DWD's Reviews

Published by HarperAudio in June of 2018. Read by Carly Robins. Duration: 8 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged. The premise of Squeezed is that middle class Americans are feeling "squeezed" economically because...they are. I heard an interview with this author on NPR and I was intrigued so I decided to check out her book. Quart lists several factors, some more plausible than others. She is very big on the concept that the "caring careers" are under-paid due to latent sexism, since the majority of the people in those careers are female. These careers include nurses, daycare personnel and teachers. She correctly notes that raising children is expensive and daycare is a big part of that. A great deal of the book is spent on this topic, including alternative arrangements to traditional daycare, experiments in state-funded pre-school and the struggles of single parents having to work and pay for daycare.  The author, Alissa Quart She calls into question the idea tha...

Published by HarperAudio in 2017 Read by Christopher Grove and Nan McNamara Duration: 7 hours, 30 minutes Unabridged. Norma and Leo were together for 67 years, happily married in Michigan. Sure, they were slowing down, but they were still living on their own and doing it well. Then, Leo go very sick and ended up dying two weeks later in a hospice. While Leo was dying, Norma discovered that she had a cancerous mass on her uterus. At 90 years old, this surgery would be very tough on Norma. At best, there would be a long, tough recovery period after surgery. At worst, the surgery could have fatal complications, all the more likely due to Norma's age. Norma's son and daughter-in-law had been living the RV lifestyle for several years and, after a long discussion with Norma's doctors, Norma decided to join them rather than seek medical treatment. The doctors predicted that probably would live less than a year without the surgery. She decided to forego the treatment and use h...

Published by Random House Audio in November of 2017. Read by the author, Denis Leary. Duration: 6 hours, 36 minutes. Unabridged. This sequel to his 2008 book, Why We Suck: A Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid, is an up and down work and not quite as good as his earlier effort. Why We Don't Suck starts out very strong, with Denis Leary lashing out at both of the main candidates in the 2016 Presidential Election and their uncritical supporters. The book slows down as Leary tells the story of 11 Americans that inspire him.  After that, the book nearly grinds to a halt as Leary sort of meanders about being critical of a number of things. He settles on religion for a while, gets into a convoluted discussion of cursing and also launches into an extended bit that starts as a riff off of President Trump's featuring Twitter feeds but devolves into "What if...?" Twitter feeds of past Presidents and, sadly, expands to include other world leaders, including Id...

Originally published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 1998. Read by Cotter Smith. Duration: 4 hours, 20 minutes. Abridged. I don't know how many books historian Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) wrote about the D-Day Invasion, but they all a little different and they are all quite enjoyable to read. Ambrose is perhaps most famous for writing the history that inspired HBO's excellent  Band of Brothers , which was also based on the same theme. Ambrose had a gift for writing histories that were informative, entertaining and, at times, quite moving - and this one was no exception. The focus was on the D-Day invasion, the immediate aftermath, the Battle of the Bulge and the final push into Germany. There is no discussion of how the war started and little of how it ended, but almost everyone who would read this book knows all of that anyway. The audiobook was read by Cotter Smith who did a nice job. I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here:  THE VI...

Originally Published in 1993. Freak the Mighty is the story of a lonely gentle giant named Max and his tiny Kevin, nicknamed "Freak", become neighbors and eventually the best of friends in this "coming of age" story. Max lives in the basement of his grandparents' house. His grandparents are raising him because his father, Killer Kane, killed his mother. Other kids taunt Max because of this. Max just goes through the motions at school. One day, Max meets Kevin (Freak). Kevin has Morquio Syndrome which has caused him to be very small. But, Kevin is also very bright and very willing to engage the world. Max, despite his large size, would prefer to be ignored by everyone. Kevin begins taking Max on so-called quests - basically they are exploring the neighborhood but Kevin makes them sound so much more interesting once he describes these trips in his own imaginative style. Max carries Freak on his shoulders as they travel, an arrangement that works out well for bo...

I tried. I really did. Published in 2017 by Tantor Audio. Read by Johnny Heller and Jo Anna Perrin. Duration: 8 hours, 58 minutes. Unabridged. The premise of American Civil Wars is interesting. The idea is to place the American Civil War in the context of the currents of the politics of the larger world of the time in order to show how the war changed the politics of other areas (prime examples are the Dominican Republic and Mexico - both were invaded by European powers while the United States was unable to enforce the Monroe Doctrine) and how those outside political forces influenced the Civil War. One of the stated goals is that teachers read this book and try to bring these insights to their students in the classroom. Don H. Doyle is the editor of this book. I think that it more accurate to say that he "collected" a series of essays by experts in non-American history that focused on how the Civil War affected their regions. I wish he had been a true editor because th...

