DWD's Reviews

Lots of plot threads that eventually tie together Published by HarperAudio in 2012. Performed by Jonathan Davis. Duration: 9 hours, 38 minutes. Unabridged. I have been a Phillip Margolin fan since I read his book The Burning Man nearly 15 years ago. I worked at a used book store at the time and I remember turning a couple of people on to Margolin's stuff. I must admit that I have not read some of his more recent books, not out of lack of interest, but mostly due to the pressure of a massive To-Be-Read pile (do you REALLY need to add yet another book to the pile?). Phillip Margolin So, when I came across a Margolin audiobook, I knew that this was a good chance to catch up while not adding to the To-Be-Read pile, since I usually listen while doing things like driving. So, what did I think of Capitol Murder ? First, this book is at least the third book in a series following the adventures of Brad Miller and Dana Cutler. This is not really a problem because Margolin se...

A Few Thoughts on Uncle Tom's Cabin First Published in 1852. Harriet Beecher Stowe sat down to write a book that would show the United States the evils of slavery. She wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly in response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, at the urging of her sister-in-law. She succeeded in fueling the debate over slavery and she pointed a finger of shame at the slave owners and at America as a whole. Harriett Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) It created a national sensation. Within ten years, it sold two million copies, making it the best-selling novel of all time in the United States, in proportion to population, according to noted Civil War historian James M. McPherson. The book was so controversial and so powerful that there were attempts to ban it in some parts of the South. Pro-slavery authors attempted to counter the book with their own books with titles like Uncle Robin, in His Cabin in Virginia, and Tom Without One in Boston in an attem...

Published by CreateSpace in 2012. The action continues in Book 3 of the Day Eight Series. In The Spiritual Singularity the tech company Day Eight is moving forward with their plans to use computerized simulated humans ("simulants") to affect events in the real world in a very dramatic way. Political assassinations, dramatic leap forwards in technology and a physical link between the computer simulant Ezra and the President of the United States make computer programmer Trevor Leighton very worried for the future of humanity itself. Leighton is working as best he can to save himself and possibly even the whole world even though he is running out of money, running out of time and running out of options. The Spiritual Singularity is full of rich, meaty themes that have been discussed in science fiction and fantasy for decades. In the Lord of the Rings series,Tolkien looks into the idea of what unlimited power does to a human being. In the original Star Trek series, Captai...

Published in 2012 by CreateSpace Yesterday, I posted a review of Book 1 of this series ( The Reborn ) and I wrote a lengthy rave review. I am not going to go into all of that here. Suffice it to say, I really liked Book 1. Of Mice and Hitmen is where the series really hits its stride. In Book 1, programmer Trevor Leighton discovers that his employer, a tech firm called Day Eight, has created simulated human life in a computer. Not just Artificial Intelligence, but simulated life write down to the cellular level.  These computerized people are called simulants. Trevor has already met one fairly simple version of the simulant program, a simulant 1.0 if you will. In Book 2 he meets Ezra, the most updated version of the simulant program. She lives in an accelerated world, programmed to go faster so that she can complete projects in the real world quicker. Her name is Ezra, which is an odd name for a female, but it means "helper" in Hebrew and she is being used to work on ...

Published in 2012 by CreateSpace So, I have on the table next to me three books by Ray Mazza . These books make up The Day Eight Series. They are self-published and most experienced readers know that a great number of the self-published are fair to middling and I am usually tempted to grade them on a curve, the thought process being, " Well, it's pretty good considering it's a do-it-yourself job and she did it all herself." This is much the same thought process I have when I do handyman work around the house and I proudly show it off to my wife - it's pretty good but certainly not professional. I let these three books sit on my to-be-read pile for about a month. Why? I was not in the mood for, "Well, it's pretty good, considering..." So, I pick up book one, The Reborn , and about 15 pages in I am thinking, "Where is he going with this?" I read the back cover a couple of times and decided to give it a few more pages. Where are the...

