DWD's Reviews

  Published in 2022 by Penguin Audio. Read by Joe Barrett. Duration: 8 hours, 57 minutes. Unabridged. Mark Leibovich is an experienced political reporter. For years, he covered Washington, D.C. and various presidential campaigns while working for New York Times Magazine. He also writes with a sarcastic, funny edge. As made clear by the title, Thank You for Your Servitude does not look positively on former President Donald Trump.  Also, as made clear by the title, this book looks at the name brand people that worked for and with the Trump Administration and the ways that they debased themselves for a seat at the table. There are also a few people that stood up the former President and paid a political price. Former President Donald Trump and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. These well-known people include Mitch McConnell (he both stood up to the President and debased himself), Mitt Romney, John McCain, Sean Spicer, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Reince Preibus and the incomparable Li

  Published by Tantor Audio in 2019. Read by Rebecca Gibel. Duration: 5 hours, 57 minutes. Unabridged . Lilliana Mason is an associate research professor at Johns Hopkins University. She collects, analyzes and breaks down the raw data that tells us what we already know about American politics right now - we are polarized. For me, the most interesting part in when she looks at what that means and who is actually being polarized here. If you are a true political junkie - the type of person that reads a lot of news, watches the Sunday morning talking head shows and the has clearly identifiable ideological positions you can be very partisan, but are unlikely to be truly polarized.  The true insight in this book came from a deep look at the most polarized people - the people that truly believe that the other party is a clear and present danger to the country and that all Republicans are clearly Nazis or all Democrats are clearly communists. You run across the people in the comment sections

  Published in 2022 by Zondervan. Read by the author, Andy Stanley. Duration: 5 hours, 11 minutes. Unabridged. Andy Stanley brings a warning to churches across the United States: Do not become involved in partisan politics. Jesus is not a Republican and he is not a Democrat. He did not come to rule this world and he did not make his church a government for this world. Nevertheless, Stanley has been criticized by church members he has known for years for not taking splashy political stands. . Stanley goes on to detail very practical reasons not to get involved in partisan politics, such as ticking off 40% of your potential mission field by endorsing a certain candidate and being known as a Democrat or Republican church.  The answer? Neither.  By identifying with a political candidate or a party, you are rejecting your fellow Christians who disagree with you by identifying with a party more than identifying with the body of Christ. This is literally a heresy. The body of Christ has work

  Published by HarperAudio in June of 2022. Read by Josh Bloomberg. Duration: 8 hours, 14 minutes. Unabridged. Tim Miller is a Republican political operative. He previously worked on the presidential campaigns for John McCain (2008), Jon Huntsman (2012) and Jeb Bush (2016), worked for the Republican party as a liaison to the Romney campaign (2012), created "gotcha" content for websites and traditional media, helped run a Political Action Committee (PAC) and writes regularly for Rolling Stone magazine and political websites. He's connected. He knows someone on every campaign. He knew people all over the Trump administration.  He is also a "Never Trumper". He once made a list compiled by the Washington Post of the top ten Never Trumpers. Miller talks about the motivations of people that joined the Trump White House after they swore that they never would because he was simply not an acceptable candidate or president. He talked with several people and he got the s

  Published in 2017 by Hourly History. I am an avid reader of history, but I have areas of weakness that I am perfectly willing to shore up a bit, but I don't want to invest a ton of time in. Francisco Franco  was one of those people for me.  I came into this biography knowing only the barest of facts about the long-time dictator of Spain. Franco ruled from 1939 until his death in 1975. This biography spends little time on his early life and could have expanded on the Spanish Civil War that brought him to power. For example, the most famous image of the war is the painting Guernica .  Guernica by Pablo Picasso (1937) Guernica is one of the most famous paintings of the 20th century. It depicts the chaos of an attack by the German air force on the city of Guernica. Guernica was holding out against Franco's forces and Franco enlisted German help to deal with the city. German and Italian bomber planes tried out the relatively new technology in real life. Pablo Picasso painted Gue

  Published in 2021 by Harper Horizon. Read by co-author Turk Pipkin Duration: 3 hours, 6 minutes. Unabridged. During the Covid-19 lockdowns Willie Nelson decided to write a book. This is not an unusual thing for Willie - he has written a handful of memoirs focusing on various parts of his almost 80 years as a professional musician (he was paid to play in a local band at the age of 10) and this book almost certainly overlaps with other books.  The format of Willie Nelson's Letters to America is that Willie is writing thank you letters to various people, places and things that influenced his life and his career. He has a letter to his hometown, his grandparents, his sister, various members of his band over the years, his ex-wives, his wife, his kids, the fellow members of the supergroup The Highwaymen, among others. Nelson's guitar, Trigger There is also a letter to his guitar, Trigger. Nelson bought Trigger, sight unseen, in 1969 because he needed a new guitar after someone ac

