DWD's Reviews

  Published by Hourly History in March of 2024. Hourly History publishes an extensive line of histories and biographies that are intended to be read in about an hour. With that limit, none of these are the definitive biographies, but most of them  give the average reader a good sense of who the person was and why they were important.  Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) was the 36th President of the United States. One thing I particularly like about this biography is that it tells about his formative experiences in Texas as a young man, especially his short stint as a public school teacher in a very poor area of rural Texas. Getting to know those students really gave him the desire to want to create government programs to help alleviate poverty.  This biography is a little skewed towards Johnson's early life, but it's not particularly hard to find information about LBJ's time as President and the series offers books on the big events of his administration like the Vietnam W...

Published in 2017 by Blackstone Audio, Inc. Read by Bahni Turpin. Duration: 5 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. My Synopsis Ban This Book is the story of Amy Anne Ollinger, a fourth grade girl who is shocked when she gets to the library and finds out that her favorite book, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler , has been removed from the shelves as part of a book ban. Amy Anne reads all sorts of books (except Captain Underpants books - they're kind of silly) but she loves this book and comes back to it often. She has read it 13 times and wanted to read it again.  Amy Anne is told that a parent has complained to the school board about several books and they skipped the established plan to deal with these sorts of complaints and simply voted to remove them.  Amy Anne's parents buy her a copy of the book and she takes it to school to read when she can during the day. Her friends find out about the book ban, see that she has a copy and ask to read it. In return, they...

Published in 2018 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR) NOTE: Also published under the title UNBEATABLE! Attucks!  appears to be just a story about a 1950's era basketball team, but it is much more than that. it is the story of Jim Crow style racism in a northern state. It is the story of an underdog school getting its chance to compete at the highest level. It is the story of one amazing player, a great coach, and Indiana's famous single class basketball system. First - the single class basketball system. Back in the 1900's, Indiana had a single class basketball system. This means that every team was in the same playoff system together - no matter how big or how small. This was highlighted in the based-on-a-true-story movie Hoosiers. The true story had Milan High School (161 students) beating Muncie Central (1600+ students) in 1954. Usually, it wasn't that dramatic of a disparity, but small town schools did very well from 1911-1954. The biggest city in the state, Indianap...

  Originally published as a book in 1947. Graphic novel e-book edition published in 2018 by Pantheon. Adapted into a graphic novel by Ari Folman. The Diary of Anne Frank is certainly one of the most famous pieces of literature published in the last 100 years. The book the true diary of a young teen Jewish girl that was written as her family lived in a hidden apartment with two other families in an attempt to hide from the Nazi genocide. Before the war ended someone betrayed the families and Anne and almost everyone else in the apartment died in concentration camps shortly before the Nazi surrender. A page where Anne compares herself unfavorably to her sister. Ari Folman adapted the diary into a graphic novel. In the afterword he notes that this was harder than one might expect. This graphic novel is 160 pages, but if he had simply illustrated the entire text of the diary it would have ended up being more than 3,000 pages! The challenge was to maintain the spirit of the print book ...

Published in September of 2022 by Blackstone Publishing. Read by the author, Richard V. Reeves. Duration: 6 hours, 55 minutes. Unabridged. Men, as a group, are struggling in today's economy. The average male's income has falling in inflation-adjusted terms, especially so when you factor out upper class and upper middle class men. Men are more likely to be arrested, be addicts, be homeless, and more likely to succeed at killing themselves. Boys are struggling in today's educational system. They are far more likely to be suspended, expelled or placed in a special education program. They are far less likely to graduate from high school. They far less likely to attempt any sort of post-secondary education (a majority of all college students are female) or training and far less likely to complete that training or degree - even in the rare situations where the post-secondary training and/or education are essentially free. Reeves, an economist with the Brookings Institutions, sees...

