DWD's Reviews

  Published by Penguin Audio in 2017. Read by Stephen Mendel. Duration: 11 hours, 55 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Peter Ash is a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has had trouble settling in to civilian life. Specifically, he has a fear of enclosed places. He is good with his hands and restored an old pickup truck. He drives the truck all over the place and explores America by hiking and camping. The author, Nick Petrie As Burning Bright starts, Ash is hiking in a forest of giant redwoods and stumbles upon a bear, climbs a tree, meets a girl in the trees, finds out she is being hunted by a professional hit team and that's when everything starts to really get interesting... My Review: I like this series, even though it suffers a bit of a sophomore slump in my opinion. This is not to say that it is a bad book - it's not. I am rating this book 4 stars out of 5. I flew through the first half of the book, but the second half of the book was just a bit too ridiculous...

  Published in 2009 by Candlewick. Illustrated by John Lawrence Sea Horse: The Shyest Fish in the Sea is an early reader picture book aimed at children aged 4-8. It tells the story of a male sea horse named Sea Horse. It describes his daily routine and introduces his mate. Along the way, they have babies. The entire book is read on this 8 minute long YouTube video . Link to this Tweet on Twitter Yes, they misspelled Santa Claus. Perhaps they should read more...😉 I normally don't review books aimed at small children but this summer I have been reading a lot of books that have been included on various book ban lists. This one was on a list in Tennessee because of a group called Moms for Liberty . They thought that the sea horses in the book were too sexy. Also, they argued that this book was a sneaky argument in favor of transgenderism (see attached picture - yes, it's a real Tweet - see the link underneath it to go to the actual Tweet).  Here are more links to stories about t...

  Published in April of 2022 by Macmillan Audio. Read by Christina Delaine. Duration: 7 hours, 1 minute. Unabridged. As the title says, THE LAST DAYS of the DINOSAURS: AN ASTEROID, EXTINCTION, and the BEGINNING of OUR WORLD is about the asteroid that all but wiped out the dinosaurs and the world they lived in. Technically, very little of the book is about the asteroid itself but hopefully you get the idea. Riley Black does an excellent job of describing the presumed daily lives of the creatures that we know about before and after the fateful asteroid impact. The author starts out with the most famous dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops, but also includes less famous dinosaurs, insects, plants and mammals. The primary focus is the American West (Wyoming, Utah, the Dakotas, etc.)  one the most fossil-rich area in the world. But, other areas of the world are looked at as well. The step-by-step description of what scientists think happened in the seconds, minutes, ...

  Published by The Great Courses in 2013. Presented by the author, Dr. Steven Novella. Duration: 12 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. Dr. Steven Novella addresses common questions and misconceptions that people often have about medicine.  The topics covered range from the very serious (like cancer, for example) to the relatively lightweight (do caffeinated drinks actually do anything to hydrate a person?). Novella explains the science behind each of his discussions in everyday language and his demeanor is more like that of a friend than that of a lecturing authority figure.  As in all books of this sort, there were parts that I was keenly interested in and parts that I didn't care a whole lot about. But, on the whole, this book is well worth your time. I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  MEDICAL MYTHS, LIES and HALF-TRUTHS: WHAT WE THING WE KNOW MAY HURT US by Dr. Steven Novella.

  Published by Tantor Audio in November of 2021. Read by David Marantz. Duration: 7 hours, 13 minutes. Unabridged. Saul Griffith makes a convincing argument in Electrify 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 ...

  Published by Highbridge in 2020. Read by Liam Gerrard. Duration: 5 hours, 46 minutes. Unabridged I picked up In Praise of Walking because I am a recent convert (the last 4 years or so) to the joys of walking and hiking and have personally seen it change my health. I was hoping to learn some more information about it and experience a bit of confirmation bias from an expert who told me what I already knew - walking and hiking are great forms of exercise with limited chances of injury. While O'Mara says all of this, I think that this book has been been mis-described in by its publisher. The title is very accurate when it says that this book is "a new scientific exploration." But, the blurb description starts by describing this book as "a hymn to walking, the mechanical magic at the core of our humanity." Calling it "a hymn" sounds like it is going to be a more literary, story-filled approach to the topic, as authors like Malcolm Gladwell and Mary Roach...

Published by Simon and Schuster in June of 2020. Read by one of the authors, Chris Wallace. Duration: 8 hours, 40 minutes. Unabridged. The 116 days referred to in the title is the time between the day that Harry S. Truman became President and the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Chris Wallace quickly catches the reader up on what was going on and then uses a countdown for the chapters to add a sense of drama - will the scientists make it on time? Of course, we know that they do succeed - the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are one of the most well-known historical facts of the 20th century. Wallace's re-telling of the story in Countdown 1945 is full of facts but not particularly told in an interesting way. For example, there is a great deal of information about the Potsdam Conference (July 17 - August 2, 1945) that met in Germany. The Conference was important because it included the leaders of the USSR, the United States and the UK and in many ways it paved the pat...

