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...

The first edition cover Published with the alternate title "The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death." Originally published in 1969. Listed in Time Magazine's 100 Best Novels Since 1923. Slaughterhouse-Five is the most famous, most celebrated, and most controversial novel of Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007.)  My synopsis: The book serves as a memoir to Vonnegut's horrific experiences as a prisoner of war in World War II and as a sci-fi exploration of the concept of time travel.  Vonnegut's very green unit was rotated to the front in December of 1944 in order to give experienced combat troops a break. The weather was bad, the terrain was bad, and the Germans had been retreating regularly. It was presumed that the Germans would be content to settle in to winter quarters, rest, refit, and pick up the fighting in 1945.  Instead, the Germans launched a surprise offensive and what followed was the Battle of the Bulge . Lots of Americans were captured and taken back...

  Published in 1981 by Delacorte Press. Kurt Vonnegut offers this collection (he calls is a "collage") of fiction, non-fiction, interviews, and even a musical based on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  As is the case with all collections, some parts of the collection are excellent and some parts are not very good. I believe that he first half of the collection is the best, mostly because of the inclusion of a history of the Vonnegut family in Indianapolis. Ironically, it was not written by Vonnegut, but by a family member who had married into the Vonnegut family.  Indianapolis is my adopted hometown and this Vonnegut family history reads like a history of the city from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. I found it fascinating reading, especially the story of the subscription brothel gentlemen's club that was frequented by the city's elite in an area that still has political "clubs" with fancy dining and smoking rooms more than 100 years later. It would be tacky to pay ...

Originally published in 1952. Synopsis: Paul Proteus is the director of the Ilium Works in New York State in an alternate timeline to our current one. It is roughly the 1950's after yet another World War.  That war taught the engineers to trust mechanization and the government to continue the central planning model that won the war (a more extreme model of the system the real United States used during World War II.) In the Ilium works there are multiple factory buildings full of machines, but there are no people because the whole thing is automated. Proteus and the other engineers replaced all of the people with machines in the name of efficiency. Even the best human workers make mistakes or get an illness and miss work or, eventually, die.  The machines don't have that problem. They work and work and work until the day they are replaced with even faster machines. Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) in 1952 This is the source of the title, Player Piano . A player piano plays itself than...

  Published by Imbrifex Books in March of 2023. Read by Mark Sanderlin. Duration: 8 hours, 49 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Dan Renfrew is a self-described homeschooled nerd and his life has been turned upside down. He watched his father get stabbed by a stranger who invaded their house and he has no idea if he is even alive.  Now, thanks to a magical device, Dan is in Medieval England and caught up in an army on the move. He learns that his father is a "time jumper" - men tasked to fix glitches in time and make sure the timeline plays out the way it is supposed to. The year is 1066 - just a few days before King Harold Godwinson meets and defeats one of the last Viking invasions of England at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Even more importantly, King Harold will be forced to meet the forces of William, the Duke of Normandy in just a few days and will be defeated at the Battle of Hastings. But, something is wrong and even though Dan has almost no idea what to do, he has to ma...

  Published by Random House Audio in November of 2021. Read by Steve Hendrickson. Duration: 16 hours, 31 minutes. Unabridged. When I read the title of this audiobook, OUR FIRST CIVIL WAR: PATRIOTS and LOYALISTS in the AMERICAN REVOLUTION , I was sure that I was going to be listening to an in-depth look at how the population of the young United States dealt with its neighbors and family that disagreed about the question of independence. The most famous example is Benjamin Franklin and his son William Franklin. William Franklin was the last royal governor of New Jersey and their relationship never recovered from the shock of the Revolutionary War.  This book deals with more of these issues than most histories of the Revolutionary War era, but that is not particularly hard to do - most of them mention the Franklin family situation and use it as a stand-in for all families. But, it does not go in-depth into this concept of Loyalists vs. Patriots. For example, I learned more about ...

Originally published in October of 1987. The premise of Bluebeard is that it is the autobiography of a has been artist named Rabo Karabekian. Karabekian also appears in an earlier Vonnegut book ( Breakfast of Champions ). Karabekian is an abstract expressionist, like the real-life famed artist  Jackson Pollock , who is in this novel as a friend of Karabekian. Karabekian's paintings are basically canvases covered with a coat of house paint and then some strips of tape. They were popular for a while. Karabekian's paintings are really a way for him to deal with his PTSD from World War II. He doesn't want to deal with the details so he basically paints pictures of nothing. A self portrait of Kurt Vonnegut. Karabkeian tells about how he got started in the art business, kind of hints around at his World War II experience and intersperses the whole thing with talk about what is going on in his life as he is writing.  I read the book with Karabekian and his author friend Paul Slaz...

