DWD's Reviews

Published by Christianaudio.com in 2017. Read by John Pruden. Duration: 7 hours, 2 minutes. Unabridged.  In the 1960's to the 1970's, Steve McQueen (1930-1980) was the epitome of "cool" in Hollywood. Movies like The Magnificent Seven , Bullitt  and The Great Escape  made him one of the most sought-after actors in the world. But, there was a long back story to Steve McQueen and his tragic death due to cancer had a surprising twist for a man who seemed to be out to take as much out of life as possible. Greg Laurie, a super-successful California pastor (who I had never heard of, but his Wikipedia page is something else) wrote Steve McQueen: The Salvation of an American Icon  in order to investigate a rumor that Steve McQueen became a Christian before his death. He decided to be methodical and investigate McQueen's life from its beginning in Beech Grove, Indiana to its end at Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. McQueen was born at St. Francis hospital in Beech Grove, Indiana, a...

Published by WordFire Press LLC in April of 2019. Read by Charles Kahlenberg. Duration: 5 hours, 22 minutes. Unabridged. The title of Three Military SF Novellas says it all - this audiobook is actually a collection of three novellas. Nothing about any of these stories was particularly original, but I enjoyed two of the three immensely. Story #1 is called Comrades in Arms . It is set in an asteroid belt that is actually the front line of a war between humans and a insect-like species. This story has a familiar vibe - think Robocop meets Enemy Mine . I rate this novella 5 stars. Very entertaining. Story #2 is called Escape Hatch . It is set on a future earth in which a water-based alien species has invaded. They are sort of like eels and jellyfish. They combine together to create massive sea monsters and they are destroying Earth's combined navies. This story has a clever twist and has a very satisfying ending. I rate this novella 5 stars. Story #3 is called Prisoner of War . Thi...

Published by GraphicAudio in 2015. Written by Kevin Smith and Joe Quesada. Adaptation by Richard Rohan. Duration: Approximately 3 hours. Performed by multiple voice actors. GraphicAudio specializes in multicast voice performances of audiobooks - they are like old-fashioned radio plays, but heavy on the action. In this story, there are 26 different voice actors and a lot of special effects. Daredevil is a superhero by night and a lawyer named Matt Murdock by day. As a child, Murdock was blinded by an accident, but exposed to some sort of radiation in the same accident that radically enhanced his other four senses to the extreme. These enhancements allow him to fight crime, which he primarily does in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City. Murdock is having a crisis of faith after a rough romantic breakup. Despite his devil personae, Murdock is a faithful Catholic of sorts. When he encounters a young woman with her baby on the run he immediately steps in to help he...

Published by Penguin Audio in 2017. Read by Danny  Campbell. Duration: 5 hours, 53 minutes. Unabridged. The premise: In Radio Free Vermont , Vern Barclay feels that something about the modern global economy just isn't right. His beloved home state of Vermont is losing its unique character. Starbucks, Wal-Mart and Coors beer are moving in. Small farms are fading away and the local radio stations are now corporate radio stations with national programming taking a priority over local news. This last bit was especially tough for Vern Barclay. For decades he was THE voice on a statewide radio station - the guy who did the local sports, interviewed everyone with someone to say and just talked about the events of the day.  He loved Vermont and Vermont loved him. Generations of listeners sat around the breakfast table drinking coffee and learning about their own state and the people that lived in it. Now, his station has cut back his time on the air, began playing out-of-sta...

Published in 2019 by WordFire Press LLC. Read by Stephanie Minervino. Duration: 13 hours, 33 minutes. Unabridged. In the year 2034 a private corporation is making an attempt to build a colony on the surface of the moon to act as a home base for asteroid miners. They make the long run from the moon to the asteroid belt and back so that the lunar base can refine the metals found in the asteroids. It's a solid plan, but it has to start with almost nothing and work it's way to the kind of lunar colony you see in the movies. The world of 2034 is different in some ways. There are early references to some sort of traumatic biological problem, such as rampant infectious disease. A great deal of the early parts of the book is devoted to Stormie and Frank Pastorelli, two prospective lunar colonists that expose themselves to the risk of contracting a bloodborne pathogens when they help the victims of a car crash. The lengths they go to cleanse themselves of pathogens and the fear exhi...