Published by Random House Audio in 2013. Read by the author, Bill Bryson. Duration: 17 hours, 3 minutes. Unabridged. Bill Bryson's  One Summer: America, 1927  is an immensely interesting book, as would any book that featured Charles Lindbergh, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Sacco and Vanzetti, Jack Dempsey, Gutzon Borglum, Charles Ponzi, Al Capone, Al Jolson, Zane Grey, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Henry Ford, several Hollywood stars and more. Boxing champ Jack Dempsey (1895-1983) The book starts out with the story of Charles Lindbergh and the other flyers that were attempting to cross the Atlantic in a non-stop flight to claim the $25,000 Orteig Prize. Bryson moves on to tell the stories of the other people I named above - often cleverly lacing them together with the story of Charles Lindbergh. We learn about baseball, boxing, Hollywood (there's a hilarious story about Jack Dempsey with a starlet), the beginnings of "talkies" and the movie ...

Published in 2018 in the United States by Dey Street Books. Kate Harris and her childhood friend Mel decided to go on a bicycle adventure that approximates Marco Polo's trip along the Silk Road from Turkey to China. This is not a trip taken on a whim. Harris has read about explorers and dreamed about being an explorer all of her life. She's a scientist by training but she can't stand to be in a lab - she has to get out and see the world. Actually, she started out wanting to go to Mars and actually went so far as to participate in a Mars simulation complete with spacesuits out in the Utah desert.  The simulation told her one important thing - being in a space suit denied her the tactile experience of exploration such as the wind in your hair and the smells. So, rather than Mars, she decides to go to one of the most remote areas of the world, for a couple of Canadians - Central Asia. It has vast deserts, literally the tallest mountains in the world and arcane bureaucracies...

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 in 2018 by Blackstone Audio. Read by Donald Corren. Duration: 8 hours, 38 minutes. Unabridged. Rus Bradburd's All the Dreams We've Dreamed is both a complicated story and a simple story of two Chicago men whose lives have revolved around the game of basketball. It's a story of a coach and a player.  It's a story of connections between people and also a story of bureaucratic neglect.  It's a story of remorse and shame and a story of pride of place and love for one's teammates and players. It's a story of love and a story of catastrophic violence. Mostly, because it is set in the free fire gun zone of Chicago's West Side, it is a tragedy. The book centers on Marshall High School and its basketball program. Perhaps you have heard about the wave of gun violence that has swept through Chicago's South and West sides, earning it the nickname "Chi-raq" because it is reminiscent of Iraq during the bad old days of The Surge at the e...

Published by Brilliance Audio in 2005. Read by Dick Hill. Duration: 14 hours, 37 minutes. Unabridged. Technically, One Shot is the ninth Jack Reacher book that Lee Child has published, but since Lee Child doesn't write the books "in order" there are two broad time periods that Jack Reacher novels occur in: 1) In the Army, 2) post-Army. This is post-army book. It is also the book that inspired the first Tom Cruise Jack Reacher movie, but if you have seen the movie you can read this book and have an entirely different experience. It inspired the movie, the movie didn't follow it too closely. Reacher doesn't appear for the first hour and ten minutes of this audiobook. Instead, the readers are witness to a mass shooting in southern Indiana that draws Reacher from Florida because he knew the accused shooter in the Army. Once he arrives, Reacher immediately knows that something off and finds himself in a rare moral quandary. But, Reacher figures out how to proceed ...

Published by Amazon Publishing in 2017. Every racing fan has heard of Danica Patrick. She raced successfully for seven years in IndyCar, raced in 8 Indy 500s (with 6 top ten finishes) and 7 years in NASCAR (with less success). Long before Danica there was Janet Guthrie - a true pioneer in motorsports. This short kindle book puts Guthrie's achievement in context in two ways. First, it details how truly startling it was to the drivers at the top levels of NASCAR and IndyCar for a woman to show up and try to add a little diversity to the field. Drivers that I always looked up to, like Richard Petty, said startlingly sexist comments about Guthrie. The second way Speed Girl puts Guthrie's achievement in context is the more important one.  The author, Stephan Talty, describes how Guthrie worked her way up the ranks, tore apart engines, suspensions and body work and worked on her cars in her spare time as she gave up her personal life to go faster and faster in any car she could g...

Published in 2018 by G.P. Putnam's Sons. Game Warden Joe Pickett and the new governor of Wyoming have a turbulent relationship at best. The previous governor used Joe as his own personal law enforcement officer from time-to-time. This wasn't because Joe was some sort of rogue cop - quite the opposite. He knew that Joe was a dogged investigator who had a talent for following clues where they led him - or at the very least stumbling around blind and stepping in the middle of the problem on accident. Sure, it had a real cost in damage to trucks (a tradition continued in this book), but Joe could be trusted to do the right thing. In The Disappeared the new governor found about Joe and has tried to use him to deal with political problems masked as law enforcement problems. Joe has refused and the new governor does not deal with rejection well. However, this time there is a real-life law enforcement issue to deal with. A female British executive and media darling has disappeared aft...

