DWD's Reviews

Published in November of 2020 by Little, Brown and Company. Read by Peter Giles. Duration: 12 hours, 27 minutes. Unabridged. I am an enthusiastic fan of Michael Connelly's books, but to me the Mickey Haller/Lincoln Lawyer series has always been a lesser series than the related Harry Bosch series. It is never bad - just not quite as good. I am pleased to say that The Law of Innocence is much better than the typical offering in this series. In fact, this is one of the best fiction audiobooks I have listened to in quite a while. Mickey Haller is known to many as The Lincoln Lawyer. He has that nickname because he works out of the back of his car (always a Lincoln) rather than have an actual office in traffic-plagued Los Angeles. He has wi-fi, a printer and access to his digital files. His office manager works from her home office and sort of acts as his "air traffic controller" by setting up his schedule and arranging places to meet his next appointment. His drivers are typ...

  Published in September of 2020 by Recorded Books. Read by Julia Whelan. Duration: 3 hours, 30 minutes. Unabridged. Brandon Sanderson is one of the go-to names in science fiction and fantasy in the 21st Century. He has been nominated for or has won just about all of the major awards. Mary Robinette Kowal has similar credentials. Together, they created this audiobook-exclusive novella. This audiobook clocks in at 3 hours and 30 minutes, but it is an action-packed 3 hours and 30 minutes that takes the listener into an all-too-plausible (mostly) and creepy world. Mary Robinette Kowal The Original begins with Holly Winseed waking up in a hospital. She has no idea why she is there and gets very confusing answers from the staff. Soon, she realizes that she is a cloned copy of herself. Winseed lives in a future filled with nano-technology, including in the human bloodstream. The tiny robots keep people healthy and young.  It also allows the government to access your mind. Then, th...

  Published in 2017 by Random House Audio. Read by P.J. Ochlan. Duration: 4 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged. Alan Jacobs is a professor and expert on the human mind. This short work is essentially a treatise on how to keep an open mind and not get stuck in a mental rut - meaning not simply rejecting new ideas out of hand. He also addresses the concept of how to reach out to people to make new ideas more appealing to them. Alan Jacobs Jacobs fills the book with a lot of anecdotes - they were usually interesting in and of themselves, but not particularly enlightening. For me the last part of that sentence pretty much describes the book. It was pleasant enough but it really didn't teach me anything and a lot of the time I was wondering where the author was going with yet another story. I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  HOW to THINK: A SURVIVAL GUIDE for a WORLD at ODDS by Alan Jacobs.

  Originally published in 2006. Published by Recorded Books in 2007. Read by George Guidall. Duration: 9 hours, 48 minutes. Unabridged Walt Longmire's mentor as the Sheriff of Absaroka County is Lucian, a long-retired and extra-cranky one-legged man. Lucian lives in an assisted living home and he calls in Walt when a resident passes away. Nursing home residents passing away isn't normally an event that draws a lot of suspicion, but Lucian insists it was murder. Longmire decides to listen to Lucian and soon enough Walt uncovers a lot more than anyone was expecting... I am coming to the Longmire book series after seeing the entire Longmire TV series. This is technically my third book. I listened to number 3, the first book and now the second book.  And...I am going to give this series a rest for a while. I liked the interesting characters, but the book has serious pacing issues. As I said, I watched the series. My least favorite part of the series was the sequences when Wal...

Published in 2018 by The Great Courses. Lectures by Edwin Barnhart. Duration: 12 hours, 19 minutes. Unabridged. The idea behind The Great Courses is a simple one - take a college lecture course given by an expert that knows how to give an interesting lecture and package it up as an audiobook that anyone can listen to. Edwin Barnhart is an archaeologist working out of University of Texas - Austin. This course is the completion of a trilogy of courses on Native American civilizations (South America, Mesoamerica, North America). Barnhart's area of true expertise is Mesoamerica, but he has a wealth of practical experience on digs throughout the Southwest. He also clear has a love for the various mound builder civilizations that arose in North America.  Barnhart takes both chronological and regional approach to this history. The early history section generally is chronological because it is the most unclear. It is also the most technical section of the book, with long discussions of the...

  Originally published in 1998 by Nan A. Talese/Anchor Books in 1998. The Gifts of the Jews is the second book in The Hinges of History Series by Thomas Cahill.  It is a series of histories that look at important long term movements in history that helped create Western Civilization.  I read this book when it was first published and I placed it on my shelf and did not touch it for more than 20 years. Over time, I remembered it as  remembered it as a dense tome and continued to keep it on my shelf  as more of a trophy to my ability to read through difficult books than for any desire to go back and consult it or even re-read it. That changed when we stuck at home during the pandemic quarantine and we came to realize that our extensive bookshelves were overwhelmed and a purge was in order. This book was "purged" from the shelves, but went in to my to-be-read pile after I leafed though it. I don't know why I remembered this book as hard to read. Cahill has a real g...

  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 s...

