DWD's Reviews

Middle of the Road Addition to the Series Published by Vision (Hatchette Book Group) in 2011 While I am a devoted and enthusiastic fan of Connelly's Harry Bosch series, I am merely a fan of the Mickey Haller Lincoln Lawyer series. On the whole, it just lacks the same brooding intensity of the Bosch series - that sense that the world is not right and Harry Bosch is on the case to sort out at least one little part of it. In The Fifth Witness , hot shot defense lawyer Mickey Haller has fallen on rough times during a recession and he is forced to take foreclosure defense cases to keep his practice healthy. Fortunately for Haller, the Los Angeles area has plenty of foreclosures and not all of them were done "by the book" so there is a way for a talented lawyer to earn a living. Michael Connelly When one of Haller's foreclosure clients is accused of killing the bank officer who has been in charge of foreclosing on her home. She loudly insists that she is innocen...

A Great Start to a New Civil War Trilogy Published by Ballantine Books in May of 2012 Jeff Shaara returns to the familiar topic of the Civil War after writing two books about the Revolutionary War, one book about the Mexican War, one book about World War I and four books about World War II. Fans of Jeff Shaara and his father Michael know that they have a special feel for the Civil War and this book shows that Jeff's talents as a writer have only grown. I don't know if Jeff Shaara could have written about just one battle (like his father did about Gettysburg in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Killer Angels ) when he wrote the first and third books that completed the Civil War trilogy about the war in the Eastern Theater. However, he pulls it off magnificently in A Blaze of Glory. Shaara notes in his introduction that his previous books focused on the generals and he has since learned the value of seeing the battle from multiple perspectives. He does it very well here...

To the center of the galaxy and back Re-published by Blackstone Audio in 2012. Read by Tom Weiner Duration: 7 hours, 59 minutes Unabridged First published in 1976, A World Out of Time is a grand adventure that literally follows its hero, Corbell,  across the galaxy and across three million years of time as he reacts to one twist after another that eventually finds him carrying the fate of the entire world on his shoulders. The story begins with Corbell being revived from being frozen in a cryogenic chamber almost 200 years after he had been frozen in the 1970s because he had in incurable form of cancer. He is not in his own body, however. The patterns of his mind have been recovered and scanned into the "mindwiped" empty brain of a criminal by a totalitarian government called "The State." The State controls the entire world and is interested in interplanetary travel. The great distances and times involved have compelled The State to revive some of the ...

This story comes to life in the audiobook. Published by Highbridge in 2012. Performed by Simon Vance. Duration: 7 hours, 27 minutes. "The story of this book...should come as no surprise to any who have read it." I'm going to be brutally honest here. I picked up The Aleppo Codex on a lark. I thought it sounded like it was going to be interesting but I have a little pile of audiobooks and this one was quickly heading to the bottom of the pile because I was having a serious case of buyer's remorse. It looked like a tedious bit of history and I was imagining a dry, boring lecture about an old book. I literally decided to listen to it just to get it out of the pile so I wouldn't have to dread listening to it any longer. Happily, I was very wrong about this book. In its roughest outline this is indeed a book about a very old book but it is much more than that. The story of the Aleppo Codex is told by Matti Friedman, an Israeli journalist through a variety o...

Great Escapist Fiction . Published in 2012 by NAL (New American Library) Linwood Barclay. I came across him almost by accident about 3 years ago and he is one of my favorite authors to go looking for. He doesn't write series (at least not anymore) so you can just jump in and go for a ride. His books feature regular guys who get stuck in an extraordinary circumstance not of their making. Linwood Barclay In Trust Your Eyes two grown brothers are re-united due to the death of their father. One of the brothers (Ray) is  a political cartoonist. The other, Thomas, has some sort of schizophrenia that keeps him housebound. To be honest, he seemed more autistic to me (as a teacher I have ran across enough students on the autistic spectrum to readily identify the behaviors) but that is neither here nor there. Thomas has an obsession - maps. He hangs them on the wall, he studies them, he memorizes them and he cruises the internet everyday looking at Whirl360, a website that...

A question of who will find whom first.  Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2012. Read by Armand Schultz Duration: 12 hours, 3 minutes. Brad Thor changes things up a bit for his long-running character Scot Harvath in this installment. Usually, Harvath is out in the world at large fighting international terrorists. Harvath's unique talents and dogged determination make him a very powerful weapon in the world of counter-terrorism. In Black List , Harvath and a member of the Athena team (the all female Delta Force-type unit) are attacked when entering a safe house in Paris, France. She dies and Harvath barely escapes. He uses his extensive contacts to work his way to safety and try to figure out how the safe house was compromised. As he tries to re-connect to his employer it dawns on him that his entire network of operatives is under attack - and this time the enemy is not a terrorist network. This time, the enemy is an American enemy and Harvath is coming home to ...

A Worthy (and Very Different) Follow-Up to Goldberg's Liberal Fascism Published by Sentinel HC in 2012 . Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism  is one of the most profound political books that I have read in my entire life. It changed my view of politics and made me focus a lot of thinking that I had been doing about the actions of government in our daily lives. So, four years later, I was pleased to hear that Goldberg had written another book. The Tyranny of Clichés is not as serious as Liberal Fascism , but it does a worthy job of going after lazy thinking in our political discourse. The book goes after shorthand, cliched arguments that people use to try to win (or not lose) political arguments. Take the phrase "Violence never solved anything." This is said by any number of people to protest a war or people having guns or things of that nature. I have a personal history of that story. I used to teach in a small high school with a very liberal English teacher wh...