Published in 2010 by Virago Press. Natasha Walter is an English feminist who is looking at how modern culture treats women. She has two main points. I will reverse the order of their presentation in my review. Her second main point is the new belief in biological determinism, meaning men and women have areas that they are naturally better at - and that fact overrides everything. She notes that the scientific studies that this belief is based on have never really The author, Natasha Walter been scientifically proven, meaning that they were limited and not replicated on a regular basis. Some have never been replicated even once. The danger is that people just assume things like "girls aren't good at math" and "men can't take care of babies or children" and they become reality. I see it in the classroom all the time - parents tell their kid they struggled with a certain class and they understand if the kid struggles and the kid struggles. It's a sel...

Published by HarperAudio in 2016. Read by Charlie Anson. Duration: 9 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged. Ed Yong takes his readers (or, in my case, listener) into the tiny world of microbes. Traditionally, we think of microbes as tiny invaders that make us sick and, as I sit at home after yet another day of social distancing, it is easy to see it that way. But, Yong takes us into a more complicated world. A world where microbes actually benefit their larger hosts - where microbes can help produce scents or colors for attracting a mate, help guts break down leaves or nuts and even help their hosts survive poisons. In many cases, these microbes and their hosts co-evolved and have become dependent on one another. They have created their own microbiome. But, it's not that simple, either. Sometimes the microbes affect their host's behavior - and not in a good way. They can turn insects into virtual zombies, they can make mice hyperactive or depressed. They can even make mice suicidal...

Published by Penguin Audio in 2019. Read by Will Damron. Duration: 10 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. In Range David Epstein presents a strong argument that lateral thinkers (people that know a little about a lot of things) are stronger members of a team than the experts that know a whole lot about a narrow subject. He also argues that people who pick a specialty later in life have a wider perspective on things and can bring fresh ideas into a stale discussion. I literally have no problems with anything he says in this book, but I did find the book to be poorly put together. It just rambles along from one (usually, but not always) interesting topic to another and makes all of them about 30% too long.  So, I am going to rate this book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  RANGE: WHY GENERALISTS TRIUMPH in a SPECIALIZED WORLD . 

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in July of 2019. Read by Kristin Millward. Duration: 7 hours, 15 minutes. Unabridged. Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, a Norwegian ecologist, specializing in insects, has written an interesting, often funny and thought-provoking introduction to the world of insects with Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects . She gives the reader lots of interesting trivia, such as the story of male bugs that die at the climactic moment of mating due to their genitals exploding. She also tells of plants that trick dung beetles into planting their stinky seeds for them, the importance of wood beetles to keeping soil nitrogen-rich and the super-long (and boring) lives of the 17-year cicada. None of these insects gets an in-depth look because this book is an introduction because you can't seriously expect any book to cover the hundreds of thousands of species of insects in any sort of depth She looks at how insects could be helpful in the fight against pollution and cou...

Published in 2018 by HarperAudio. Read by the author, Helen Thomson. Duration: 7 hours, 19 minutes. Unabridged. Helen Thomson is a science writer with a background in neurology. She was inspired by the story of the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine to set out to meet and interview ten people who literally experience the world differently than the rest of us. In Unthinkable , Thomson does a solid job of explaining possible scientific explanations for each of these people's conditions and how those conditions may simply be extreme versions of a phenomenon that we all experience. As in all collections (in this case, a collection of people), some are more interesting than others. For example, I found the story of the man who believed he was dead to be interesting but the story of the man who believed that he was a were-tiger was pretty lame all of the way around. The author and narrator She also looks at a person who doesn't forget anything, a woman who gets lost everywhere, including...

Published in 2019 by WordFire Press LLC. Read by Stephanie Minervino. Duration: 13 hours, 33 minutes. Unabridged. In the year 2034 a private corporation is making an attempt to build a colony on the surface of the moon to act as a home base for asteroid miners. They make the long run from the moon to the asteroid belt and back so that the lunar base can refine the metals found in the asteroids. It's a solid plan, but it has to start with almost nothing and work it's way to the kind of lunar colony you see in the movies. The world of 2034 is different in some ways. There are early references to some sort of traumatic biological problem, such as rampant infectious disease. A great deal of the early parts of the book is devoted to Stormie and Frank Pastorelli, two prospective lunar colonists that expose themselves to the risk of contracting a bloodborne pathogens when they help the victims of a car crash. The lengths they go to cleanse themselves of pathogens and the fear e...

