DWD's Reviews

Published in June of 2006 by Random House Audio Read by Stephen Hoye. Unabridged Duration: 8 hours, 51 minutes. The book and audiobook for  10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America  are companion works for a History Channel series of the same name. They cover the same ten days but are independently researched and written. These dates are not the super-obvious ones like July 4, 1776 and December 7, 1941. One could quibble with the choices (it is part of the fun of a project like this one) but his choices are good ones. Here are the ten days and a few comments: 1) May 26, 1637 The date of a Puritan massacre of Indians at Mystic. He argues that King Philip's War is the model of American/Indian relations for the next 250+ years. 2) January 25, 1787 Shay's Rebellion and its influence on the Constitution. Emphasized the need for a more centralized government. 3) January 24, 1848 California Gold Rush. Focused on environmental degradation and not so much on the e...

Published by Post Hypnotic Press in 2012 Originally Published in 1990 Read by Lisa Bunting Unabridged Duration: 8 hours, 43 minutes There are a dozen or so Joanne Kilbourn mysteries. They are set in Regina, Saskatchewan in Canada. Kilbourn is a middle-aged political party worker. She works behind the scenes helping to craft policy positions, write speeches, plan campaigns and the like. Deadly Appearances literally starts with the murder of Andy Boychuck, a successful politician. Kilbourn has worked with him for years and he is suddenly dead from a poisoned glass of water he drank from as he began a celebratory speech. As the book proceeds there is another murder and only Joanne has the key to solving the mystery as she struggles to put together her shattered professional life and deal with her own issues as a recent widow (her own husband died a couple of years earlier). Lisa Bunting does a great job with the narration. She delivers on all of the emotions of Kilbourn – the ...

Published in 1996 by Sunset Productions Read by Gene Corbin Duration: Approximately 3 hours (abridged). Stewart "Hoagy" Hoag is a retired novelist and semi-retired ghost writer who, like the novelist Jessica  Fletcher in the old TV show Murder She Wrote , has a remarkable ability to be around when someone gets killed. In The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy  we find Stewart and his on again / off again relationship with his celebrity ex-wife in an on again phase. They have a baby and Hoagy is still adjusting to this reality. His basset hound Lulu is not happy having been removed from her position as the de facto child of the couple to being merely the family dog. But, this small family's routine is thrown into an uproar when Hoagy's old literary mentor Thor Gibbs arrives on his motorcycle with his 18 year old stepdaughter on the back. Thor Gibbs is a an Ernest Hemingway-type  character that is really into the mythopoetic men's movement -type stuff, except his ve...

Published December 2011 by GraphicAudio Multicast Performance Length: 52 minutes. Unabridged. This short audiobook was originally a short story in a larger collection but author Joseph Nassise has expanded on this story with several other books. GraphicAudio has adapted it to a radio drama format with multiple cast members and plenty of special effects. The Templar Chronicles: This Cleansing Fire features Captain Cade Williams, a member of the hidden Catholic order the Knights Templar. They are charged with fighting supernatural forces. One would think they might be a bunch of priests, but they are an elite commando unit carrying modern combat weapons and special swords. In this story, the team is sent out to find and destroy a group of Asian vampires. They are not Asians, per se, but this type of vampire originated in Asia. Another team was already sent in but they are not reporting back and Captain Williams and his team fear the worst. GraphicAudio's high production qu...

Published by Simon and Schuster in 2005 Read by Richard Thomas Duration: 9 hours, 29 minutes Abridged This is technically a re-read of Team of Rivals for me. I read the original 944 page hardcover book (see my review by clicking here ) and I have marveled when I have seen the 41+ hour unabridged version at the library. I love audiobooks but that is a commitment that I am not prepared to make. William Seward (1801-1872), Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State But, this abridgment is a very reasonable length and gives the listener a solid grasp of the political talents of Lincoln and some of what he faced. While the book does not cover all of his difficulties, it does a solid job of  presenting the relationship between William Seward and Lincoln, George McClellan and Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and Lincoln and Salmon P. Chase and Lincoln. Those were his most important relationships in the cabinet and they were all very different. Two became great allies (one after...

Performed by Johnny Heller Duration: 11 hours, 6 minutes Published 2012 by  Hyperion Audio Last winter I listened to audiobook #3 in this series, Heat Rises , and I was initially struck by the absurdity of a book written by a fictional author in a television show. I thought it would be a joke. We have a book written by a writer who was created by a television show writer. You would think that this would be a recipe for disaster - a mere cheap marketing ploy to generate some publicity for a television show. However, if you thought that, you would be wrong. Whoever is in charge of the "Richard Castle" franchise at Hyperion books has taken this quite seriously. Frozen Heat is a great police thriller. The story is about a murder case that homicide detective Nikki Heat's squad is investigating. Evidence points to a connection with the murder of Heat's mother 10 years earlier. As they investigate this connection, Heat and her writer boyfriend Jameson Rook travel ...

