DWD's Reviews

Published by HarperAudio in June of 2018. Read by Carly Robins. Duration: 8 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged. The premise of this book is that middle class Americans are feeling "squeezed" economically because...they are. I heard an interview with this author on NPR and I was intrigued so I decided to check out her book. Quart lists several factors, some more plausible than others. She is very big on the concept that the "caring careers" are under-paid due to latent sexism, since the majority of the people in those careers are female. These careers include nurses, daycare personnel and teachers. She correctly notes that raising children is expensive and daycare is a big part of that. A great deal of the book is spent on this topic, including alternative arrangements to traditional daycare, experiments in state-funded pre-school and the struggles of single parents having to work and pay for daycare.  The author, Alissa Quart She calls into question the idea t

Published by Penguin Audio in May of 2018. Read by the author, Charlie LeDuff. Duration: 7 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged. Charlie LeDuff has done a lot of things, but mostly he's been a reporter. He's worked all over the place, he won a Pulitzer Prize in New York City but lately he's settled down in Detroit. He told his irreverent version of the collapse of Detroit in Detroit: An American Autopsy . He takes that same vision outside of Detroit and talks about the rest of the country and finds that Detroit may be a mess, but it's hardly unique. In 2013, LeDuff was offered a job at Fox News travelling the country and taking a look at regular Americans and their struggles in a segment called The Americans . He jumped at it and went all over the place. He went to New York City to look into topless women in Times Square (it's legal). He went to both of the Bundy family standoffs and spent most of his time talking to the hangers on that joined the family. He looke

Published by HighBridge in 2013. Read by Eric Martin. Duration: 7 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged. Charlie LeDuff This is one of the best audiobooks I have listened to in a very long time. It made me laugh, made me think, made me glad I don't live in Detroit, made me worried that I live in another Rust Belt city that has lost a lot of its industrial base, and, over and over again, it shocked me. Charlie LeDuff grew up in the Detroit area and moved away to do a lot of different things, including being a reporter for the New York Times (where he won a Pulitzer Prize). He came back home to Detroit to work for a newspaper and to be close to family. When you go away from someplace and come home you see things a little more clearly and he was more than a little surprised Detroit was not only every bit as bad off as most of the country believes - it was actually a lot worse. I recently read the book Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein.  In a lot of ways, it is similar

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2017. Read by Joy Osmanski Duration: 10 hours, 1 minute Unabridged Amy Goldstein tells the story of Janesville, Wisconsin after its large General Motors SUV plant closed and thousands of employees lost their jobs. On its surface, this book has the potential of being one of the most boring books that you have ever read. But, Goldstein has a real talent when it comes to storytelling and makes this story very compelling. With the beginnings of the Great Recession, General Motors found itself in serious trouble. They had invested in manufacturing large, expensive, gas-guzzling SUV's when the price of gas was more then $4/gallon and the credit market was getting so tight that it was hard for people to qualify for loans for a $40,000 SUV. When GM closed this plant it caused an economic shockwave to tear through the community, closing most of the other factories in town that supplied the GM facility. Housing prices fell with the housing bu

Published in June of 2017 by Blackstone Audio Read by Liisa Ivary Duration: 3 hours, 28 minutes Unabridged This small book grew from an article that the author wrote after the 2016 Presidential Election. She wrote this article to explain the results to her friends in what she calls the "professional elite". The article created a lot of buzz so she expanded it into a small, accessible book that I found to be very accurate. Williams distinguishes the working class from the poor and the professional elite. In layman's terms, the working class is the middle class. It consists of factory workers, teachers, police officers, mechanics and restaurant managers. People with training and skills that literally go to work every day. The professional elite are doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, professors at elite universities and the political class. Williams details why the working class looks at the world differently than the professional elite and why the policies and

Published in 2016 by Blackstone Audio Read by George Newbern Duration: 9 hours, 57 minutes Unabridged Driverless cars have been the goal of engineers for decades, but the technology has simply not been there. Lipson and Kurman take the reader (or listener, in my case) through a history of driverless cars, artificial intelligence and make the case that driverless cars will be a common thing much sooner than most of us think. Positives:  The book is written in mostly non-technical terms and simply explains the technical terms that it does use before using them. The writers are very enthusiastic about their topic. Negatives: The writers are very enthusiastic about their topic - and sometimes they go into waaay too much detail. For example, they go into a long discussion of a intelligent road scheme that General Motors worked on for years that was a dead end. It could have been edited down by half.  But, on the whole this was a very informative book that gives the layman a sol

