DWD's Reviews

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...

Published in 2009 by Christian Audio Published by Christianaudio.com in 2009. Read by David Cochran Heath Duration: 2 hours, 26 minutes Unabridged This collection of Martin Luther's writings has a great strength in that it lets Martin Luther speak for himself with no other author offering interpretations. However, this is also its weakness since some of these documents could have used a bit of explanation.  Martin Luther (1483-1546) Considering that these texts are around 500 years old, most are surprisingly accessible. The editors chose to include the Ten Commandments section from Luther's Small Catechism   that was easy to understand with no additional explanation necessary. However, it would have been helpful to have some sort of introduction to the opening text - Luther's 95 Theses . I am both a lifelong Lutheran and a history teacher and even I found the straight through reading of all 95 theses to be more than a bit dry.   The most powerful text is ...

Published in 2017 by Blackstone Audio Read by Eileen Stevens. Duration: 5 hours, 27 minutes. Unabridged The Hotel Tito follows the family of a 9 year old Croatian girl as her family is displaced by war in the former Yugoslavia. In 1991, Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia and fought a 4 year war, mostly against the Serbs. The family has fled from Vukovar, a city on the border with Serbia. The father has stayed behind to defend their city and the family ends up in a hotel that has been re-purposed to house refugees. The story follows the girl as she and her friends go to school and try, unsuccessfully, to blend in with the local children, the activities and pranks they participate in at the refugee camp/hotel and their long wait for an apartment or a house that they can call their very own. Most importantly, they await any word on their father who was part of a spirited, but ultimately failed defense of Vukovar. The Hotel Tito sheds some light on what is, sadly, a mo...

Published in 2018 by Grand Central Publishing. The Escape Artist features Jim "Zig" Zigarowski, a man who works at Dover Air Force Base. Dover is where many of America's soldiers who have died are brought back to America. Zig is a mortician - the best on the base. He skillfully prepares all but the most damaged bodies for open casket funerals. No one beats his sense of dedication because no one else is dealing with his own personal grief by throwing themselves into their work to try to help others with their grief like Zig does. One day, Zig notes that the name of an incoming body from a plane crash in Alaska: Nola Brown, a soldier he knew as a girl in his daughter's Girl Scout troop. When he goes to prepare the body he discovers that this is not the same person. And, once he starts to look into things, he quickly finds that no one wants him to find out anything about Nola Brown and are willing to make sure that he doesn't... The setting of this book was infor...

Published by Tantor Audio in 2017. Read by David Colacci and Susan Ericksen Duration: 14 hours, 48 minutes Unabridged Matt and Karen Smith decided to visit every National Park in the U.S. National Park System. They decided to only visit the 58 sites that are actually named "National Park". This is important because there are over 400 sites in the park system that have titles like National Monument, National Lakeshore and National Recreational Area - so many that it is doubtful that any one person has been to them all. As if to prove this point, just after the Smiths published the first edition to this book, a new National Park was added to the system and they had to go visit it and update their own book just to keep their own record intact.  The book is written as a series of e-mails back to their sometimes traveling partners Bob and Sue. Bob and Sue never actually accompany them on one of these trips. They alternate back and forth narrating their adventures in the order...

Published in 2018 by Blackstone Audio Read by Fiona Hardingham and Ralph Lister Duration: 10 hours, 3 minutes Unabridged The Devil's Claw features Jennifer Dorey, a reporter on the small island of Guernsey in the English Channel. It is very close to France and, in a lot of ways, it is a unique mixture of cultures. Dorey is not like a lot of people in this little insular island society - she has left the island and been a successful reporter in London, but she has returned to the island to start over due to some horrible, mysterious event. Everything is going well on Guernsey until a young woman is found drowned. At first it seems like a suicide, but Dorey starts to ask questions and everyone except one police officer who is about to retire thinks that she should just leave well enough alone... This is a moody work, much influenced by both the fairly recent and the ancient history of the island. It works in a lot of local landmarks like the "fairy ring" which ha...

