DWD's Reviews

Published in 2023 by Random House Audio. Read by Dion Graham. Duration: 5 hours, 40 minutes. Unabridged. As of the day I am writing this review, 7 of the top 10 richest people in the world live in the United States (the least wealthy has $80 billion.) The rate continues on when you go down the list - 14 of the top 20 live in the United States.  The United States has 650 billionaires. But, the official poverty rate in the United States at this moment is 11.5% - the highest rate in the in the leading industrialized economies of the world. This chart shows that it has bounced around between 10.5% and 15%, depending on the economic recessions and the like f or the last 30 years . During this entire time, the United States has been the leader in wealth creation for the entire planet. The author, Matthew Desmond Sociology professor Matthew Desmond set out to find out why. It's easy to look at those billionaires and note that they don't pay their fair share. The tax code is tailor mad

  Published in 2017 by Blackstone Audio, Inc. Read by Bronson Pinchot Duration: 8 hours, 28 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: A Colorado police chief named Colton has organized a search for a young girl he suspects has been abducted. He reaches out to the best tracker he knows, Sam "Raven" Spears, for help. Raven is part Sioux and part Cherokee - an important fact because he soon suspects that the abductor is acting out a Cherokee legend featuring cannibals.  While Colton and Raven are on the hunt, there is a North Korean EMP attack on the United States. For those not aware, EMP stands for Electromagnetic Pulse. Nuclear weapons emit a pulse that absolutely fries most electronics. If you bomb a city normally, the pulse is limited by hills, buildings, and lots of other things. But, if you blow a nuclear bomb up high up in the air, the bomb doesn't do a lot of damage but the EMP kills all exposed modern cars (older cars have no computer systems, electrical systems, power plants

  Published in 2020 by Penguin Audio. Read by Stephen Mendel. Duration: 9 hours, 59 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Peter Ash is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. He served with the Marines and even though he is back at home - he is not. He wanders because he can't stay indoors due to PTSD manifesting as claustrophobia. As he wanders, he finds good people in trouble and he tries to get them out of trouble.  In the past he's been in Milwaukee, Oregon and Washington State, Colorado and Memphis. This time he's in Iceland.  Ash has been hired by a rich grandmother to find her son-in-law and her grandson. Police in Maryland believe that her son-in-law killed her daughter, kidnapped her grandson, and took him to his home country - Iceland. So, Peter Ash somehow braves an airplane trip and arrives in Iceland only to find that this case is way more complicated than he ever imagined... My Review: Despite the obvious plot hole of a man with SEVERE claustrophobia riding on a

  Originally published in 1995 by Brilliance Audio. Read by the author, Tom Bodett. Duration: 15 hours, 43 minutes. Unabridged. The author and narrator. I think Tom Bodett's End of the Road series of short stories is just one of the best audiobook experiences out there. Technically, this book is part of that series even though almost none of it takes places in that oddball community of End of the Road, Alaska (it earned its name by being, well, the place where the road ends.) Bodett is well-known as a frequent panelist on the NPR show Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!   but he is most well-known for his voiceovers for Motel 6 in which he promised in his folksy way, " We'll leave the light on for you ." I say all of this just to say that this book was a major disappointment.  Everything about this book seems like it should work. It has a grounding in his Alaska stories. It consists of a series of short stories - his area of expertise. But, there is just way too much goi

Published in 2001 by Books In Motion. Read by Rusty Nelson. Duration: 11 hours, 59 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Sheriff Bill Gastner is coming to the end of his appointed term as Sheriff of Posadas County - a border county in southern New Mexico. Bill has been in the department in one form of another for 31 years and he is looking forward to a well-deserved retirement with no real plans for how to fill his days. Bill Gastner has got a wild last few days as Sheriff  - he has a drunken teen driver with a fake driver's license issue by the department of motor vehicles, two damaged police cars, two other teens in the hospital, and more. My Review: I am a big fan of this series. I love old Bill Gastner - he has insomnia, happily eats the same pepper-filled burrito at the same restaurant 2 or even 3 meals per day, and relies on experience more than the speed an agility of younger officers. But, this book was padded with a whole lot of nothing. We meet Gastner's son and grandson who

  Published in 2016 by Hachette Audio. Read by William DeMerritt. Duration: 9 hours, 28 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Underground Airlines is set in the year 2015 in an alternate historical timeline. This is a world where the American Civil War almost happened but did not. In the real historical timeline, an amendment to the Constitution called the Crittenden Compromise was proposed in December of 1860 as the first Confederate states were seceding. It preserved slavery, limited its spread and clarified the role of the federal government in returning runaway slaves. The Crittenden Compromise was not taken seriously by most people and it failed. In this alternate history, it was taking seriously because President-elect Lincoln was assassinated in Indianapolis as he was traveling to his inauguration in Washington, D.C. The shock of the assassination brought all of the states back together to negotiate and a version of the Crittenden Compromise passed. There was no Civil War and American

