freed thanks to the near-riot of the Oberlin College community. The book ends up with the ...