DWD's Reviews

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 Listening Library in 2004. Read by Dick Cavett Duration: 3 hours, 36 minutes. Unabridged A lot of people aren't aware that the plot for the classic Christmas movie A Christmas Story was not written as a coherent novel but was actually a collection of short stories that the author had written about his childhood in northwestern Indiana during the Great Depression over the years that were then skillfully edited into a movie. These stories don't follow the plot of the movie exactly, but all of the high points are here, including the infamous lamp, the bully, the BB gun, the visit to Santa and the Bumpus hounds.  Jean Shepherd (1921-1999) Interestingly, this audiobook was not read by Jean Shepherd, who was a professional radio personality and told most of these stories over the air (he is also the narrator in the movie). Instead, it is read by television host Dick Cavett. At first, I was disappointed - but Cavett did a great job. This audiobook was a lot of...

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2002 Read by James Rebhorn, Bruce Davison, Becky Ann Baker, Peter Gerety, Fred Sanders, Stephen Tobolowsky Duration: 13 hours, 21 minutes Unabridged Troop D is the name for the troopers in a Pennsylvania State Police post in western Pennsylvania. They are a close-knit bunch, as you would expect. But, it's not just because of their shared struggles as police officers - they share a secret and it's hidden in a shed behind their post station. In that shed is a 1953 Buick Roadmaster - but it's not any kind of Buick that was ever built in Detroit. It was left behind at a gas station when its driver stepped out of the car, told the attendant that the oil level was fine, headed towards the bathroom and then literally disappeared. The car is weird. In fact, it really isn't a car. It can't actually drive. It's almost like someone who didn't understand the mechanics behind a car tried to build one. But, that's not the ...

Published in 2013 by Random House Audio Read by the author, Jim Gaffigan Duration: 5 hours, 26 minutes Unabridged Despite the title, stand up comic Jim Gaffigan's first book is not about weight or food. No, Dad Is Fat is about being a parent and raising 5 little kids in a small New York City apartment. Jim Gaffigan If you are not a parent, there is probably not much about this book that would appeal to you. This is a point that Gaffigan makes at the beginning of the book in a story early on about when he and his wife traveled with parents of a new baby. True, those parents were obsessive to the extreme, but just about any parent could look at that extreme and think to themselves, "Yeah. That's nutty...but it's not crazy nutty. For me, the best part was when Jim talked about his own parents and growing up in northern Indiana. His impersonation of his father and his constant throat clearing (something that Jim never points out but always does) was funny and e...

Published in 2015 by Blue River Press Not many people know about the horrible story of the Sultana , a paddlewheel steamboat that sank into the Mississippi River in April of 1865. It is the worst maritime disaster in American history but was largely overshadowed by the events surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and his dramatic funeral train tour from Washington, D.C. to Springfield, Illinois. The Sultana  was grossly overcrowded. It was designed to carry 376 passengers, but it was carrying 2,155 passengers when three of its boilers exploded in the early morning hours of April 27, 1865.  Most of its passengers were survivors of the infamous Andersonville prisoner of war camp that were being shipped home.  This book is technically a sequel to Saint Patrick's Battalion . It continues the story of a boy who traveled with an American army during the Mexican War. In Fire in the Water , that boy has grown up and become a famous war correspondent. He is travelin...

Published in 2012 by Random House Audio Duration: 26 hours, 59 minutes Read by Sam Dastor Unabridged For most people, Salman Rushdie is, and will always be, that author that the Iranians tried to have killed all of those years ago. I freely admit that this is an accurate description of me. Although I am an avid reader, this is the first Salman Rushdie book that I have even contemplated reading.  Rushdie narrates this autobiography in the third person, which is a little weird and gave me the impression that he is trying to distance himself a bit from his own story. The biggest chunk of Joseph Anton: A Memoir  tells about how Rushdie dealt with the fatwa , or ruling against him and his book The Satanic Verses by the leader of the Iranian Revolution himself, the Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini ruled that the author, the publishers and the editors of the book should die for blasphemy and that anyone who died in an attempt to kill them would be considered a martyr. This cau...

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2014 Read by Wil Wheaton Duration: 6 hours, 36 minutes Unabridged Randall Munroe is the writer and 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. Munroe has collected the best questions and put them into this book: What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions . The 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 a...

