DWD's Reviews

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2014. Read by Bernadette Dunne Duration: 6 hours, 49 minutes. Unabridged. When Books Went to War looks at the deliberate effort by the government of the United States to put books in the hands of its soldiers as they went off to fight in World War II.  There were multiple reasons behind this idea. The first was simple: Reading books is a practical way to help soldiers pass the time. "Hurry up and wait" is a common refrain from soldiers of all eras and books helped fill the time. Another reason was to remind the soldiers of what they were fighting for. Being on the front has a way of making life seem cheap and disposable, but reading a good story might help keep soldiers attached to the good things from back home. This may seem corny, but so many letters from the soldiers and sailors were written to the authors of these books that emphasized this very point. Betty Smith, the author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn wrote and spoke about all of the ...

Published by Penguin Audio in 2025. Read by the author, Brian Recker. Duration: 6 hours, 40 minutes. Unabridged.   My cousin reviewed Hell Bent on Goodreads and his review made me very excited to read it as well.  I just re-read that review and I am still excited to read the book he described. The actual book is solid, but took a long time to get going and seemed like it was put together in an odd way - almost backwards and I think that diluted its strength. Recker starts with a lengthy discussion of what happens if you fall out of your tribe's accepted truths. In this case, his tribe is American Evangelical Christianity, but you may have had a similar falling out with another group. For example, I have had a falling out with a lot of friends and family because I left my political tribe (I am a never-Trump Republican.) This part was simply too long for me. I was far more interested in the actual discussion about the relative strengths and weaknesses of those that argue in fav...

Published in 2024 by Little, Brown, and Company. Read by the author, Malcolm Gladwell. Duration: 8 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. Malcolm Gladwell delivers another immensely entertaining and informative rambling discussion of, well, so many things in Revenge of the Tipping Point . Ostensibly, this is a look at the opioid epidemic, but Malcolm Gladwell's style always reminds the reader that the world is inter-related and complicated and so very interesting. I plowed through this 8 hour audiobook in just a couple of days. I listened whenever I could and, honestly, I forgot that this was supposed to be a book about the opioid crisis during the 2nd hour and I did not remember he directly came back to the topic during hte 7th hour. In the meantime we had discussed medicare fraud in Florida, Cheetahs in zoos, the dangers of monocultures, Los Angeles as the country's epicenter of bank robberies, COVID superspreaders, vehicle emmissions, and more. It was all so interesting and he does ...

Published in 2024 by Tantor Media. Read by Stephen R. Thorne. Duration: 7 hours, 1 minute. Unabridged. Alan Dean Foster is a prolific sci-fi author. He has written over 50 sc-fi novels, but he is probably most famous for his numerous novelizations of sci-fi movies and TV shows, such as the original Star Wars movie (ghost written for George Lucas), Alien , Star Trek: The Animated Series , Krull , and The Last Starfighter . The Director Should've Shot You is the story of Foster's experiences as the man who Hollywood turns to to write novelizations of sci-fi movies. He talks about how that system (usually) works, the odd experiences, his interactions with directors, producers, and faceless stuidio executives, and his various thoughts of the strengths and weaknesses of the various projects.  My experiences with Foster as a young reader start with his two Star Wars books that he wrote when George Lucas  and his team were finishing the original movie. As I noted, he ghost wrote th...

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio Originals in 2022. Performed by a full cast, including Jeri Ryan and Michelle Hurd. Duration: 1 hour, 39 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis Set immediately after the Star Trek streaming show Picard: Season One , the audiobook  No Man's Land is an adventure featuring the characters Seven of Nine and Raffi.  With the collapse of the Romulan Empire comes the rise of local Romulan warlords who are trying to assert their control over the Romulan territory and, just as important, lay claim to the Romulan brand.  A Romulan who has taken the title Emperor is conquering/leveling various planets in an attempt to establish himself as the successor to the Romulan Empire. It looks he is heading towards a planet that is secretly holding a massive collection of written materials, museum pieces, and other cultural relics of the collapsed Romulan Empire.  There is a mad scramble to remove the relics, led by an ancient, kindly professor of unknown or...