  Published in January of 2022 by Random House Audio. Read by Beth Hicks. Duration: 7 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. The author of How Civil Wars Start has an extensive background in studying exactly why some countries collapse into Civil War and other countries don't, even when everyone thinks they will, like South Africa after Apartheid. The first half of the book is a look at countries that slid into Civil War and specific characteristics that tend to make Civil War more likely. Her team has come up with a scale and they get concerned when societies move quickly on that scale. It doesn't matter if they move quickly away from democracy or towards it - generally speaking moving quickly means that groups in power lose power and they don't like it and they lash out. A classic example of this is Iraq. The Sunni had almost all of the power under the dictatorship Sadam Hussein, but once he was overthrown the Shia majority took power and decided that it was time to get even - d

  Published in February of 2022 by Random House Publishing. Read by the author, Jeremy W. Peters. Duration: 13 hours, 46 minutes. Unabridged. Sorry that this will be a herky-jerky post. It deserves a better one, but that would have to be a much longer post, perhaps 3 or 4 times longer. That would be so lengthy that no one would bother to read it. Peters' book details how the GOP went from the party of Eisenhower and Reagan to the party of MAGA and Trump. The old GOP advocated Free Trade, welcomed immigrants , valued the NATO alliance and wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade. The MAGA party flirts with the idea of leaving NATO, denounces Free Trade agreements, openly despises illegal immigrants and openly discusses the idea that all immigrants (legal and illegal) are being brought into the U.S. to replace white people with more compliant people of color. As Tucker Carlson, the number one cable news voice of the MAGA movement, stated in April 202 1, " the Democratic Party is trying to

  Published by Tantor Audio in November of 2021. Read by David Marantz. Duration: 7 hours, 13 minutes. Unabridged. Saul Griffith makes a convincing argument that the clean energy future to prevent excessive global warming (No carbon) only comes from making everything, and I mean everything, electric (with the exception of air travel) - electric cars, electric boats, electric trains, electric heat pumps to heat homes, electric stoves, electric ovens, electric water heaters, and electric clothes dryers.  I mostly picked up this book as a reaction to the fact that so many people in my social media feed keep re-posting anti-electric car memes that they did not create. Someone is really pushing back hard against the concept. I saw this book and began to wonder if this concept were even possible. According to Griffith, it is very possible and with almost no "and then we come up with magic technology" moments baked into his plan. Based on what is already being done in Australia and

  Published in November of 2021 by Penguin Audio. Read by the author, Jonathan Karl. Duration: 10 hours, 32 minutes. Unabridged. In 2020, ABC White House reporter Jonathan Karl wrote a book about his experiences covering Donald Trump's run for President in 2016 and the first three years of his Presidency. It is called Front Row at the Trump Show . Karl follows up with this book of the last year of the Trump Administration and the first few months of his post-Presidency.  Karl meticulously names his sources and plays actual audio tracks as he tells this sordid story of misinformation, deceit, outright lies and a botched attack on the Capitol building in an attempt to thwart the results of an election. If the previous paragraph upsets you and you think it is full of lies then you do not want to read this book unless you enjoy being upset.  If that paragraph sounds about right to you, I highly recommend this book as a primer to what you are likely to hear from the January 6 Commission

  Published in 2007. Heather Cox Richardson is a historian I have only recently discovered because of her prolific social media presence that she developed while under Covid lockdown. She writes a daily news summary of a few paragraphs with a view towards how these events match up with historical events or trends. Plus, she takes questions from people and develops a one hour daily online lecture. They are interesting, sometimes rambling little presentations and this book shares a lot of the same features.  Teddy Roosevelt (center with glasses) and the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War Richardson is looking at the time right after the Civil War in American History.  In the history books, Reconstruction, the Old West, the Gilded Age and the Spanish-American War are all treated a separate things. Combining all of these typical divisions of American history into one book makes for a more comprehensive study of the time period.  Traditionally, they are studied separately - in a typic