Published in 2011 by Random House Audio Read by the author, Tom Brokaw Duration: 7 hours, 8 minutes Unabridged I picked up this audiobook in the hopes that former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw would be offering some in-depth analysis on a wide range of issues. After all, the cover promises to look at "Who we are, where we've been and where we need to go now to recapture the American Dream." Instead, we get a lot of amiable reminiscing about Brokaw's family, his early career, and a bit of of a slanted history lesson with every chapter with some half-hearted advice that is based on discussion with industry leaders. That is the essence of the problem Brokaw is a top-level journalist. He is a journalist emeritus - respected and admired for what he used to do but he is not doing the gritty stuff any more. He hobnobs and socializes with elites. If he wants to talk about some new trend in computers he can literally call Bill Gates and get his take. But, here's

Slow Going At First. Published in 2010. For a book that is all about how quickly the world's stock markets can be played by a few bad actors who don't particularly care about making money so much as they care about wreaking havoc, this book took a very long time to get started. Part of that is my fault. I failed to realize that I was in the middle of a series until after I had read this book. I had read the second installment in this series 7 years ago but I literally remembered nothing about the main character, Ty Hauck. In this installment, Hauck is in the suburbs of New York City. He is working for a corporation as a security consultant, meaning he investigates people the company may work with and gets involved with internet breaches and the like. Hauck's company is investigating an big-time investor with a hidden past. But, Hauck has a personal connection to the murders of a Wall Street broker and his family and soon finds a connection to a third murder that

Published by Hachette Audio in 2009 Read by the author, Malcolm Gladwell Duration: 12 hours, 49 minutes Unabridged This fascinating audiobook is actually a collection of articles that Malcolm Gladwell has written over the years. Each story is about 30-45 minutes long and cover a great variety of subjects. Topics include ketchup, mammograms, FBI profilers, pit bulls, menstrual cycles, Ron Popeil (founder of Ronco), the dog whisperer, plagiarism, the Challenger Explosion/risk, home hair coloring products and the opportunities that those products offered for female executives, first impressions/job interviews, homelessness and how to solve it (really!), The Pill, Enron and the importance of having a great teacher in every classroom. I am a teacher and I was of course interested in his discussion about teachers. What was best was his emphasis on the day-to-day interaction between students and teachers and how one can observe quality education in action. What was worst was the insi

Published in January of 2014 by Regnery Publishing In 2012 Kevin D. Freeman published Secret Weapon: How Economic Terrorism Brought Down the U.S. Stock Market and Why It Can Happen Again . In that book, Freeman detailed how America's financial markets are vulnerable to manipulation by foreign powers by creating bubbles (like in the oil markets). Individual companies could also be targeted, individual sectors or the markets as a whole. The first part of Game Plan is a brief review of the vulnerabilities he described in Secret Weapon . To be honest, if you have not read S ecret Weapon , you can read Game Plan and get the general idea. He also includes updates, including letting his readers know that he has briefed the Pentagon on these vulnerabilities.  The New York Stock Exchange. Photo by Urban. The rest of the book is devoted to telling the reader about the strengths and weaknesses of various kinds of investments, such as stocks, bonds, gold, etc. in a period of fina

Published by Simon and Schuster in 2013 Read by Robert Petkoff Duration: 8 hours, 47 minutes. I teach in a public high school that is in the midst of transforming from a suburban/affluent to an urban/poverty school. I currently teach Spanish but I am also licensed to teach several social studies classes including economics. While this hardly makes me an economist, it does mean that I know enough about economics to make me dangerous to myself. I always think that it is interesting when economists take on non-traditional topics, like the Freakonomics guys do. In this case Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir look at the effect of scarcity on impulse control, poverty, time management, dieting and lonely people. Kids at my school have a horrible time with impulse control, poverty and time management so I was hooked when the authors started to look at how scarcity affects these behaviors. Through a series of studies (theirs and others) they demonstrate that people who are fina

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in August of 2013. Narrated by Jason Culp. Opening and closing chapters read by Mark R. Levin. Duration: 6 hours, 54 minutes. For the past several years Conservative commentator Mark R. Levin has been laying out his arguments that demonstrate the government is over-reaching its Constitutional limitations in a series of books. He has discussed the Supreme Court in Men in Black , the roots of statist politics in Liberty and Tyranny and pointed out the ongoing actions of statists in Ameritopia . Now, in The Liberty Amendments , Levin details how he would address the problem using a series of Constitutional amendments. Since it is unlikely that the current crop of Senators and Representatives would vote to amend the Constitution and limit their power, Levin urges the states to initiate the process by calling for a national convention. Mark R. Levin His proposed amendments include: -Term limits for Congress (12 years); -Repeal t

