DWD's Reviews

Published in 2012 by Houghton Miffllin Harcourt Publishing Company I have had Scott Weidensaul's The First Frontier for longer than a year, buried in my legendary pile of books (actually, I am more organized than that, they are all in 4 milk crates) but when I heard an interview with Wiedensaul on the John Batchelor radio show I was reminded to dig it out. Weidensaul is to be commended for a very thorough job of researching the history of the relationship between the natives and the European colonists. The records are scant, the spelling is haphazard and so much of it is buried in myth and politics. He starts with the disposition of the American Indian population prior to the arrival of Europeans. The limited history of pre-Colombian contact is discussed (with the Vikings and various fishing fleets) and the discussion of the similarities of differences of the various American Indians arrayed along the Atlantic coastline is quite interesting. But, as Weidensaul's

A short story: dramatic, gory, creepy and quite satisfying. Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2008 Read by Mare Winningham Duration: 2 hours, 13 minutes "Run, run, as fast as you can You can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man!" Some time back some brilliant someone in the vast Simon and Schuster bureaucracy (I assume it is vast. I guess it could be just some guy named Simon talking to some guy named Schuster all day long but it seems much bigger to me) decided that Stephen King's short stories would make nice little audiobooks. That anonymous, faceless cubicle dweller was absolutely right. Here's the deal with Stephen King and audiobooks - he tends to write long books and that means you are listening to one story for a long time. For example, the audio version of The Stand lasts 47 hours and 52 minutes. Two complete days of a tale of woe, disease, mass death, chaos. I listen in the car so that would mean a solid month, maybe more. Can you i

This book had such potential and then... I really liked the premise behind Forced Out : a young baseball player hides from the New York mob by playing single A ball in Florida but he is discovered by a former Yankees talent scout. Soon enough, the mob is on the hunt again. But... (WARNING: Spoilers, sort of...) The book gets increasingly complicated (which is fine, life is complicated) and the only way Frey resolves anything with any character in this book is by having someone killed off. I expected lots of people to die (it is about the mafia, after all) but this story gets ridiculous. The book ends up feeling like Frey was either: a) under a tight deadline; or b) unable to figure out how to end this complicated book in a reasonable way so he just started killing everyone off. Either way, it was a very unsatisfying ending. In good conscience, I cannot recommend this book to all but the most ardent of Stephen Frey fans. I rate this book 2 stars out of 5 and it

What Would You Do? Originally published in 1994. Imagine you're a defense lawyer but you used to be a prosecutor. Now, imagine you find out a career criminal that you put on Death Row is really innocent of the crime because you discover that the witness statements you used were all lies. Now, imagine that he's going to die in a month. What do you do? Throw in a heaping handful of racial politics, Florida's fascination with the electric chair and the main characters fractured family life and you've got Clifford Irving's Final Argument . It started out very slow but I kept going and it turned out to be one of the better legal thriller books I've read for a while. I give this book a "4 stars" - I'm dropping the score because of the slow start. This book can be found in multiple formats on Amazon.com here: Final Argument by Clifford Irving .  Reviewed in 2004.

Relentlessly violent screwball book. This is my first Carl Hiassen book. It is also Hiaasen's first book as a solo author. Hiassen goes for over-the-top funny, much like Elmore Leonard and Dave Barry. but, in the end it wore me down rather than keeping me intrigued. The premise of the book is that a Miami-based newspaper columnist is sick of all of the development in and around Miami and the Everglades so he decides to start a campaign of terrorism to scare away the tourists and to discourage more development. The columnist (whose anti-development commentary rarely deviates from Hiasssen's as the narrator) is joined by an anti-Castro bumbling bomb specialist, an African American that is a former star member of the Miami Dolphins who hates almost all white people and a native Indian from the area who is flush with bingo and gambling money. Throw in a newbie Private Detective and an Orange Bowl Queen that is sick of the pageant scene and you have a potent mix but, in the en