  Originally Published in 1939. Audiobook version published in 2011 by Penguin Audio. Performed by Dylan Baker. Duration: 21 hours, 1 minute. Unabridged. Winner of the National Book Award. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Declared to be the best-selling book of 1939 by the New York Times. I last read The Grapes of Wrath when I was in high school, nearly 40 years ago. It was assigned reading for my English class and all I really remembered about it was a couple of scenes. I remembered the last scene, with the flood and starving man. And I remembered and early scene where the tractor operator is plowing up the farms, the farmyards and even intentionally damaging homes in Oklahoma. Besides that, I had nothing but a pervasive memory of sorrow and injustice. I've always thought of this book and Of Mice and Men as kind of a set of books about migrant farm workers during the Great Depression. I've read Of Mice and Men  5 or 6 times, though - a fact that I can one hundred percent attribu

  Published by Random House Audio in April of 2023. Read by the author, Jonathan Kennedy. Duration: 9 hours, 23 minutes. Unabridged. Kennedy presents a compelling argument that disease has had a profound impact on world history by just telling a history of Europe from the days of cavemen up until now. The first 45 minutes or so of this audiobook seemed to be wandering around and not going anywhere, but Kennedy was laying a strong foundation for the rest of the book. The book makes it painfully obvious that humanity has bounced from one biological disaster to another. Humanity has adapted (either by behavior - like building sanitation systems to deal with body waste to control cholera) or biologically by simply having a large body count until those with immunity can rebuild (the Black Plague is a prime example.) Kennedy persuasively argues that infection and disease helped the rise of Christianity, the rise of Islam, the end of feudalism, the rise of capitalism, and the European conques

  Published in 2023 by Penguin Audio in July of 2023. Read by the author, Russell Moore. Duration: 6 hours, 46 minutes. Unabridged. Russell Moore is currently a theologian for the magazine Christianity Today , but he is more famous for being one of the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) for the last 20 years - both as a professor and at the national level. He's also a prolific author and very media friendly. In many ways, Moore was the perfect media face for the Southern Baptist Convention - smart, likable, pleasant and often funny. But, he butted heads on a variety of topics with the rest of the leadership. He was against gay conversion therapy and he wanted the SBC to listen to women who accused men in church leadership of sexual abuse. He especially wanted Southern Baptists to talk about racism and its complicity in upholding Jim Crow laws and distance themselves from Confederate symbols like the flag.  The biggest thing they disagreed about and the thing that rea

  Published by Christianaudio.com in 2021. Read by Sarah Zimmerman. Duration: 7 hours, 26 minutes. Unabridged. Beth Allison Barr is a professor of medieval and church history at Baylor University. She has written a lot about women in the medieval world. She is also an evangelical Christian and a youth pastor's wife. This puts her in a rather unique position to comment on the role of women in the evangelical church and topics like complementarianism in the more conservative churches. Complementarianism is a church teaching that men and women have very distinct roles in family life, marriage, and the church. These roles are distinct, but of equal value, but men are given leadership roles. In more conservative churches, women are never put into any sort of leadership roles over men. They will not be pastors. They will not lead a board. They won't even teach older boys or men in Sunday school. In some interpretations, they will not teach men or older boys any topic at all. The more

  Published in March of 2022 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, Will Hurd. Duration: 8 hours, 47 minutes. Unabridged. Will Hurd has done a lot of things in his 45 years. He has been an operations analyst for the CIA (working in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan), he was worked in high-tech (including cyber-security and artificial intelligence), has served 6 years as a member of the House of Representatives from Texas, and is now a Republican candidate for President in 2024. This book was undoubtedly an attempt to introduce Will Hurd to a larger audience. I follow politics pretty well and I had never heard of Will Hurd until he announced his campaign for President in June of 2023 (to be fair, there are 535 members of Congress and most are not well known outside of their districts.) I heard about this book in a political podcast and, lo and behold, it turns out that my library had it. Just to let you know where I am coming from as I review this book, I am a Never Trump Repub