Published by Tantor Audio in 2017 Read by David Colacci Duration: 8 hours, 17 minutes Unabridged The Corps Justice series continues its tales of SSI (Stokes Security International), a private security firm that sometimes doubles as the President's personal private paramilitary army that acts when he just can't do things politically. In National Burden , the President is in political trouble. There is a plot to frame the President and a very connected contact of SSI is concerned about strange movements in the stock market. So, he contacts his friends at SSI to give him a hand. And, they soon discover that things are much worse than they had ever imagined... Politics, as portrayed in this book, are just not realistic. For example, the President appoints a new Vice President (it was a vacant position) and he just goes to work as the VP. No hearings. No fuss. No muss. No Congressional approval (as required by the 25th Amendment). Imagine all of the squabbling and all of the ...

I Blasted Through this Audiobook. Published by Random House Audio in 2010. Read by the author, Wes Moore. Duration: 6 hours, 12 minutes Unabridged Wes Moore, the author of The Other Wes Moore , is originally from a tough Baltimore neighborhood. His family struggled with loss, poverty, his neglect of his own education and rebellious flirtation with crime. But, he "made it", eventually becoming a Rhodes Scholar, have a career in international finance (which was interrupted when he volunteered to serve as a paratrooper in Afghanistan), and now heads two educational foundations, writes articles and makes political commentary. One day, Moore was sent an article about another young man from Baltimore also named Wes Moore. The other Wes Moore is a convicted murderer and is serving time in prison. This prompted the author to reach out to the other Wes Moore and eventually write this dual biography about how they both ended up in two very different places. It is not a judgment...

Published by Random House Audio in 2009 Read by Don Leslie Duration: 13 hours Unabridged I am an avid reader of Civil War era histories (I own more than 100 and who knows how many that I have read from the library) and it is rare for me to find a book that covers new territory for me. This book did. I knew as an abstract fact that there were thousands of white Union soldiers that came from the Confederacy. They are mentioned in many histories, but they are rarely a focus. The State of Jones focuses on the family of Newton Knight, an unwilling Confederate soldier who was forcibly drafted, fought in multiple battles and eventually went AWOL.  Newton Knight was not afraid to fight and kill for what he believed in. When the government tried to force him back into the military he  started an anti-Confederate insurgency movement centered in Jones County, Mississippi. Those renegades tied up Confederate military assets and virtually stopped in-kind tax collections that were ne...

Published in 2012 by Tantor Audio Duration: 5 hours, 2 minutes Read by the author, Ken Jennings Unabridged In Because I Said So , Ken Jennings takes his famous encyclopedic knowledge of trivia that served him so well on Jeopardy and applies it to 125 bits of folk wisdom that we've all heard of the years that we all know but never really think about, let alone question. Do you really need to wait an hour after eating before you swim? Will your eyes really freeze that way? Do you really need to drink 8 glasses of water or will you ruin your eyesight if you read in low light? Ken Jennings does the research and finds the answers in a short, succinct and sometimes snarky fashion. I am only rating this audiobook 4 stars rather than 5 for one reason - the narrator. The author, Ken Jennings, read the book himself and there is always a danger when an author reads his or her own book rather than hiring a professional.  It must be great to keep it all "in house" but there...

Published by Macmillan Audio in July of 2017 Read by Christina Delaine Duration: 10 hours, 6 minutes Unabridged Cassie Dewell moved to North Dakota in her last book, one of the few experienced police officers in an oil boom town. In Paradise Valley the oil boom has mostly died down due to a drop of petroleum prices - but the town is still a much busier place than it was before the boom. The local sheriff is pondering retirement and wants Cassie Dewell to replace her. But, Dewell has other goals - and one of them is the pursuit of the serial killer known as the Lizard King. He is a long haul trucker who specializes in killing truck stop prostitutes (known as "lot lizards", thus the serial killer's nickname). He was also part of a conspiracy that resulted in the death of her mentor and partner, Cody Hoyt and nearly killed her. Dewell has a plan to capture this serial killer - a plan that is not officially on the books with the department. But, when the trap is finally...

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 in September of 2017 by National Geographic The author, James P. Owen, was 70 and realized that he was horribly out of shape. By out of shape I do not mean that he was fat. I mean he was walking around like a stiff and brittle old man - more content to sit and watch the world go by rather than get up and be a part of it. Rather than go to the gym and try to become buff, he decided that he needed to combat aging by becoming "functionally fit". Instead of bulging biceps he would pursue these 5 goals in an effort to be more mobile and become less likely to injure himself in his everyday life: -Core stability and strength -Flexibility -Balance -Muscular strength -Cardiovascular endurance And he succeeded. He claims that at age 75 he is the most fit shape of his life. There is nothing really shocking in this book, but he gives tons of practical advice to make things happen more safely and more quickly, especially if you have a few extra bucks to pay for a memb...

