DWD's Reviews

Published in October of 2024 by eChristian. Read by James R. Cheatham. Duration: 7 hours, 28 minutes. Unabridged. Have you ever listened to someone speak, agreed wholeheartedly with almost everything the person said, but still felt underwhelmed by the presentation? That's where I am with this book. Bezner is the pastor of a church in Houston and he discusses how the church needs to stop being a cheerleader for both America and Jesus. Oftentimes, America comes first - especially as churches make political power a priority.  As the title says, Bezner says the church has to return to honoring Kingdom Values over American Values. Bezner is not anti-American, but he does not that American popular culture and American political do not really align with Kingdom Values - and that should be the goal. He goes on to tell about things he's done wrong in this area of his ministry and things that he believes are working out well now. Like I said at the outset, I liked what Bezner had to say,...

Published in October of 2024 by Worthy Books. Read by the author, April Ajoy. Duration: 8 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. Star-Spangled Jesus is the story of April Ajoy and her spiritual evolution since the political appearance of Donald Trump in 2015-2016.  Is it weird that a politician caused a spiritual evolution?  No, not in a world of Christian Nationalism. For the most basic definition, I am going to say that it is a belief that a person can't truly be an American if they aren't Christian and their rights as an American should reflect that. Also, this is precisely what happened to me, so I get it. Trump shocked me out of the Republican = Good Christian mindset because of the simple reason that he is so overtly antithetical to so many Christian ideals and is proud of it. If the previous paragraph offends or confuses you, you will hate this book.  Ajoy's pre-2015 Christian experience was much more conservative than mine and more intense. Her father was a conservative p...

Published by Zondervan in April of 2024. Read by the author, Nancy French. Duration: 9 hours, 56 minutes. Unabridged. My synopsis: Ghosted is an autobiography of Nancy French. Nancy French had a career as a Conservative political columnist and ghost-writing for people in Conservative circles. She helped Conservative politicians write opinion pieces, helped them come up with clever lines for radio and TV interviews, and even books. She worked with such Conservative stars as Sarah Palin and Ben Sasse. She even worked with the Romney campaign.  The book starts with her childhood in Kentucky, including an awful story of sexual abuse at the hands of a manipulative youth pastor and how that sent her life into a spiral into she met her future husband while she was in college. Nancy French is married to David French, a well-known Conservative political columnist, commentator, and attorney. He worked for two organizations that defended the rights of Christian groups and Conservatives on co...

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2024. Read by the author, Frank Bruni. Duration: 9 hours, 46 minutes. Unabridged. Frank Bruni, as the title The Age of Grievance implies, looks at how people of all political stripes act as though they are aggrieved at so many things. Sometimes, it's kind of funny and harmless, sometimes it's deadly serious to our values (forcing speakers off campus because they are too conservative) and sometimes people's lives (January 6th.) If you follow the news, especially political news, not much is new here except grouping them all together and adding analysis.  He is not saying grievance is always wrong. For example, the Civil Rights movement was a grievance movement. But, he is saying that it has to be informed grievance. For example, he discusses the fact that most people that are convinced that China's economy is larger than America's economy (China's economy is about 2/3 of the size of the U.S. economy with 3 times the popul...

  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 by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2024. Read by the author, Fareed Zakaria Duration: 13 hours, 2 minutes. Unabridged. Fareed Zakaria's Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present  is exactly what the title says it is. Zakaria writes about the beginnings of capitalism, multi-cultural societies, globalism, democracy, the industrial revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Fascism, the failed Arab Spring, LGBTQ+ rights, and the rise illiberal democracy and the return on authoritarianism and the forces that pushed back (or overturned) them. The author Zakaria has clearly done his research and writes in such a way that it flows from one topic to another almost as if they entire book was just one big story (which it is, if you look at it as the story of humanity, especially The West.) If you find yourself wondering how we got here, this is a good place to start. Zakaria breaks down complex movements and ideas and makes them understandable. ...

Published by Worthy Books in 2024. Read by Erin Bennett. Duration: 8 hours, 38 minutes. Unabridged. Elizabeth Neumann worked for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the George W. Bush and Trump administrations.  During the Bush Administration, the work of the DHS centered around preventing attempts by foreign groups, usually Muslim-based, to commit acts of terrorism on the United States or on Americans abroad. She became an expert on why some Muslims were radicalizing (or self-radicalizing), the signs of what to look for, and things that can be done to prevent radicalization. During the Trump Administration, she started seeing more and more reports about domestic terrorism, usually coming from self-radicalized ultra-conservatives who are encouraged by media. Two prime examples are the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter and the El Paso shooter. Both issued manifestos that quoted liberally from fringe MAGA Conservative theories, like the  Great Replacement theory pushed by p...

