DWD's Reviews

A political thriller for people that don't know much about politics Read by Robert Petkoff 11 hours, 42 minutes. The premise behind A Heartbeat Away is simple and brilliant:  What if terrorists released a biological weapon into the House chamber during the President's State of the Union Address - the one time when just about everybody who is anybody in the Federal government is all in one room together? The follow through, however, is not so hot. Palmer's characterization of how a President would deal with this sort of problem shows that Palmer does not understand the one thing that all presidents are - they are politicians. They know how to collaborate, get things done, work with people they cannot stand to get their programs enacted. Even the most difficult President can schmooze and get people to work with them.  The president in A Heartbeat Away , James Allaire is the most politically tone deaf character I have ever seen. He manages to make the whole thi...

Published by Blackstone Audio Duration: 6 hours, 36 minutes Narrated by Barrett Whitener Unabridged Robert A. Heinlein’s Time for the Stars is a true bit of science fiction history and, in a way, embodies all of the “cool” stuff that made me such a fan – a bit of physics, adventure, young people off to explore unseen worlds, and some newfangled technology. Heinlein (1907-1988) first published Time for the Stars in 1956, during a time period when he had a contract with Scribner’s to produce books that were young people friendly. They were aimed at young adults, although I enjoyed it as well. It is the memoir of the space travels of Tom Bartlett, who is also one half of a very talented set of twins. The premise of the book is simple enough. The Earth is too crowded and a research corporation called the Long Range Foundation has invested in several ships to seek out new planets that humans can inhabit. There are already colonies throughout the solar system but they ar...

Published in 2010 by Tantor audio Read by Todd McLaren Duration: 14 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. Called a “Master of Alternate History” by Publishers Weekly, Harry Turtledove continues on that track in Atlantis and Other Places with a set of 12 short stories. Topics and eras range from pre-history to the Peloponnesian War to the Byzantine Empire to World War II and two stories set in modern times. All of these stories have appeared in other publications. This collection begins and ends with two stories about Atlantis, a topic he has explored more deeply in a trilogy. “Audubon in Atlantis” is the first story that Turtledove published about Atlantis. The famed 19 th century naturalist John James Audubon has traveled to Atlantis to catalog some of its unique wildlife. Turtledove introduces his alternate world, including basics of the history of Atlantis and he introduces the House of Universal Devotion, a religion that is most analogous to the Mormon Church in regular histor...

The unabridged audiobook is excellent Published by Bantam Doubleday Audio in 2001 Duration: 12 hours, 7 minutes Read by David Lansbury Unabridged I am not a giant fan of Grisham's latest legal thrillers but I am becoming a fan of his non-lawyer books, such as Bleachers and A Painted House . Grisham's non-legal novels are wonderful "slice of life" views of rural/small town America. A Painted House is a rite of passage novel about a 7 year old boy (Luke Chandler) growing up on an Arkansas cotton farm in 1952 with his parents and grandparents. His uncle is off fighting the war in Korea. It is the beginning of the two month long picking season and his family hires some hired hands to help pick the cotton. They hire a combination of "hill people" (poor whites from up in the Arkansas hills) and Mexicans who are literally trucked into Arkansas in the trailer of a semi as if they were cattle. Luke learns a lot during this season, including abou...

Duration: approximately 3 hours Read by Gillian Anderson   So, how can I say this succinctly and clearly? The abridged audiobook of The X-Files: Ground Zero is not good. It is bad. It is not well read. It has few of the best qualities of the TV show. Gillian Anderson Read by Gillian Anderson, the abridged audiobook clocks in at about 3 hours and read unenthusiastically by Gillian Anderson. One of the reasons I picked this one up is that I figured she'd read it well. It says it was recorded in Vancouver in 1995 (where the show was filmed) and it sounds like she read it between takes. She sounds tired and completely uninterested in the text. Then again, when you look at what she was reading, I cannot blame her for being uninterested. This book has none of the zip of the show. Mulder's lines are almost non-existent. No smart-alack lines or observation. No wry sense of humor that makes even the weakest of the TV shows watchable (I love the X-Files but let...

David Morrell's Black Evening: Tales of Dark Suspense is a collection of horror short stories. This is a change of pace from Morrell's normal fare of action/suspense/thriller novels, but this is a strong collection that is a great read and will be especially rewarding for Morrell's fans. David Morrell There are 7 short stories in this collection. The weakest by far is the first one, "The Dripping". I'd rate it 3 stars. But the rest are 4 or 5 star short stories which is high praise from me since I am not normally a fan of the short story format. Of especially high quality are "But At My Back I Always Hear" and "Orange Is For Anguish, Blue For Insanity." Those stand up with the best short format horror stories that you can put against them, from Poe to King. Each story is introduced by the author who includes plenty of details about how he started writing, what was going on in his life when he wrote the stories. Th...

