DWD's Reviews

Originally Published in 1944-1945 Published by HarperAudio Read by Robert Whitfield Duration: about 3 hours. First published as a newspaper serial in 1944-45, The Great Divorce  is a fictional look at heaven and hell. The story is not so subtly built to be a vehicle for Lewis to discuss his major themes, including God's forgiveness, the pride of men and women who chose to remain in hell rather than accept heaven and the respect and power accorded to those with strong faith in heaven.  C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) This short book (160 pages in print, 3 hours as an audiobook) starts with the narrator riding a bus away from a disagreeable grey suburban town. The town is not really a bad place but its residents are all difficult in some way and they squabble and then move away from each other.  Later, the reader learns that the grey town is purgatory or hell, depending on the person. From time to time a free bus comes to the town and its residents can ride to a new pla...

Published in 2014 by HighBridge Audio Hosted by Desmond Tutu Commentary by Nelson Mandela Duration: 1 hour, 15 minutes. Winner of the Audie Award - Audiobook of the Year for 2015. Considering that Mandela: An Audio History is the history of the entire apartheid era of South Africa in 75 minutes, this short history is surprisingly thorough and very compelling.  The audiobook tells the story of apartheid through the story of Nelson Mandela - why he decided to fight against it, how he decided to fight against it, his trial for treason, his time in prison, how the struggle continued with him as the symbol of hope and resistance, the collapse of the apartheid system and it ends with the election of Mandela as president. Each chapter begins with a short introduction by Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu (also a large voice against apartheid ). Nelson Mandela  (1918-2013) casting his vote in the 1994 election. The story is mostly told through interviews with Mandela and doze...

Originally published in 2012. Audiobook version published in 2013 by Post Hypnotic Press Read by Cameron MacDonald Duration: 9 hours, 45 minutes. Time travel science fiction can be tricky. Do you play it straight and have time traveler affecting the time line like   Blackout/All Clear   by Connie Willis? Or, do you play fast and loose with time travel and timelines like the Dr. Who series does? Personally, I like the stricter interpretation of time travel. I think the loose interpretation is like Robert Frost's famed comparison of free verse poetry to rhyming/metered poetry to "playing tennis without a net." I guess it comes from to many years of playing Role Playing Games as a kid - I tend to put myself in complicated plots and think about how I would get out. Unfortunately (for me at least), this book plays by a set of fast, loose and rather arbitrary rules about time travel and leaves its own plot open to its own internal inconsistencies - the entire story ...

Originally Published in 2010. Post Hypnotic Press audio version published in 2013. Read by Daniel Mate Duration: 1 hour, 34 minutes Canadian author Gail Bowen takes a break from her Joanne Kilbourn series to bring us Love You to Death , featuring Charlie D, a talk radio personality who works the late night shift. This is part of the Rapid Reads series by Orca Books. This is designed to be a set of exciting, short mysteries. On paper this book clocks in at 128 pages. Charlie D is working the night show on Valentine's Day. His guest is the boss's wife. The boss is an ancient man who has married the young, very elegant and very expensive prostitute he used to frequent. She is now very pregnant and being interviewed about her thoughts on love and relationships.  Meanwhile, the neighborhood around the station is now awash in threatening newsletters and posters that advocate getting rid of the local prostitutes in any way possible. These vigilantes are inspired by the right ...

Originally published in 2001. Published HighBridge Audio in 2013. Read by Simon Prebble Duration: 10 hours, 32 minute s Mark Billingham's Sleepyhead  is set in London and features a serial killer with a twist. Rather than actually trying to kill his victims, the attacker is trying to paralyze them by pinching a spot in their neck for nearly two minutes in an attempt to cause a stroke in the victim's brain stem. The result, if done right, is a person who cannot do anything more than blink even though their brain is entirely functional. This is difficult and the result has been a slew of dead young women and one "successful" victim who is forced to breathe on a ventilator in a hospital. Thanks to the inspired work of a coroner, the local police know what the attacker is trying to do - but they have no idea how to stop him. The star of the investigation is Detective Inspector Tom Thorne, a troubled middle-aged cop with his own demons. Due to a past failure, Tho...

