DWD's Reviews

  Published by Listening Library in 2019. Read by Imani Parks. Duration: 6 hours, 35 minutes. Unabridged. Winner of more than 15 awards, including "A 2020 ALA Notable Middle-Grade Novel" and "A Bank Street Best Book of the Year" Makeda and her family are moving from Maryland to New Mexico. Her father got a position in a symphony in New Mexico. Her mother doesn't have a job right now, but she used to tour the world playing the violin before she had a family. The author, Mariama J. Lockington Makeda is loved by her mother, her father and her older sister, but she is different. They are white and she is black. Her family never makes her doubt their love, but strangers make her keenly aware of the differences when they ask where her parents are in stores or when they stare at her getting out of the car with the rest of the family until they finally figure out their relationship with one another. The older she gets, the more she wonders about her own roots. While the

Published by  Hourly History  in 2020. 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. I want to know a bit more, not become an expert. The history of the Spanish conquest of the New World is just one of those areas for me. I know more than most people, but I can see the glaringly empty areas of my own ignorance. Cortés is, of course, the Spanish conquistador that pretty much invented the idea of being a Spanish conquistador. Conquistador means "conqueror" in Spanish and  Cortés pretty much perfected the concept when he conquered the Aztec Empire from 1519-1521. I am not going to attempt a defense of  Cortés' motives or techniques, but it was literally one of the most amazing conquests in history.  What this history does well is give a brief synopsis of the conquests in a straight narrative history. There's not a lot of analysis and certainly not much information

  Originally published in 2009. In 1960, a six year old little girl named Ruby Bridges was to be the first African-American student to integrate an elementary school in Louisiana. To say it did not go well would be an understatement. Parents pulled their children out. So many pulled their children out that Ruby was in a class by herself at first. There were so screaming, protesting mobs of parents. There were threats of violence. It was so bad that federal marshals were sent in to ensure her safety and to ensure that the desegregation order was enforced. ********** This book was written by Ruby Bridges and is published by Scholastic as a Level 2 early reader. That is pretty early for a student to read about this topic - Ruby Bridges was the same age as the children who would be reading this book. I normally don't review books for little children, but I decided to review this one when I saw that a group called Moms for Liberty called for it to be removed from a a school system in Te

  Published by Little, Brown and Company. Read by the author, Clint Smith. Duration: 10 hours, 6 minutes. Unabridged. Clint Smith decided to explore several key historical sites that have ties to American slavery and how the consequences of American slavery has echoed down throughout American history. He is looking for constant threads in American history from the perspective of African Americans. He visits Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, New Orleans, Angola Prison, a plantation in Louisiana that emphasizes the lives of the majority of the people that lived and worked there (the slaves and the Jim Crow era labor that was trapped there), a Confederate grave yard, the place were Juneteenth happened in Texas, New York City (a slave stronghold in the North for a surprisingly long time) and finally a fortress used as a slave market in Africa. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) and Sally Hemings (c. 1773-1835) This is a difficult book in many ways. Smith intentionally digs into difficult questi

  Published in November of 2021 by Random House Audio. Multicast Performance Duration: 18 hours, 57 minutes. Unabridged. I have developed a new hobby as of late - I read books that politicians tell people they should not read. The former governor of Indiana (and later the President of Purdue University) tried to prohibit Indiana University (or anyone else) to use a well-known history book to teach anyone anywhere. I read it. The Lt. Governor of Texas cancelled a book reading about the Alamo because it was not a hero worship book. There's a politician in Texas that  posted a list of 850 books  that he wants to ban across the state that has provided a lot of potential reading.  But, in the last couple of years nothing, absolutely nothing, has compared to the  1619 Project and the controversy it has generated. If you have not heard of the original 1619 Project , you have not been paying attention to America's culture wars. President Trump hated it so much he created a 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 2008 by Random House Audio. Read by John H. Mayer. Duration: 17 hours, 16 minutes. Unabridged. A reconstruction of what the Viking village in Newfoundland may have looked like Tony Horwitz set out to fill in a big gap in his understanding of American history. He vaguely knew that the Vikings arrived in the New World and did something or other and he knew about Columbus' voyage in 1492 and he knew about the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock and the First Thanksgiving in 1621, but what happened in between? Also, what about the people that were already here? Horwitz decided to find out what he didn't know and this book is a combined travelogue and history lesson. He starts with the small failed Viking settlement in Newfoundland, Canada, moves on to the Dominican Republic to learn about Columbus and comes to the United States to look at the first Spanish explorers and settlements in New Mexico and Florida. He also looks at the epic and eventually tragic expeditions of explo

    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 2020 by Workman Publishing. Read by Geoffrey Cantor. Duration: 7 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. Connor Towne O'Neill was attending the 50th anniversary recognition of the Selma to Montgomery March when he discovered something unexpected. The Selma to Montgomery march ended when Alabama State Troopers joined local deputies at the Edmund Pettus bridge and beat them until they retreated. The bridge is named for a Confederate General and a Grand Dragon of the Alabama KKK. O'Neill was looking for a place to park and drove into a graveyard. In the graveyard, he discovered a group prepping a part of the graveyard for the re-installation of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest (the original had been stolen) in the graveyard. It was on a piece of property owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the middle of the graveyard. O'Neill sensed that this was the more powerful story, no matter how dramatic that moment on the bridge had been 50 years earlier. He decide

