DWD's Reviews

  Published in March of 2022 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, Will Hurd. Duration: 8 hours, 47 minutes. Unabridged. Will Hurd has done a lot of things in his 45 years. He has been an operations analyst for the CIA (working in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan), he was worked in high-tech (including cyber-security and artificial intelligence), has served 6 years as a member of the House of Representatives from Texas, and is now a Republican candidate for President in 2024. This book was undoubtedly an attempt to introduce Will Hurd to a larger audience. I follow politics pretty well and I had never heard of Will Hurd until he announced his campaign for President in June of 2023 (to be fair, there are 535 members of Congress and most are not well known outside of their districts.) I heard about this book in a political podcast and, lo and behold, it turns out that my library had it. Just to let you know where I am coming from as I review this book, I am a Never Trump R...

  Published in 2023 by Hourly History . In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in an effort to stabilize their neighbor. In theory, Afghanistan had a communist government and the USSR had a policy of not letting any communist government fall.  Soviet troops leaving Afghanistan in 1989 via a bridge that was special built for the purpose of letting the USSR withdraw from Afghanistan even quicker. In 1989, the Soviet Union finished withdrawing its armed forces from Afghanistan. On paper they had negotiated a stable pro-Soviet government to lead Afghanistan after 10 years of frustrating fighting an elusive enemy that specialized in hitting the much better equipped Soviet army within guerilla hit-and-run tactics.  Within 3 years both the government of Afghanistan and the government of the USSR had collapsed and Afghanistan became a haven for international Muslim terrorists like Osama bin Laden . As I read about the difficulties that the Soviets had in fighting against t...

  Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2003. Read by the author, Khaled Hosseni. Duration: 12 hours, 1 minute. Unabridged. This book was published about 20 years ago and I just got around to reading it. This is not an uncommon thing for me - I did the same with the   Harry Potte r  books and The Handmaid's Tale , also.  I was motivated to read this for the same reason I was motivated to read The Handmaid's Tale - it was permanently placed on a banned book list in Idaho  in May of 2022. There are three parts to the story. The first part is a long description of the life of Amir, a boy who is growing up in Afghanistan in the 1970s. Amir had his problems, but he had a pretty decent life. He and his father fled to the United States when the chaos think of as "Afghanistan" began - the Communist Revolution of 1978. The author, Khaled Hosseni The second part of the book is the story of how Amir and his father adapt to life in the United States, including the re-bu...

Published in 2009 by Blackstone Audio. Read by the author, Tamim Ansary Duration: 17 hours, 28 minutes. Unabridged. Tamim Ansary has done something that is very hard to do - he has written a long history of a complicated topic without making it boring and after more than 17 hours of discussion, he left me wishing that it was even longer. Ansary makes the observation that most histories that people in the West (Western Europe and the Americas) read are written from a Western perspective. That makes sense. But, the history of the world is not just the history of Western Civilization. There are multiple civilizations on the planet. Mesoamerica (the Mayas, Aztecs, Toltecs, etc.) is a separate civilization. China is the historic center of another civilization. So is India. And between the West and India and China is another one. Westerners usually refer to it as the Middle East. This book is a history of that civilization from the beginning of recorded history (empires like Bablyon) to ...

Originally published in 1933. The dust jacket from the original hardcover printing in 1933. Lost Horizon was the first novel published under the label Pocket Books (Pocket Book #1) and was one of the best-selling novels of the 20th century. My copy of this book was published in 1966 and it says it is part of the 62nd printing by Pocket Books. The story starts in Afghanistan where a local rebellion has caused the British government to evacuate all 80 of the white residents via airplane. The last airplane out is a high performance luxury airplane carrying just 4 passengers. Turns out, their pilot is a hijacker armed with a pistol and he takes them far off course into modern-day Tibet. They have a very rough landing on a high mountain glacier and the hijacker dies. The four survivors start to walk across the glacier but are soon discovered by a party from a nearby monastery called Shangri-La. They are escorted back the monastery and settle in for a long wait for the next supply p...

Published in 2013 by St. Martin's Press. Mike Ritland served as a Navy SEAL, became a trainer of SEALs and eventually moved into training dogs that work with SEALs - the most elite of all service dogs.  While they look a lot like German Shepherds, Ritland points out that the SEALs usually use Dutch Shepherds or Belgian Malinois - breeds that are lighter, leaner and even more trainable. He describes how they sort out only the most focused dogs and then spend months training them to do things that most dogs would never do - like ride in helicopters, jump out of planes, fight people (but stop on command) and chase down a target through and over everything and be able to sniff out specific odors, like bomb-making materials.  Ritland's stories of training and combat in Navy Seal Dogs are interesting and sometimes touching, especially the stories of the soldiers bonding with the dogs in their down time (the dogs are supposed to be segregated from the rest of the soldiers, but...