Published in 2013 by Harper Audio Read by the author, Simon Winchester Duration: 13 hours, 33 minutes Simon Winchester's sprawling book, The Men Who United the States , tells a history of the United States organized around five themes: Wood, Earth, Water, Fire and Metal. To be honest, I largely ignored the themes and just enjoyed listening to this magnificent, chaotic, rambling history. Starting roughly with Lewis and Clark (Winchester backtracks a lot), the story of America is told through the tales of the people that made America a more perfect union through their explorations or their inventions. The reader (or listener if you are enjoying the audiobook) is told about Lewis and Clark and the Pony Express and the invention of the telegraph, the first transcontinental rail line, the exploration of the Grand Canyon, the role of New Harmony (Indiana) in the study of American geography,  a con game involving jewels, how George Washington toured the Frontier before he became pr...

Great Characters, Giant Plot Holes Published in 2003 by Sound Library (BBC Audiobooks America) Read by Nick Sullivan Unabridged Duration: 11 hours, 47 minutes Stephen J. Cannell (1941-2010) was best known as a television writer, producer and the creator of such classic shows as the A-Team, The Rockford Files and The Greatest American Hero . But, late in his career Cannell also wrote a lot of novels, mostly action-based mysteries (not all that surprising considering his history in television). Runaway Heart is, in some ways, a typical Cannell story, but it does have some distinct differences. There are three main characters. The book starts with Herman Stockmire, an overweight, idealistic Los Angeles-based attorney with a bad heart (arrhythmia) who heads up a law firm called The Institute for Planetary Justice. Despite the big name, the Institute consists of Herman and his daughter Susan. Together, they go to court for all sorts of hopeless causes. They have sued mega-co...

  Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in December of 2013. Read by Linda Emond Duration: 1 hour, 56 minutes This short story is designed to go between books 15 & 16 in the series and is the audiobook version of a kindle e-book that was released in the summer of 2013. In Bones In Her Pocket forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan is called out to a remote location called Mountain Island Lake. It is the site of an artist colony and a raptor rescue center (they help deal with injured hawks, eagles and owls as well as advocate for policies that will help those animals). A body was found floating in a canvas bag that floated up in the aftermath of a serious flood. As Brennan figures out whose body was found she soon discovers that there is no shortage of suspects... This is my first Kathy Reichs book of any sort. To her credit, Reichs did not lose this newbie to her series despite the short length of the audiobook. The story moves along quickly and is ...

"Focus" lacks focus Published in 2013 by HarperCollins. Read by the author, Daniel Goleman. Duration: 8 hours, 8 minutes. Unabridged Dr. Daniel Goleman is best known as the author of Emotional Intelligence . In many ways this book is less of a book about the importance of focus and more of a sequel to Emotional Intelligence . It is also a anti-global warming manifesto, an education reform book, a self-help book for business leaders who want to be the real leaders in their offices and there is a little bit about how people are able to focus their attentions a bit more and get better results. That, of course, is the problem with the book called Focus . The primary topic should be the ability of people to focus and some hints to help you focus better. The book starts out with exactly this...well, focus. We learn how a store detective is able to focus on a crowded room full of bustling and sort out the normal shopping behaviors from the actions of a shoplifter. Golem...

Originally published in 1971. Audiobook edition published by HighBridge Audio in 2013. Read by Brian Holsopple  Duration: 6 hours, 1 minute. Ross Thomas (1926-1995) is a multiple Edgar Award winner. HighBridge Audio is going back and re-releasing a number of his books as audiobooks.  The Backup Men is #3 in the four part Mac McCorkle series. I had not read or listened to any books by Ross Thomas before this one and, to his credit, Thomas did an extraordinary job of getting this newbie listener up to speed rather quickly. Mac McCorkle is a part owner of a rather fancy restaurant in Washington, D.C. that he calls a "saloon." His partner is Mike Padillo who used to work for the CIA or a similar government entity (he is never quite clear about this) and is well-known in the professional hitman/bodyguard/spy community.  Padillo is approached by a couple of well-known members of his professional community, a set of nearly identical male and female twins, the Got...

Originally published in 1973. Audiobook version released in 2005 by Harper Audio. Read by George Guidall. Duration: Approximately 6 hours. Unabridged. Winner of the 1974 Edgar Award, Dance Hall of the Dead is an early entry in the Leaphorn series and is one of the best. Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police is called into a case that technically occurred on the Zuni reservation but there is a Navajo involved. Ernesto Cata, a middle school-aged Zuni boy and his friend George Bowlegs are missing. All that is left behind is an immense amount of blood that makes it clear that one or both of the boys died. Joe is brought in by the FBI who is coordinating a joint FBI/Zuni/Navajo task force to find the boys. Leaphorn has the feeling that the Zunis think the Navajo boy killed the Zuni boy and he has just been brought in to lead a manhunt as far as the Zunis are concerned. The FBI makes it clear that they think it is related to drug trafficking and they think the boy...