Published in 2018 by Penguin Audio. Read by Ari Fliakos. Duration: 13 hours, 40 minutes. Unabridged. Simply described, The War Before the War is an in-depth look at the slavery controversy in the United States from its very beginnings through the Civil War. I am an avid reader of books that explore American slavery and the Civil War. Anyone that denies that slavery wasn't THE issue that pushed America to Civil War is deluding themselves and simply has not read the statements that five of the seceding states (Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia) issued in 1860 and 1861. Slavery was the most discussed item in four of the five declarations (Virginia's brief declaration does not mention many specifics but does refer to "the oppression of Southern Slaveholding states"). As the reader goes through this book it is easy to see that slavery was always a difficult problem for every generation of Americans to deal with. The Founders wrestled with it and...

Published in March of 2019 by Random House Audio. Read by by the author, Alex Kotlowitz. Duration: 9 hours, 53 minutes. Unabridged. Journalist Alex Kotlowitz has written several books about race, crime and life in the Midwest rust belt. An American Summer focuses on Chicago's most violent neighborhoods. How violent are they? In the past 20 years, 14,033 people have been killed and another 60,000 have been injured by other people shooting guns. Just to compare, it is as if the entire population of Scranton, PA or Ogden, UT or Napa, CA were all killed or wounded by gunfire. But, it's not like all of Chicago experiences this violence. It is really just a few neighborhoods - so the impact is a lot like a civil war is going on in a medium-sized city. Everyone knows someone who has been shot and most people know someone that has been killed. That takes a toll on the survivors and that is what this book is about.  Kotlowitz follows nine stories from these neighborhoods. Some we...

Published in December of 2018 by HarperAudio. Read by Peter Noble. Duration: 9 hours, 26 minutes. Unabridged. Paul Collier is an award-winning economics professor at Oxford University. His name is symbolic of how he approaches this book, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties. Collier has been knighted for his work as an economist. This means that he could have listed his name as Sir Paul Collier, but he does not. Collier may be a big shot professor who holds three positions at Oxford University (possibly the best university on the planet), but he is also the guy from Sheffield, England. Collier repeatedly compares it to Detroit because they are of a similar size and both  lost a great deal of their industrial base over the last 50 years. This book is intended to be read by the layman. Collier could certainly bury the reader with obscure terms, but he does not. Instead, he uses plenty of real world examples of well-known companies (Toyota vs. GM, for example) and w...

Published in 2014 my Macmillan Audio. Read by George K. Wilson. Duration: 11 hours, 15 minutes. Unabridged. Ruddy McCann is a former college football star (in the running for the Heisman Trophy) who ended up going to prison rather than the NFL. Now, he is in his early thirties, out of prison and back in his hometown in northern Michigan. He helps his sister run the family business (a dingy old bar) and he works as a repo man. A repo man repossesses cars for lenders when their owners are behind on their payments, usually with a tow truck. Ruddy has a lot going on in his life right now. He met an interesting woman, he has a difficult repo job and the bar is in serious need of a cash infusion because the creditors are threatening to cut them off. But, most distressing is the voice in his head. This is not a pretend voice, like a conscience - this is a real voice from a guy that says he was shot by two men and buried in the woods not far from Ruddy's hometown. Ruddy believes him, too...

Published in 2015 by Brilliance Audio. Read by the author, Karen Armstrong. Duration: 5 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged. Also published under the title St. Paul: The Misunderstood Apostle. Karen Armstrong is a multiple award-winning author of more than 25 books, the great majority of them exploring religion. She is particularly interested in Islam, Christianity and Judaism.  St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate is aimed at the informed layman - not at other historians or religious experts. I read A LOT of history and have gone to church my entire life, but I can get lost in the weeds pretty quickly if too much professional jargon is used. Armstrong assumes  basic knowledge of the Christianity and of the New Testament. Nothing too complicated or deep and most of my Bible knowledge comes from Sunday school and small group Bible studies led by layman with a workbook. Armstrong takes care to explain things along the way because she is not out to impress the intellectuals - s...

