DWD's Reviews

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2024. Read by Kevin R. Free. Duration: 14 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. In Life After Power Presidential historian Jared Cohen looks into the post-Presidential lives of seven Presidents and their quests for some sort of meaning after having one of the most important jobs you can have. Some Presidents fade away due to health reasons, like Reagan. Others are eager to resume their former lives, like Washington. But, others still feel like they have something more to offer or have unfulfilled goals. The seven Presidents he looked at are: Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush. I have enjoyed hearing about John Quincy Adams' post-Presidential life ever since I first read John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage  30+ years ago. I've read more than one book about him and this re-telling is quite good.  A photo of John Quincy Adams  taken in 1844. Jimmy Car...

Published in 2009 by Blackstone Audio. Read by the author, Tamim Ansary Duration: 17 hours, 28 minutes. Unabridged. Tamim Ansary has done something that is very hard to do - he has written a long history of a complicated topic without making it boring and after more than 17 hours of discussion, he left me wishing that it was even longer. Ansary makes the observation that most histories that people in the West (Western Europe and the Americas) read are written from a Western perspective. That makes sense. But, the history of the world is not just the history of Western Civilization. There are multiple civilizations on the planet. Mesoamerica (the Mayas, Aztecs, Toltecs, etc.) is a separate civilization. China is the historic center of another civilization. So is India. And between the West and India and China is another one. Westerners usually refer to it as the Middle East. This book is a history of that civilization from the beginning of recorded history (empires like Bablyon) to ...

Published in 2012 by Random House Audio Duration: 26 hours, 59 minutes Read by Sam Dastor Unabridged For most people, Salman Rushdie is, and will always be, that author that the Iranians tried to have killed all of those years ago. I freely admit that this is an accurate description of me. Although I am an avid reader, this is the first Salman Rushdie book that I have even contemplated reading.  Salman Rushdie. Photo by Andrew Lih. Rushdie narrates this autobiography in the third person, which is a little weird and gave me the impression that he is trying to distance himself a bit from his own story. The biggest chunk of Joseph Anton tells about how Rushdie dealt with the fatwa , or ruling against him and his book The Satanic Verses by the leader of the Iranian Revolution himself, the Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini ruled that the author, the publishers and the editors of the book should die for blasphemy and that anyone who died in an attempt to kill them would be co...

Published in 2008 by Crown Publishing Matt Freed is summoned on very short notice to Bucharest to interview a member of Iran's intelligence community. He was unrecruited, meaning that he is a "walk-in" - literally someone who walked into the embassy and offered information that the American government would want. Freed has been asked to talk to this man because he is an expert on Iranian politics and he speaks the language. He is also an extremely capable intelligence operative. The interview yields valuable and very scary information. Freed starts to act on it and soon discovers that there may be more to this situation than he has been led to believe. He starts his own investigation and becomes convinced that this may be a double cross. His superiors disagree and it becomes a race against time with Freed working against foreign governments and his own... This is a middle-of-the-road spy novel. The action was good but sometimes the narration needed to be made more c...

Published in October of 2016 by Mark Mooney Read by the author, Mark Mooney Duration: 5 hours, 57 minutes Unabridged CNN Money editor Mark Mooney's Three Cents a Mile tells the story of his 2 year trek across the world as a vagabond traveler more than 35 years ago. He left New York City and headed east, visiting Ireland, England, France, North Africa, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India, Thailand and even more destinations with nothing more than a few dollars in his pocket and a typewriter and a notebook to compose travelogue articles that he sold to newspapers back in America. Along the way he met playwrights, authors, poets, star-crossed lovers, thieves, hippies, drug burnouts, farmers, beggars, mystics, and he turned down the chance to meet Mother Theresa. He slept on beaches, in flophouses, on buses, above a bookstore with other aspiring writers, in an apartment building filled with strippers/prostitutes and in a barn. He traveled by plane, by ferry, by bicycle, by b...

Published in October of 2014 by Simon and Schuster Read by the author, Gillian Anderson Duration: 9 hours, 34 minutes Unabridged A Vision of Fire is a mix of political thriller with sci-fi and a heavy dose of the occult thrown in as well. The book starts out with top-level negotiations taking place at the United Nations between India and Pakistan over the disputed region of Kashmir. Both countries are nuclear powers and both countries are sending troops to the border. An Indian ambassador is trusted by both sides and he is trying to broker a peace between them before a nuclear war starts. But, after dropping off his daughter Maanik at her school mysterious assassins make an unsuccessful attempt on his life. He reassures his daughter that he is fine and proceeds to the negotiating table. But, his daughter starts to have some sort of break down and starts clawing at her arms.  She is rushed home and heavily sedated because she is hurting herself. The translator...

