DWD's Reviews

Published in 2006 by Tantor Media. Read by Grover Gardner. Duration: 10 hours, 10 minutes. Unabridged. Winston Groom, best known as the author of Forrest Gump , is also a historian of sorts. He has written 14 non-fiction books, using his research skills he honed as a journalist to investigate a historical topic. In this case, the topic Patriotic Fire is the Battle of New Orleans. Most people know everything they know about the battle from the catchy Johnny Horton song: I n 1814 we took a little trip,  Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip We took a little bacon and we took a little beans And we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans. I knew a little bit more, having read a little about the battle. I didn't know much, however, not really being a fan of the War of 1812 or Andrew Jackson. But, I am a fan of Winston Groom so I decided to give it a try. Groom is skilled at telling a narrative history and at the end, I had a much better idea of how the Ba...

This book was originally published on paper in 1998. Re-mastered audiobook version published in 2015 by Pottermore Publishing. Read by Jim Dale. Duration: 9 hours, 3 minutes. Unabridged. Harry Potter returns for his second year at Hogwarts. Volume 2 follows a similar pattern as the first one in that we begin with Harry enduring a summer with his horrible muggle (non-magical) family, going off to Diagon Alley to shop for back-to-school shopping and then having an eventful trip to school with his supplies. We hear about his classes, quidditch, his teachers, his friends and some foul goings on at the school that threaten everything. But, there are plenty of differences and that make this book much more enjoyable than the first book. There is much less macro "world building" going on because the general parameters have already been set. Instead, interesting details are fleshed out. For me, as an adult first-time reader, the relationship between those who can do magic and the ...

Published by Hachette Audio in 2018. Read by Dion Graham. Duration: 7 hours, 44 minutes. Unabridged. Edgar Award-Winning author. Down the River unto the Sea features Joe King Oliver, a private detective in New York City. He used to be one of the best detectives in the NYPD, but he was set up for a crime he did not commit. He had a consensual sexual encounter with a woman he was supposed to arrest, but it was videotaped and made to look like a rape - a sexual favor in exchange for not being arrested. He lost his job, he lost his wife and he lost his daughter. He spent a 90 days in the lock up at Rikers Island and it broke him. Oliver gets his life together with the help of a friend on the force and builds a respectable business. His daughter is in high school now and works as his receptionist in the afternoons. One day a case comes in his door that changes everything and might offer a chance at redemption... This is my first Walter Mosley book. You can't be a fan of detective boo...

Published in 2017 by Listening Library. Read by Mozhan Marno. Duration: 11 hours, 56 minutes. Unabridged. D.C. Comics' DC ICONS series creates a new YA version of their flagships character's origin stories. DC went out and found established YA authors and let them do their thing in books like Wonder Woman: Warbringer. Leigh Bardugo is an established YA fantasy author and she brings that vibe to the story of Princess Diana of Themyscira, the character who will eventually be better known as Wonder Woman. Diana is a teen that lives on the island of the Amazons - female warriors who died in battle but were reborn on Themyscira, where they can no longer intervene in the lives of mortals. Her mother is the queen of the island. Diana witnesses an explosion of a ship off the coast of Themyscira and breaks the rule of non-intervention by rescuing the sole survivor, a teenage girl and brings her back to the island. And then everything started to fall apart... This book borrows a...

Published in 2019 by HarperAudio. Read by Eric Jason Martin and Jeff Harding. Duration: 2 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. The title says this is a short story, but the print version of Cleaning the Gold is 129 pages and I would call that a novella. Karin Slaughter's Will Trent character works with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He is working on a cold case murder based on the activities of the very first Jack Reacher novel, The Killing Floor . Trent is looking for Jack Reacher based on a 20 year old DNA sample. Reacher is working in Fort Knox and Trent assumes an undercover identity to Pallets of gold in Fort Knox - they are featured in the audiobook. find him... The book is all written in third person with Slaughter writing the Will Trent sections and Child writing the Reacher sections. Lee Child is one of my favorites, but Karin Slaughter is certainly not. In fact, she's one of the few authors I refuse to read any longer. Just to compare, including this review I have...