  E-book published in October of 2022 by Lake Union. Synopsis: Jack Parker is a stay-at-home dad - but not really by choice. He used to be a big executive in a growing company, but a series of mishaps one Saturday morning led to him being fired and ending up in a humiliating viral video. So, he is at home taking care of a toddler and a kindergartner while his wife is moving up the corporate ladder (different corporation, thank goodness.) He is nervous about his kindergartner starting school and is contemplating going back out in the job market because he can see that the need for a full time stay at home dad during the day is coming close to its end. When he meets his high school bully and nemesis at a local park, he is dismayed. He is more upset to find out that his bully also has a student entering kindergarten at the the same school as his daughter. He decides he has to act when he finds out that the bully is running to be the president of the parent council and is proposing pol...

The author, Michael McCreary 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 the book, 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 lit...

Published by Penguin Audio in 2019. Read by Will Damron. Duration: 10 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. In Range David Epstein presents a strong argument that lateral thinkers (people that know a little about a lot of things) are stronger members of a team than the experts that know a whole lot about a narrow subject. He also argues that people who pick a specialty later in life have a wider perspective on things and can bring fresh ideas into a stale discussion. I literally have no problems with anything he says in this book, but I did find the book to be poorly put together. It just rambles along from one (usually, but not always) interesting topic to another and makes all of them about 30% too long.  So, I am going to rate this book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  RANGE: WHY GENERALISTS TRIUMPH in a SPECIALIZED WORLD . 

Published by Author's Republic in 2019. Multicast performance. Duration: 1 hour, 11 minutes. Unabridged This audiobook is a mixed bag. So, 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 ...

Published in December of 2018 by HarperAudio. Read by Peter Noble. Duration: 9 hours, 26 minutes. The author, Sir Paul Collier 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 ...

Published in 2018. The author, Tara Westover, in 2014. This memoir was one of the most celebrated books of 2018 and for good reason. This is not a fun story to read, but it is absolutely engrossing. The writer has an extraordinary ability to write description - both of the physical environment and of emotional pain and confusion. Tara Westover grew up in rural Idaho on a mountain near a small town. Her father refused to send his children to school, at least not consistently, because school was a plot by the government (and later, the Illuminati). Tara did not have a birth certificate until she was 9 years old and is still not entirely certain of her exact birth date. He also refused any sort of modern medical care or medication or vaccinations for the same reasons. And, he refused to get driver's licenses and have car insurance and to even wear seat belts because those were also a plot. Their home was stocked with weapons, food and fuel for a future Armageddon. Her mother ...

Published by Macmillan Audio in 2017. Read by Xe Sands. Duration: 5 hours, 24 minutes. Unabridged. Tali Sharot has written an interesting little book about our brains and the way they work. Clearly, she is an expert with a PhD in psychology and neuroscience, but she has that rare talent of being able to make the complicated seem pretty basic using real life examples. If you've ever had an online argument, you know the frustration of doing research to show your opponent that they are clearly wrong, only to have them completely ignore the facts. I recently had this experience with an online story posted by a friend about a single truck stop in a nationwide chain that had stopped flying the American flag . The "reporter" asked a cashier why the flag was not out and he said it was because they didn't want to offend drivers from Mexico. Boom! Big story, right? It turns out that their oversized flag pole's mechanism for raising and lowering the flag was broken a...

Published in 2018 by Blackstone Audio. Read by Donald Corren. Duration: 8 hours, 38 minutes. Unabridged. Rus Bradburd's All the Dreams We've Dreamed is both a complicated story and a simple story of two Chicago men whose lives have revolved around the game of basketball. It's a story of a coach and a player.  It's a story of connections between people and also a story of bureaucratic neglect.  It's a story of remorse and shame and a story of pride of place and love for one's teammates and players. It's a story of love and a story of catastrophic violence. Mostly, because it is set in the free fire gun zone of Chicago's West Side, it is a tragedy. The book centers on Marshall High School and its basketball program. Perhaps you have heard about the wave of gun violence that has swept through Chicago's South and West sides, earning it the nickname "Chi-raq" because it is reminiscent of Iraq during the bad old days of The Surge at the e...

