DWD's Reviews

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Limited in 2016. Read by Mike Grady. Duration: 7 hours, 33 minutes. Unabridged. Peter Wohlleben is a forester in Germany, meaning that he manages a commercial forest in Germany. Even though he manages a commercial forest, he is a real fan of true "old growth" forests. Over the years he has gone out of his way to really study the way forests work as a complete unit.  In The Hidden Life of Trees , his observations and research combine to tell an active, but very slow story of trees. Compared to people, many trees live a much slower life (centuries vs. decades), but a forest of trees is more than just an accidental accumulation of trees whose seeds all landed in the same place.  In many ways, a healthy forest is a lot like a giant organism - it shores up its weak parts, it sustains itself, it is extraordinarily complicated and if one part is out of whack, the whole thing can suffer. Wohlleben explores these themes in some detail with a lot o...

  Published by Thomas Nelson in 2017. Read by Simon Bubb. Duration: 6 hours, 36 minutes. Unabridged. Dion Leonard is an ultramarathon runner. Ultramarathons are technically marathons that are longer than a traditional 26.2 mile marathon, but Dion Leonard likes to run extended multi-day ultramarathons. He was running a multi-day race in the Gobi Desert in China when he met a scruffy little dog as he was lining up to start day two of the race. To be accurate, the little dog was attracted to him - it wouldn't leave him alone! Gobi with Dion Leonard When the race started, Leonard assumed that the dog would follow for a while and then return home, wherever that was. But, the dog followed him every step of the way - 23 miles. That night, the dog stayed with Leonard in his tent and went with him again on the 3rd stage of the race. As they headed into the desert, Leonard worried that the dog could be hurt by the higher temperature more brutal landscape. So, he arranged for the dog to be ca...

  Published in 2020 by Workman Publishing. Read by Geoffrey Cantor. Duration: 7 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. Connor Towne O'Neill was attending the 50th anniversary recognition of the Selma to Montgomery March when he discovered something unexpected. The Selma to Montgomery march ended when Alabama State Troopers joined local deputies at the Edmund Pettus bridge and beat them until they retreated. The bridge is named for a Confederate General and a Grand Dragon of the Alabama KKK. O'Neill was looking for a place to park and drove into a graveyard. In the graveyard, he discovered a group prepping a part of the graveyard for the re-installation of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest (the original had been stolen) in the graveyard. It was on a piece of property owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the middle of the graveyard. O'Neill sensed that this was the more powerful story, no matter how dramatic that moment on the bridge had been 50 years earlier. He decide...

  Published in 2016 by Macmillan Audio. Read by the author, Giles Milton. Duration: 4 hours, 53 minutes. Unabridged. Giles Milton is a prolific British writer of histories and historical fiction. This is a collection of odd stories of history that he has run across doing his research. Lenin, preserved in his tomb.  He has gone from being an  object of reverence to a tourist attraction. There are the two stories mentioned in the title - Hitler using stimulants and Lenin's odd burial, but there are a lot more from several different time periods. The problem is that there were a lot of similar stories and some weren't really from "unknown" chapters. Lots of Nazi-related stories and three separate stories of cannibalism (a plane crash, a sailing ship caught in the duldrums and a prison escape in an isolated area). That's a lot of Nazis and cannibals for a 5 hour audiobook. I found this stories to be neither great nor bad and often repetitive. I rate it 3 stars out of...

  Originally Published in 1990 as part of the book Four Past Midnight . Audiobook published in 2016 by Simon and Schuster. Read by Willem Dafoe. Duration: 8 hours, 46 minutes. Unabridged. More than 30 years ago Stephen King released a collection of four large novellas (each was certainly large enough to be a stand-alone book) called Four Past Midnight . I snapped it up and read it right away because I was an avid fan of King's work at that time  and read everything of his as soon as it arrived in my local library.  I rem embered this story as one that I did not enjoy but I also remembered that they had made a mini-series based on this story so maybe I just missed something. After all, who puts money into making a mini-series based on junky source material? Simon and Schuster decided to start breaking up King's short story and novella collections into separate, smaller stories a few years back. When I found this audiobook for The Langoliers , I decided to listen to it this...