Lots of Fun Published by HighBridge in 2012. Multicast Duration: about 1 hour. My family and I are avid fans of fairs and festivals. We like to wander around and experience the hullabaloo of all of the people, the noises of the midway, the incessant sales pitches of the guys trying to sell replacement windows or guttering and, of course, the animals. We just attended the Indiana State fair last weekend and spent an astounding 13 hours wandering around the giant circle of the fair (it is built around a one mile dirt track) seeing everything from Star Wars Stormtroopers to a petting zoo filled with week-old calves to a giant carving made of cheese (still being carved as we watched!). I learned about $261,000 John Deere Tractors, heard an acoustic blues band, bought a wallet, and saw a clown marching band performance - all before we hit the midway! So, when I found this little audiobook of stories collected from NPR over the years about fairs and festivals I knew this was right...

A Trip Down Memory Lane Published in 1961 by The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc Intended for upper elementary students. Thirty-five years ago books like Lew Wallace: Boy Writer filled my library's book shelves in Hope, Indiana and I went through them like a hot knife through butter. I am sure they are a big reason why I enjoy history so much today. I remember enthusiastically reading about the adventures of young Daniel Boone, Abraham Lincoln and even about Martha Washington and other "yucky" girls as I worked my way down the shelf. Union Major General Lew Wallace (1827-1905) I have next to my computer a 1961 hardback copy of Lew Wallace: Boy Writer, part of the Childhood of Famous Americans series .  As suggested by the series title Lew Wallace: Boy Writer focuses on the childhood of future the Civil War general, territorial governor of New Mexico (during the days of Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War) and author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ . It featur...

A Dual Biography of Sorts Published by National Geographic in 2012. Note: This is a YA book aimed at 5th graders and above. This adult enjoyed the book also. From time to time the dual biography comes back into vogue. Dual biographies are a great way to compare and contrast two people's lives and, in this case, this style is used to compare and contrast two different organizations: The Ku Klux Klan and Superman, Inc. and see how these two radically different groups interacted. There is, of course, so such thing as Superman, Inc. - I made that up. Superman is owned by D.C. Comics, but there are people who make all sorts of decisions on how to present Superman. What will he stand for and stand against? What will the next comic be like? How about the next movie? Superman Versus the Ku Klux Klan   tells the story of the creation of Superman (and the two young Jewish boys from Ohio who created him) and how Superman quickly caught on once a publisher finally took him on in 1938. ...

Easy to love and easy to hate Published by Simon and Schuster Audioworks in 1987. Performed by Robert Vaughn Duration: 3 hours Abridged Note: The 2007 re-release of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls clocks in at just over 13.5 hours, so this  3-hour-long 1987 abridgment is undoubtedly heavily abridged, even considering that acclaimed actor Robert Vaughn is a relatively quick reader. Books like The Cat Who Walks Through Walls are hard to describe and easy to love and hate. This is a soaring piece of fiction that takes the listener into a fully-developed world that has enough internal coherence and relationship to our current world that the reader can feel comfortable (there are Volvo vehicles, they stop at a Sears store, etc.) On the other hand, the action is frenetic to the point of chaos (this may be due to the abridgment, but upon reading an online summary, it may not) and the interaction of the characters is often witty but unrealistic to the point of being laughab...

Three stories in one: A biography, a mystery and an adventure Published in 2012 by Regnery History The USS Grunion was a top of the line submarine for the U.S. Navy in 1942. Literally, the fastest submarine in the fleet and outfitted with the latest in torpedo technology (magnet activated designed to go off near ships) and led by the highly-respected Lieutenant Commander Jim Abele, the USS Grunion was sent to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska to harass Japanese supply ships (for those who did not know, Japanese forces held parts of the Aleutian Islands for a little more than in a year from 1942 to 1943). The USS Grunion performed well, sinking two Japanese submarines and damaging a freighter despite problems with the torpedoes. What the crew of the USS Grunion did not know was that these advanced torpedoes did not work like they were supposed to. They did not track well towards their targets (although the magnetic trigger, called a magnetic pistol, was sup...

A Nifty Little Biography Published by Thomas Nelson in 2012. Jackson: The Iron-Willed Commander   is a welcome addition to a larger series called The Generals that offers relatively short biographies (about 200 pages) of America's better-known generals. This book is by no means the definitive biography of Andrew Jackson, but it is great introduction to this controversial man. Andrew Jackson lived most of his life on the American frontier. His most famous battle was, of course, the Battle of New Orleans in the last moments of the War of 1812 (technically, it took place after the treaty was signed) but by that time Jackson was a veteran of many battles. He had already fought the British in two wars, skirmished with the Spanish several times and was involved in multiple frontier wars with Native Americans. Throw in Jackson's willingness to duel and one quickly realizes that Jackson thrived on action and danger. A great deal of his life seems to be consumed by organizing for...

Four Classic Essays By a Noted Historian Collection published by Penguin Classics in 2008. The Significance of the Frontier in American History is a collection of four essays written by noted historian Frederick Jackson Turner from 1893 to 1910. Penguin Classics has re-issued these essays as part of its Great Ideas series. Frederick Jackson Turner is featured in just about every U.S. History textbook for his essay  The Significance of the Frontier in American History , written in 1893. I am embarrassed note that I had never read this classic essay until I read this collection, although I was familiar with its basic thesis. In this essay Turner notes that the 1890 census determined that as of 1890 there was no longer a definable "frontier." He asserts that this is the beginning of something new for the United States as it has always been defined by its (usually) westward boundary. Turner notes that the Western settlers came from all parts of the easte...

Lots of plot threads eventually tie together Published by HarperAudio in 2012. Performed by Jonathan Davis. Duration: 9 hours, 38 minutes. 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 sets up things e...