Published by Listening Library in 2019. Read by Andrew Elden. Duration: 7 hours, 28 minutes. Unabridged. Set in modern America, Matt de la Peña's Superman: Dawnbreaker: DC Icons delivers a traditional Superman origin story with a little bit of a twist. This book follows along the line of the Smallville TV show, with Metropolis being within driving distance of Superman's Kansas hometown instead of basically being a stand-in for New York City. Big things are going on in Smallville. A tech firm has moved in, bringing in lots of jobs and a new corporate headquarters. They also are buying up farm land. And, a new smaller company has come in as well. Also, LexCorp is sniffing around. Smallville is considering passing a law requiring people suspected of being illegal immigrants (there is a burgeoning Hispanic population who serve as farm workers and work in a meat processing plant) to produce papers on sight and Hispanic men are disappearing. Clark Kent has always been amazingl...

Originally published on paper in 1997 by Scholastic. Originally published as an audiobook in 1999. Published in 2015 by Pottermore. Read by Jim Dale. Duration: 8 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged. Truth time. This was my first time with the book form of Harry Potter. I'd seen the first movie and maybe the second, but never actually read or listened to any of them. This is a big deal for me because I am generally a fan of the wonderful world of nerd stuff.  I will dispense with the plot stuff since just about everybody, even me, knew the bare outline - orphaned wizard boy with no friends and hated by his relatives that took him in, special magic school, Quidditch, and a creepy bad guy that killed the boy's parents. So, what did I think? This book is so adored and so talked up that it couldn't possibly live up to the hype. But, I liked it. I am looking forward to the other books. It is my understanding that they get more complicated and I certainly don't know the plots of...

Published by HarperAudio in 2016. Read by Charlie Anson. Duration: 9 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged. Ed Yong takes his readers (or, in my case, listener) into the tiny world of microbes in I Contain Multitudes . Traditionally, we think of microbes as tiny invaders that make us sick and, as I sit at home after yet another day of social distancing, it is easy to see it that way. But, Yong takes us into a more complicated world. A world where microbes actually benefit their larger hosts - where microbes can help produce scents or colors for attracting a mate, help guts break down leaves or nuts and even help their hosts survive poisons. In many cases, these microbes and their hosts co-evolved and have become dependent on one another. They have created their own microbiome. But, it's not that simple, either. Sometimes the microbes affect their host's behavior - and not in a good way. They can turn insects into virtual zombies, they can make mice hyperactive or depressed. They can ev...

Published by Annick Press in 2019. Read by the author, Michael McCreary. Duration: 3 hours, 37 minutes. Unabridged. Michael McCreary is a pretty unique thing in this world - a stand-up comic who is on the autistic spectrum. He uses the word Asperger's to describe himself in promotional materials. But, one of McCreary's points in this book and in his shows is that he is not all that unique. People on the autistic spectrum are not necessarily like the Dustin Hoffman character in Rain Man . McCreary cautions his readers not to assume too much and think that everyone is on the autistic spectrum. He has compulsive behaviors that are more than the average person would experience. McCreary has some genuinely funny moments in Funny, You Don't Look Autistic , but for me I got the most out of this as a teacher. It is not unusual to have students on the spectrum in my classes, and listening to this very self-aware talkative former student talk about his experiences shed a little ligh...

