DWD's Reviews

Published in 2019 by HarperAudio. Read by Eric Jason Martin and Jeff Harding. Duration: 2 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. The title says this is a short story, but the print version of Cleaning the Gold is 129 pages and I would call that a novella. Karin Slaughter's Will Trent character works with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He is working on a cold case murder based on the activities of the very first Jack Reacher novel, The Killing Floor . Trent is looking for Jack Reacher based on a 20 year old DNA sample. Reacher is working in Fort Knox and Trent assumes an undercover identity to Pallets of gold in Fort Knox - they are featured in the audiobook. find him... The book is all written in third person with Slaughter writing the Will Trent sections and Child writing the Reacher sections. Lee Child is one of my favorites, but Karin Slaughter is certainly not. In fact, she's one of the few authors I refuse to read any longer. Just to compare, including this review I have...

Published in 1999 by Wiley and Sons. Roger Mudd, formerly of CBS and NBC news, interviewed five historians about their special topics of expertise. They are all solid interviews that allow the historians to tell why their topics are important. Mudd does a great job of letting the interviews flow along a natural conversational path, but he does interrupt with questions that ask for clarification or challenge a point. The historians are: Gordon Wood discussing the American Revolution; James McPherson discussing the Civil War; Richard White discussing Westward Expansion; David McCullough discussing the Industrial Era; and Stephen Ambrose discussing World War II/Eisenhower/Nixon. This was a lot like sitting down with a talented professor in a coffee shop and letting him/her go on about their favorite topic. They weren't lectures, but more like a conversation. I know the work of four of these five historians and have read quite a bit of McCullough, Ambrose and McPherson. McPherson is my...

Published in 2010 by Virago Press. Natasha Walter is an English feminist who is looking at how modern culture treats women. She has two main points in Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism . I will reverse the order of their presentation in my review. Her second main point is the new belief in biological determinism, meaning men and women have areas that they are naturally better at - and that fact overrides everything. She notes that the scientific studies that this belief is based on have never really The author, Natasha Walter been scientifically proven, meaning that they were limited and not replicated on a regular basis. Some have never been replicated even once. The danger is that people just assume things like "girls aren't good at math" and "men can't take care of babies or children" and they become reality. I see it in the classroom all the time - parents tell their kid they struggled with a certain class and they understand if the kid struggles ...

Originally published in 1961. According to the price tag on this book, I picked it up at a souvenir store in The Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I couldn't tell you when for sure, but my best guess is that it was about 45 years ago. This is a small book, almost like a large children's book, so it just moved along with me wherever I went and I never read it until now. The cover of the book is deceiving. The cover looks like it was written for small children (that is most certainly how I acquired it) but the pictures in the book are much more detailed and complicated, much more like those found in an old-fashioned encyclopedia or an old-style museum. The text is certainly not written for small children, although it does have a slightly paternalistic tone. It feels dated. The one really strong feature to this book is a seven page testimony about the Trail of Tears from Private John Burnett. Burnett was ordered to accompany the Cherokee because he could speak their language....

Originally published in 2003. Note: Lee Child wrote his books out of chronological order. In chronological order, this would be book #10. This book starts out with a very different sort of introduction. I don't want to spoil it so I will skip ahead a bit. Reacher is out to get a man who he thought he killed years before. He has some sort of business arrangement with a family with underworld connections in Maine that lives in a castle-like mansion on the coast. Reacher works his way inside the organization and waits for his opportunity. Also, he is on the lookout for a missing DEA agent who is thought to have been kidnapped by the organization and is being held somewhere. Reacher is not sure who he can trust as he tries to figure out what is really going on... This story is more complicated than most Reacher stories. The action is ridiculous, as always - but that's one of the reasons you read a Jack Reacher book. I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.co...

Published by Kobo Originals in 2018. Read by Meegwun Fairweather. Duration: 7 hours, 11 minutes. Unabridged. In The Marrow Thieves , it is the latter half of the 21st century and the world has had a series of literal upheavals. Earthquakes sheared off California, global warming has changed the weather. Droughts occur in former wet spaces and dry places have become swamps. Sea levels have risen and drowned out many cities. Many animal species have died off and others are in severe decline. On top of that, the nations of the world have gone to war and most cities were destroyed, people have fled to the remaining cities. The entire world map has been re-drawn. In the future there is also another problem. Almost everyone in the world has The author, Cherie Dimaline. lost the ability to dream. Everybody except the indigenous population of the Americas - Native Americans. However, their bone marrow can be harvested for a substance that lets other people dream. The government and the Ca...

Published by Listening Library in 2019. Read by Andrew Elden. Duration: 7 hours, 28 minutes. Unabridged. Set in modern America, Matt de la Peña's Superman: Dawnbreaker: DC Icons delivers a traditional Superman origin story with a little bit of a twist. This book follows along the line of the Smallville TV show, with Metropolis being within driving distance of Superman's Kansas hometown instead of basically being a stand-in for New York City. Big things are going on in Smallville. A tech firm has moved in, bringing in lots of jobs and a new corporate headquarters. They also are buying up farm land. And, a new smaller company has come in as well. Also, LexCorp is sniffing around. Smallville is considering passing a law requiring people suspected of being illegal immigrants (there is a burgeoning Hispanic population who serve as farm workers and work in a meat processing plant) to produce papers on sight and Hispanic men are disappearing. Clark Kent has always been amazingl...

