DWD's Reviews

Published by Del Rey in 2014. Illustrated by Caanan White. Synopsis: The Harlem Hellfighters is Max Brooks' history of an all African American unit (the 369th Infantry) that fought on the Western Front alongside French units. They mostly came from New York. This unit was allowed to fight precisely because they were assigned to a mostly French army. The American army would not let African Americans fight and had originally used the 369th as laborers, alongside civilian laborers. The French were in need of immediate manpower. French white soldiers already had experience fight alongside regiments of soldiers from their African colonies and were eager to bring American troops to the front, no matter their color. The 369th spent more time than almost any other American unit on the front lines. They may have spent the most time on the front lines. They were the first Allied unit to reach the Rhine River.  Legend has it that the nickname "The Harlem Hellfighters" was given to t...

  Published in 2020 by Random House Audio. Read by multiple readers (see text of review). Duration: 9 hours, 50 minutes. Unabridged. The premise for the novel Devolution is that a leader in the tech industry has built a completely new type of housing development in rural Washington state.  They are designed to use as little energy as possible, recycle the human waste and run on solar panels. The community is small and isolated - just a few homes in order to lessen the overall environmental impact. If you are old enough to remember the Mt. St. Helen eruption in 1980, in this novel, the same thing happens to Mt. Ranier. This is a complete possibility in real life and it is generally believed that the consequences would be much, much worse with Mt. Ranier. When Ranier erupts, this community is completely isolated by the chaos that follows. The government is doing the best it can, but this is a full-blown crisis and a few missing people in the woods (even if they are rich and con...

I reluctantly started this one and finished it enthusiastically Originally published in 2006 by Crown. A friend from work had World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War on his desk and said I should read it. Zombies!? No thanks! I've avoided all of the Twilight books and the other undead/monster books. He pitched it by saying it was fictional (of course!) but modeled after the very real work of Studs Terkel, The Good War: An Oral History of World War II . For those that don't know, Terkel interviewed hundreds of people about World War II and arranged their interviews into a narrative of sorts that told the history of the war. Well, that wasn't much of a selling point either because I never really got into Studs Terkel very much, so this was strike two. But, I took it home and started reading. Max Brooks The first 20-30 pages are boring but they do set up the rest of the book by introducing the concept of zombies, how they came to be, what they are capabl...