DWD's Reviews

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. ...

Published by HighBridge in 2013. Read by Eric Martin. Duration: 7 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged. Detroit: An American Autopsy is one of the best audiobooks I have listened to in a very long time. It made me laugh, made me think, made me glad I don't live in Detroit, made me worried that I live in another Rust Belt city that has lost a lot of its industrial base, and, over and over again, it shocked me. Charlie LeDuff grew up in the Detroit area and moved away to do a lot of different things, including being a reporter for the New York Times (where he won a Pulitzer Prize). He came back home to Detroit to work for a newspaper and to be close to family. When you go away from someplace and come home you see things a little more clearly and he was more than a little surprised Detroit was not only every bit as bad off as most of the country believes - it was actually a lot worse. I recently read the book Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein.  In a lot of ways, it is simi...

Published by Random House Audio in 2016. Read by Dick Hill. Duration: 13 hours, 7 minutes Unabridged. Fans of Jack Reacher know that the Lee Child does not write his books in a linear pattern - he bounces around on the Jack Reacher timeline quite a bit. Night School is set in the 1990's when Reacher was still in the military. Reacher has just come off of a secret mission in the Balkans.  He helped find and eliminate war criminals from the fighting that erupted in the wake of the collapse of Yugoslavia. It was the kind of mission that the government was glad to have done, but not glad to acknowledge. Reacher receives a medal in a private ceremony and then is sent off to an inter-agency training seminar in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. But, it turns out that there are only two other people at this "training" - an FBI agent and a CIA agent that are also fresh off of missions that  the government was glad to have done, but not glad to acknowledge. The State Department...

Published in 1993 by Harlan Davidson, Inc. This unique volume looks at the near-constant state of war that existed in one part or another of the English colonies, from the first attempt at colonization in 1585 until the end of the French and Indian War in 1763. The first quarter of Struggle for a Continent deals with the frequent wars that erupted between the English and the Native Americans that they encountered. Similar patterns emerge as disagreements and misunderstandings become full-fledged brutal and desperate wars of survival in colony after colony, with the exception (at first, at least) of Pennsylvania.  The rest of the book is devoted to the English struggle against other colonial powers, namely the Spanish and the French. Spain was already a declining power at this point so they posed a minor threat when compared to the ever-growing French Empire. A great part of the book is spent discussing the French threat emanating from Canada towards New England and what ...

Published by Peter Besson, Inc. in 2018. Read by Conner Goff Duration: 7 hours, 7 minutes. Unabridged. In the near future the population of the world has reached the breaking point and climate change has made it all the harder to feed everyone. Throw in a near-continuous state of war and a collapsing economy and you might understand why some people would want to go and kill themselves before someone else gets around to doing it. So many people were killing themselves that a niche industry formed - suicide hotels designed to deal specifically with the needs of those that want to kill themselves. They are called "Last Resorts" and have any number of conveniences for those that are determined to "check out" of this life, such as handguns, poisons, drugs for overdosing and convenient places to throw oneself off of the roof without harming passersby. The only real rule is that once you check in, you cannot check out alive. You can stay as long as you'd like, so l...

Published in 2001 by Enslow Publishers, Inc. Matthew Brady is most famous for being THE photographer of the Civil War, but he had quite the career before the war. He was arguably the most famous photographer in the world before the war and the war cemented him in the historical record. Every American has seen his team's handiwork - one of his photographs of Lincoln was the model for Lincoln's image on the penny. But, if you are a student of the Civil War, you have seen Brady's handiwork over and over again - such as his picture of Lincoln conferring with McClellan in a tent at the Antietam battlefield, his portrait of Lincoln with his son Tad, and his picture of Robert E. Lee taken right after the war. This biography is intended to be a supplemental reading in a fifth grade or higher classroom. I am a voracious reader of just about anything about the American Civil War (this is my 100th book I am reviewing with a Civil War theme) and I found this slim volume to be quite in...