  Originally published in 2004. Published by Recorded Books in 2007. Read by George Guidall. Duration: 13 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. The Longmire book series is the definition of a successful franchise with 16 novels and a six season television series. I watched the series and I enjoyed it immensely, so I decided to give the books a go. There are obvious differences in characters (The Ferg is a massive change, for example), but they are not deal-breakers. I prefer to look at them as another interpretation of the characters.  The main mystery in The Cold Dish was highly adapted for the TV series, so much so that it was basically a whole new mystery. A few years earlier 4 white high school boys sexually assaulted a fellow student. She was Native American who suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and didn't really understand what had happened. The trial that followed was rough on the local white and Native American communities and ended with minimal punishments for the boys....

  Originally published in 1995. Published in 1998 by Pelican Publishing Company. The answer to one of the more popular Civil War trivia questions is: Stand Watie. The question is: Who was the last Confederate General to surrender at the end of the Civil War? Stand Watie is unique because he is the only Native American to become a general during the Civil War. The Cherokee and other Indian Nations living in Oklahoma were drawn into the Civil War and fought in more than 30 engagements - some relatively small and some quite large.  Slavery was a factor (Watie had slaves and a plantation), but there were also local political issues that were probably more influential.  Like most of the fighting in the West, the battles were not large by Civil War standards, but the fighting was usually pretty personal. Villages were burned out, refugees fled by the thousands and it was not uncommon for soldiers to know the people they were fighting personally. Also, this front was one of the ...

  Published by Octane Press in September of 2020. I thoroughly enjoyed this autobiography because John Andretti was my favorite race car driver - period.  I have watched auto racing for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories are going to qualifications for the Indy 500. I have Janet Guthrie's autograph - not realizing when I got it that it was actually an amazing autograph to have. The sound of a single car circling the track with the roar and whine of the engine (it has both sounds at the same time) echoing off of the stands makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. The history at that track cannot be topped by any other venue in the world. I attended my first NASCAR race at Michigan in 1981 with my father. The spectacle of the whole thing was amazing. It was won by my favorite driver at the time, Richard Petty. In 1986, we went to our first Indy 500 and haven't missed one since (the 2020 race doesn't count since no spectators were allowed due to Cov...

  Originally published in 2011. Set in a future America where the world has been invaded by inter-dimensional space aliens that are a living bio/tech hybrid, this dystopian series is full of action and does not offer much in the way of subtlety. The world has been overrun by strangelets - the cutesy nickname for creatures that can rip apart a human being in seconds. This was accidentally caused by a supercollider that opened up a rift that released an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that destroyed electronic systems across the world. I received this book for free way back in 2011 and it was quickly buried under hundreds of free Kindle book offers that I've found over the years. I was flipping through the list of books that I have not read and the title caught my attention. I have no idea how Spam is involved. I found this book to be intriguing, even if it was simplistic. The only real problem I have is this: 49% of the book is the story I picked and 51% of it is a sample of another nov...

  Published in 2019 by Listening Library. Duration; 9 hours, 10 minutes. Read by Oliver Wyman. Unabridged. The eternal issue with Loki in the Marvel Universe is the sibling rivalry between Loki and Thor that is encouraged by their father Odin who dangles the possibility of inheriting the throne in front of both of them. Odin encourages Thor to be "The Hero" and Thor responds too enthusiastically and Odin disapproves. Odin encourages Loki to try and keep up with Thor, but Loki can't keep up physically so he is forced to act using magic and/or tricks and Odin disapproves.  This book is built on this tension. It's an okay book, but not a great one. There are three main settings for the novel - Odin's court, on Alfheim and in London in the late 1800's. For me, the best part was the part in London, but it just never really grabbed me.  In this novel, the brothers are in their late teens or early twenties (or the equivalent to that for Asgardians.)  There was a grea...

  Published by The Great Courses in 2013. Read by the author, Robert Garland. Duration: 24 hours, 28 minutes. Unabridged. Robert Garland Robert Garland gives his listeners a look at the "other side of history" - meaning from the point of view of the lower and middle classes, slaves, regular soldiers, women and children from the Stone Age through Medieval Europe. Occasionally, he looks at the rich, but not quite famous as well. He also explores how religion worked in every day life, family life, marriage ceremonies, how many jobs were performed and funeral rites in Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, the Persian Empire, the Roman Empire and Medieval Europe, particularly England. Garland is a lecturer at Colgate University in New York State so he delivers this information through a series of 48 half-hour lectures. Asking for all 48 lectures to be 5 star quality is asking too much, but I found this to be an enjoyable and educational listen. Highly recommended. I rate thi...

Published in 2019 by Fortress Press Lenny Duncan, as noted in the title, is a black pastor in a very white church body - the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). I belong to a different Lutheran denomination, but I recognize the congregations and the issues he is talking about. I found out about Dear Church from an interview on the morning news on NPR. Duncan took a unique route to becoming a pastor. He was a homeless teen, he was a prostitute, he served time in jail and he was seeking something spiritual when he attended an ELCA church and heard the Lutheran teachings on God's grace and his life was changed. Now, he is a pastor telling this church that he loves that it must do better. To be fair to the ELCA, this letter is not just applicable to that denomination, it is applicable to most of the mostly white mainline protestant denominations. But, comments like this one are more than fair for all Lutheran churches: " People are deciding not to come to our churche...