Published in 2008 by Crown Publishing Matt Freed is summoned on very short notice to Bucharest to interview a member of Iran's intelligence community. He was unrecruited, meaning that he is a "walk-in" - literally someone who walked into the embassy and offered information that the American government would want. Freed has been asked to talk to this man because he is an expert on Iranian politics and he speaks the language. He is also an extremely capable intelligence operative. The interview yields valuable and very scary information. Freed starts to act on it and soon discovers that there may be more to this situation than he has been led to believe. He starts his own investigation and becomes convinced that this may be a double cross. His superiors disagree and it becomes a race against time with Freed working against foreign governments and his own... This is a middle-of-the-road spy novel. The action was good but sometimes the narration needed to be made more c...

Published in May of 2016 The 2016 Presidential election cycle has been wild, to say the least. A rookie politician with an unstoppable mouth and a veteran politician with a long, checkered past are an unlikely pairing. Throw in a couple of strong third party candidates and the fact that these are the two most hated candidates in a generation and you may very well have an election in which no one wins a majority of the votes in the electoral college. What would happen in no one actually wins, or if it is too close to call? Aaron Burr (1756-1836) Veteran White House correspondent Fred Lucas gives us some insight as he tells the story of six troubled Presidential elections: 1800, 1824, 1876, 1888, 1960 and 2000. With each election Lucas describes the political environment of the time, the major players in the election and the reasons why it became a disputed election. He details how it finally worked out and then offers informed speculation as to what would have happened if the...

Published in 2014 Wynne's War is a war story and a western with a bit of A Few Good Men thrown in as well. It starts out in Iraq where Army Ranger Elijah Russell is filmed rescuing a horse during a firefight and becomes a YouTube sensation. Russell and his buddy are taken out of Iraq to a remote base in Afghanistan. Russell is tasked with training horses for a special forces unit to use against Taliban fighters. They want horses because they are quiet compared to any motorized vehicle, can go places where four-wheelers can't and never need to be re-fueled so long as there is available grass. Russell grew up breaking horses and a great deal of the first third of the book is about Russell thinking about his childhood and detailing his "horse whisperer" style of breaking horses.  The charismatic leader of this special forces unit, Captain Wynne, is a mystery and so is his real goal with these horses. Russell can't quite figure him out and when he and his buddy...

  If you like the Mission Impossible movies, you'll like The Demeter Code Normally, I don't review two books at the same time. But, the author of this series sent me both books together, explaining that they are closely tied. From what I have read in other reviews, Unsavory Delicacies (really, it is a 30 page collection of short stories) served as sort of a bridge between books 1 and 3.Personally, I think you should just jump into book three, The Demeter Code . I felt no better informed about what was going on at the beginning of Book 3 than I would have if hadn't read 2. So, if you just jump into book three be prepared for a little confusion, much like at the beginning of the first Mission Impossible movie. In fact, this book reminded me quite a bit of that series due its fast-pace, dramatic action scenes and the emphasis on working as a team and trusting the team over everything else. The real action starts out with an American operation in Europe going bad, res...

Published in 2012 by HighBridge Audio Multicast performance Duration: 2 hours, 16 minutes This collection was inspired by listeners who wrote NPR and commented on why these stories from their vast treasure trove of stories have stuck with them for so long. Some are funny, some are sad and some are thought-provoking. They are also a mixed bag. Some are great, some are so-so and some had me wondering why they were included at all. Pretty typical of the collection is a skit called "Complexities of Modern Love in the Digital Age". It features the two voice actors that you most typically hear when you call a big corporation for customer service and they lead you through the phone tree. In this case, they have the two voices talk to one another and date. The idea is sort of cute but the actual skit was not as funny as the idea of the skit. A Kathy Griffin interview. Eh.  The Cookie Monster interview was fun. I loved the story about a stray cat that wandered into ...

This 2009 edition has been updated to reflect new developments and includes new material obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. I am torn about this book.  If you are not familiar with Pat Tillman, in the broadest terms, he was an NFL player who quit the NFL to join the army after the 9/11 attacks. Where Men Win Glory  focuses intently about the war in Afghanistan, the ongoing war (when this review was written in 2014) that has been mostly forgotten and ignored. Krakauer's review of the recent history of Afghanistan makes this book worth reading in and of itself. For most people, the reasons that Al Qaeda used Afghanistan as a base of operations is murky at best. The descriptions of how Tillman's unit operated and where they traveled are very vivid. Krakauer's 2000 Presidential election spin (the Florida recount - he only tells part of the story and does not mention numerous "recounts" by the media had Bush winning - about as many as had Gore w...

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2013. Read by Brian Hutchinson. Duration: 10 hours, 8 minutes. Unabridged. Author Scott McEwen co-wrote American Sniper , the auto-biography of famed SEAL Chris Kyle and from those contacts and the stories he heard he was inspired to write this fictional story of American special forces in Iran and Afghanistan. The insignia of the Navy SEALs This is really three separate operations deftly told as three separate stories with overlapping characters and a little overlap when they get back to base. The first operation is the insertion of a lone operative into Iran to kill a weapons designer. McEwen uses this fairly straightforward story to introduce the weapons and other equipment that will be used throughout the book. The second and third operations deal with a captured American female helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. She is part of a unit that inserts and extracts special forces all of the time so the men feel a real connection to ...

