DWD's Reviews

Originally published in 1960. Read by Tom Weiner. Duration: 10 hours, 55 minutes. Unabridged. Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, 1961. A Canticle for Leibowitz is a Golden Age of sci-fi novel that originally started out as three related short stories that were published in  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction   in 1955, 1956, and 1957. The author, Walter M. Miller (1923-1996) was convinced to rework them into a single novel - the only novel he published in his lifetime (a sequel to this book was published after his death.) Synopsis: The story is set in a dystopian future. During the late 1950s or early 1960s the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union became a nuclear war called the "flame deluge." Human life was nearly destroyed and genetic mutations are fairly common in man and nature.  Six hundred years later the only surviving constant from the pre-war times is the Catholic Church. The story focuses on an abbey of monks in New Mexico w...

Originally published in 1970. Named a Newberry Honor Book in 1971. Set in the New Mexico and Arizona territories in 1863-1865, Sing Down the Moon is the story of a teenaged Navajo girl named Bright Morning.  Despite the fact that the American Civil War is raging in the East, this is a tough time for the Navajo. There are pressures from the people they call Spaniards who raid the Navajo and other Native Americans in search of slaves (undoubtedly the "Spaniards" were Spanish-speaking Mexicans that were living in the territory before Mexico lost it to the United States at the end of the Mexican War in 1848.) But, that's not the worst of it. In 1864, the U.S. military under Kit Carson (called Long Knives in this book) rounded up all of the Navajo and put them in a concentration camp called Bosque Redondo. The Navajo in the book are unsure as to why they were forced to come to the camp, but the ongoing threat of Confederate raids into Arizona and New Mexico had a lot to do wi...

Published in 2001 by Books In Motion. Read by Rusty Nelson. Duration: 11 hours, 59 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Sheriff Bill Gastner is coming to the end of his appointed term as Sheriff of Posadas County - a border county in southern New Mexico. Bill has been in the department in one form of another for 31 years and he is looking forward to a well-deserved retirement with no real plans for how to fill his days. Bill Gastner has got a wild last few days as Sheriff  - he has a drunken teen driver with a fake driver's license issue by the department of motor vehicles, two damaged police cars, two other teens in the hospital, and more. My Review: I am a big fan of this series. I love old Bill Gastner - he has insomnia, happily eats the same pepper-filled burrito at the same restaurant 2 or even 3 meals per day, and relies on experience more than the speed an agility of younger officers. But, this book was padded with a whole lot of nothing. We meet Gastner's son and grandson who...

  Published in 2019 by Zest Books. Illustrated by the author, Shing Yin Khor. In another recent review I wrote this: I have a real weakness for oddball travel books. I have read a memoir about a man that hitchhiked throughout Europe and North Africa, a book about a man's bicycle trip from the UK to India, a book about a man who walked across Afghanistan, a book about a man who rode a motorcycle around the edges of Afghanistan, a book about two women who biked from Turkey to China, a book about a man who walked the length of the Nile, a man who walked the Appalachian Trail with his deeply irresponsible friend from high school...and more. And more. And more. This book continues that tradition with a twist - it is done in comic book style. Usually, this is called a graphic novel, but this book is not a novel because it is not fiction. The author calls it a "graphic memoir." Illustration from the back cover The author/illustrator is an immigrant from Malaysia. She came over ...

  Published by Hourly History in 2020. Geronimo (1829-1909) is the Apache leader that is famous for having fought just about everybody that encroached on his people's land. Later on, when he had surrendered he was shipped all over the place to different reservations. That was pretty much the facts that I knew about Geronimo and I thought that I really needed to add more to that. After all, he is one of the few Native Americans that everyone has heard of.  Hourly History  publishes histories and biographies that you can read in about an hour. That can be a tough job for big topics in history like "The Industrial Revolution" or "The Roman Empire" but it is just about right for a short biography.  Geronimo may have fought with the United States and was eventually captured by the U.S. Army (many, many times) but he was really angry with Mexicans. Mexico was his primary enemy because Mexican soldiers killed his family and friends while he was on a trip to a Mexican t...