  Published in 2021 by Grand Central Publishing. Read by the authors, Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar Duration: 5 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged. Amber Ruffin is a writer for Seth Meyers' late night show and she has a show on the Peacock streaming service. I have never watched her show (nothing against her - I just can't keep up with all of the platforms out there) but I have run across video clips on social media. Ruffin's style is very quick and very clever. In this book, she doesn't get into sexual topics or anything that a lot of people would find objectionable. Except for the racism. There is a lot of racism. Just tons of it. Amber Ruffin (left) and Lacey Lamar (right) Lamar and Ruffin are sisters. They grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. And, they are African Americans. Ruffin moved away to New York City and has made a living in comedy. Lamar stayed in Omaha and has worked in health care.  The premise of the book comes from Lacey Lamar's habit of texting Ruffin when she r

  Published in 1951 by Random House. I n the 1950's and 1960's Random House created an extraordinary history series for children called Landmark Books. There were 122 books in the American history series and 63 in the World Landmark series. A very solid description of the series can be found here:  link . When I was a kid my little hometown library had what seemed like an endless shelf of these books (I even remember where it was in the library nearly 40 years later). Undoubtedly, these books are part of the reason I am a history teacher. I have started a collection of these books. When I run across them at library sales and thrift sales I pick them up. Some of the texts have aged well, some have not. This book is aimed at students from 3rd to 8th grade. It is a simple read with line drawings. It could use a few more maps.   The history is basically accurate in the broad strokes, but it is full of "quotes" and scenes that never happened in order to make the story move

Published in 2020 by Random House Audio. Read by the author, Alicia Garza. Duration: 9 hours, 31 minutes. Unabridged. Alica Garza is one of the founders of the organization Black Lives Matter .  This reader decided that he only had a superficial knowledge of the movement and wanted to learn more. This book seemed like a reasonable place to start. The first part of the book is basically a recounting of Garza's early life and her beginnings as a community organizer. This was quite enjoyable. Garza is a talented writer and she tells her story well. The author, Alicia Garza The middle part gets bogged down with some esoteric political movement talk. Lots of discussion over meanings of words like "intersectionality." I thought she made her point very clearly early on and kept on making it. This was clearly very important to the author, but the lay reader who is not heavily invested in the movement and its specific language would, like me, find this to be too much insider talk.

  Published in 2019 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by Robon Miles. Duration: 5 hours, 53 minutes. Unabridged.   Erica Armstrong Dunbar brings us an accessible biography of one of the true heroes of American history - Harriet Tubman. The book is long enough to give a decent picture of her life but short enough that it doesn't intimidate potential readers. A traveling statue named honoring Harriet Tubman named "Journey to Freedom" I am not going to go through the entire biography of her life, but this book covers all of the major points of her life such as:  -Her escape from slavery;  -Her multiple trips back to Maryland to free family, friends and anyone that would go; -Her work in anti-slavery societies where she met and worked with people like Frederick Douglass, William Seward and John Brown; -The communities she helped start in New York and Canada; -Her work with women's rights groups and her struggles to get white women to include black women in their fight; -H

  Published by Tantor Audio in November of 2020. Read by Joana Garcia. Duration: 5 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. This is the second time in less than a month that I am reviewing and audiobook that covers the topic of immigration written by an Hispanic immigrant. In both cases, I came to the book highly prepared to like it and in both cases I was disappointed. The author, Karen Gonzalez I have no problem at all with the points that Gonzalez makes in this book. As a Christian, I think many Christians have been on the wrong side of this issue for decades (including me, for a while). However, this book just doesn't seal the deal. It says a lot of the right things, but it doesn't do the trick. Issues: 1) There are pieces of sloppy research, or maybe just sloppy writing or editing. For example, when the author asserts that the concept of borders came around with the end of the Thirty Years War and the series of treaties known as the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. I think she was refe

  Book originally published in 2016. Audiobook published by Harper Audio. Read by Grover Gardner. Duration: 6 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. News of the World is a pretty simple book - on the surface. Set in 1870 Texas, a 70+ year-old veteran of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War is asked to travel more than 300 miles to deliver a 10-year old girl to her extended family near San Antonio, Texas. When she was 6, she was adopted by the Kiowa after they killed immediate family in a frontier attack. Their journey starts in Wichita Falls (near the Oklahoma-Texas border) and faces a lot of difficulties.  The author Jefferson Kyle Kidd goes by the name Captain Kidd because that was his rank in the Mexican War, where he served as a messenger. That is appropriate since his true love is bringing news to others. He worked on newspapers, he owned newspapers, he edited newspapers and now he is out of the newspaper business completely due to post-Civil War Reconstruction rules.  Kidd can't stay

  Published in 2008 by W.W. Norton and Company . This series of essays was most likely compiled to be the text for college-level classes by Eric Foner, a historian well-known for his expertise on the Civil War, the Underground Railroad, American Slavery and Reconstruction. Lincoln, of course, sits astride all of these issues. There are 11 essays covering four broad topics:  -Lincoln as "The President", looking at such things as how he acted as commander-in-chief and how Lincoln protected (and failed to protect) civil rights during the war. Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) -Lincoln as "The Emancipator", focusing on his view of slavery, citizenship for African Americans, his zeal for colonizing freed slaves and his hot and cold relationship with abolitionists.  -Lincoln "The Man" with essays about his writing style (and how it changed as the war went on), his views on religion (and how it also may have changed as the war went on) and his family life (his birth fa

  Originally published in 2011 by Eastern National Eastern National is the publisher of the official books published by the National Park Service. Their books are on display in National Park gift shops in visitor centers across the country. Most are pretty good - I've bought more than my share of them because they are compact volumes, full of great, pertinent illustrations printed on glossy paper and their information is solid. The problem is that the writing is always solid, if not particularly engrossing.  The Civil War Remembered is an exception that pattern because the authors are historians who are also name brand Civil War authors - some are authors that have hit the top of the non-fiction best seller lists and you don't do that if you write dense prose. There are 16 essays in this 175 page book. Each one covers a specific topic that makes for a rough narrative telling of the history by exploring themes such as America before the Civil War, what it is was like to serve i