DWD's Reviews

  Originally published in 1995 by Brilliance Audio. Read by the author, Tom Bodett. Duration: 15 hours, 43 minutes. Unabridged. The author and narrator. I think Tom Bodett's End of the Road series of short stories is just one of the best audiobook experiences out there. Technically, this book is part of that series even though almost none of it takes places in that oddball community of End of the Road, Alaska (it earned its name by being, well, the place where the road ends.) Bodett is well-known as a frequent panelist on the NPR show Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!   but he is most well-known for his voiceovers for Motel 6 in which he promised in his folksy way, " We'll leave the light on for you ." I say all of this just to say that this book was a major disappointment.  Everything about this book seems like it should work. It has a grounding in his Alaska stories. It consists of a series of short stories - his area of expertise. But, there is just way too much goi...

  Published in 2014. 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 fits in best with my book about the 2,190 mile Appalachian Trail because it is set on the American West's counterpart to that trail: The 2,650 mile Pacific Crest Trail. This trail runs from Mexico to Canada through California, Oregon, and Washington State.  Foskett is an experienced long-distance hiker but this hike is a challenge for any hiker to complete in a single attempt. The threat of snow in the mounta...

  Published in 2022 by Recorded Books. Read by David Chandler. Duration: 9 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Game Warden Joe Pickett investigates a report of a dead elk. Fearing that it is the victim of a botched attempt at poaching, he investigates. Instead, he finds a burned corpse and falls headlong into another murder investigation. Meanwhile, Joe's wife Marybeth, the director of the local library discovers an odd package left at the library with connections to a prominent Nazi from World War II. And...Nate Romanowski is in Denver hunting down an old enemy during the midst of an Antifa/BLM riot. My review: This is a book series about a game warden. Oftentimes, he is joined by a former special forces guy who is so into nature that he used to stand naked in a stream of water for hours at a time to get the feel of a river and its entire ecosystem - from the slime at the bottom to the fish to the birds that swoop down to the beavers that dam it up. Antifa protest in Denver Th...

  Published by Penguin Audio in 2017. Read by Stephen Mendel. Duration: 11 hours, 55 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Peter Ash is a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has had trouble settling in to civilian life. Specifically, he has a fear of enclosed places. He is good with his hands and restored an old pickup truck. He drives the truck all over the place and explores America by hiking and camping. The author, Nick Petrie As Burning Bright starts, Ash is hiking in a forest of giant redwoods and stumbles upon a bear, climbs a tree, meets a girl in the trees, finds out she is being hunted by a professional hit team and that's when everything starts to really get interesting... My Review: I like this series, even though it suffers a bit of a sophomore slump in my opinion. This is not to say that it is a bad book - it's not. I am rating this book 4 stars out of 5. I flew through the first half of the book, but the second half of the book was just a bit too ridiculous...

  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...

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 Tantor Audio in February of 2017. Read by David Colacci. Duration: 6 hours, 23 minutes. Unabridged. Broken features Daniel Briggs, a former sniper and a war veteran who is struggling to incorporate himself back into society. He suffers from PTSD in the form of anger control issues. Until recently, he copes by drinking, although in this book he has put the bottle aside. He also copes by drifting from job to job and place to place, avoiding deep connections. While in Seattle, working at a fish market, Briggs encounters an elderly woman wandering the streets with an 8x10 photo of her son, a war veteran who disappeared when he returned. Briggs decides to look into the situation and soon discovers that there are a lot of missing veterans and this is part of something much larger then he had ever imagined. The Daniel Briggs character is reminiscent of Lee Child's Reacher character and fans of Reacher might want to check this series out. I liked the Briggs character but...