Published by MacMillan Audio in 2013 Read by Jeremy Davidson Duration: 11 hours, 25 minutes Unabridged Lisa Scottoline breaks new ground in Don't Go . For years, she has written courtroom dramas and legal thrillers. This time, Scottoline tries to tie together two distinct stories featuring Dr. Mike Scanlon, a podiatrist from Philadelphia. One is the story of an Army doctor doctor serving in Afghanistan and the other is a murder mystery.  Scanlon is a member of the National Guard and when the story starts he has been called up and is serving in Afghanistan. Podiatric surgeons are in high demand because of the common use of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) that explode under military vehicles and damage the feet of the passengers. Mike has left a wife and an infant child back in Philadelphia. His wife dies from a household accident and his wife's sister and her husband care for the child as he rushes back home to make funeral arrangements. They agree to care for her for t...

Published in 2013 by Regnery Publishing, Inc. Raymond Ibrahim's Crucified Again is at once alarming, shocking and tedious. The book documents attacks by Muslims on Christians, Christian churches and Christian organizations throughout the world, especially in predominately Muslim countries. Ibrahim uses newspaper articles and TV news programs that are printed and broadcast in Arabic and, thus, largely ignored by Western media as a source. He also uses regional Christian newspapers and  magazines and newspapers from organizations that document human rights abuses. He then proceeds to methodically list instance after instance of anti-Christian attacks from Nigeria, to Egypt to Indonesia. Ibrahim starts with a short overview of the history of Muslim/Christian relations in majority Muslim countries.  He lists the Koranic verses that are used to justify persecution of Christians (and all other faiths) and then demonstrates how it is done again and again and again. This is ...

Very Interesting History of the Modern Presidency Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2012 Read by Bob Walter Duration: 22 hours, 1 minute Unabridged Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, both editors at Time , have delivered a very listenable, fascinating look at each American president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama. No matter their political persuasion, their life experiences or their qualities as a human being, all 12 of these men share one thing: they were once President. This is an exclusive club and it seems that just about every president has looked to a former president for a shoulder to lean on, advice or even as a personal envoy sent to convey a sense of urgency to the message. The Presidents Club is told in a rough chronological order starting with Truman. When Truman was President there was only one other member of the Presidents Club: Herbert Hoover. Yes, the same Hoover that Truman and FDR disparaged for 12 years. However, to his credit, Truman sent ou...

Published in 2012 by Harper Colin Powell updates his 2003 memoir My American Journey with It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership . The book is really two books. The first part is an expansion on an article that was written about him for Parade magazine in 1989. In that article he listed 13 rules he had for life: It ain't as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning. Get mad, then get over it. Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it. It can be done! Be careful what you choose. You may get it. Don't let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision. You can't make someone else's choices. You shouldn't let someone else make yours. Check small things. Share credit. Remain calm. Be kind. Have a vision. Be demanding. Don't take counsel of your fears or naysayers. Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. Colin Powell speaking at the United Nations Powell then expa...

Published by Simon and Schuster in 2012 Read by Armand Schultz Duration: Approximately 6 hours Abridged In The Last Man , Vince Flynn takes a break from the Mitch Rapp prequels and puts Mitch right in the thick of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. He is brought in to investigate the disappearance (a presumed home invasion kidnapping) of Joe Rickman, the head of the CIA's clandestine operations in Afghanistan. In fact, he's been involved in so many clandestine operations that he could singlehandedly gut the intelligence agency's efforts in multiple countries around the world. Vince Flynn (photo by Phil Konstantin) But, as Rapp and his team start to investigate they find that all of the pieces don't quite fit together. Add to that an FBI agent that believes that Rapp and Rickman have pocketed millions of dollars intended for intelligence efforts in Afghanistan and the reappearance of a deadly man from Rapp's past and you have the basis for a go...

A Scotsman, a mastiff and a feudal nation Published by Mariner Books in 2006. When the United States first invaded Afghanistan one of my friends wondered aloud if we intended on keeping it as a colony. I quipped that we already owned a mountainous desert area full of people that have a religion that we don't understand - we call it Utah (with apologies to my Mormon friends out there). Rory Stewart After reading The Places In Between I truly realize the depth of our misunderstanding of the situation in Afghanistan. I keep up on the news better than most. I've spoken with veterans who have returned from Afghanistan. Yet, as I read Stewart's account of his walk across Afghanistan just weeks after the fall of the Taliban, I realized that this truly is a foreign culture - as alien to me as any on the planet. I am amazed that the mission in Afghanistan has been as successful as it has been. Stewart introduces us to the variety of cultures that Afghan...