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2017. Read by Joy Osmanski Duration: 10 hours, 1 minute Unabridged In Janesville: An American Story , Amy Goldstein tells the story of Janesville, Wisconsin after its large General Motors SUV plant closed and thousands of employees lost their jobs. On its surface, this book has the potential of being one of the most boring books that you have ever read. But, Goldstein has a real talent when it comes to storytelling and makes this story very compelling. With the beginnings of the Great Recession, General Motors found itself in serious trouble. They had invested in manufacturing large, expensive, gas-guzzling SUV's when the price of gas was more then $4/gallon and the credit market was getting so tight that it was hard for people to qualify for loans for a $40,000 SUV. When GM closed this plant it caused an economic shockwave to tear through the community, closing most of the other factories in town that supplied the GM facility. Housin...

Published in 2017 by G.P. Putnam's Sons. In 2015's Endangered , C.J. Box introduced his readers to the Cates family. The Cates family was a dangerous group by anyone's standards - likely to poach wildlife, cheat business partners or maybe just get in a fight for the sheer fun of it. The most dangerous members of the family are the mom and the golden child Dallas. Dallas is also a champion professional rodeo star and should have been a real celebrity in his hometown of Saddlestring, except for the fact that no one can stand him or his family. Joe Pickett helped break up the Cates family crime ring and in the process most of the family was killed. Dallas Cates and his mother went to jail. His mother is serving a life sentence. In the process of her family being taken down she broke her neck and is now paralyzed. Joe Pickett has a problem. Dallas Cates has just been released from jail and it's clear that he wants revenge. He hasn't made a move yet, but it is obvious ...

Published by GraphicAudio in 2015 Read by a multicast Duration: 6 hours, 9 minutes. Unabridged. Captain America is called to Berlin to uncover a Hydra plot. Iron Man is called to Washington, D.C. to confront Ultron. Thor is in Siberia confronting a magical threat of immense proportions. Dr. Banner is investigating a mystery of his own with SHIELD. And, Black Widow and Hawkeye have their own problems confronting A.I.M. In The Avengers: Everybody Wants to Rule the World , the Avengers are each pulled into their separate top-level emergencies - each of which could result in a worldwide disaster. Soon enough, the Avengers discover that each of these threats has arisen in response to a much larger threat - if only they can figure out what it is in time... Usually, I really enjoy GraphicAudio's adaptations of comic book novels. Their use of sound effects and multiple actors remind me of an old-time radio show. But, a high quality performance could not hide the fact that the action...

P ublished in 2017 by Brilliance Audio. Read by Timothy Andres Pabon. Duration: 9 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged The action surrounding embattled water engineer Nathan Fisher and his family in the year 2035 continues in Rogue State , the second book in this series . In the first book, Nathan witnessed an act of terrorism designed to egg on a tense situation between the government of California and the federal government. Now, he and his family are being hunted by a mysterious group funded by a group of oligarchs that are determined to manipulate this situation to their advantage. In the second book of this series the action factor gets ratcheted way up. In many ways, the main story line of the book is one giant chase scene across a series of rural and urban desert landscapes - but it is a heck of a chase scene. We also learn a lot more about the bad guys and the messed up version of America that Konkoly has created for this book (which I found at least as interesting as the chase s...

Published by Brilliance Audio in 2016 Read by Timothy Andres Pabon Duration: 10 hours, 9 minutes Unabridged In the year 2035 America is almost unrecognizable. Environmental collapse due the abuse of aquifers and mountain run-off in the West has caused the governments of many Western states to practically collapse. The highway systems have become "No Man's Land" and the Arizona border has practically been overrun by drug cartels who often act as a brutal de facto government in some areas. California has escaped this fate due to a strict resource protection regimen that limits travel, and strictly watches how much water and electricity each household consumes. The relationship between the strict (yet successful) government of California and the often ineffectual federal government is strained to the point that there is an open and active movement that is pushing for California to secede. Political assassinations and the sabotaging of a critical power plant make the pol...