Published by Penguin Audio in 2019. Read by the author, Timothy Egan. Duration: 12 hours, 42 minutes. Unabridged. At the beginning of this pilgrimage, author Timothy Egan describes himself as a lapsed Catholic, perhaps even an agnostic. He was raised Catholic in Washington State and decided to go on a long-established pilgrimage route called the Via Francigena to contemplate his faith and how the church has betrayed its own faithful with the ongoing sexual abuse scandal. The Via Francigena runs from the cathedral at Canterbury in England, through France and Switzerland into Italy and ends in Rome at the Vatican. It is one of the most established pilgrimage routes in Europe, but not as well known as the Pilgrimage of Compostela in Spain.  Egan gives the listener little history lessons as he tells the story of his own pilgrimage through Europe. Those are usually interesting and informative. He tells his thoughts about faith and Christianity as he travels as well. When possible,...

Originally published in 1982. Published in 2010 by Simon and Schuster. Read by Kevin Kenerly. Duration: 7 hours, 42 minutes. Unabridged. Stephen King's long and storied career is legendary. At this point, he has 61 novels, including 7 written under the pen name Richard Bachman. At first, he wrote books under the Bachman pen name because the publishing industry had a rule of thumb - no more than one book per year per author. Clearly, with a prolific author like Stephen King that rule would be problematic. This edition of The Running Man includes an essay by Stephen King that talks about Richard Bachman and his relationship with his pen name. The Bachman books have a darker tone than the Stephen King books by design. The Running Man has a particularly dark tone. Set in 2025 in an alternate history (even though it was written in 1982, it refers to things in 1978 that did not happen) in which America has become a corporate oligarchy. The economy is ruled by a company called Genera...

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2016. Read by Andrew Elden. Duration: 7 hours, 44 minutes. Unabridged. In 2012, Ken Ilgunas embarked on a 1,900 mile hike from the beginning of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline in Alberta, Canada to its terminus on the Gulf Coast of Texas.  He did this because he is opposed to the pipeline and is very concerned about the expanded use of fossil fuels, the environmental damage caused by the mining of oil sands and the potential for spillage from the pipeline. Along the way, he blogs about his experiences with his iPad in the hopes of creating a little buzz about the topic. He was inspired to do this by a series of conversations he and a friend had during a stint in the kitchen at a Prudhoe Bay oil drilling site. They were going to hike the entire length together, but his friend begged off and fell into a support role, occasionally mailing him food and replacement pieces of equipment and boots (he went through 3 pairs of boots on this hike). Ilgun...

Originally published in 1959. Audiobook published in 1998 by Blackstone Audio. Read by Lloyd James. Duration: 9 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged. Winner of the Hugo Award for best sci-fi novel of 1960. Way back when - when I was in high school and Ronald Reagan was President, I used to read a lot of Robert A. Heinlein. Now, as an adult, I find myself all over the place with my ratings of Heinlein, mostly average. With this book, I will have two 5 star ratings, two 3 star ratings and two 2 star ratings. That makes a very mediocre rating of 3.333 out of 5. That would be a C+ on a grading scale and I agree with that assessment. This book marks the transition in Heinlein's professional career from writing science fiction for kids and young adults to writing for adults. This book was originally supposed to be for kids but the original publisher rejected it so Heinlein shopped it around, found a new publisher and never wrote for kids again. The book Starship Troopers is a rare book in ...

Published in 2015 by Simon and Schuster Audio Read by Tim Sample. Duration: 1 hour, 20 minutes. Unabridged. Stephen King uses the voice talents of Tim Sample, a humorist that specializes in talking about Maine. Fans of Stephen King know that the prolific author loves to set his stories in his home state of Maine. This one is set on the corner of a lake surrounded by vacation homes. Two families are part of a year-after-year fireworks contest. One is a family from Rhode Island. The other is an older mom and son who grew up in the area and bought their dream home on the lake. They don't know each other well, but their sense of pride get in the way as their desire to "one up" each other gets more and more ridiculous as the years go along. The folksy manner of the narrator makes this predictable story a lot of fun. It is the perfect matching of author and narrator. I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Drunken Fireworks by Stephen King.

