DWD's Reviews

  Published in 2020 by Hourly History. Hourly History specializes in e-book biographies and histories that take most readers about an hour to read. In some cases, an hour to cover a topic seems about right. For example, I really enjoyed their book on the  Cuban Missile Crisis .  Of course there is a massive difference in the time involved with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Mayan Civilization - one lasted for weeks, the other for centuries. That makes a big difference with what can be dealt with the series' self-imposed one hour time constraint and that difference really hurt this e-book. I have zero problems with the facts presented in this book, but I do have a problem with the way they were presented.  I found this book to be oddly written. My pet theory as I was reading it was that it was an early experiment with an AI author program - but there is an actual name attached to my kindle e-book - Henry Freeman. Oddly, the Amazon website does not list Freeman as the author.   I r

Finalist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Named to Time Magazine's 100 Best YA Books of All Time. Published by Listening Library in 2017. Read by Kyla Garcia. Duration: 9 hours, 41 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Julia is the daughter of Mexican immigrants to the United States. They live in pretty run down neighborhood in Chicago. She is in high school. Her family doesn't really understand her (basic YA fare) and she really loves writing. She is looking forward to moving on to college - like so many kids she wants nothing more than to get far, far away from where she grew up. There is one presence that looms over everything - her dead sister Olga. Olga was older than Julia and has recently died in a bizarre accident - she stepped off of a city bus and was hit by a semi-truck. Her family is traumatized, of course. To make matters worse, Julia is constantly being compared to Olga - the perfect daughter who only gets more perfect in memory. Julia digs

Published in 2021 by Penguin Audio. Read by the author, Nathaniel Philbrick. Duration: 9 hours, 34 minutes. Unabridged. George Washington looked at the newly formed United States of America and saw what it had always been - 13 disunited states with nothing to bind them together. Washington may not have been the deepest-thinking founding father, but some things he just "knew" deep in his bones. What did he know in this case? He knew that they actually all did have something in common. They all had George Washington in common. So, George went on a series of extended trips around the states until he had visited all 13 of them and he gave them a visible introduction/reminder (it depended on the state and the citizens) of what the new United States of America was all about. Travels with George is the story of those tours. Each state had its own issues. For example, Rhode Island wasn't even a state when the started traveling - it was holding out. The Southern states, especiall

Published in 2018 by HarperAudio. Read by MacLeod Andrews. Duration: 9 hours, 49 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Bearskin features Rice Moore as the caretaker of a piece of Appalachian Virginia wilderness for a foundation. His job includes is walking the property, cataloging what he finds, remodeling the house on the property, and keeping poachers out.  He's also hiding. A few years back he was caught smuggling drugs across the border from Mexico and ended up serving time in a Mexican prison. In the prison, Moore killed a man who was highly connected to a Mexican cartel and now he has taken on an assumed identity in the middle of nowhere in Virginia.  When someone starts killing bears on the foundation property just to harvest organs to sell in Asia, Rice knows that he has to do something, even if it risks blowing his cover... My Review: This book sounds interesting and exciting. I found it underwhelming in so many ways.  The book started out with tons of description. That's no

  Originally published in 1965. After a steady stream of science fiction books, Kurt Vonnegut delivers a straight out social commentary with God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater .  Synopsis: Eliot Rosewater is the heir to a family fortune built on selling munitions in the Civil War and every war after that. The family fortune was built in Indiana but the family has moved to Providence, Rhode Island where it has a family mansion along with all of the others along the waterfront. His father is one of the senators from Rhode Island. The Rosewater family avoids paying income taxes on this vast fortune by funding the Rosewater Foundation. Generally speaking, the foundation has been a legal way to not pay taxes and instead pay Eliot a whole lot of money to do nothing but supervise a foundation that does next to nothing. A mural of Vonnegut in his hometown - Indianapolis. Photo by DWD Eliot is suffering from PTSD (called "combat fatigue" in this book) from his experiences in World War II an

Published in 2024 by Amazon Original Stories. The premise of Tiger Chair is that it is a frank letter from a mid-level Chinese officer to a friend back home. World War III has been going on for a while. It started over the invasion of Taiwan and has now spread around the world. Chinese forces are active on many fronts, including India. China has also attacked the United States in the mistaken belief that America's racial diversity and political animosities would cause American resolve to crumble and it would be a short war. This has turned out to be wrong and the invasion has turned into occupation duty and occupation duty has always been terrible.  I think Brooks has an actual agenda with this book and it is a warning. It is not a warning about China. It is a warning about over-dependence on technology and the foolishness of war. On top of that, it is so easy for one country to think that they have a realistic take on another country's internal politics and culture when they

  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