  Published in 2017 by HarperAudio. Read by Eva Kaminsky. Duration: 10 hours, 26 minutes. Unabridged. Brittle is a caretaker robot in a future United States.  Sort of. In Sea of Rust , the United States is dead and gone due to a war between humanity and its robot servants 30 years earlier. Robots were everywhere. They were maids, gardeners, factory workers, delivery drivers, lovers, nurses, nannies, cooks, wait staff and more. On top of that, Artificial Intelligence (AI) super computers were built to do the math and research that human beings struggled to grasp.  Humans struggled to deal with the concept of robots as thinking beings. The AI super computers were clearly smarter than any individual human and the robots clearly possessed an intelligence of their own, even if it wasn't exactly like human intelligence.  The author, C. Robert Cargill As humanity seemingly made a breakthrough in its acceptance of robots as possible equals, a shocking act of political violen...

  Published in 2020 by Random House Audio. Performed by multiple voice actors. Duration: 4 hours, 35 minutes. Unabridged. Set in the time between Star Wars: A New Hope (Episode IV) and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Episode V) , Doctor Aphra is the story of a rogue archaeologist who specializes in weapons of the past. It is based on a comic series. She doesn't collect them to stick them in a museum, she collects them to use them. She thinks an ancient weapon unused is a travesty, like an ancient symphony left unplayed. So, she specializes in tracking down weapons that were locked away and hidden so no one could get their hands on them. Her other skill is modifying ships and droids to make them effective weapons. While Dr. Aphra is looking for the operating system of a murderous protocol droid (he hates "organics" and loves to torture), she is captured by Darth Vader. Vader doesn't care about the droid software, but he does want to use Dr. Aphra's skills to ...

  Published in 2015 by Tantor Audio. Read by Joe Barrett. Duration: 8 hours, 36 minutes. Unabridged. Garbology is the study of garbage. Archaeologists use garbology to learn all about ancient societies - what they ate, their tools, their clothing, their toys, their technology, etc. You can also apply garbology to modern garbage dumps and Humes uses this as an entrance to discussing all sorts of issues about our modern world and our problem with waste. Humes figures that the average American is on pace to create more than one hundred tons of garbage per person per lifetime. This is higher than the estimates you usually find because those estimates don't include the waste created on your behalf by manufacturers and service providers. Garbology starts out very strong with a look at how landfills and trash removal have evolved over time. Sounds boring but I found it to be very interesting. Later, he moved on to pollution, especially ocean pollution and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch ...

  Published in 2021 by Grand Central Publishing. Read by the authors, Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar Duration: 5 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged. Amber Ruffin is a writer for Seth Meyers' late night show and she has a show on the Peacock streaming service. I have never watched her show (nothing against her - I just can't keep up with all of the platforms out there) but I have run across video clips on social media. Ruffin's style is very quick and very clever. In this book, she doesn't get into sexual topics or anything that a lot of people would find objectionable. Except for the racism. There is a lot of racism. Just tons of it. Amber Ruffin (left) and Lacey Lamar (right) Lamar and Ruffin are sisters. They grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. And, they are African Americans. Ruffin moved away to New York City and has made a living in comedy. Lamar stayed in Omaha and has worked in health care.  The premise of the book comes from Lacey Lamar's habit of texting Ruffin when she r...

  Published in 2020 by Random House Audio. Read by multiple readers (see text of review). Duration: 9 hours, 50 minutes. Unabridged. The premise for the novel Devolution is that a leader in the tech industry has built a completely new type of housing development in rural Washington state.  They are designed to use as little energy as possible, recycle the human waste and run on solar panels. The community is small and isolated - just a few homes in order to lessen the overall environmental impact. If you are old enough to remember the Mt. St. Helen eruption in 1980, in this novel, the same thing happens to Mt. Ranier. This is a complete possibility in real life and it is generally believed that the consequences would be much, much worse with Mt. Ranier. When Ranier erupts, this community is completely isolated by the chaos that follows. The government is doing the best it can, but this is a full-blown crisis and a few missing people in the woods (even if they are rich and con...

  Published by Random House Audio in 2011. Read by Dick Hill. Duration: 14 hours, 5 minutes. Unabridged Any fan of the Jack Reacher series knows that they are not written in chronological order. T he Affair is set in Reacher's later years in the Army. He is a major and, as fans know, he is part of the military police. Chronologically, it is set directly before the events of The Killing Floor , the first Jack Reacher book that was published. Jack Reacher has been sent to Mississippi as part of a two man team to investigate a murder of a young woman that took place outside of a military base. It is presumed that the murderer was a soldier on base, maybe even the captain of a team of Rangers that have been shuttling in and out of Kosovo on secret missions as part of the Balkan civil war that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia. That is a problem because this captain is very connected politically. His father is a U.S. Senator that is on the committee that helps set the military budget...