Published by Macmillan Audio in 2017. Read by Xe Sands. Duration: 5 hours, 24 minutes. Unabridged. Tali Sharot has written an interesting little book about our brains and the way they work. Clearly, she is an expert with a PhD in psychology and neuroscience, but she has that rare talent of being able to make the complicated seem pretty basic using real life examples. If you've ever had an online argument, you know the frustration of doing research to show your opponent that they are clearly wrong, only to have them completely ignore the facts. I recently had this experience with an online story posted by a friend about a single truck stop in a nationwide chain that had stopped flying the American flag . The "reporter" asked a cashier why the flag was not out and he said it was because they didn't want to offend drivers from Mexico. Boom! Big story, right? It turns out that their oversized flag pole's mechanism for raising and lowering the flag was broken a...

Published by Scholastic in 2018 What Would She Do? is collection of very readable short biographies of women - which, after being factually correct, is the most important thing. As David McCullough said,  " No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read."  Woodward writes in an informal, approachable style that I enjoyed quite a bit. Each biography is accompanied by a full page illustration of the woman and a little chart with basic biographical information. There is also a large pullout quote from or about her. For example, for Emma Watson there is this quote: "The saddest thing for a girl to do is to dumb herself down for a guy." Generally, I did not like the "What Would _____ Do?" section that was included at the end of each biography. The author was clearly trying to make a connection between the women in the book and the typical American student with typical American student problems. But, trying to connect Cleopatra...

Originally published in hardback book form in 1991. Published by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, David McCullough Duration: 11 hours, 19 minutes Unabridged Brave Companions: Portraits in History  is a collection of previously published articles and speeches. It's a smattering of this and that - sometimes it's about art, sometimes about scientists, sometimes about politicians and sometimes it's just some musings from McCullough about history. It doesn't matter, almost all of it is interesting and well-told. McCullough understands the value of telling history as a story - as always he is very approachable. My favorite entry was the story of the railroad that preceded the Panama Canal. It was an amazing story of the power of human will against nature. McCullough reads this audiobook, which is great because McCullough has a fantastic speaking voice and is well known for his voice work. I envy both his writing ability and his talents as a speaker. My fav...

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2014 Read by Wil Wheaton Duration: 6 hours, 36 minutes Unabridged Randall Munroe is the illustrator of the web-based comic strip xkcd. On his website, he has a place where people can leave "What if..." science-based questions and he tries to answer them. Why would they leave science questions on a comic strip website? Well, it turns out that Munroe is also a physicist - with a sense of humor. The author, Randall Munroe Munroe has collected the best questions and put them into a book. Questions include things like what would happen if the earth kept growing and when would you notice a change in gravity? What would happen if you fired in an arrow in a zero-gravity environment? How does all of the computing power of all of humanity stack up against all of the actual computers? What would happen if you opened up a giant drain in the lowest part of the ocean and drained it all away? And more. Many of the questions are interesting and...

Published by Polity in March of 2017. If you have ever had the misfortune to run across one of the alt-right's pseudo-scientific webpages that discuss the genetics of race and how science proves one race is smarter/better/nicer/whatever than other races you will see the need for Jonathan Marks' book Is Science Racist? Sadly, an author I used to Tweet back and forth with a little re-Tweeted some posts from one of these alt-right sites and I got my fill of them during one long evening. They are the internet's version of those young men marching in Charlottesville with the white polo shirts and khaki pants. Like those men, on the surface these sites were pleasant enough until you actually start to pay attention to what was being said. They wrap themselves in pseudoscience that, unfortunately, is twisted around to sound reasonable. It is these types of people that Jonathan Marks is talking about when he notes: "Every science has had its own set of ethical issues - chem...

Published by Tantor Audio in 2004 Read by Shelly Frasier Duration: 8 hours, 5 minutes Unabridged One fact about life on this planet - we are all going to die. Mary Roach takes a look at what happens once we're dead and asks what happens next? She's not exploring the afterlife - she is looking, literally, at what happens to our bodies when we "shuffle off this mortal coil." Roach explores what happens when you donate your body to science - everything from a medical school to a once-living crash test dummy. Or, you can donate your body to a mortuary school so prospective morticians can practice their future craft. Maybe you don't want to donate your entire body. What happens if you just donate some of your organs? What if you are not donating anything. What happens when you have a traditional funeral? How about if you are cremated? There are new ways to dispose of a body as well, including one that pretty much cooks the meat off of your bones and one that...

Published in March of 2017 by HarperAudio Read by Fred Sanders Duration: 12 hours, 56 minutes Unabridged In The Body Builders , Adam Piore describes the advances in medicine in a number of areas, especially (but not limited to) recovering from injuries, illness or dealing with genetic disorders. He starts out with a profile of a leader in the field of prosthetic limbs who has reverse-engineered the human leg and, for the first time, makes the idea of TV's "Six Million Dollar Man" seem like a real possibility. There is the amazing story of the engineer who created a device that allows a blind woman to "see" with her ears. Piore describes advances in experimental genetic engineering and muscle therapies that promise not only to help with genetic disorders but also may ultimately end aging as we know it. But, it's not just about the body, it is also about the mind. There are advances in figuring out what causes Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Parki...