  Published in 2021 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by Timothy Andres Pabon. Duration: 10 hours, 10 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: The famous expedition into Mexico led by "Black Jack" Pershing to punish Pancho Villa in 1916 and 1917 is the stated topic of this book. However, this book is much more than that. It is a look at the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and World War I (1914-1918) and America's rather aggressive foreign policy in Latin America. Within most Americans' living memory the United States had taken on the responsibilities of empire by defeating Spain in the Spanish-American War in 1898. The United States took the Philippines, Guam, Cuba and Puerto Rico and immediately got involved in a fight against Filipino insurgents and independence movements that lasted more than a decade. The concept of foreign intervention was not a new one and the impulse to intervene remained strong. With war in Europe looming, the Mexican Revolution made America nervous. An ...

  Pu blished in 2008 by Books In  Motion. Originally published in 1999. Read by Rusty Nelson. Duration: 8 hours, 56 minutes. Unabridged. In Out of Season things are not going well for Undersheriff Bill Gastner, the second in command of the Posadas County Sheriff Department in southern New Mexico. He is planning to retire in a few months and the person he had hoped he would take over for him is moving out of state. He found out another officer has applied to a much larger department where there are more opportunities.  Things get even worse, though. A woman that most would consider more than a little mentally off balance calls the department and says that she has seen a struggling small plane disappear behind a mesa near her home. She says that it must have crashed. When a deputy checks it out, he spots wreckage. When they finally get close they find two bodies - and one of them is the Sheriff, a man who notoriously hates to ride in planes. When Gastner and the department...

  Published in 2008 by Random House Audio. Read by John H. Mayer. Duration: 17 hours, 16 minutes. Unabridged. In A Voyage Long and Strange Tony Horwitz set out to fill in a big gap in his understanding of American history. He vaguely knew that the Vikings arrived in the New World and did something or other and he knew about Columbus' voyage in 1492 and he knew about the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock and the First Thanksgiving in 1621, but what happened in between? Also, what about the people that were already here? Horwitz decided to find out what he didn't know and this book is a combined travelogue and history lesson. He starts with the small failed Viking settlement in Newfoundland, Canada, moves on to the Dominican Republic to learn about Columbus and comes to the United States to look at the first Spanish explorers and settlements in New Mexico and Florida. He also looks at the epic and eventually tragic expeditions of exploration that the Spanish sent out. Finally, he turn...

  Published by Recorded Books in 2012. Read by George Guidall. Duration: 8 hours, 16 minutes. Unabridged. Tularosa features Kevin Kerney, a retired police detective living in New Mexico. His former partner has come to him with a plea for help. His former partner's son (Kerney's godson) has gone AWOL from White Sands Missle Range in New Mexico. He had been a model soldier up to the time of his disappearance with clear plans to attend art school once he left Army career.  Here's the difficulty. It wasn't Kerney's choice to retire - he was at the top of his game when he was shot twice in the line of duty in his gut and his knee. This happened because his partner and best friend was out of place -- drinking.  It has been three years. It took Kerney a long time to physically and mentally rehabilitate and he never forgave his former partner for letting him get hurt. Kerney is not asked to forgive his former partner, but to put aside his dislike to go and find his godson....

Published in 2016 by Tom Doherty Associates (A Tor Book) Harry Turtledove specializes in alternate histories. Usually, he has a big twist - what if the South won the Civil War? What if Atlantis were a real continent? What if the Colonies lost the Revolutionary War? What if MacArthur actually dropped atomic bombs during the Korean War? The House of Daniel is a different kind of story, with a twist. To be perfectly honest, I read the description of this book, with its references to The Great Depression, baseball, "hotshot wizards" and zombies and missed the fact that it was actually referring to actual wizards and zombies, not metaphorical wizards (the whiz kid experts that FDR hired) and zombies (the unemployed masses who are desperate for work). I really thought that Turtledove had just written a straight book about semipro baseball in the Great Depression. And, basically he has. 85% of this story is about baseball. Jack Spivey does odd jobs, plays semipro baseball for a few...

Published by Simon and Schuster in June of 2020. Read by one of the authors, Chris Wallace. Duration: 8 hours, 40 minutes. Unabridged. The 116 days referred to in the title is the time between the day that Harry S. Truman became President and the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Chris Wallace quickly catches the reader up on what was going on and then uses a countdown for the chapters to add a sense of drama - will the scientists make it on time? Of course, we know that they do succeed - the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are one of the most well-known historical facts of the 20th century. Wallace's re-telling of the story in Countdown 1945 is full of facts but not particularly told in an interesting way. For example, there is a great deal of information about the Potsdam Conference (July 17 - August 2, 1945) that met in Germany. The Conference was important because it included the leaders of the USSR, the United States and the UK and in many ways it paved the pat...