Originally published in 1960. Published in December of 2018 by HarperAudio. Read by Vivienne Leheny. Duration: 5 hours, 29 minutes. Unabridged.  Eleanor Roosevelt, cousin of one president and wife of another became a celebrity and a political force to be reckoned with in her own right after the death of her husband in 1945. She worked with the United Nations and wrote a regular newspaper column. Over her lifetime, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote more than 25 books, met thousands of people, visited dozens of countries and raised half a dozen children. All of that in addition to being First Lady for more than 12 years. Eleanor's column was normally based on letters that were sent to her. A lot of those letters asked for her advice. This book is a distillation of the advice she had given over the years. It is written in a very approachable, simple manner and, as she notes at the end of her book, doesn't really teach anything new. Instead, there is a lot of practical advice and observa...

Winner of the 2018 Edgar Award for Best Novel. Published by Hachette Audio in 2017. Read by JD Jackson. Duration: 9 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. Darren Mathews is a rare thing - a black Texas Ranger. He is also suspended for getting involved in a situation with a man with Aryan Brotherhood ties that ended up murdered soon afterwards.  A friend in the FBI tells him about another situation, way out in a small town on Highway 59 in East Texas at the edge of a bayou. Two bodies have been found in the bayou - one black and one white. The first body was a black man - beaten nearly to death and then drowned in the bayou. The second was a white woman, found floating in the bayou a few days later. So, Mathews heads off to this little town and starts nosing around with no authorization. He discovers a little cafe run by an elderly black woman on one end of town and a bar owned by her white neighbor on the other end of town - a bar that regularly plays host to the Aryan Brotherhood. ...

Published by christianaudio.com in 2011. Read by Johnny Heller. Duration: 9 hours, 8 minutes. Unabridged. The Brotherhood is the story of Boone Drake, a young Chicago cop who seemingly has it all. He is married to his beautiful high school sweetheart. They have a healthy toddler son. His career is on the fast track. His family attends a big church and he helps run the athletic program. But, a horrific home fire destroys this idyllic life. Jack loses his family and his faith as he slowly recovers. As Jack slowly rebuilds his personal life, will he still be able to move forward in his career? ************Caution: spoilers*********** This book is all about world building for the other two books in the series. We meet Drake and set up his tragic backstory. Sadly, the tragedy dominates the book. The descriptions of how his family died are quite graphic and go on for quite a while (there is an extensive hospital scene). It verges on the level of being grief porn. It just goes on and on ...

Published in 2016 by HarperAudio. Read by Roger Wayne. Duration: 5 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. Two things before we start: 1) I am not a reader of self-help books - I can't think of the last one I read.  The author, Mark Manson 2) You simply cannot read this book if coarse language bothers you. I will follow the style of this book in this review. Manson makes many points in the book, but two stuck out to me. He posits that many people are unhappy because they simply try to focus on too many things and can't do any of them well. In short, he says that you have to stop giving a f*ck about everything and figure out the very few things that you actually give a f*ck about and make them your priority. One of his other points is similar, but worthy of mention. He points out that no matter where you go, there's a 500 pound bag of sh*t problems waiting for you. If you move to a new city, there will be a 500 pound bag of sh*t of problems. If you quit your job because...

Published in 2009 by Random House Audio. Narrated by Mirron Willis Duration: 11 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor is set in 1985. Benjie Cooper and his brother are spending the summer at the resort town of Sag Harbor, New York. This Long Island resort town is actually two resort towns - one white and one black. The Coopers are part of a very close-knit African American community of New York City professionals that started their part of Sag Harbor two generations earlier. During the summers, families head out on the weekends and older kids are often left out in Sag Harbor for the summer. Benjie and his brother are in high school and a group of high school boys hang out together all summer. Benjie is desperate to be cool (being on Dungeons and Dragons-playing Star Wars fan doesn't help - take it from a kid who was both in high school at the same time). They get summer jobs, they hit the beach, they look for girls, they try to get into concerts at loca...

