DWD's Reviews

Published by Macmillan Audio in 2019. Read by Stephen Graybill. Duration: 11 hours, 5 minutes. Unabridged. City of Windows features Lucas Page, a certified genius (an astrophysicist) with a special talent - he can envision the relations between the stars as they rotate in the sky above and predict where they will go mathematically. It is a natural talent, one he's had since he was a little boy. He can apply this skill to crime scenes as well. He can eyeball a crime scene and tell from what direction and angle a shot came from without having to take all of the steps that Crime Scene Investigators usually have to take.  But, he was seriously injured while on the job with the FBI several years ago. The incident took an eye, a hand and part of a leg. He gladly walked away from the FBI and became a college professor. But, when his old partner is killed by a sniper with a very long-range shot on a busy road in New York City in the middle of a snowstorm, Lucas Page is reluctantly called ...

Published in 2018 by HarperAudio. Read by the author, Rob Schenck. Duration: 11 hours, 26 minutes. Unabridged. In Costly Grace , Rob Schenck tells the story of his life as a story of three conversions. His first conversion was a conversion from Judaism to Christianity as a teenager. Soon after graduating high school, he married and began to work to his certification to join the ministry. He first worked in a shelter for junkies but he found that to be a little too dangerous for his wife. Plus, he longed for something with a larger impact. He became a pastor with a church but still felt that wasn't enough. He participated in joint missions in Mexico to help those that live in the garbage dumps and scrounge them for food and recyclables. After one of his trips he found that his twin brother (also a pastor) had become involved in Operation Rescue, the anti-abortion movement that encouraged protesters to block the entrances to abortion clinics and use non-violent resistance to stop w...

  Libertarians and Conservatives - Natural Allies, Natural Rivals Published in 2015 by Crown Forum Charles C. W. Cooke is a writer for National Review  and as such he has been in the center of a storm as the political Right works through a new generation of thought on a variety of issues. In some issues, the political Right is united, such as on the concept of Limited Government and keeping taxes as low as possible. In others, they have a variety of opinions. Generally speaking, Libertarians bond more readily with the Right than the Left, which is why Ron Paul identified as a Libertarian for years yet caucused with the Republicans in the Congress and ran for president as a Republican. The dislike of the Nanny State on many issues pushes them together as temporary allies on many issues. But, on other issues such as the War on Drugs and Gay Marriage the Right is split and split deeply. In The Conservatarian Manifesto, Cooke is attempting to nudge the Republicans ...

Published in 2007 by Crown Publishers Just to get it out of the way, Joe Bageant (1946-2011) and I differ politically despite sharing similar roots. We both grew up in rural America near a working class town. We both were educated in the local public schools and left to go to college and never really went back except to visit (although do I live in a working class neighborhood in a city). Admittedly, his town (Winchester, Virginia) is a little more poor and run down than mine but I may be remembering my home with rose-colored glasses and he may be intentionally focusing on the worst aspects of his. But, Bageant did return to Winchester in order to write Deer Hunting with Jesus . He returned to be a foreign correspondent of sorts. His aim is to explain white working-class America ("...that churchgoing, hunting and fishing Bud Light-drinking, provincial America...the people who cannot, and do not care to, locate Iraq or France on a map - assuming they even own an atlas." [...

Libertarianism thought delivered painlessly by nice guy Stossel Published April 10, 2012 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, John Stossel Duration: 9 hours, 14 minutes The title of this audiobook , No, They Can't ,  is a play on the 2008 campaign slogan of then-candidate Obama, "Yes We Can!" Stossel, of course, is the TV consumer reporter turned anchor of ABC's 20/20 who now hosts a weekly show of Fox Business News and a series on one-hour specials on Fox News. He has won nineteen Emmy Awards. He begins his book with an explanation of why he left ABC after more than 20 years and how the culture of ABC made it very uncomfortable for him to explore stories in any way except the tried and true politically correct way. The premise of the this audiobook is that the entire thought process behind that campaign slogan is wrong  - the government cannot do a lot of the things that people want it to do, and even if everyone agreed it should give those thin...

An Important Book - for Liberals and Conservatives Published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning author David K. Shipler takes a long hard look at the rights we have sacrificed in the era of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, and lesser wars such as the War on Handgun Violence in T he Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties . I picked this book up figuring that my Conservative sensibilities might get ruffled a bit by a New York Times reporter but I might learn a thing or two along the way. I always tell people that the traditional left-right continuum used to describe someone's politics is so inaccurate as to be useless. Really, what is the difference between an aging hippie living on a hill somewhere raising some dope for personal use and telling the government to get out of his business and a Barry Goldwater-type conservative (like me) living by himself on a hill somewhere that tells the government to get its nos...

The Thirteen American Arguments offers a lot of potential but doesn't deliver Howard Fineman I heard Howard Fineman on the radio discussing The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country one day and scribbled the book title down in my little notepad as I was driving down the road. The idea behind this book is truly great - find 13 central arguments that have been passed down over time and look how different eras of Americans have addressed them. Fineman's 13 arguments are: 1. Who is a person? 2. Who is an American? 3. The role of faith 4. What can we know and say? 5. The limits of Individualism 6. Who judges the law? 7. Debt and the Dollar 8. Local v. National Authority 9. Presidential Power 10. The terms of trade 11. War and Diplomacy 12. The environment 13. A fair, "more perfect" union He adds to these by noting 5 groups that often have competing visions about what to do with each of these: the St...

Neat idea but bad follow through Published in 2006 by Three Rivers Press. I grabbed Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots on impulse as I was leaving the local purveyor of books. You see, I am a "Crunchy Con" of sorts, being an avid recycler. But, this book really failed to reach me. In fact, I felt like I was being preached at with certain topics being outright hammered into my skull due to their repetitive re-occurrence. Pluses: -The book addresses the fact that the conservative movement is not monolithic and their are a variety of reasons for people to espouse conservatism. -Embraces a belief in buying local - something I try to do when I go out to eat or shop whenever reasonably possible. -Points out how silly it is to apply big business agricultural regulations to family farms. Negatives: -What the heck is "crunchy"? Search the internet and you may get a reference to "Crunchy granola", which bas...

The works of a brilliant essayist are a joy to read. Originally published in 1988. I admit, I was attracted to Thank God for the Atom Bomb because of the title. Our library had it featured on its web page with some excerpts and I was intrigued. I was not disappointed. The title essay is simply brilliant. It is also caustic, blunt and nuanced. I'll refer to it before the next time I teach about World War II. There are two more essays on World War II. I found the two essays on George Orwell to be most interesting. His commentary on the differences between tourism and travel reminded me of the Twain essays I've been reading lately. "Taking It All Off in the Balkans" is the account of his visit to a nudist resort in the former Yugoslavia - very funny and (I've got to say it) revealing. Paul Fussell Two essays were just not interesting to me, being mainly about poetry and I find myself unable to muster the interest to read poetry, let alone rea...

I liked this book a lot except... ...the last 1/3 of it got bogged down in too much technical detail and repeated information that had been previously stated. That is too bad because the first 2/3 was well-written and informative. The Great American Gun Debate: Essays on Firearms and Violence  really is an interesting book - one that should burst some bubbles of the anti-gun crowd. The writers painstakingly analyze the statistics and the motivations of some of America's biggest gun control lobbies, including the Centers for Disease Control (did you know that they use bogus data to label handguns as a public health threat? They quote FBI data that literally does not exist - they cite the document but it does not have the statistics that they use as a justification to lobby against guns. The document doesn't even report that type of statistic!) Don't let my comments about the last 1/3 of the book deter you from reading the rest of it - it really was worth the time and...