A Review of the Audiobook Published in 2013 by Dreamscape Media, LLC. Read by Adam Verner Duration: 9 hours, 18 minutes Unabridged Carter Ross is an excellent reporter in the newsroom of a slowly dying newspaper in Newark, New Jersey. When he hears of the death of a police officer, he immediately rushes to the family and convinces them to talk to him about the officer and the kind of life he lived. Ross is certain that he has the makings of a top-notch human interest story - the kind of story that he would be proud if the family saved it for the officer's tiny baby son to read someday. But, when Ross calls in the good news to his editor he is immediately waved off of the story because the Newark police are telling everyone that this officer killed himself after he got drunk on the job. But, that sounds fishy to Ross so he starts his own investigation into the case - and soon he finds that he has more suspects than he can possibly investigate... Brad Parks has a way of makin...

Published by Stark Raven Press in 2017. Narrated by Charles Craig. Duration: 3 hours. Unabridged. Bass Clayton is a bounty killer, basically a paid assassin, in the Old West. He has had no qualms about doing this job - at least he didn't until he tried to kill Silver Grimes. He fired blindly into Grimes' cabin with a shotgun, wounding Grimes and splattering Grimes' girlfriend all over the bed. Clayton walks away from his bounty hunter gig and becomes the town drunk in a town called Rueful Regret. His plan to slowly drink himself into oblivion is going well until Grimes walks into the bar... I did not enjoy this audiobook. The book was full of too many folksy expressions and was surprisingly slow-paced considering that it was just a three hour audiobook. But, the worst aspect of the book was an overly detailed description of animal cruelty and bestiality that did nothing to advance the plot. All it did was provide a few minutes of padding in an already slow story in a...

Originally published in 1996. With Black Profiles in Courage , Kareem Abdul-Jabbar presents a look at American history through a different lens than you usually see. This book follows from even before the arrival of Columbus through Rosa Parks receiving her just accolades in the 1990's. His underlying theme, as explained in the title, is that African-Americans have been contributing in important ways the entire time, but they are often "whitewashed" from history. Abdul-Jabbar is best known for his time as a top-level basketball player. But he is not just a jock (if you are a fan, you know he never was JUST a jock.) He is also an amateur historian - and quite a thoughtful one. Clearly, he was inspired by the book Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy but this book is not structured in any way like that classic. The book starts with its weakest proposition from a historical perspective. There are historians that assert that African peoples were heavily involved in Meso...

A Review of the Audiobook Winner of the 1957 Pulitzer Prize Originally Published in 1955 Published by HarperAudio Duration: 3 hours, 10 minutes Read by John F. Kennedy, Jr. Abridged President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) If you have not read Profiles in Courage , it is comprised of 8 short biographies of Senators that JFK found to be inspirational in some way or another. Those Senators are: John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Thomas Hart Benton, Sam Houston, Edmund G. Ross, Lucius Lamar, George Norris and Robert A. Taft. Each of these men's stories were very well done, even if some of them, like John Quincy Adams' biography, actually seemed very short compared to what these men actually accomplished. But, then again, this is just a look at one point in time, not a complete list of each man's accomplishments and an abridged version of that short look on top of that. This audiobook version of JFK's classic work is read by the President's son, John F. ...

Published in March of 2018 by Thomas and Mercer. True Fiction features Ian Ludlow, an author of action thrillers. He writes an over-the-top action series that makes James Bond look like a kindergartner and he's on a semi-successful book tour. But, he knows something wrong (besides the tour and his lame attempts to flirt with his tour handler) when a plane is remotely attacked during a terrorist attack in Hawaii. He knows how it was done because he dreamed it up years before when he was a part of a CIA-led author retreat. The purpose of the retreat was to have authors of thrillers think up "out of the box" terrorist ideas so that the CIA could have an idea of what they might be up against in the future. But, it turns out that it wasn't the CIA that hosted the retreat - it was a private group that wants the CIA's operations to be outsourced to them so they can make a fortune - and they are trying to kill off the only surviving author from the retreat - Ian Ludlow....