Published by AudioGo in 2012 Read by Joe Barrett  Duration: 6 hours, 6 minutes. Unabridged This is the first book I have read (or for that matter even seen) in the Sam McCain series. Normally, I would not recommend jumping in on the tenth book in a series, but it is a testament to the skill of the author, Ed Gorman, that I was able listen to Bad Moon Rising and join right in and not feel lost at all. The titles in the series all come from music from the general time that the book is set in.  It is late August 1968. It is hot in Black River Falls, Iowa. The book starts with Sam McCain at a party watching the violence of the Democratic National Convention. Hippies are on TV and hippies are in Black River Falls. They are a source of controversy as their free love lifestyle, long hair and drug usage rankle a lot of people in small town Iowa. They live on an old farm with a history of tragedy and that history continues as the daughter of the local millionaire is found dead i...

A Clever Twist on the Typical Western. Published by Mind Wings Audio. Read by Emily Durante. Duration: 1 hour, 3 minutes This short story is a clever twist on the typical western story. Many westerns have the theme of the banker, or other powerful businessman exploiting the townspeople for his own nefarious purposes only to have the local drifter come in and confront him and eventually save the day. A Salvationist from the 1880s Nancy Cole Silverman has a similar situation with the most powerful man in Bisbee, Arizona, a mining boom town, exploiting the local miners and young women by gobbling up their claims (in the case of the miners) or coercing them into becoming prostitutes in his brothel (in the case of the young women). The hero is not a cowboy or a gunfighter.  Instead, she is a bumbling, well-intentioned and brave rookie evangelist (Salvationist) named Fannie Johnston who has come to town with the Salvation Army as part of a team sent to evangelize to this rowd...

Delivers what it promises Published by Creative Content Ltd in 2011. Narrated by Lorelei King Duration: 1 hour, 20 minutes Creative Content has a whole series of short audiobooks and kindle books in its "The Lowdown" series. The main feature of the series is that they are short (a little more than an hour or about 35 "pages" on the Kindle) and give the reader a quick look at a topic. In this case, the topic is the origin of the Vietnam War. Note, this is not a history of the entire war, but if you ever wondered just how the United States got involved in the Vietnam War, this nifty little history will do the job just fine. President Lyndon Johnson signs the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in August of 1964 Anderson roots his history in the aftermath of World War II. There are two major factors at play. The first is the desire of the French to re-establish their pre-war colonial empire and re-assert themselves as a major player on the world scene despite their be...

Highly Recommended Published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2012 Last summer I read David K.Shipler's first book on this topic, The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties (see my review by clicking here ) and I found it to be the most profound book I read that summer and maybe all year. I began my review of that book with this thought: "I always tell people that the traditional left-right continuum used to describe someone's politics is so inaccurate as to be useless. Really, what is the difference between an aging hippie living on a hill somewhere  raising some dope for personal use and telling the government to get out of his business and a Barry Goldwater-type conservative (like me) living by himself on a hill somewhere that tells the government to get its nose out of his business? Some dope. Otherwise, they are both determined advocates of civil liberties - keep out of my business if it is not hurting anyone else." When I read the fir...

Published in 2012 by Thomas Nelson Grant: Savior of the Union is an enjoyable, easy-to-read biography of Ulysses S. Grant, the Union General that seemingly came from nowhere to become the man that engineered the conquest of  the Confederacy. Yockelson covers Grant's entire life and also a bit of his father's life, with an appropriate emphasis on Grant's military service in the Mexican War, his resignation from the army between the wars, his difficulties as a civilian and his return to the service once war broke out between the Union and the Confederacy. Two-thirds of the book covers the four years of service in the Civil War. His Presidency and retirement years are quickly brushed over. Grant's career is dealt with fairly throughout the book. His great decisions are applauded, his mistakes are pointed out (Cold Harbor, in particular) and the reader gets strong feel for his calm, determined leadership style and his emphasis on substance over style. This is a much...