Originally Published in 2006. Audiobook edition published in 2008 by Brilliance Audio. Read by Christopher Graybill Duration: 9 hours, 23 minutes. Unabridged. Named Best Crime Novel of the Year by the London Evening Standard. Named one of the Top Ten Crime Novels of the Year by The New York Sun and the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel. Audiobook version named a finalist for the Audie Award. Veteran writer Robert Crais is mostly famous for his Elvis Cole/Joe Pike novels. The Two Minute Rule is on of his few stand alone novels. It features a former bank robber named Max Holman.  Synopsis Holman has a son that he barely knows because of Holman's life of crime and his subsequent prison term. All he really knows about his son is that he has become a policeman in LAPD - and Holman couldn't be more proud. That pride turns into sorrow on the day of Holman's release from prison. As he is packing up, he gets a message that tells him his son has died as a result of a shooting along with ...

Originally published in 1968. Audiobook published in 2016 by Random House Audio. Read by Erik Singer. Duration: 4 hours, 3 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis Major James Brionne is a Virginian and a confidante of President Ulysses S. Grant. He helped pacify the region immediately after the war, including hanging a criminal named Allard. The rest of the Allard family gang, bushwackers from the brutal Missouri theater of the Civil War, comes to Virginia to kill Brionne. They don't find Brionne, but they do find his wife and son at Brionne's plantation house. She takes out one of the Allard gang and then kills herself rather than be brutalized by them. The Allard gang never finds Brionne's son, who had hidden himself in a little cave nearby. Brionne decides he needs a massive change of scenery. He takes his son out West on a train, to a region he had explored as part of a military mission years earlier. He wants to find a place to start over with his son - Utah. But, Briolle gets t...

Published in August of 2025 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, John Fugelsang. Duration: 9 hours, 24 minutes. Unabridged. John Fugelsang is seemingly omnipresent on the cable TV news/political talk show circuit. He is a talented debater because he knows how to bring the goods to an argument, especially when Christian Nationalism is involved. Fugelsang had a unique upbringing in a super-Catholic household. Why was it unusual? His mother was a former nun and his father was a former Franciscan friar. They fell in love, had a bunch of kids, and made sure that they all went to church whenever it was having a service.  In a a lot of ways, this felt a lot like my childhood. No - my parents weren't nuns or priests. But, I grew up in rural setting where my Lutheran church was one of the centers of my life. Church every weekend, most of the holiday services, Sunday school, Christmas programs, church youth group, vacation bible school, and I worked at a church summer camp for fi...

Originally published in 1985. Audiobook published in 2012 by Audible Studios. Duration: 16 hours, 26 minutes. Read by Paul Boehmer' Unabridged. I distinctly remember loving this series 40 years ago and excitedly visiting my local bookstore to pick up a new one when they were published. I was an avid player of Dungeons and Dragons and a book series released by the publishers of Dungeons and Dragons was a guaranteed win. As the series continued to print new books, I kept on buying them. I probably owned dozen or so of them. Somewhere along the way I sold off my Dragonlance collection. I worked part time at a used bookstore at one point and they probably ended up there. When I found the books in audiobook format, I decided that it was time to revisit these books and see if they held up to my memories of uncritical acclaim. Synopsis: In The Dragons of Spring Dawning , the forces of the Dragon Queen are rolling up victory after victory. But, rather than confidently rolling up the scatt...

Originally published in book form in 1985. Audiobook published by Audible Studios in 2013. Read by Paul Boehmer. Duration: 17 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: The war against the Dragon Queen continues. The forces of good pulled off a major victory at the end of the last novel, but now the forces of evil are looking for revenge.  Tanis, Flint, Goldmoon, Laurana, and the rest of the intrepid companions head off in search of new ways to fight the Dragon Queen's advancing armies. Or, if that fails - lead a refugee exodus. They use an ancient map from before the Cataclysm to find a legendary seaport only to find that it is no longer anywhere near the sea due to the immense destruction of the Cataclysm. As the companions try to figure out their next steps, an armada of dragons attacks the city, breathing flames from above. Dragon Army ground troops swarm into the city and the companions are split into two groups while Tanis faces the decision of a lifetime. My Review: This is a ...