Originally published in 2014. Audiobook version published in 2018. Read by the author, Ron Stallworth. Duration: 5 hours, 50 minutes. Unabridged. Black Klansman is the memoir of Ron Stallworth, at the time the only African American detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department (this was the 1970's), wrote a letter in response to a classified ad. It was looking for recruits to the Ku Klux Kan. Stallworth expressed his interest and thoughtlessly signed his own name, rather than an undercover name. Soon enough, the Klan leader called the number and Stallworth found himself being recruited. Clearly, Stallworth couldn't show up in person so he created a little task force complete with a white undercover officer pretending to be Stallworth, when needed. Eventually, Stallworth had a membership card (!) and having frequent phone conversations with David Duke, the most famous KKK leader in the country. The premise of the book was, sadly, more interesting than the follow through. ...

Published in 2018 by Random House Audio. Read by Scott Brick. Duration: 12 hours, 51 minutes. Unabridged. Jack Reacher is in New Hampshire and is working his way cross-country to San Diego. As normal, in Past Tense he is hitchhiking. He gets dropped off near the town where his father was born, Laconia. He has never been there and decides to check it out. His father has been dead for thirty years but he might find someone who remembers him.  The more  digs, the more he finds that this father's backstory doesn't quite jive with what he is discovering on the ground... Meanwhile, a Canadian couple is travelling through New Hampshire on their way to New York City. They are carrying a mysterious cargo in the trunk of their rattletrap Honda. When the Honda dies in the parking lot of a lonely hotel, the owners of the hotel convince the couple to check in for the night and try to find a mechanic in the morning. But, something doesn't seem right... This book had all of the piece...

Published in 2015 by Macmillan Audio. Read by Jeremy Bobb. Duration: 9 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. In the early years of the Great Depression, kidnapping became a fairly common crime, especially in the Midwest. It was viewed by some as a safer alternative to bank robberies, especially since unsuspecting victims were often not armed. The most famous kidnapping of the era was the Lindbergh baby case. It ended tragically, but did result in a Federal anti-kidnapping law. That law got its first test when George "Machine Gun Kelly" Barnes and his wife Kathryn planned the kidnapping of oil tycoon Charles F. Urschel (no relation to the author of The Year of Fear , but he admits to initially researching the topic due to the victim having the same last name as his). Urschel was taken from his home in Oklahoma to a farm in Texas. The moment they crossed the border, the kidnapping became a federal crime. Machine Gun Kelly started out his career as a bootlegger, but his new wife Kath...

Published by Tantor Audio in 2018. Read by Barnaby Edwards. Duration: 8 hours, 34 minutes. Unabridged. Levison Wood is a British explorer/journalist. He has gone on two other hiking expeditions (one to walk the length of the Nile, the other to walk the length of the Himalayas) before this trip. In Walking the Americas he was joined by a Mexican photographer friend from Merida, in the Yucatan Peninsula. Together, they started walking south to Belize, then on to Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and finally Colombia. The author, Levison Wood Along the way, they encounter hidden Mayan ruins, a city overwhelmed by drug gangs, poverty, the aftermath of a hurricane, welcoming people, a few unfriendly people, Native Indians, a horrible rainstorm, mansions, a couple of difficult horses and the remains of a lost colony founded by Scotland in the 1700's. This was a surprisingly short book considering it spans eight countries. It was an entertaining book with some ...

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2017. Read by Nick Thurston Duration: 14 hours, 34 minutes. Unabridged. Paul Johns is an explorer specializing in fungus. He works his way out of the Amazon rain forest back to civilization and comes home to the United States with a horrible fungal infection. A person traveling with him has the same infection but she passes away. Neil Johns is Paul's brother and a brand-new employee of the National Security Agency (NSA), specializing in code-breaking and seeing patterns where no one else can. He begins to notice some strange things about Paul and some strange activity deep in the rain forest that Paul just came from... This book is a great science-based action thriller, much like the late Michael Crichton used to specialize in. It makes you think, it shows you a different way at looking at intelligence and is a heck of a romp. Throw in the likable and believable characters and some moments of real humor and the whole combination is really quite g...