Published by T.A. Ward Books in May of 2018. Read by Tom Askin. Duration: 8 hours, 41 minutes. Unabridged. In this science fiction novel, the United States suffered a horrible day of terrorist attacks known as the Day of Destruction in the 2040's. There were nuclear attacks in some places but Philadelphia was attacked by a nerve gas called Obcasus. The gas itself was bad enough, but the side effects are worse. Women who were exposed give birth to children with brain damage that makes them uncontrollably violent - even as infants. They are called inexorables. The main character of Children of Wrath is Dr. Ethan King, a Philadelphia infectious disease doctor that has treated patients for Obcasus exposure since the Day of Destruction. He is happily married but he and his wife cannot have children. One day, Dr. King spots a starving, nearly dead Inexorable child as he is leaving the hospital late at night and he decides to take it home... The premise behind this book was very s...

Published in 2017 by NavPress The title of the book Eats with Sinners: Loving Like Jesus Eats with Sinners: Loving Like Jesus comes from a passage in the fifteenth chapter of the Book of Luke. In the previous chapter, Jesus ate with Pharisees (a Jewish sect that prided themselves on their strict adherence to all of the religious rules of the day) and told them not to be too prideful as they picked their seats for this "dinner party". In Chapter 15, we come across this passage: Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of th law muttered, "This man welcomes sinners and eats with them." Then Jesus told them this parable: "Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn't he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?  And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and ...

Published in 2015 by Eastern National A year and a half ago I visited the Lincoln home at Springfield, Illinois (a great place, by the way) and in the visitors center I found this book. I was intrigued for three reasons: 1) the Park Service books are always beautifully put together, like a National Geographic with lots of color pictures; 2) I knew nothing about any Asian participation in the Civil War - I figured there had to be some because the war was so vast and involved so many people - but I knew nothing about them; 3) This was the physically largest book in the series - even bigger than the books on the Underground Railroad and American Indians in the Civil War - two areas that are well documented. This book continues in the tradition of being beautiful visually. It is written as a series of articles, each telling a part of the overall story and each article is illustrated with high quality photos. However, the articles are often overlapping, with mentions of some of the same m...

Published by Basic Books in 2018. Zoologist Lucy Cooke explores some of the offbeat bits of the animal world in The Truth About Animals - a book that shows us that most of us think we know a lot about the animal world, but we really don't. None of the animals featured are obscure - they are all well-known, with the possible exception of the eel (at least in the United States).  The animals featured in the book are: eels, beavers, sloths, hyenas, vultures, bats, frogs, storks, hippos, moose, pandas, penguins and chimpanzees. Cooke usually begins with a look at the animal in question in historical texts so that we can see that these misunderstandings have been going on for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. For example, bats have been misunderstood and mis-classified since...well, forever. The struggle to figure out how exactly bats travel at night was especially gruesome, featuring scientists blinding live bats, plugging up their noses and coating their bodies with l...

Published by ChristianAudio.com in 2012. Duration: 2 hours, 19 minutes Read by Mirron Willis Unabridged Even though How Should Christians Vote was published 4 years prior to the 2016 election, it was surprisingly relevant to the Trump era of politics. Tony Evans is a pastor and also a chaplain for an NFL team. This is important, because he uses a football analogy the referee to describe the role of Christians in the election process. I went into this audiobook ready to be irritated - irritated because so many big name Christian leaders have become very political as of late - forgoing the work of God's kingdom for the work of a politician or a political party, in my mind. Evans is quite clear that Christians should vote and should fully participate in the process - to not do so would be not using one of the tools we have to impact the culture and the country. BUT, Christians should not become blind followers of a politician or a party because they do not necessarily advocate th...

Published by Tantor Audio in May of 2018 Read by Peter Berkrot Duration: 7 hours, 4 minutes Unabridged I pounced on this history because Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys have always been a mysterious presence in my readings on the Revolutionary War. They show up during the early days of the war and add a zest of mystery and frontiersman derring-do that blunts British momentum. And then...they just disappear from the typical history. Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom follows the timeline history of the American Revolution, going back and forth between a series of the Green Mountain Boys. My fleeting impression of them was that they were some sort of super-patriotic mountain men. The reality, on the surface, seems more nuanced. But, in reality, I think that I was right. They were super-patriotic mountain men, but their loyalties did not lie with the United States - their devotion was to Vermont and only Vermont.  Vermont was not a colony when the Revolutionary War starte...