Published by Books in Motion in 2008. Read by Rusty Nelson. Duration: 8 hours, 57 minutes. Unabridged. Undersheriff Bill Gastner returns in Privileged to Kill , another mystery set in a sleepy New Mexico county on the Mexican border set in the mid-1990's. However, in this story, Posadas County is anything but sleepy. To be fair, the story starts out sleepy enough with Bill Gastner feeling his age and talking with a a 51 year-old stranded bicyclist with a busted tire that he picks up on the side of the road just for the heck of it and totes him, his bike and all of his equipment into town. Bill and the bicyclist become friendly and the bicyclist heads off to make camp somewhere and then move on the next morning after he gets his tire fixed. But, things pick up quickly when Gastner gets a phone call in the middle of the night. A freshman girl has been found dead under the bleachers at the high school football field and the bicycle rider was camped nearby and he has been arrested. ...

Posadas County Mysteries Are Just Not As Good Without Bill Gastner First published in 2002. Synopsis: The Posadas County Sheriff's office is short-handed when it gets word that a pilot spotted a body that has been shot in the middle-of-nowhere. Literally, in the middle-of-nowhere - not near a road, a train track, a business or anything. The bullets were fired just in hearing range of a gravel pit but no one thinks twice about bullets being fired in the New Mexico countryside because people hunt or shoot at varmints on a regular basis. So, new Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman and her team start to dig into what they have - a body in the desert and no other clues. Soon enough, they discover more, including a local connection to what may be an international crime spree (although, it's not hard to be international so close to such a porous border). With the addition of the sudden death of a suspected animal trafficker in a fiery explosion, the new Undersheriff has her hands ...

Originally published in 1991. Bill Gastner is the cantankerous, ornery old Undersheriff of Posadas County in southern New Mexico. An undersheriff is the person right below the elected position of Sheriff and is appointed by the Sheriff. In the case of fictional Posadas County, the Sheriff is a former used car salesman who is a heck of a businessman but does not know much about law enforcement. So, Bill is literally the old hand that knows his way around the law and the county. Also, he is afraid that the Sheriff might drop him because he's in his sixties and generally considered to be an old grump. Gastner is a widower and an insomniac who will work 20 hours a day if he can. Why not? His kids are grown up and out of the house, he has no love life and he prefers his own company to just about anyone else's. A Southern New Mexico Landscape. Photo by NMTrey. One night while out on one of his volunteer patrols he listens to radio talk about a car filled with teenagers. A ...

One of Hillerman's best Originally published as a traditional book in 1980. Read by George Guidall Duration: 7 hours, 2 minutes Unabridged. People of Darkness is one of Hillerman's best and happens to be the first of the Jim Chee novels. It is set, like most of Hillerman's mysteries, in the Navajo reservation in the Four Corners Area. In this case, Jim Chee is working in the southeast corner of the reservation, in an area commonly called the "Checkerboard" because it consists of a series of parcels of reservation and privately-held land parcels that are interspersed with one another. Even though he is an officer with the Navajo Tribal Police, Chee is contacted to do some work as a private citizen who lives off of the reservation using his vacation time. It seems a multi-millionaire's wife wants Chee to investigate the theft of some of her husband's private "momentos." Chee starts to look into it and his curiosity draws him to ...

Good, but not great Hillerman.  The Shiprock formation in New Mexico Originally published in 1996. Joe Leaphorn has just retired and Jim Chee continues his exploration into cross-cultural dating (and difficulties). Officer Bernadette Manuelito becomes a full-fledged character in the series. In fact, this may be the best characterization of her in the series. There are actually two mysteries in The Fallen Man . One is a cattle-rustling caper. The other is the long-dead body of a climber that is found on Shiprock (Rock With Wings). If you ask, "What's a shiprock?" than you haven't been to the Four Corners area since this giant exposed interior of a volcano dominates its local landscape like some sort of gothic tower created in the imagination of Stephen King. This is not Hillerman's best work, but it is enjoyable for any fans of Hillerman. This would not be a good one to start with if you have not read any of the series. I rate this book 4 st...