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2012. Read by Joe Barrett Duration: 8 hours, 55 minutes . Unabridged James McPherson is undoubtedly the most popular living Civil War historian. He writes in a common, easy-to-understand style that flows nicely and does not dumb down the facts. His latest book, War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865 continues that tradition. Union Admiral David D. Porter - Leader of the Naval forces in the Vicksburg campaign. If you read a typical Civil War history you get a just a little bit of the information, usually in passing, about the war on the open sea, in the bays, harbors, up and down the rivers and even in the swamps. McPherson reverses that arrangement in this book and focuses on the strategies, personalities and challenges that faced both navies and mentions the land campaigns in passing. If you are a frequent reader of Civil War books, little of this material will be new. But, the special focus does make th...

Published in 2012 by Hyperion Audio Performed by Dan Stevens Duration: 4 hours, 42 minutes. Unabridged. I am torn by this book. I liked the message (just live your life, enjoy the time you have, don't be a clock-watcher) but this short book felt like it was jammed full of padding. The Time Keeper features a man named Dor who lives at the beginning of civilization. He is happily married to his childhood sweetheart, has kids and is also the first man to measure time. He creates sundials, water clocks, measures the cycles of the moon and notices the days get longer and shorter as the year progresses. His childhood friend is the king and the creator of the Tower of Babel. His friend wants to harness this ability to measure time in some way to build his tower but Dor refuses. They are banished and eventually his wife dies from a disease. Dor returns to the tower and storms up the stairs just as God punishes the builders of the tower (sort of like it is described in Genesis). Do...

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2012 Duration: 10 hours, 57 minutes Read by John Pruden Chimera is the third installment of new author T.C. McCarthy's remarkable Subterrene War trilogy.  This is not an easy trilogy. It has brutal battle scenes, shows the reader an uncomfortable vision of technology pushed too far and asks important questions about what it is to be human. And, on top of that these three books are well-told, hair-raising trips through three different war zones in a truly dysfunctional world. In Chimera McCarthy introduces a new set of characters, as he does in every book in the series. Stan Resnick is an assassin. He seeks out and executes germline clones created by the American military to be frontline shock troops in Kazakhstan. They are all female (the males cannot be controlled), start fighting at age 16 and are pre-programmed to die at age 18. But, some have fled the war zone and have escaped to countries all over the world, surviving in a pathetic ...

Published in 1995 by Sunset Productions Performed by John Dhyani Running time: about 3 hours . Note: I assume that this book was abridged. It's original length in paperback was 182 pages and 3 hours would not normally cover that many pages. Back in the 1970s and 1980s John Jakes ruled the paperback historical fiction market with series like North and South trilogy and his Kent Family Chronicles.  Wear a Fast Gun   is not one of those sweeping historical epics. It  was written in 1956 and is a pretty typical western. A new sheriff named Reb Fallon has come to the town of Longhorn. Longhorn is a dangerous place and Reb Fallon is a hard man so it seem to be a perfect fit. Fallon sets out right away to confront the random violence associated with the saloons and also with a gang of cattle rustlers that hide behind hoods. Along the way he makes a lot of enemies, a few friends and encounters a possible love interest. The story itself is neither bad nor good - like I ...

Published by Bantam Audio Publishing in 1991. Multicast performance.  Duration: 1 hour, 4 minutes .   Louis L'Amour's famed Sackett family adventures continue with this full cast dramatization of of a short story about William Tell Sackett. Tell Sackett appears in seven L'Amour novels and two of his short stories. In Booty for a Badman , Tell Sackett is prospecting for gold and not finding anything. He is close to giving up completely when he is approached by one of his successful gold-mining neighbors with a proposal. The successful miners are piling up quite a stash of gold (50 pounds among the group) but they fear their claims will be jumped if they leave for town to deposit it in the bank for safekeeping. Even worse, they could be robbed and killed along the way - a fate that has struck other miners So, they want Tell Sackett to sneak their gold to the bank in exchange for a small cut of the gold. This way, their gold gets deposited, Sackett can make hi...

I have rarely been carried into another (horrible) world so thoroughly as I was by this audiobook. Published by HighBridge Audio in April of 2012. Read by Kyle Munley. Duration: 12 hours, 13 minutes. Unabridged. Paul Grossman's   The Children of Wrath is a dark detective story set in one of the most tragic situations in all of history: The Weimar Republic in the weeks before the rise of the Nazis. A series of murders of boys combined with the impending failure of Germany's experiment with democracy, the collapse of the American stock market and the open street fighting between the Nazis and the Communists makes this tragic piece drip with a sense of the impending descent of Germany into the madness that enveloped it after the Nazis took command. Willi Kraus is the only Jewish detective in the Berlin police force (and perhaps all of Germany). He is a decorated veteran of World War I but his country treats him with no respect because he is Jewish. His fellow detectives...