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2013. Read by Brian Hutchinson. Duration: 10 hours, 8 minutes. Unabridged. Author Scott McEwen co-wrote American Sniper , the auto-biography of famed SEAL Chris Kyle and from those contacts and the stories he heard he was inspired to write this fictional story of American special forces in Iran and Afghanistan. The insignia of the Navy SEALs This is really three separate operations deftly told as three separate stories with overlapping characters and a little overlap when they get back to base. The first operation is the insertion of a lone operative into Iran to kill a weapons designer. McEwen uses this fairly straightforward story to introduce the weapons and other equipment that will be used throughout the book. The second and third operations deal with a captured American female helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. She is part of a unit that inserts and extracts special forces all of the time so the men feel a real connection to ...

Published in 2013 by Regnery Publishing, Inc. Raymond Ibrahim's Crucified Again is at once alarming, shocking and tedious. The book documents attacks by Muslims on Christians, Christian churches and Christian organizations throughout the world, especially in predominately Muslim countries. Ibrahim uses newspaper articles and TV news programs that are printed and broadcast in Arabic and, thus, largely ignored by Western media as a source. He also uses regional Christian newspapers and  magazines and newspapers from organizations that document human rights abuses. He then proceeds to methodically list instance after instance of anti-Christian attacks from Nigeria, to Egypt to Indonesia. Ibrahim starts with a short overview of the history of Muslim/Christian relations in majority Muslim countries.  He lists the Koranic verses that are used to justify persecution of Christians (and all other faiths) and then demonstrates how it is done again and again and again. This is ...

An informative book without an ax to grind from someone who was really there (who also knows how to write well!) Rory Stewart If the Iraq war interests you in any way, even if you are a partisan of the pro-war or anti-war persuasion, read The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq. Rory Stewart was a member of the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority). He functioned as governor of Amara province in Southern Iraq - a semi-swampland where the Tigras and Euphrates come together. His tale is a tale of success, failure, friendship, war, violence, trust and betrayal. In other words, his is a story of real people in a very difficult situation with the compounded challenges of religious, language and cultural barriers. Here's what you learn from this book: -Success in Iraq is best measured on a relative scale and will ultimately have to be determined by the Iraqis themselves - on their terms with their leaders. -Iran is defini...

Ridiculous but entertaining. Usually I have a low tolerance for over the top nonsense in my thriller novels. I tend to not like the stories with the unstoppable good guy whose training takes over and causes him to wipe out legions of his opponents. But, this one hit the spot for some reason. Matthew Dunn The premise is really quite simple: Will Cochrane is a member of MI6 - the British version of the CIA. He is their super-spy, code-named Spartan. He is nearly unstoppable and pretty much has carte blanche to do whatever he wants to defend the UK. A new intelligence leak from Iran has discovered the existence of a similar type of super spy in Iran and he is planning a very big hit against the West. Cochrane is dispatched to stop him. The chase runs through Eastern Europe and America and of course ends in a dramatic, utterly unrealistic confrontation after sniper fights, special forces commando raids and lots of high level meetings in which Cochrane convinces everyone that he ...

2000 years in 387 pages - A great effort but somewhat unsatisfying. Published in 1997. Don't get me wrong - I am came to The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years as a true fan of Bernard Lewis. His book The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror was one of the more thought-provoking books I read last year. However, this book is quite different than 'Crisis'. It's scope is massive, and it is a history book rather than a work of examination and informed conjecture. Lewis addresses these shortcomings in his introduction and admits that it will be a difficult undertaking to do it well. He acknowledges that whatever format he chooses to cover this history, it will be unsatisfying for some. I give him credit for doing it well, but not as great as the other books and articles of his that I've read. Bernard Lewis The book is broken up into three general sections. The first is a general overview of the Middle East over the last 2,...

It started out so strong but... David Ignatius The Increment started out so strong, the characters were so strong, the plot was crisp and the whole thing just felt right. The plot centers around two characters. One is an Iranian nuclear scientist that is disillusioned with the Iranian regime. The other character is a veteran CIA chief - the head of the Iranian desk. Like I said, the book starts out very strong. I was intrigued by the characters, the situation and the back story of the two main characters. By the end of the first page I was convinced I was reading a 5 star book. But, the characters started to change. They started acting differently. For example, the head of the CIA is a retired Admiral. He comes off as a principled, with-it kind of leader who is just out of his element when he's not commanding a ship. Fine. Later on, he has multiple scenes in which he just plays with toy ships rather than making decisions. He goes from being a leader to ...