Illustrated by L. Fury and Nate Powell. Published by Harry N. Abrams in 2021. This spring I read the MARCH , the three volume graphic novel series about Congressman  John Lewis  (1940-2020) and the Civil Rights movement. When I finished the series, I thought to myself that it would be interesting to see how John Lewis ran for Congress and the struggles he encountered in an era where the KKK still openly marched. My Synopsis: The graphic novel RUN picks up right where MARCH  trilogy left off. At the end of the  MARCH trilogy, there was a celebration of the passage of the Civil Rights bills - a moment of success. There was also the murder of a volunteer who was helping with the celebration by anti-Civil Rights forces. RUN explores what happened after the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had it first taste of success.  At the end of  MARCH , there was a celebration of the passage of the Civil Rights bills. With that, a long-term goal achiev...

Published in 2024 by HarperAudio. Read by the author, Bakari Sellers. Duration: 4 hours, 33 minutes. Unabridged. The Moment that Bakari Sellers refers to in his book is the so-called moment of racial reckoning that came with the murder of George Floyd and the protests all around the country that followed. Sellers discusses a lot of relevant things that lead up to this moment including the murder of 9 African Americans by a young White supremacist in Charleston in 2015 and Covid-19. But, events like the Buffalo shooting  of 2022, continued questionable acts of  and media and political-types discussing the Great Replacement Theory from 2017 until the present day have shown that moment of reckoning was not a big a moment that people supposed it was. Or, it demonstrates that the racist elements in America are pushing back hard. I have run across Sellers as a guest on a couple of different podcasts that I follow and have always found him to be thoughtful and engaging. I have to ...

Published in 2024 by Random House Audio. Read by Ray Porter. Duration: 11 hours, 2 minutes. Unabridged. White Rural Rage is a look at the rural/urban divide in the United States in politics as personified in the MAGA movement.  The book is broken up into multiple chapters, each with a theme about how rural America is advantaged even though they claim they are put upon by urban elites. Sometimes, the authors have a point, sometimes they are just grinding their axes for no particular reason (like in the pickup truck chapter.) The book has some excellent points, but it clearly written like an extended opinion hit piece rather than an extended informational piece and that did nothing but hurt the audiobook in my opinion.  I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: WHITE RURAL RAGE: THE THREAT to AMERICAN DEMOCRACY by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman.

Published in April of 2024 by Little, Brown, and Company. Read by Will Damron. Duration: 8 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged. Finish What We Started is a look at the MAGA/Trump movement from a different perspective. There are lots of books about Trump, his children, Roger Stone, Stephen Miller, Bill Barr, Mike Pence, or any of the other big players in the Trump Administration.  This book is different. It looks at regular people caught up in the movement in official positions and how they reacted. There is a guy who wrote a kindle e-book about the real power of political parties - the local precinct committee person in numbers. The theory is that if you get enough like-minded people in charge of the local precincts, you will control the party. That author gets the attention of Steve Bannon and his popular podcast and people start buying the book and putting its principles in action. Bannon is the only famous person featured in the book.  The book chronicles the transition from tra...

  Published in 2016 by Top Shelf Productions Written by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin. Illustrated by Nate Powell. 2016 National Book Award Winner for Young People's Literature 2017 Printz Award Winner 2017 Coretta Scott King Author Award Winner 2017 Sibert Medal Winner 2017 YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Winner 2017 Walter Award Winner Congressman John Lewis (1940-2020) continues his life story in book three of the March series, focusing on his struggles in the Civil Rights Movement. The book starts with the 16th Street Birmingham Church Bombing in September of 1963 and ends with the signing of the Voting Rights Act in August of 1965. These were, by any account, much like the famous Charles Dickens line from A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the...

Originally Published in 2020. Published by Oxford Press in 2022. Historian Heather Cox Richardson has made herself into a name brand historian with her near-daily first drafts of history in which she writes up the day's political news and ties in similar historic themes or long-running trends.  How the South Won the Civil War follows along those lines.  The book looks at two long-standing trends in American points of view in American history that are in constant tension with one another. This quote from page xv of the introduction gets the thesis of the book pretty well: America began with a great paradox: the same men who came up with the radical idea of constructing a nation on the principle of equality also owned slaves, thought Indians were savages, and considered women inferior. This apparent contradiction was not a flaw, though; it was a key feature of the new democratic republic. For the Founders, the concept that "all men are created equal" depended on the idea t...