Published by Simon and Schuster in 2013. Read by Pete Simonelli Duration: 12 hours, 2 minutes Computer expert (to say the least, the man was a pioneer in the field of virtual reality and was at the ground floor in multiple Silicon Valley projects and companies) Jaron Lanier discusses possible futures of the economy and the online community in this rambling, interesting audiobook. The author, Jaron Lanier Lanier spends quite a bit of time discussing what he calls Siren Servers. Siren Servers are massive collectors of data such as search engine sites, credit bureaus, the NSA, and some very large retail sites. These servers collect "free" data from you that is provided by tracking your searches, purchases, phone calls or GPS location on your cell phones and sell it to advertisers. Facebook is a sterling example. Lanier believes that you should be reimbursed for this information through a series of hundreds or even thousands of micropayments which would be used to

Published by Regnery History in May of 2013 Grover Cleveland. Quick! Name me any fact about Grover Cleveland that you can think of! Was he the one that was so fat that he got stuck in the bathtub? No, that was Taft. Is he on the Mount Rushmore? No, those are Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and T. Roosevelt. Was he a famous Civil War general that became president? No, that was Grant, Garfield, Hayes and Harrison. Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th President (1837-1908) Was he the president who was elected, got beat running for his second term but ran again and then won so that you have to learn his name twice if your teacher makes you learn the presidents? Yes. That's him. But, as John M. Pafford demonstrates in The Forgotten Conservative, Grover Cleveland was a man  of contradictions. He was a uniquely principled man who was also mired in a sex scandal (the famous taunt went:  " Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?"  "Gone to the  White House , ha ha ha!&

Book Marred By The Author's Insistence On Including Everything and Analyzing Nothing Published by Harper Audio in February of 2013 Read by Terence Aselford Duration: 21 hours, 8 minutes Amity Shlaes' previous book was a history of the Great Depression called The Forgotten Man. In his own way Calvin Coolidge is also a forgotten man. He sits midway between two presidential giants (Wilson and FDR) who vigorously expanded the power of the federal government and the executive branch. His term was not marked by wars, but rather by a general rise in America's prosperity. Coolidge is not remembered as a great president but as an oddity - Silent Cal who took naps every afternoon. Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933), president from 1923-2929 This is unfortunate. While hardly a perfect president, Coolidge has some important lessons to offer. I feel that I have to offer some bonafides at this point. I am not a fan of this book but I do find Coolidge interesting, On my blog you wi

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2001 Read by Edward Herrmann Duration: 5 hours, 55 minutes Abridged I freely admit that I am one of the few people that did not see the movie A Beautiful Mind. So, I decided to give the audiobook a try. Turns out, I have discovered after a little research,  the book and the movie have little in common. Fair enough. The plot in short is that John Nash was identified as a mathematical genius in college and brought into several special programs to develop that genius. He specialized in what laymen might call "pure" mathematics but he also was intrigued by economics. In 1959, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and he spent time in and out of several mental hospitals. Eventually, he was released from those hospitals and he lived in and around the Princeton campus as a shadowy figure who left mathematical equations on the chalkboards when no one was around. After more than 25 years, Nash finally began to emerge from his il

Published by Regnery in 2012 When I told two of my Catholic friends (who do not know each other) that I was reading a book about economics written by a Catholic priest, both reacted with a hearty laugh. Then, both commented about the political leanings of the priest, assuming that the priest would be quite liberal. Sadly, they were very surprised when I described some of the Rev. Sirico's thoughts. Why sadly? It is sad that many people (not just Catholic priests) do not grasp the simple relationship between one's standing before God and one's rights - God has made you an individual and you are endowed with certain rights - as an individual. People are creative (as is the Creator), are intended for some sort of work and should have the freedom to find the work that pleases them and reap the benefit from what they have sown. Reverend Robert Sirico Sirico begins by telling his personal story - how he went from being a well-connected ultra-liberal to being a conser

Entertaining but fails to live up to the title Published by Metropolitan Books in 2004. Thomas Frank's stated purpose in What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America is to tell how Conservatives won the hearts of the working class, the middle class and the rich all at the same time. His answer is that rich, Republican elites throw up red herring issues (abortion and gay marriage are two that he mentions frequently) that bamboozle the working poor and the middle class into supporting them and their greater cause of Free Market Capitalism and International Free Trade even though Capitalism and treaties such as NAFTA inevitably beat the little guy into a pulp (his thought, not mine). Thomas Frank Yep. That's about it, although Mr. Frank says it much better than I just did. He also never goes into detail about why Capitalism and Free Trade are both evil (he just assumes you agree, I suppose), although he is very critical o