  Published in September of 2021 by Macmillan Audio. Read by the author, Evan Osnos. Duration: 17 hours, 7 minutes. Unabridged. Evan Osnos is a reporter for The New Yorker . He was inspired to write about the phenomenon of Donald Trump and the 2016 and 2020 elections when he returned from an multi-year assignment in China and noted that politics, journalism and even economics in the United States had changed. He didn't use this analogy, but I will: Parents don't notice their kids changing and growing because they see them every day. But, the aunts and uncles who only see them at the holidays can easily detect the changes. Osnos went to three places that he used to live to investigate: Greenwich, Connecticut; Chicago, Illinois; and Clarksburg, West Virginia.  In West Virginia, he primarily looks at the changes in journalism such as the loss of local news and small town newspapers. He also looks at government pulling back environmental regulations and business avoiding responsibi

  Published in July of 2021 by HarperAudio. Read by the author, Gary John Bishop. Duration: 1 hour, 34 minutes. Unabridged. Gary John Bishop is a life coach/motivational speaker from Scotland. He calls himself a Personal Development expert.  His topics include how to deal with the pandemic, conspiracy theories that we may believe in and how to deal with conspiracy theories that loved ones may hold dear. He talks about mask mandates and the wildly varied response to them, especially in the United States. He also talks about how we hate the changes to our lives that were brought on by the pandemic, even if we weren't happy with our pre-pandemic lives because the human mind both craves change and loves stability and those are not compatible goals.  The author, Gary John Bishop He gives practical advice. For example, don't argue with advocates of conspiracy theories and welcome them back if they come back to reailty because you've had your crazy moments yourself. He also advise

    Published in June of 2021 by Penguin Audio. Read by Fred Sanders. Duration: 12 hours, 15 minutes. Unabridged. This is the second book that I have read because a governor took steps to keep people from hearing about the book. The story of the first is detailed here .  In the case of this book, the Governor and especially the Lt. Governor of Texas had an event featuring a discussion of this book removed from the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, Texas. They acted in early July of 2021 because they were not happy about how it questioned the way the history of the Alamo (in San Antonio, Texas) is traditionally taught at the Alamo itself and in textbooks, classrooms, movies and books. Here is the text of the Lt. Governor's Tweet from July 2, 2021: " As a member of the Preservation Board, I told staff to cancel this event as soon as I found out about it. Like efforts to move the Cenotaph, which I also stopped, this fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place @Bull

  Published in April of 2019 by Princeton University Press. Read by Katherine Fenton. Duration: 6 hours, 49 minutes. Unabridged The key to this book is to understand the difference between a conspiracy theory and the new conspiracism.  Conspiracy theories are the classic hobby of odd people that we all know. They collect reams and reams of information to prove that the lunar landings were faked, that LBJ had JFK killed, or to prove that 9/11 was an inside job. They work very hard to prove their point. They collect video evidence, find paper trails, produce flow charts and maybe have a wall dedicated to showing how all of the data points connect. There is a logic to conspiracy theories, even if most people find them weird.  The new conspiracism is often incoherent because it demands no logic - it depends on being repeated over and over again and a strong assertion that "people are saying" it is true. There are no documents that back it up. There are no elaborate theories. Just

  Published in 2015 by Tantor Audio. Read by Joe Barrett. Duration: 8 hours, 36 minutes. Unabridged. Garbology is the study of garbage. Archaeologists use garbology to learn all about ancient societies - what they ate, their tools, their clothing, their toys, their technology, etc. You can also apply garbology to modern garbage dumps and Humes uses this as an entrance to discussing all sorts of issues about our modern world and our problem with waste. Humes figures that the average American is on pace to create more than one hundred tons of garbage per person per lifetime. This is higher than the estimates you usually find because those estimates don't include the waste created on your behalf by manufacturers and service providers. The book starts out very strong with a look at how landfills and trash removal have evolved over time. Sounds boring but I found it to be very interesting. Later, he moved on to pollution, especially ocean pollution and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -

  Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2018. Read by the author, Michael Lewis. Duration: 0 hours, 54 minutes. Unabridged. Originally, this audiobook was originally written for Bloomberg View , the editorial/opinion site of Bloomberg News. Lewis went to Washington. D.C. during the run up to President Trump's "State of the Union Address". Lewis visits the press room in the White House, speaks with a former press secretary from the Obama Administration and visits with Trump advisor Steve Bannon. He also spends time with a former ethics official in the government who quit because President Trump and his administration openly flout the standards for ethics that were established in previous administrations (like divesting your portfolio of investments that could be a conflict of interest with your position in government). Finally, Lewis ends up watching the State of the Union with Steve Bannon in Bannon's home with running commentary from Bannon. Michael Lewis, for me,