Published by Simon and Schuster in 2013 Read by Robert Petkoff Duration: 8 hours, 47 minutes. I teach in a public high school that is in the midst of transforming from a suburban/affluent to an urban/poverty school. I currently teach Spanish but I am also licensed to teach several social studies classes including economics. While this hardly makes me an economist, it does mean that I know enough about economics to make me dangerous to myself. I always think that it is interesting when economists take on non-traditional topics, like the Freakonomics guys do. In this case Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir look at the effect of scarcity on impulse control, poverty, time management, dieting and lonely people. Kids at my school have a horrible time with impulse control, poverty and time management so I was hooked when the authors started to look at how scarcity affects these behaviors. Through a series of studies (theirs and others) they demonstrate that people who are financia...

Originally published in 1970. Audiobook version published in 2013 by HighBridge Audio. Read by David Shih Duration: 7 hours, 34 minutes. Based on historical facts, the story of the 47 Ronin is a very popular one in Japan that has been told and re-told hundreds of times in books, plays, films, manga and more. A friend of mine that teaches Japanese compared it to the tale of King Arthur in England in that some versions feature magic, some extra characters, some are longer and some are shorter but there are some things that are consistent in every version. Of course, not being Japanese, Westerners often miss some of the power of the story. John Allyn's knowledge of the language, his time in Japan during the Post-World War II occupation and his extensive experience with theater made him a fairly unique talent to present this story to Westerners. Allyn explains quite a bit as he tells the story , including items that would not have to be explained to native Japanese. It is...

Published by Simon and Schuster in 2013. Read by the author, Rush Limbaugh. Duration: 4 hours, 31 minutes This is bound to irritate some listeners of Rush who may not read any more than the simple fact that I was not impressed by this book. Let my establish my bona fides right off. I have been a semi-regular listener to Rush since 1991 when I heard his parody song about Ted Kennedy called "I'm a philanderer" to the tune of Dion's "I'm a Wanderer." I have read Rush's books. I remember his TV show, if you look at my reviews you will see that I'm fairly well-read in Conservative literature and I even have a subscription to National Review. That being said, I cannot say that I was a fan of this book. I am a history teacher and I really have no problem with the history Rush presented. The book is about the Puritans, the Mayflower, their trip across the ocean and their first year in the New World. It was a bit simplistic and did not go into m...

Published by Simon and Schuster in 2013. Read by Pete Simonelli Duration: 12 hours, 2 minutes Computer expert (to say the least, the man was a pioneer in the field of virtual reality and was at the ground floor in multiple Silicon Valley projects and companies) Jaron Lanier discusses possible futures of the economy and the online community in this rambling, interesting audiobook. The author, Jaron Lanier Lanier spends quite a bit of time discussing what he calls Siren Servers. Siren Servers are massive collectors of data such as search engine sites, credit bureaus, the NSA, and some very large retail sites. These servers collect "free" data from you that is provided by tracking your searches, purchases, phone calls or GPS location on your cell phones and sell it to advertisers. Facebook is a sterling example. Lanier believes that you should be reimbursed for this information through a series of hundreds or even thousands of micropayments which would be used to...

A Tour De Force Published in 2013 by Simon and Schuster Read by Will Patton  Duration: 18 hours, 35 minutes I am an occasional reader of Stephen King. When I was younger I used to be an enthusiastic fan of all things Stephen King, but I took a break (about 15 years) and have slowly come back to the Stephen King fold, picking through some of what I missed, listening to his short stories as audiobooks and sometimes reading a book as it comes out. In this case, I am very glad that I did not hem and haw over this one. It is a tour de force of how to write horror, human frailty, human resilience and the power of friendship and love. Throw in the amazing performance by reader (and veteran actor - he is the coach in high school football movie Remember the Titans ) Will Patton and this audiobook is an experience that must not be missed. Stephen King Doctor Sleep is the sequel to the classic novel The Shining. I read it many, many years ago and decided NOT to re-read it before I ...