Published by Little, Brown Young Readers in 2024. Read by Kauser Mohammed. Duration: 10 hours, 34 minutes. Unabridged. Book summary Noor Khan is a senior in high school and she is devastated. Her father walked out on her family and moved back to his native England. He gave no warning and the family is reeling. Noor's mother decides that a change of location would be best. Noor, her little sister (a freshman), and her mom move from their diverse upper middle class Chicago neighborhood to a downstate Illinois small town so that her mom can work at a small college.  Noor hates it. She misses her friends and the vibrancy of Chicago. She also feels like an oddity because she is Indian and Muslim in a school that is very white and very Christian.  She determines to gut out this one last semester of high school and then head back to Chicago to go to college. She decides she doesn't need friends or even to enjoy this small town - she just needs to get in, get the diploma and then get ...

Published in 2025 by Little, Brown and Company. Read by Peter Giles. Duration: 10 hours, 50 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis The Lincoln Lawyer returns for another case in The Proving Ground . Mickey Haller has moved away from defense work to civil litigation. In this case, an AI program designed to be a friend substitute to young adults and teens told a teenage boy to get rid of his girlfriend in a way that could easily be interpreted as killing her. So, he took his father's unsecured pistol and shot her in the high school parking lot. Haller is suing the company for marketing a faulty product towards teens. He is pretty sure he has the goods - bad programming and an unethical marketing team that is more concerned about demonstrating the potential of the AI so the company can be absorbed by a bigger company with deep pockets. They wanted the payoff rather than making it safe. But, as Haller and his team start to dig, they find they are out of their depth. Tech writer Jack McEvoy come...

Audiobook published in 2010 by Listening Library. Performed by MacLeod Andrews and Nick Podehl. Duration: 7 hours, 51 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis Will Grayson, Will Grayson is the story of two Chicago area teens named Will Grayson who attend different schools and do not know one another. One Will Grayson is determined not to risk hurt romantic feelings by not putting himself out there to make connections and possibly get hurt. Instead, he focuses on knowing all about obscure bands and lives vicariously through his over-the-top best friend, Tiny Cooper. Tiny Cooper is a massive mountain of young man who is also gay and is also the school's most talented athlete. Think of the biggest football lineman you have ever seen, make that lineman great at every sport, able to sing show tunes at the drop of a hat, and the biggest social butterfly in the school. The other Will Grayson is a closeted gay teen who has found an online boyfriend from Ohio. He muddles through high school life by g...

Originally published in 1984. Audiobook published in 2013 by Audible Studios. Read by Paul Boehmer. Duration: 20 hours, 0 minutes. Unabridged. Way back when, I read every book in this series from cover to cover as quickly as they came out. I did the same with at least two other follow-up series from these authors and, if I remember correctly, I read other books that were connected to this series - but not by the original authors. I proudly had about a dozen related books on my book shelf. That was 40 years ago. I sold those books along the way and had largely forgotten about them. I was reminded of them and I decided to listen to the audiobook version of the first book just to see if they were as good as I remembered. Synopsis: Krynn is a mostly peaceful place years after a calamity caused the people to turn away from the old gods. Cynicism abounds and the people worship new gods that may not after much comfort, but at least they didn't turn away from the people at their time of gr...

Originally published in 1962 in  the magazine If: Worlds of Science Fiction. Published in 2017 by Author's Republic. Read by Phil Chenevert Duration: 19 minutes. Unabridged. 2 B R 0 2 B is set in a future world where the population is kept at a strict limit so that the living can live in a clean and safe environment. When a new person is born into the world, someone must volunteer to leave because aging has pretty much been cured. The Federal Bureau of Termination keeps track of all of the births and deaths to be sure that the math works out. The phone number for the Federal Bureau of Termination is 2 B R 0 2 B - pronounced "two be or naught to be." The story is about a father whose wife is about to give birth to triplets. One of the grandparents of the triplets has agreed to die. Unless something changes, the future parents will have to pick out two babies to kill... This is an intentionally provocative short story that had a quick and brutal ending that surprised me.  ...

