DWD's Reviews

  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 September of 2021 by Macmillan Audio. Read by the author, Evan Osnos. Duration: 17 hours, 7 minutes. Unabridged. Evan Osnos is a reporter for The New Yorker . He was inspired to write about the phenomenon of Donald Trump and the 2016 and 2020 elections when he returned from an multi-year assignment in China and noted that politics, journalism and even economics in the United States had changed. He didn't use this analogy, but I will: Parents don't notice their kids changing and growing because they see them every day. But, the aunts and uncles who only see them at the holidays can easily detect the changes. For Wildland Osnos went to three places that he used to live to investigate: Greenwich, Connecticut; Chicago, Illinois; and Clarksburg, West Virginia.  In West Virginia, he primarily looks at the changes in journalism such as the loss of local news and small town newspapers. He also looks at government pulling back environmental regulations and business avoidin...

P ublished in 2012 by  Cincinnatus Press   Insurgent is a worthy successor to the original book in this series, Republic: A Novel of America's Future.   Book One details how a fictional confrontation between the state of West Virginia and the federal government over the proper role of the Department of Homeland Security eventually leads to a very short war in which West Virginia is quickly defeated.  Book Two deals with post-war relations between the occupying federal government, its troops and the people of West Virginia and the closely monitored civilian government of West Virginia. The flag of West Virginia The parallels between this fictional war and the Iraq War and the multi-year struggle to create a stable environment in Iraq once Sadaam Hussein was removed from power are striking and, I am sure, quite intentional. And, since this is a book about Americans in a situation similar to that experienced by the people of Iraq, the...

Very well-written and guaranteed to make you think. Originally published in 2007. Approximately 346 pages. Set in America's near future, Republic is a look at the authority of the federal government run amok in the name of national security. Imagine, if you would, the government's reaction to a series of timed bombings that target the Pentagon and the first responders that come to save as many of the victims as they can (as was common in the Iraq War) but instead of a foreign attacker, the culprit is a domestic terror group. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sweeps in and starts to get very nervous about every sort of domestic disturbance. In this environment a profitable factory closes down in a small West Virginia town that depends on this employer for its very existence. The profitable factory closes because its holding company determined that it can make an even larger profit by relocating to Indonesia. When the newly unemployed American workers trespass an...

A Fascinating Investigation into American History Published 2008 by National Geographic Scott Reynolds Nelson went on a search to see if there was a real John Henry that inspired the songs and the legend of the man with the hammer who beat the steam drill in a contest. First and foremost, this is a book written for children, but it was interesting to this grown up as well. The topic was interesting, the pictures are great - lots of real pictures from the past of men on railroad work crews with their equipment. Nelson goes on to explain how the songs were used by work crews not just for entertainment but to keep time while moving tracks and pounding on spikes. Lastly, he explains, step-by-step how he makes his investigation. This could have been extraordinarily boring, but Nelson keeps it interesting. He actually creates a sense of tension as he tracks down his information. John Henry statue near Talcott, West Virginia Nelson does come up with a potential source of the legen...