Published in September of 2017 by John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Retrograde tells the story of a Mars colony has been established by four separate factions: China, Russia, America and Eurasia (Europe, India, Israel, Japan, and more). The groups work together, but not always smoothly but they are building a successful colony. Suddenly, everything is thrown into a tailspin when the major world powers begin firing nuclear weapons at one another and 15 cities are obliterated - and each faction of the colony has suffered losses. And...there's little chance that there a re-supply ship coming any time soon. The colonists have to figure out if they can trust one another despite the nuclear strikes back on Earth and they need to figure it out soon because Mars is a tough enough place to live when everything and everyone is working well, it's really tough when no one trusts one another. And, it gets even tougher when they finally figure out what is really going on... This i...

Published by Ace in 2014 Alternate histories always deal with a what if...? moment in history and how things might have been. In the case of V-S Day , the moment is what if Nazi Germany decided to throw the resources that it was throwing into a its buzz bomb program into an actual space program led by Wernher von Braun? The Germans are building a a primitive space shuttle like device that can take off from the Reich, circle the globe and drop bombs on New York City from a low earth orbit, far above the reach of America's anti-aircraft guns. And, it can do it again and again with no hope of a defense. Fans of NASA know that in the real world, Wernher von Braun was brought back to America after World War II and helped develop America's space program. In this world, rocket pioneer Robert Goddard leads a team to develop an American space fighter "plane" to go up and take out the German space bomber. Most of the book details the space race between the two powers, which ...

Published in 2011 by Boaz Publishing Company First - a confession. I know the author of this book. However, the last time I spoke to him was most likely in December of 1989. We had one class together in high school and 3, maybe 4, classes together at the School of Education at Indiana University where we discussed movies, a mutual love of reading, and Roy Orbison. But, I've kept track of Chris as a writer in magazines and newspapers - mostly essays about his new family and his globe-trotting life teaching in all sorts of places, including ten years at a men's prison in Indiana - the subject of this book. The book Mike Tyson Slept Here is set in and around the Plainfield Correctional Facility, where Mike Tyson served nearly three years for rape from 1992 to 1995. Tyson does not appear in the book, but he was its most famous resident, seeing as how he went in at the height of his career. Mike Tyson Slept Here is not an autobiography, but there are semi-autobiographical ele...

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2016 Read by Robert Petkoff Duration: 9 hours, 40 minutes Unabridged This book is part of a series marking the 50th anniversary of Star Trek. Captain to Captain features Captain Una, better known as Number One in the original pilot episode of the Original Series ("The Cage") and the regular cast of the Original Series. Captain Una, a legendary Starfleet officer, comes to the Enterprise on a surprise visit for vague reasons and promptly steals a secret object that captains of the Enterprise keep hidden away from even the Federation. Kirk isn't even sure what it is exactly, but he knows it can't fall into the hands of the Klingons, the Romulans and maybe not even the Federation because what he does know is that it is the key to more power than anyone should be able to control.  Number One from the original pilot of Star Trek Now Kirk has two questions: Why did Captain Una steal the object? Why is Captain Una heading t...

Published by HighBridge, a Division of Recorded Books in February of 2017. Read by Jonathan Yen Duration: 10 hours, 24 minutes Unabridged In The Not-Quite States of America , Doug Mack takes his readers on a sometimes serious, sometimes humorous tour of America's territories: the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and Puerto Rico (in that order). Mack goes into a little history of each territory and sets off to experience a more in-depth tour than the typical tourist might normally take. He meets with local leaders, well-known personalities, mainland Americans who have moved to the territory and goes out of his way to meet talkative locals who are willing to discuss the relationship between that territory and the United States government (which is usually riddled with strange rules that cause all sorts of unintended consequences). Along the way Mack visits a restaurant that allows its guests to feed beer to pigs in the U.S. Virgin Islands, ...

Published in 2016 by Tantor Audio Read by David Colacci Duration: 7 hours, 17 minutes Unabridged Fallen features Daniel Briggs, a retired Marine sniper who is struggling with alcohol and his own personal demons, especially an internal drive to fight and kill that he calls "The Beast". Briggs is a drifter who stumbles into trouble as he wanders the country and often finds himself in the middle of trouble, much like Lee Childs' character Jack Reacher. If you are familiar with the Reacher series, Briggs is more morose and angry than Reacher, but I think that they would find a lot in common. Briggs is in Maine, drinking at a touristy bar when he encounters some drunks giving the waitress a hard time. He takes them on, wins and then discovers that the police are coming for him. Briggs takes off on foot and encounters a friendly local preacher who is delivering food to members of his church - sort of a rolling food pantry. The preacher takes in Briggs for the evening and...