Originally published in 2000. Performed by Andrew Cullum. Duration: 14 hours, 49 minutes. Unabridged. Also published under the alternate title "The Archer's Tale" Harlequin is the tale of Thomas of Hookton during the early years of the Hundred Years' War . Hookton was a tiny English fishing village that was destroyed by French raiders from a ship. The raiders burn and loot the village, kidnap as many women they can, burn the village, and steal a religious relic - the famed lance that St. George used to kill the dragon. Thomas heads off to join up as an English archer so he can get his revenge on the French noblemen that destroyed his hometown and get St. George's lance back. The bulk of the book is about his adventures in France in a series of battles in the Hundred Years' War serving as a harlequin.  A harlequin was the French term for an English long bow archer. The battle scenes in this book are unbelievably well-told and Andrew Cullum's performance as...

Published in 2013 by The Great Courses. Lectures delivered by the author, Philip Daileader. Duration: 12 hours, 32 minutes. Unabridged. The idea behind The Great Courses is that anybody can have access to high quality college instructors who are truly experts in their fields. In this course the focus is the Early Middle Ages (roughly 300 CE to 1000 CE).  Daileader starts with the start of the decline of the Roman Empire, somewhere around the year 300 CE. He looks at the trends of the late Roman Empire and how they led to the fall of the Roman Empire in the West (Rome, not Constantinople) and how those trends led to the political and economic systems that typify the time period we know as the Middle Ages. There is a heavy focus on what is now France, which is well-deserved since Charlemagne is one of the biggest historical figures of this era. But, other areas get a fair amount of attention, like Ireland, Spain, and the Islamic world. The sudden appearance of the Vikings contribute...

Published in 2024 by HarperAudio. Performed by January LaVoy. Duration: 10 hours, 13 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis Troy, Georgia is, on the surface, an idyllic small town. But, the book banners have gotten active and removed a whole list of books from the school libraries and the public library.  The school board president, Beverly Underwood, was surprised at the arrival of this committee of book banners and how they manipulated social media to scare the town led by the local lady curmudgeon, Lula Dean. As a compromise, the school board president agrees to store all of the disputed books in her basement until things can get sorted out. Meanwhile, Lula Dean has set up one of those "little free library" boxes in her front yard with alternative books that she considers wholesome. It features titles like The Art of the Deal, Chicken Soup for the Soul books ,  and "Lost Cause" histories of the Civil War that she purchased at a Goodwill store in a nearby store in the barg...

Published by Little, Brown, and Company in 2025 Read by Will Damron. Duration: 9 hours, 3 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis Michael Connelly takes a break from his Lincoln Lawyer series, his Harry Bosch series, and his Detective Ballard series to explore something new - Catalina Island. Los Angeles County has jurisdiction over Catalina, a 75 square mile island a little more than 20 miles from mainland Los Angeles. Almost everyone takes the express ferry to Catalina, a boat ride that takes a little more than an hour.  The separation means that Catalina is a very different place than Los Angeles. Cars are rare - almost everyone drives golf carts or walks. Less than 5,000 permanent residents live on the 75 square mile island and the pace of life is quite a bit slower. It is widely believed that the Los Angeles Sheriff Department sends its screw up cops to Catalina for a little more seasoning or to find a safer place to make enough mistakes for the department to boot them out. Nightshade ...

Published in 2019 by Random House Audio. Read by the authors, Jon Meacham and Tim McGraw. Duration: 7 hours, 40 minutes. Unabridged. It turn out that historian Jon Meacham and country music star Tim McGraw are neighbors. They decided to work together on Songs of America , a book that looks at the role of music in American politics. They start with songs of the Revolution and work their way forward, hitting songs you've heard of such as The National Anthem (War of 1812) and The Battle Hymn of the Republic (Civil War) and songs you've most likely never heard of.  Not every song is war related. For example, the anti-lynching song Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday. There is a nicely done section comparing two still-popular songs from the 1980s - Born in the USA by Bruce Springsteen and Proud to Be an American by Lee Greenwood.  I particularly liked the juxtaposition of two Vietnam era songs: The Ballad of the Green Berets by Sgt Barry Sadler (1966) and Fortunate Son by Creeden...