  Published in 2015 by Tantor Audio. Read by Joe Barrett. Duration: 8 hours, 36 minutes. Unabridged. Garbology is the study of garbage. Archaeologists use garbology to learn all about ancient societies - what they ate, their tools, their clothing, their toys, their technology, etc. You can also apply garbology to modern garbage dumps and Humes uses this as an entrance to discussing all sorts of issues about our modern world and our problem with waste. Humes figures that the average American is on pace to create more than one hundred tons of garbage per person per lifetime. This is higher than the estimates you usually find because those estimates don't include the waste created on your behalf by manufacturers and service providers. Garbology starts out very strong with a look at how landfills and trash removal have evolved over time. Sounds boring but I found it to be very interesting. Later, he moved on to pollution, especially ocean pollution and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch ...

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 2021 by Macmillan Audio. Read by the author, Ty Seidule. Duration: 10 Hours, 45 minutes. Unabridged I have been studying the Civil War since I was in college 35+ years ago. My thoughts on Robert E. Lee have evolved over the years. I used to be a lightweight proponent of the Lost Cause theory of the Civil War. I never was comfortable with the concept of slaves being content with slavery, but I certainly believed that the Southern officers were generally a noble and heroic lot when compared to the Union officers and the most noble and heroic officer of them all was Robert E. Lee.  My thoughts the war and Lee have changed as I have read more and gotten older and perhaps a bit wiser. This book will be the 131st book I have reviewed that has been tagged "Civil War" and the 42nd book tagged "Robert E. Lee". I have widened my readings to include more of the Antebellum Period and more of the Reconstruction Era. Reading the Declarations of Causes of Seceding S...

Published in 2006 by Brilliance Audio, Inc. Read by J. Charles. Duration: 12 hours, 43 minutes. Unabridged audio edition. Jack Du Brul's Havoc is a techno-thriller that races from the Hindenburg disaster to Africa to Washington, D.C to Atlantic City to Niagara Falls to Russia and back to Africa with hardly any time to take a breath.  The book features Philip Mercer, a geologist by training that often troubleshoots for the White House. This is the seventh book featuring Mercer, a fact that was not on the audiobook label. However, Du Brul does a great job of catching the reader up on what has been going on - I assumed it was the first book in the series as I was listening to it.  The Hindenburg disaster on May 6, 1937. The action starts with a traveler on the infamous Hindenburg as it flies to its fate with destiny in Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937. A crazed man is hiding a secret in a safe in his room and he is afraid that the Nazis know he has it and are plot...

Published in 1991 by Silver Burdett Press 118 pages of text. 8 pages of timelines, sources and an index at the end. This book is part of a larger series (The History of the Civil War Series). It is very readable with a good balance of national history versus the biography of Swedish immigrant inventor John Ericsson, with the glaring exception I note below. John Ericsson (1803-1889) was almost the stereotypical nutty professor type inventor - he never properly patented many of his best inventions. Ericsson built a great number of inventions, but unlike Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, he never really built any industries around them. He seemed to have trouble with personal relationships and was happiest when the was building in his laboratory. John Ericsson (1803-1889) Among other things, Ericsson invented a screw propeller, a "caloric" engine and, most importantly, he was the designer of the famed U.S.S. Monitor, the first ironclad in the Union navy, part...

While I am sympathetic to a point, Kauffman drives his point home with so much rancor and vigor that I ended up being both bored and repulsed. Published in 2010 by Chelsea Green Publishing. Bye Bye Miss American Empire takes what should have been a fun look at the various groups that want to split apart current U.S. states and/or make independent countries out of U.S. states and turns it into a long, repetitive, angry rant about American foreign policy, both Presidents Bush and the United States (indivisible, as the pledge goes) in general. Kauffman starts off on the right foot with an introduction to these various splinter groups (or groups that wish to splinter America, to be more accurate) by taking the reader to a meeting of secessionist movements from all around the country in Vermont. For me, this was the first and last enjoyable chapter. Kauffman then launches into an extended discussion of secessionist movements in America in which he "scores points" by making ...

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...

Originally published in 1990. Hocus Pocus starts out at the end and you spend the whole book reading little stories to see how the character ended up where he is now. Eugene Debs Hartke is a prisoner being held in the library of Tarkington College. The book is his collected memoirs which were written on numbered pieces of scrap paper. The future he lives in is dominated by the Japanese economy and the American foreign and domestic policies are consumed by "The War on Drugs." Racism is much more prevalent. Eugene Debs Hartke was a teacher at Tarkington College, a college for very rich Special Education students who would not graduate from a traditional university. Across the lake is a maximum security prison that holds 10,000 prisoners - most of them were Special Education students who turned to crime to make a living. This is a good book, but it starts out a little slow. There are similar themes as other Vonnegut books I've read, especially his focus on how life...