Published in 2016 by Random House Audio. Multicast performance. Duration: 8 hours, 28 minutes. Unabridged. One of my favorite audiobook bloggers wrote a gushing review of this entire trilogy. It was such an enthusiastic review that I almost got all 3 books in the trilogy based on his word alone. I am glad I didn't. ****Warning: Spoiler Alert**** Sleeping Giants is derivative of two other works of science fiction - and they're not the finest bits of sci-fi. Imagine a mash-up of The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and Pacific Rim and you've pretty much got this book. It is like Pacific Rim in that you've got a giant robot weapon that has to be operated by two people at the same time to work. It's like Power Rangers in that certain people have been randomly "chosen" to operate this robot and possibly defend the earth from alien attack. T he chosen ones get to suit up and use the mighty morphin powerbot in this audiobook. ****Spoilers continue****...

Published by Tantor Audio in 2010. Read by David Colacci. Duration: 7 hours, 51 minutes. Unabridged. I heard about this book in a memorable interview with Tommy James on the old Dennis Miller radio show when this book came out nearly 10 years ago. It was one of the best radio interviews I have ever heard and I am not even a giant Tommy James and the Shondells fan. So, when I came across the audiobook I knew I had to listen to it - and I was not disappointed. For those not familiar with Tommy James, he is responsible for the songs "Hanky Panky", "Mony Mony" and "I Think We're Alone Now". He had two #1 hits and 14 Top 40 hits overall. He started his music career as a middle school kid in Niles, Michigan performing in bars and fraternity houses and pretending to be old enough to be in bars and fraternity houses. They did a lot of work in South Bend and Lake County in Indiana and eventually got regular work in Chicago. They even released the song ...

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 ...

Published in 2014 by Blackstone Audio. Read by Pam Ward. Duration: 5 hours, 12 minutes. Unabridged. Sgt. Stubby wearing his medal vest (left), marching in a parade (upper right) and wearing his special gas mask (lower right). During the quick basic training for American forces heading for France in World War I, a stray dog found its way into a Connecticut National Guard training camp at Yale University. The unit was sprawled all over the campus and this Boston Terrier mix wandered around making friends all over. His friendly nature guaranteed a lot of table scraps. He marched with the men, learned the commands and blended in as well as a dog can. Somewhere along the way, someone taught him how to salute and hold the salute until it was returned. When it came time to board a ship and head to France, the soldier that he spent the most time with, Corporal James Robert Conroy, hid him under his coat as others provided a distraction. Once aboard, Stubby ensured he got to stay with his...

Published by Author's Republic in 2019. Multicast performance. Duration: 1 hour, 11 minutes. Unabridged This audiobook is a mixed bag. I will start with the positive side. The multicast performance in this audiobook is really, really good. The voice actors perform it like an old-fashioned radio play and they are excellent. It even has sound effects that are timed right, set to the right sound level and are not obnoxious. The story is another matter. It starts out with one plot (two university professors trying to grow the size of the practically nonexistent faculty labor union at a small private university in Indiana), drifts into a second story line and finally moves into a third, rather bizarre story thread that doesn't even come close to addressing the original conflict in this 71 minute story. This audiobook just slides around like a nervous six year old tells a story to a bunch of adults at a family get-together. I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5. It gets 2 stars be...

Published in 2014 by Random House Audio Read by the author, Bryan Stevenson. Duration: 11 hours, 11 minutes Unabridged. "...if he just had the money for a decent lawyer." Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer who has spent his entire career working with people who have been wrongfully convicted and unfairly sentenced. He works through the Equal Justice Initiative with a lot of death row inmates in Alabama. He has succeeded in getting over 100 re-trials and/or re-sentencing hearings for people on death row. He has had multiple convictions completely overturned. Stevenson does a lot of work in Alabama because Alabama doesn't do much to subsidize the defense in death row cases. How much does the state spend for the entire case, including appeals? Just $1,000. Some counties help with that amount, but more than 70% of Alabama's death row inmates were represented by $1,000 lawyers. Considering that the average cost of a simple will is $375 , you can see that a $1,000 worth o...