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 2023 by ChristianAudio.com. Read by the author, Kaitlyn Schiess. Duration: 6 hours, 27 minutes. Unabridged. I first heard about Kaitlyn Schiess on one of my favorite podcasts: The Holy Post . She is one of the three regular hosts of the show and often serves as their in-house theologian. She is well-suited for this role because she offers well-considered answers and she thinks them through before she answers, rather than just shooting her mouth off - all the more impressive when one considers that she is by far the youngest member of the podcast. I was drawn to The Ballot and the Bible because: 1) I am concerned the rise of Christian Nationalism in America and the damage it does to the Christian witness; 2) I knew that Schiess would give thoughtful answers. The intermingling of Christianity and politics is not a new phenomenon in the United States (or in the rest of the world - but that is not the focus of this book.) Schiess looks at the intermingling of faith and politi...

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in January of 2024. Read by the author, Tina Nguyen. Duration: 7 hours, 23 minutes. Unabridged. Tina Nguyen is a mainstream reporter now, but she started out in the world of conservative media. How conservative? How about working for Tucker Carlson before he joined Fox News? Nguyen had a boyfriend that connected her to the feeder system of conservative politics and media. Go through these high school programs and you get invited to college programs like the Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom at Claremont McKenna College and then on to think tanks, conservative media, or a staff position with a politician. Nguyen broke up with the boyfriend and went into conservative media...until she realized it was all very small, very inter-related and, in the end, unsatisfying and unable to pay the bills. Also, she discovered that one of her mentors was a racist creep and so was the boyfriend that brought her into the movement.  The author...

  Published in November of 2023 by Penguin Audio. Read by the author, Jonathan Karl. Duration: 8 hours, 32 minutes. Unabridged. ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl brings us his third book about Donald Trump as President and as former President. His first book covered candidate Trump and the first 3 years of the Trump Administration. The second book covered the last year of the Trump Administration with a special focus on all of the "stop the steal" claims. It was called Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show . Too bad it was not in fact Trump's "final act."  Karl has a long relationship with the former President. He interviewed 5 times before he even decided to officially run for President in the 2016 election. He's interviewed him multiple times since, including for all three of his books. Karl includes actual audio clips from those interviews (questions and answers) for the benefit of those that doubt. If you think Donald Trump is awesome, this is not the...

Published by HarperAudio in December of 2023. Read by the author, Tim Alberta. Duration: 18 hours, 16 minutes. Unabridged. Tim Alberta is a writer for The Atlantic and also an Evangelical. He grew up in the faith, but is very troubled by the tendency towards Christian Nationalism. He was inspired to write this book after an incident at his father's funeral at the church he grew up in.  Alberta embarked on a cross-country exploration of the intersection of Evangelicals and politics at Christian Nationalism - and how this combination is changing Evangelicals and they way they are perceived. Alberta does not come at this as an outsider. As I already noted, he grew up in the church - and still belongs to a church. To me, this is important. I read another book with a similar theme ( The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism ) that just didn't hit the right tone and answer the right questions because the author was coming from the outside. She didn...

  Published in 2023 by Little, Brown and Company in December of 2023. Read by the author, Liz Cheney. Duration: 12 hours, 14 minutes. Unabridged. Liz Cheney is most famous for two things. Pre-January 6, 2021 she was famous for being Dick Cheney's daughter and a leader of the House Republicans.  Post-January 6, 2021 Cheney is most famous for being one of the leaders of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.  Cheney was one of the few Republicans willing to incur the wrath of Donald Trump and actually look into the role he played in the January 6 Attack. Cheney calls the book a memoir, but this is not really true. The book offers next to nothing about her childhood or her personal life. You know that she has a husband because she mentions that he helped her proofread various papers she had prepared for the committee.  Cheney starts with former President Donald Trump's election denialism immediately following the 2020 election date rather than...

Published by Tantor Audio in 2020. Read by Tom Parks. Duration: 6 hours, 44 minutes. Unabridged. Whitehead and Perry are the first sociologists who set out to do an in-depth study of Christian Nationalism and Christian Nationalists. Whitehead (Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis) and Perry (University of Oklahoma) both hail from states where Christian Nationalism plays a strong role in the political and cultural realms. First, you need a working definition of Christian Nationalism. Whitehead describes it as:    "a cultural framework that is all about trying to advocate for a fusion between Christianity — as they define it — and American civic life." I also like this description by a completely unrelated person,  Rev. Skye Jethani :  "Christians participating in politics or influencing society with their values is NOT Christian Nationalism.  Christians believing they have a God-given right to dominate the government & society by excludi...