Published by HighBridge Audio in 2012. Performed by the guests and cast of Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Duration: about 2 hours. If you have not discovered NPR's weekly radio show  Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!  , then I pity you. This clever show is truly one of the funniest shows on radio or television or just about anywhere and this collection is promoted as a distillation of the best of a very funny crop. The question is, is it truly "More of the Best"? Yes. It lives up to its own hype. They truly are all funny. Even the people who I had never heard of like Neko Case and Tavi Gevinson were funny and interesting. Other, more well known personalities (at least to me), like Henry Winkler, Jane Goodall, Vince Gill and Brian Williams were as funny or funnier than I expected. This audiobook focuses on a part of the show - the "Not my job" segment. In this segment a celebrity is asked 3 questions about a topic about which they may not have any pa...

Published by HighBridge Audio Duration: about 2 hours. Every installment of HighBridge Audio's NPR Driveway Moments series is composed of collections of stories that aired on NPR. In this case, the common theme is cats.  The stories aired from 1984 to 2011 and cover everything from lions to mock youtube videos of a cat running for the Senate (Hank the Cat - see the video below) to the origins of the domestic house cat to cats being used in the fight against AIDS. But, the heart of the collection are the stories about the connection between every day house cats and the people they live with. There are travelling cats, vacationing cats, a cat that lives in a hotel and several stories memorializing cats who have passed on. All of the stories in the collection have first-rate production values but, as always happens in any collection, some stories are better than others. The cover of the audiobook promises "Radio stories that won't let you go" and some d...

Published by HighBridge Audio in 2012 Read by Brian Holsopple Duration: 1 hour, 48 minutes Unabridged. A re you the kind of person who has the best of intentions but continually puts important projects aside to do other things? Is your work environment organized horizontally (stuff spread all over the desk, open chairs and any other flat surface) rather than vertically (in a filing cabinet)? Do you find that even though you put things off you still get a whole lot of stuff done - just not the stuff that you were supposed to get done? If any of these descriptions sound like you than you should check out this audiobook. I have to admit, all of those descriptions describe me. Right now I am writing a review of a fun audiobook rather than writing one of a book I read three weeks ago that was not a particularly well done book. But, I am writing and that means one more book review will be checked off of my "to-do" list. John Perry is a philosophy professor at Stanford. Wh...

A Disappointing Adaptation Published in 1988 by Bantam Audio Publishing  Performed by a full cast Duration: 3 hours, 42 minutes Abridged and edited for the radio drama format. Way back in 1968, the BBC created a radio play version of The Hobbit to air in eight 30 minute segments with a full cast, original music and special effects. Due to a dispute between the Tolkien estate and the BBC the original tapes were to have been destroyed. But, the issues were resolved, copies resurfaced and since the late 1980s the BBC has re-issued this version of The Hobbit  in various formats. I listened to a 1988 audio cassette version. J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) Now, I truly love the story The Hobbit  - it is a true classic and I listened to this version to give myself a little reminder of the story before the movie comes out at the end of this year. However, this audio version has some serious troubles. First, the positives. The narrator (a character created for this a...

Hard-boiled detective mysteries at their best Published by Highbridge Audio in 2012 Duration: 6 hours, 31 minutes. Narrated by Peter Ganim, Richard Ferrone, Jeff Gurner, David Ledoux Black Mask magazine was a classic of the era of the pulp magazines. It's specialty was detective stories. If you love the movies with the hard-boiled detective in a trench coat with a smart mouth, a quick gun and even quicker fists who gets hired by some "dame" then this is your series. Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) In the seventh release of the series, Highbridge Audio brings us five stories of varying lengths read by four different narrators. Every story begins with a short introduction to each author that includes a mini-biography of their career and of the characters featured. Many of these characters that made their way to the Hollywood big screen and the title story ( The Shrieking Skeleton ) is written by Charles M. Green, a pseudonym of Erle Stanley Gardner, a prolif...

To the center of the galaxy and back Re-published by Blackstone Audio in 2012. Read by Tom Weiner Duration: 7 hours, 59 minutes Unabridged First published in 1976, A World Out of Time is a grand adventure that literally follows its hero, Corbell,  across the galaxy and across three million years of time as he reacts to one twist after another that eventually finds him carrying the fate of the entire world on his shoulders. The story begins with Corbell being revived from being frozen in a cryogenic chamber almost 200 years after he had been frozen in the 1970s because he had in incurable form of cancer. He is not in his own body, however. The patterns of his mind have been recovered and scanned into the "mindwiped" empty brain of a criminal by a totalitarian government called "The State." The State controls the entire world and is interested in interplanetary travel. The great distances and times involved have compelled The State to revive some of the ...