Published by Penguin Audio in May of 2018. Read by the author, Charlie LeDuff. Duration: 7 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged. Charlie LeDuff has done a lot of things, but mostly he's been a reporter. He's worked all over the place, he won a Pulitzer Prize in New York City but lately he's settled down in Detroit. He told his irreverent version of the collapse of Detroit in Detroit: An American Autopsy . He takes that same vision outside of Detroit in  Sh*tshow: The Country's Collapsing and the Ratings are Great  and talks about the rest of the country and finds that Detroit may be a mess, but it's hardly unique. In 2013, LeDuff was offered a job at Fox News travelling the country and taking a look at regular Americans and their struggles in a segment called The Americans . He jumped at it and went all over the place. He went to New York City to look into topless women in Times Square (it's legal). He went to both of the Bundy family standoffs and spent most of his...

Published by Tantor Audio in 2016. Read by Guy Bethell. Duration: 7 hours, 20 minutes. Unabridged. The entire history of the world is less than 7 and 1/2 hours? Yep, that's what Christopher Lascelles purports to offer in his A Short History of the World . He acknowledges that this is not a complete history - he never intended it to be. Instead, his aim is to connect some of the dots that the average reader may have picked up in history class, movies and History Channel documentaries (and hopefully spark a bit more interest). Lascelles does succeed in hitting many of the high points and certainly does a better job at not being as Eurocentric as other short world histories have been, such as A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich. Lascelles spends quite a bit of time discussing China, Japan, India and Mongolia. All that being said, there are entire civilizations that are ignored or get nothing more than a passing nod. That is always the problem when writing a history o...

Published by Vintage Español in 2018. If you are not a viewer of Univision, you may be unfamiliar with Jorge Ramos. He is a news anchor/reporter for the network. I knew Ramos for one reason - he was literally thrown out of a major press conference during the Iowa Caucus season for asking then-candidate Donald J. Trump too many pointed questions about the centerpiece of his campaign - the wall.  Ramos (on the left with no tie) trying to ask then-Candidate Trump a few tough questions during that Iowa press conference.   Ramos was born and raised in Mexico City, but moved to America for additional journalistic training and in search of the opportunity to be more free in his journalistic practice. He kind of lucked into broadcast journalism but he has run with it and done quite well for himself. He has become an American citizen as well. Ramos addresses the press conference story right away. It's not as dramatic as it looked on TV, because the future President did let him co...

Published by Random House Audio in 2017. Read by Dick Hill. Duration: 13 hours, 6 minutes. Unabridged. Jack Reacher is on the road again in The Midnight Line . Fans of the series know that Reacher just can't stay in one place too long so he is on a bus out of Chicago. The bus stops in a Wisconsin town for a "comfort stop" and Reacher decides to stretch his legs. He is window shopping in a pawn shop window and sees a woman's ring. It is a Class of 2005 West Point ring and he wonders how it ended up there. He is also a graduate of West Point (from 20+ years before that) and he knows that no one just gives up their ring. Reacher lets the bus go on without him, buys the ring and starts backtracking how it ended up in the pawn shop. Right away, he develops a lot of resistance in the form of lies and eventually a serious attempt to drive him away. Of course, all of this makes Reacher even more determined to figure it out. Besides, what else does have to do...? This is ...

Published by Random House Audio in 2017. Read by January LaVoy. Duration: 8 hours, 45 minutes. Unabridged. Princeton University in New Jersey owns the original manuscripts of all five of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels. Camino Island starts out strong with an elaborate heist of these manuscripts and eventually ends up with an elaborate scheme to find the presumed purchaser of these priceless, purloined compositions in Camino Island, Florida. This audiobook was a great example of great characters but a really loose story that really doesn't hang together too well. It's almost as if John Grisham had no real concept where the book was going so he started moving one way and then changed his mind and just left his plot hanging while he went a new way - again and again and again. The result is a lot of interesting characters with a plot that goes all over the place and finally ends up with a pretty boring ending followed up by a nice little turn of the plot at the end. To be ho...

Published by Books in Motion in 2008. Read by Rusty Nelson. Duration: 8 hours, 57 minutes. Unabridged. Undersheriff Bill Gastner returns in Privileged to Kill , another mystery set in a sleepy New Mexico county on the Mexican border set in the mid-1990's. However, in this story, Posadas County is anything but sleepy. To be fair, the story starts out sleepy enough with Bill Gastner feeling his age and talking with a a 51 year-old stranded bicyclist with a busted tire that he picks up on the side of the road just for the heck of it and totes him, his bike and all of his equipment into town. Bill and the bicyclist become friendly and the bicyclist heads off to make camp somewhere and then move on the next morning after he gets his tire fixed. But, things pick up quickly when Gastner gets a phone call in the middle of the night. A freshman girl has been found dead under the bleachers at the high school football field and the bicycle rider was camped nearby and he has been arrested. ...