Published by Simon & Schuster Audio in 1994 Read by Jonathan Frakes Duration: 2 hours, 55 minutes. Abridged Based on a script by Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga All Good Things... is an abridged audiobook presentation of the novelization of the two hour series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation .  There is a lot of room there for errors to be made. Will the reader interpret the material well? Is the abridgment done well? Is the novelization of the script done well? That's a lot of steps between the original authors and the audiobook listener and any of them done poorly could result in a poor audiobook presentation. Jonathan Frakes as Commander Will Riker This audiobook was done quite well. The novelist is a prolific author of Star Trek books so he knows his material. The abridgment was done well. The reader was Jonathan Frakes. Frakes played Commander Will Riker throughout the show's run (and directed several of them) so he knows how everyone is suppos...

Audio version published by Skyboat Road Company in 2008. Multicast Performance Duration: 16 hours, 25 minutes Unabridged. The premise behind Resonance is simple - the magnetic poles are starting to switch and it is starting to cause frogs to be born deformed, messing up migration patterns and kill people who are in "hotspots" (areas where the reversal has already started). Scudiere does a great job of creating believable characters and her five main characters are quite strong. We have two young doctors from the Centers for Disease Control and their boss (played by Arte Johnson of Laugh-In fame), a young narcissistic geologist and a young biologist who specializes in frogs. These five race around the country documenting "hotspots" and trying to figure out why people exposed to them die. As they travel, we learn a lot more about the characters and a romance starts to bloom. Well, it would start to bloom except for two things: 1) the entire world suddenly sh...

Published by Doubleday in 2012 If you remember the giant television shows of NBC's heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, Top of the Rock will be fascinating. Shows like Cheers, Cosby, Law & Order, ER, Will &  Grace, Friends, Frazier, 3rd Rock From the Sun, Mad About You and Seinfeld ruled the airwaves. Thursday nights were dominated by NBC and NBC usually made more money on that night than the other six nights combined - literally billions of dollars. Warren Littlefield was directly involved in the creation of these shows or the in the decision to put them on the air. Littlefield tells the story of "Must See TV" through the voices of the participants themselves. The book is literally a series of quotes with very little in the way of narration from Littlefield himself. Littlefield calls it "oral history" format. If this book were a movie, it would be one of those "talking head" documentaries full of people talking. But, what a documentary it ...

Published by Random House Audio in 1999 Read by Anthony Heald Duration: 2 hours, 59 minutes. Abridged Probably no one, even George Lucas himself, knows more about the Star Wars universe than prolific author Michael A. Stackpole. He has authored comics and novels and helped to build the entire post- Return of the Jedi storyline. Isard's Revenge is set several years after the last movie. The New Republic (the government that took over from the  Rebel Alliance in Episodes IV, V and VI) is mopping up the various bits and pieces of what is left of the Empire. Several warlords have set themselves up here and there and the New Republic is negotiating or fighting with them.  In this storyline, a warlord named Ysanne Isard, the former Director of Imperial Intelligence, presumed defeated and dead, has returned. She has put together a rather complicated plot to draw Wedge Antilles (newly promoted to General by Admiral Ackbar) and his Rogue Squadron into a trap so she can wipe them ...

Published in 1992 by AvoNova (Avon Books) Tim Sullivan's Lords of Creation tries (and really tries hard) to pull together a whole lot of ideas and one really big one and put them all into a 242 page sci-fi paperback novel. It is set in the year 1999. Instead of a successful first Gulf War,  America gets bogged in a protracted fight that saps its political vitals at home. The Republicans work with a growing Christian Milleniallist movement who believe that the end of the world as we know it is coming and America should be prepared. A Department of Morality is developed and led by a preacher who attacks all of paleontology as "the work of Satan." Entire university departments are shut down due to a lack of funding and only amateur paleontologists can continue to dig. A fossil dig in Montana. Photo by SD Public Broadcasting One group of such amateurs are digging at a remote site in Montana when they find a odd metal box buried deep in a fossil bed, with the fossi...