DWD's Reviews

Published by Brilliance Audio in 2016 Read by Timothy Andres Pabon Duration: 10 hours, 9 minutes Unabridged In the year 2035 America is almost unrecognizable. Environmental collapse due the abuse of aquifers and mountain run-off in the West has caused the governments of many Western states to practically collapse. The highway systems have become "No Man's Land" and the Arizona border has practically been overrun by drug cartels who often act as a brutal de facto government in some areas. California has escaped this fate due to a strict resource protection regimen that limits travel, and strictly watches how much water and electricity each household consumes. The relationship between the strict (yet successful) government of California and the often ineffectual federal government is strained to the point that there is an open and active movement that is pushing for California to secede. Political assassinations and the sabotaging of a critical power plant make the pol...

Published in 2009 by G.P. Putnam's Sons. Years ago, person who left a comment on one of my Amazon reviews told me about C.J. Box and gave me the title to his first book featuring Joe Pickett. I found it at the library and I was hooked. If you like Michael Connelly or Robert Crais, you will love C.J. Box. If you like Tony Hillerman's Navajo Tribal Police books than I am sure that you will enjoy Box's descriptions of the local landscape and the people of Wyoming. In Below Zero  Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett is working on two cases. The first case (and the minor one in the story) concern's Joe's pursuit of the Mad Archer, a poacher that likes to shoot his arrows at just about anything. Besides out of season game, the Mad Archer has shot a bald eagle and Tube, the ultra-friendly Corgi-Labrador mix that Pickett has adopted. Joe arrests him and he promptly skips town while out on bail and Joe goes back on the hunt for him. The main story concerns a dying Chic...

Brian Fagan's The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 is, by definition, an introduction to the climate phenomenon of the same name. Actually, it is quite similar to a History Channel documentary of the same name. On page xix Fagan notes that historians are either "parachutists" (big picture) or "truffle hunters" (love all of the details of one particular era or topic). Fagan warns that this is a parachutist book - an overview. So, what of this overview? Fagan starts with the Vikings and covers an area that is better covered by Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed . However, his stories of how the fishing industry was affected by the shift to a colder climate was surprisingly interesting. A lengthy discussion of how the colder climate change brought more disease, famine and general mayhem is punctuated by the single best one page description of the changes in farming methods that came about in t...

Disappointing. I really enjoyed The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 (I gave it 4 stars) . I was not thrilled with The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations (I gave it 2 stars) and I have to say that I do not care much for The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization either. In fact, to be short and sweet let me suffice it to say that if you follow this link: http://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/2010/08/great-warming-climate-change-and-rise.html and see my review about The Great Warming  and add in an extended discussion about mankind in the Ice Age you will pretty much have the substance of The Long Summer . The two books could have easily have been made into one slightly larger book. I rate this book 2 stars out of 5. This book can be found on Amazon.com here:  Reviewed on December 18, 2010. Also mentioned in this review:

Better than the first book. 6 Discs 7 hours, 30 minutes Read by: Stephen J. Dubner, one of the authors SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance is the sequel to the wildly popular book by the same authors, Freakomonics the movie and a newspaper column . One author is the economics talent - the man with all of the questions who knows where to find the answers. The other is the writing talent (who is learning a good bits of economics along the way, no doubt) who takes these interesting topics and puts them on paper in an interesting way. The goal of these books and the newspaper column is to get people to look at the world in a different way - an economic way of thinking. I find these works to be fascinating, eye-opening and always entertaining, even if I don't always agree with their conclusions (sometimes I think they are asking the wrong questions or have not gathered in enough information). Thei...

A change of pace for Larry Bond Don't get worried, Larry Bond is still cranking out the war thrillers, but Larry Bond's Red Dragon Rising: Shadows of War one is not the grand sweep of a worldwide battlefield that his previous books have featured. Instead, we focus in on four people swept up in the beginnings of World War III. Those four people are a climate scientist studying in northern Vietnam who happens to have video that proves that China is instigating World War III in his cell phone, a female CIA agent who is trying to rescue him, a military wargamer (and former special forces) who is helping map out America's strategy to combat China's aggression and a Chinese lieutenant in an elite commando squad who is trying to catch the climatologist. I'll admit, it starts out slow but it builds and is a rollicking adventure by the end. This is the first of a four part series and I see it as the prologue to a much more sweeping war series that is sure to come. Th...

Disappointed Published in 2008 by Bloomsbury Press. My mother in law bought me three Brian Fagan books for Christmas last year because they were on my Amazon Wish List. I read the first one T he Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 right away and enjoyed it. I gave it four stars. . I was saving this one, hoping to enjoy it just as much. Now, I am worried that I'll never muster enough interest to read the third one. The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations seems rushed - a poorly edited and a poor man's version of Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed with some global warming hype thrown in for good measure. Many of the cultures covered by Fagan were actually covered in Diamond's more detailed book. Fagan looks at the time of the Medieval Warming Period, approximately from 800 AD to 1300 AD, and the effects of this slightly warmer time on numerous societies, including Western Europe, the ...

"Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket." -Barack Obama Nov. 2008 Power Grab: How Obama's Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America is Chris Horner's third book in a series of books about the global warming "crisis" is a mind-numbingly well-researched expose on the Obama administration's plan for fighting global warming and creating thousands and thousands of green jobs. Horner is an attorney and knows well the value of research. He uses hundreds of direct quotes from Obama, his appointees, members of Congress and members of environmental groups to show you where the administration has moved and is likely to continue moving. Even more damning is the knowledge that many members of the EU have already taken this actions and they are now backing off from them. Christopher C. Horner Horner's impeccable research is so strong, so deep (more than 800 endnotes fill more than 8...