Published by Scholastic in 2018 What Would She Do? is collection of very readable short biographies of women - which, after being factually correct, is the most important thing. As David McCullough said,  " No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read."  Woodward writes in an informal, approachable style that I enjoyed quite a bit. Each biography is accompanied by a full page illustration of the woman and a little chart with basic biographical information. There is also a large pullout quote from or about her. For example, for Emma Watson there is this quote: "The saddest thing for a girl to do is to dumb herself down for a guy." Generally, I did not like the "What Would _____ Do?" section that was included at the end of each biography. The author was clearly trying to make a connection between the women in the book and the typical American student with typical American student problems. But, trying to connect Cleopatra...

Published in 2016 by Audible Studios Read by Jacob York Duration: 1 hour, 18 minutes Unabridged Harris Sockel graduated from college and was convinced that he should join Teach for America (TFA) by a dedicated recruiter. He wasn't particularly interested in being a teacher before TFA, but he liked the idea of making a difference. So, he enrolled in their crash course designed to teach a recent college graduate how to be a teacher and, in just a few weeks, he is certified by TFA and heads off to New York City to be a middle school teacher in a charter school. I teach in an urban public school in the Midwest, so I completely understood much of his commentary - the struggle to get papers graded, the struggle to copy papers (apparently an epic struggle in his school) and trying to keep everything moving forward. I particularly enjoyed his discussion of the ubiquitous SWBAT - a fairly new thing in my school. In the end, Sockel's audiobook left this listener a little confused....

Published by Macmillan Audio in 2017 Read by the author, Gail Saltz Duration: 8 hours, 18 minutes Unabridged Psychiatrist Gail Saltz looks at the larger categories of "brain differences", such as dyslexia, depression and ADD in this interesting audiobook. This is a surface-level look at these brain differences (it comes out to a little more than an hour per difference she discusses - you can't expect any more than surface-level discussion), but informative nonetheless. Considering that the average person probably has no knowledge of any of these differences or, at best, a great deal of knowledge of one or two of the seven she discusses, this book serves as an excellent introduction. Dr. Gail Saltz. Photo by Sigrid Estrada Each chapter starts with a description of each of the brain differences including physical differences, if any. Saltz also introduces the reader to two or three high-achieving people with these differences. Some are celebrities, some are not. ...

Published by Oxford University Press in November of 2017. Cara H. Drinan is a law professor at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Her book The War on Kids: How American Juvenile Justice Lost Its Way  deals primarily with the changes to the justice system over the last 30 years and the mostly unforeseen consequences of those changes. Drinan discusses how in the late 1980's and early 1990's the United States was experiencing a crime wave, including "the nation's peak murder rate" (p. 156) and a number of these criminals were minors. Lawmakers responded by making it easier to move cases involving juvenile offenders into adult court. Juvenile court, although imperfect, at least made some attempt to accommodate itself to the specific needs of youth offenders and offered opportunities to rehabilitate themselves. It also recognized the fact that young people's brains just work differently than adult brains (a point Drinan brings up often thr...

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 by Penguin Audio in 2011 Read by Arthur Morey Duration: 12 hours, 45 minutes Unabridged Referring to Noah Webster (1753-1848), the creator of the famed Webster Dictionary, as a Founding Father is generous, to say the least. He did live serve in the Connecticut militia, even deploying at one point, but he never saw much action. He did know many of the Founding Fathers and actually stayed in the homes of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, but they had frequent guests so it would not be fair to characterize those friendships as particularly close friendships. He did advocate strongly for the adoption of the Constitution and for a short time was actively involved in partisan politics as a newspaper editor in New York City. But, when people think Founding Father they are usually referring to far brighter lights than Noah Webster. A 1958 stamp featuring Noah Webster If I were naming this book I would have dropped the Forgotten Founding Father angle and kept the res...