  Originally published in 1942. Published in 2016 by Penguin Audio. Read by Scott Aiello. Duration: 4 hours, 36 minutes. Unabridged. 1942 was a rough year for America in World War II, especially in the early months. The Pacific Fleet was devastated and American troops were barely involved in the European Theater. As part of a total war effort, every resource had to be tapped, including pulling in famous authors like John Steinbeck to write books that assured the American public that the Army Air Corps/Air Force (he uses both terms interchangeably) had a plan, was implementing the plan, and it was going to be a successful plan.  Steinbeck was a bold choice to write what is basically a piece of American propaganda. His novels Of Mice and Men and Grapes of Wrath caused quite an uproar just a few years earlier with their criticism of the American capitalism. I think the reasoning was that if Steinbeck approves of what the Army Air Corps/Air Force was doing, it must be okay. A B-17 (left)

  Published in June of 2023 by Twelve. Read by Tim Andres Pabon. Duration: 9 hours, 32 minutes. Unabridged. Ben Terris offers up a collection of stories about a few of the people that casual political observers have never heard of. I regularly watch the Sunday morning political shows and listen to political podcasts and I'd only heard of 4 of the people featured in this book, and only 1 of them by name.  That, of course, is the point of the book - a look at the movers and shakers below the obvious level of movers and shakers. Some move and shake a whole lot in the world of Washington politics, some barely do any moving at all, and some used to move and shake a whole lot but now have been sidelined by scandal. Terris looks at people like Matt Schlapp, who is the head of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) - the travelling roadshow of right wing politics. Schlapp is an example of a hyper-connected mover and shaker in the book. But, he also looks at people with less inf

  Originally published in 2006. Published by Listening Library in 2019. Read by Jeff Woodman. Duration: 6 hours, 47 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Colin Singleton is a child prodigy who has recently stopped being a child. He has graduated from high school, is preparing to go to a great college but he is unsettled by a couple of things. Number one: being a child prodigy means that you are potentially an important adult. Colin is aware that it is now time for potential to turn into something - anything - meaningful. Number two: Colin just got dumped - again. He has dated 19 different girls and all are named Katherine. Technically it is 18 different girls because Katherine 1 is also Katherine 19, but the point is pretty much the same. So, Colin is wallowing in self-pity when his best friend, a slacker named Hassan, comes to him and suggests that they need to go on a road trip. They head south through Indiana and eventually end up in Gutshot, Tennessee where Colin meets a girl named Lindse

  Book edition originally published in 2006. Audiobook published in 2019 by Listening Library. Read by Asmeret Ghebremichael. Duration: 3 hours, 0 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: This short piece of historical fiction focuses on a slave family in Georgia in the 1790s. The main character is Sally. She has a brother, a mother and a father. The one thing that this family has going for them is that their owners have a policy of not breaking apart families. That is the policy until relatives of the owners find themselves struggling financially. In a couple of days, Sally and her brother and 3 other slaves are going to be sent to the other plantation to help it get back on its feet again.  The family decides to run away together rather than be split apart. After some discussion with a friendly house slave who has done some traveling with the family, they decide not to head north. They haven't seen a map but they know that the trip across northern Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, a

  Published in 2009 by Listening Library. Performed by multiple actors. Duration: 2 hours, 36 minutes. Unabridged. July of 1863 was the height of the American Civil War. The month contained the Battle of Gettysburg, the end of the long siege of Vicksburg, and the battle at Battery Wagner where the 54th Massachusetts demonstrated that African American soldiers would be an effective and important addition to the Union Army. It also featured one of the worst riots in American history - the New York City Draft Riot. The riot was ostensibly a violent reaction to the imposition of a draft to fulfill state military quotas, but it was more than that and this short audiobook does a very good job of looking at those reasons. The draft was unpopular for more than just the fact that the men who were drafted did not want to join the army. Rich people could afford to pay $300 to avoid military service if they were drafted. It took most workers more than 6 months or more to earn this sort of money. T

  Published in 2019 by Penguin Audio. Read by Stephen Mendel. Duration: 11 hours. Unabridged. Synopsis: Peter Ash served multiple tours of duty with the Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. When he left the service, he wandered the roads of America - partly because he could not find a place to settle down and partly because he suffers from claustrophobia as a form of PTSD. He can't sleep indoors. He has a very tough team being inside unless it's a spacious room or has lots and lots of windows.  The author, Nick Petrie. Peter has been living with his very serious (and very rich) girlfriend helping maintain her compound and recuperating from the misadventures of the last book. But...he's getting bored. His girlfriend gets word from a friend named Wanda in Memphis that people are threatening her in her new house that she bought in a tax auction. They are throwing bricks through windows and the like. Peter drives across the country in his restored work truck to help keep an eye out