  Published in 2001 by Forge (Tor). Treason has been in my to-be-read pile for a long time. I was inspired to finally read it after watching the musical  Hamilton on a streaming service. As you may know, the character of Aaron Burr plays a large part and I got to wondering exactly what happened to Burr when he went west after his term as Vice President. The problem, as the author points out, is that we don't really know exactly what Aaron Burr did. He went on trial for treason, but it was a hurried and botched trial and Burr was found not guilty. Nevin does a solid job of explaining what Burr might have been doing. Nevin goes along with the popular theory that Burr was working with the commanding general of the U.S. Army, James Wilkinson. In 1854, letters were discovered that showed that Wilkinson was in the pay of the government of Spain and was feeding them all sorts of information. Aaron Burr, 1756-1836. Nevin supposes that Wilkinson gave Spain false information designed ...

  Originally published in 2000. Read by Jim Dale. Duration: 20 hours, 37 minutes. Unabridged. I am continuing my first time read (technically a listen) of the Harry Potter series 20 years after the fact. Rather than go through the plot of the book, I am going to skip to my review. The fourth installment of this book is best so far. A slow start builds up to a tremendous ending. I have been pretty critical of Jim Dale's performance in this series up until now. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire  Jim Dale nails it. As it goes along he gets better and better. His reading of the scene where Harry looks into Dumbledore's pensieve is absolutely riveting. This is the book where the Harry Potter series makes a turn from being a bunch of cute kid's books. For example, grown-up topics like racism are dealt with. Racism is actually dealt with in 3 different ways - with the House Elves, Giants and the topic of pure blood wizards. Jim Dale I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It ...

Published in 2019 by Random House Audio. Read by Pete Simonelli Duration: 7 hours, 44 minutes. Unabridged. Tank Rizzo is a retired police officer. He retired early because his partner suffered a career-ending injury in a botched raid on a drug dealer's apartment.  Tank's retirement consists of hanging out at the neighborhood restaurant, dating the owner of the restaurant, helping his partner with his rehab and catching a few hockey games with the father of his girlfriend (a retired mob boss). The author, Lorenzo Carcaterra But, Tank has a hobby that is sort of an open secret. He has built his own team of crime solvers and he solves cold cases for his old boss. His former partner helps by working remotely. They are paid from sort of slush fund or a secret budget line. It's not really clear, but money is not an issue. Tank's estranged brother and wife die in a car crash in a snowstorm and Tank's mystery-loving nephew moves in and joins the team and they have just caug...

  Published in 2015 by HarperAudio. Duration: 8 hours, 13 minutes. Read by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner and Erik Bergmann. Unabridged. Levitt and Dubner are the authors the co-creators of the Freakonomics franchise. They have published several books, have a radio show, have a website and have had a long-running column in the New York Times . All of them have featured odd takes on economic theories (as the title of this book suggests). They also have a blog that they used as a place to put their odd thoughts - not complete articles or chapters. This book consists of 132 entries from their blog. And, that, in short, is the weakness of this audiobook. Their other works are much more thought out and this one just feels like the results of a preliminary brainstorming session. There were some interesting entries and there were some real clunkers. Also, there were way too many entries about gambling. I have absolutely no interest in gambling but the authors are really into it....

Published in 2020 by HarperAudio. Read by the author, Bakari Sellers Duration: 5 hours, 9 minutes. Unabridged I came to My Vanishing Country not knowing a thing about Bakari Sellers. I don't know where I heard about his book, but I had placed a hold on the audiobook at my library. I assume I heard him in an interview on NPR or found his name on a list of prominent books to be released in 2020. Bakari Sellers in 2018. Photo by Luke Harold. Sellers has the distinction of being one of the youngest state legislators ever and the youngest African American ever elected to a post in American history. He is from South Carolina, was a member of its legislature for 8 years, is an attorney and is now a commentator for CNN. I am not from South Carolina and I don't have cable or satellite so I had never seen his work on CNN, either.  My complete unfamiliarity with Sellers made the book a little tedious at times. But, the last quarter of the book is very strong. It was so strong, due to mor...

Originally published in 1982 as a novella in the collection Different Seasons . Read by Frank Muller. Duration: 3 hours, 57 minutes. Unabridged. I originally read this novella when it was published as a part of the collection called Different Seasons  more than 35 years ago. This is the third time I have read this story, but the first time in the last 20 years.  I have never seen the beloved movie. Stephen King Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption tells the story of two prisoners in Shawshank Prison in Maine, starting in the late 1940's. One is the main supplier of things smuggled into the prison (but not hard core drugs) and the other is a banker that has been falsely convicted of murdering his wife and her lover. They are not exactly friends, but they are friendly and they certainly respect one another. The banker has an odd habit of collecting rocks he finds in the prison yard and carving them into little sculptures - but could it be a sign of something more? I have neve...