  Originally Published in 1960 by Louisiana State University Press. Five Civil War historians were asked to present papers at the Annual Civil War Conference at Gettysburg College. While these were all experts on the Civil War, each had a slightly different topic to create a more well-rounded discussion in Why the North Won the Civil War. The first essay, God and the Strongest Batallions by Richard N. Current, looks at economic factors that gave the North a decided advantage and how the North exploited them. It also looks at things the Confederacy failed to do to maximize their strengths. T. Harry Williams wrote the second essay. It is entitled The Military Leadership of North and South. Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) and Jefferson Davis (1808-1889) Norman A. Graebner's essay Northern Diplomacy and European Neutrality  actually looks at both Northern and Southern diplomatic efforts. This one interested me because it took a hard and sustained look at the responses of the governmen...

  Published in 2021 by HarperAudio. Read by Vikas Adam. Duration:  8 hours, 32 minutes. Unabridged. Day Zero is a book about Pounce, a top-level nannybot in an unspecified future time in the combined city of Dallas and Austin, Texas. The world is an unsettled place because robots like Pounce replaced people in all of the repetitive and unskilled jobs all over the world. But, those people didn't go anywhere, they are simply given a Universal Basic Income and left to live their lives without any sort of work. Some find productive ways to live their lives, some turn to drinking, drugs or even fringe political movements.  The author If you can imagine that Frosted Flakes' Tony the Tiger character as a robot, you get the idea behind Pounce. He was purchased to be the caregiver for an eight year old boy named Ezra.  Pounce works with Ezra's parents and the older housekeeper robot to help maintain a safe and supportive environment for Ezra. Pounce walks Ezra to and from sc...

Originally published in 2005 Published when Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) was 82, A Man Without a Country is a series of short essays from a man who is pretty embarrassed by his country with the election and re-election of George W. Bush - thus the title. (One can only imagine Kurt Vonnegut's reaction to the election of Trump!) But, very little of the book directly deals with politics. He wanders from topic to topic - this sounds like it should be a mess, but each of these essays flow right along, breaking every rule that your English teachers taught you about having a proper opening paragraph, a clearly stated thesis, etc.  But, then again, your English teacher wasn't Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut, by the way, strongly recommends against the use of semi-colons. I absolutely agree.  If you haven't read Vonnegut, brace yourself. He is angry, sarcastic, insightful and brilliant. He writes about a wide variety of topics. Some are dated, like the comments about the fights over placing t...

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2018. Only available in audiobook format. Read by the author, Michael Lewis. Duration: 0 hours, 54 minutes. Unabridged. Originally, Has Anyone Seen the President was originally written for Bloomberg View , the editorial/opinion site of Bloomberg News. Lewis went to Washington. D.C. during the run up to President Trump's "State of the Union Address". Lewis visits the press room in the White House, speaks with a former press secretary from the Obama Administration and visits with Trump advisor Steve Bannon. He also spends time with a former ethics official in the government who quit because President Trump and his administration openly flout the standards for ethics that were established in previous administrations (like divesting your portfolio of investments that could be a conflict of interest with your position in government). Finally, Lewis ends up watching the State of the Union with Steve Bannon in Bannon's home with runn...

  Published in 1951 by Random House. I n the 1950's and 1960's Random House created an extraordinary history series for children called Landmark Books. There were 122 books in the American history series and 63 in the World Landmark series. A very solid description of the series can be found here:  link . When I was a kid my little hometown library had what seemed like an endless shelf of these books (I even remember where it was in that little library nearly 40 years later). Undoubtedly, these books are part of the reason I am a history teacher. I have started a collection of these books. When I run across them at library sales and thrift sales I pick them up. Some of the texts have aged well, some have not. Custer's Last Stand  is aimed at students from 3rd to 8th grade. It is a simple read with line drawings. It could use a few more maps.   The history is basically accurate in the broad strokes, but it is full of "quotes" and scenes that never happened in order...

Published in 2020 by Random House Audio. Read by the author, Alicia Garza. Duration: 9 hours, 31 minutes. Unabridged. Alicia Garza is one of the founders of the organization Black Lives Matter .  This reader decided that he only had a superficial knowledge of the movement and wanted to learn more. The Purpose of Power seemed like a reasonable place to start. The first part of the book is basically a recounting of Garza's early life and her beginnings as a community organizer. This was quite enjoyable. Garza is a talented writer and she tells her story well. The author, Alicia Garza The middle part gets bogged down with some esoteric political movement talk. Lots of discussion over meanings of words like "intersectionality." I thought she made her point very clearly early on and kept on making it. This was clearly very important to the author, but the lay reader who is not heavily invested in the movement and its specific language would, like me, find this to be too much ...