A literary phenomenon Published in 2006 Read by Kerry Beyer Duration: 4.5 hours Unabridged I teach high school Spanish and history but even if you don't have much interaction with young people, you'd have to live in a cave not to have noted the literary phenomenon that is the novel Holes . Although my students don't read Holes in my class, they have mentioned it so I decided to listen to it as an audiobook during my drive to and from school. The plot itself is fairly unique in that there are literally no loose ends. Nothing is introduced that does not have a consequence later on, be it the prison guard quitting smoking and chewing sunflower seeds instead or the references to peach preserves, it all ties together. All of that makes the story less believable, more like a dark fairy tale but all of the more enjoyable. Louis Sachar The story itself is pretty solid. There's a mystery, a sense of camaraderie and an awful tale of injustice in the flashbacks. It i...

A sci-fi book for lovers of history Published in 2010 by Audible Studios. 23 hours, 56 minutes. Read by Katherine Kellgren. Unabridged. 43 hours of audio listening later (read wonderfully by Katherine Kellgren who handled a wide variety of accents and aging characters with real skill), I am finally done with the Blackout/All Clear saga. These books are intended to be one giant book, not a series, although you would never. ever know that from the audiobook's cover. To her credit, the author, Hugo and Nebula Award winning author Connie Willis introduces the second half of this audiobook with a warning that you had better listen to the first half first. Indeed you should and you should listen to the second installment as soon as you can after hearing the first one because there is no review, no scenes where the characters re-hash everything for the benefit of the listener. This is literally the second half of a very large book and she starts out exactly where she left off. See m...

A prototype of the current crop of approachable books on economics Originally published in 1980. Duration:12 hours, 15 minutes Read by James Adams Unabridged. Free To Choose: A Personal Statement is the manifesto on the power of capitalism and freedom (and how they go hand in hand) that was designed to be read, digested and discussed by the common man, not the economist. In fact, this is the book that was designed as a follow-up companion to a 10 part PBS mini-series that fleshed out the ideas in the series and addressed issues and further questions that came up in the making of the television program. Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976 (he always credited his wife for helping develop his theories so I would imagine he considered it a shared prize). The audiobook follows the lead of the mini-series and has 10 broad areas that it covers, including: -The Power of the Market; -The Anatomy of a Crisis (an in-depth study of the Great Depress...

LeVar Burton creates the framework for an epic yet... Read by LeVar Burton Approximately 3 hours ...he fails to follow through. Have you ever read a book in which the author takes a premise that would, at most, fill about 150 pages and yet he or she stretches it out to 400 pages? This is not one of those books. Aftermath has the opposite problem - an awful future is described and peopled. The cure for cancer and brain disorders is discovered, stolen and recovered with lots of gunfights, chases, psionic warfare, attempted child rapes, attempted suicides, kidnappings galore, slavery and people being skinned alive. However, none of it is fleshed out - we are left with the skeleton of an epic story - a framework of what could have been. Think Stephen King's The Stand told in less than 300 pages. I just wish he'd added more. LeVar Burton I am reviewing this as an abridged audiobook (no doubt the abridgment is part of the problem as well. Too often, too much is ...

Lackluster characters hurt a very interesting premise Read by David Colacci Published by Tantor Media, November 2010. Duration: 9 hours, 56 minutes, Unabridged. Ultra-prolific author Alan Dean Foster introduces yet another series with The Human Blend , the first installment of a trilogy set in a relatively near-future Savannah, Georgia. In this interesting new world the direst predictions about global warming have come true. America’s southern states have become near-tropical. Flooding ocean waters have buried coastal cities, forced them to move onto stilts or have caused cities to move inland. Much of Florida is underwater, the Everglades have swallowed the rest. Political changes have swept the world as well. The United States is now part of a larger country called Namerica. Several countries in Asia are equal to, if not more important than Namerica. The moon, Mars and Jupiter’s moon Titan have been colonized as well. Alan Dean Foster But, the most important changes ar...

Recommended for middle schoolers through adults    National Book Award, Young People's Literature, 2002. Published in 2002. Limiting The House of the Scorpion to a young adult audience is a disservice to the book and to the themes it brings up. This would be a fantastic book for an adult discussion group - there are so many themes and controversial topics that a group could discuss for hours and hours. That being said, I nearly quit listening to this audiobook after the first hour. It was sooooo slow to get started. On top of that, it was often dark and opressive. However, after the character Tam Lin comes in to the story the whole book changes and you would have had to fight me to get me to give the book up. By the time the end came around I felt like I had lived a life with Mateo and was thoroughly satisfied. So, what kind of themes are there? Well, this book, in my opinion, points out the dangers that many of the more Conservative thinkers warn us about ...

Be prepared - this is only half the story Published in 2010. 18 hours, 44 minutes Read by Katherine Kellgren Connie Willis continues her on again/off again time travel series with Blackout , a book about time travelling historians from mid 21st century Oxford who are visiting World War II England. Katherine Kellgren does a fantastic job of nailing the great variety of English accents and the one American accent as well as the male voices. Time travel has become routine for these historians - they have teams to help prepare them for their jumps into the past, including clothing, paperwork and implants to help them with accents. They are also able to learn vast amounts of information by way of sleep learning, which can be helpful for memorizing such things as every location of a V-1 attack or what time all of the air raids happened during the Blitz. But, the routine of time travel belies a deeper problem - that of "slippage".  The trips back and forth are becoming less ...