Originally published on paper in 1997 by Scholastic. Originally published as an audiobook in 1999. Published in 2015 by Pottermore. Read by Jim Dale. Duration: 8 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged. Truth time. This was my first time with the book form of Harry Potter. I'd seen the first movie and maybe the second, but never actually read or listened to any of them. This is a big deal for me because I am generally a fan of the wonderful world of nerd stuff.  I will dispense with the plot stuff since just about everybody, even me, knew the bare outline - orphaned wizard boy with no friends and hated by his relatives that took him in, special magic school, Quidditch, and a creepy bad guy that killed the boy's parents. So, what did I think? This book is so adored and so talked up that it couldn't possibly live up to the hype. But, I liked it. I am looking forward to the other books. It is my understanding that they get more complicated and I certainly don't know the plots of...

Published by HarperAudio in 2016. Read by Charlie Anson. Duration: 9 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged. Ed Yong takes his readers (or, in my case, listener) into the tiny world of microbes in I Contain Multitudes . Traditionally, we think of microbes as tiny invaders that make us sick and, as I sit at home after yet another day of social distancing, it is easy to see it that way. But, Yong takes us into a more complicated world. A world where microbes actually benefit their larger hosts - where microbes can help produce scents or colors for attracting a mate, help guts break down leaves or nuts and even help their hosts survive poisons. In many cases, these microbes and their hosts co-evolved and have become dependent on one another. They have created their own microbiome. But, it's not that simple, either. Sometimes the microbes affect their host's behavior - and not in a good way. They can turn insects into virtual zombies, they can make mice hyperactive or depressed. They can ev...

Published by Annick Press in 2019. Read by the author, Michael McCreary. Duration: 3 hours, 37 minutes. Unabridged. Michael McCreary is a pretty unique thing in this world - a stand-up comic who is on the autistic spectrum. He uses the word Asperger's to describe himself in promotional materials. But, one of McCreary's points in this book and in his shows is that he is not all that unique. People on the autistic spectrum are not necessarily like the Dustin Hoffman character in Rain Man . McCreary cautions his readers not to assume too much and think that everyone is on the autistic spectrum. He has compulsive behaviors that are more than the average person would experience. McCreary has some genuinely funny moments in Funny, You Don't Look Autistic , but for me I got the most out of this as a teacher. It is not unusual to have students on the spectrum in my classes, and listening to this very self-aware talkative former student talk about his experiences shed a little ligh...

Published in 2007 by Scholastic Nonfiction. Suggested for readers grades 9-12 . I've read my fair share of articles about the lost colony of Roanoke. They all have a similar story line. They tell the story from the colonists' point of view. And why wouldn't you tell it that way? It's a compelling story when it is told that way. Roanoke: The Mystery of the Lost Colony comes at this story differently - it incorporates the court politics back in England and the mixed motivations for creating the coloy in the first place. If you are not familiar with the story. Roanoke was England's first serious attempt to put a colony in the New World. It originally had a duel purpose. The first was simple enough. Sir Walter Raleigh had legal claim to the land as part of an inheritance, but only if he could establish a permanent colony on it by 1591. It was an immense piece of property, if he could keep it. It would have included all of the North American coast north of Spanish Fl...

Published in 2003. Originally published about 440 B.C. Herodotus, if you don't know, is widely considered to be the West's first historian. He investigated and wrote about the rise of the Persian Empire and the Greco-Persian wars that came as a result of a struggle over Hellenic city-states on the Mediterranean coast of modern-day Turkey. Persia took them over and Athens inspired them to rebel, only to be re-conquered. After that Persia led three separate invasions of modern-day Greece by land and by sea, taking Athens twice but eventually being defeated all three times. Herodotus (484-425 B.C.) There are many familiar stories in Herodotus: On the War for Greek Freedom , including the Battle of Marathon (the inspiration of our modern marathon run because a soldier ran the 26.2 miles from the battle to Athens to tell the results of the battle and then died) and the Battle of Thermopylae where the 300 Spartans held off a massive Persian army. Herodotus also attempts et...

Published by Penguin Audio in 2019. Read by the author, Timothy Egan. Duration: 12 hours, 42 minutes. Unabridged. At the beginning of this pilgrimage, author Timothy Egan describes himself as a lapsed Catholic, perhaps even an agnostic. He was raised Catholic in Washington State and decided to go on a long-established pilgrimage route called the Via Francigena to contemplate his faith and how the church has betrayed its own faithful with the ongoing sexual abuse scandal. The Via Francigena runs from the cathedral at Canterbury in England, through France and Switzerland into Italy and ends in Rome at the Vatican. It is one of the most established pilgrimage routes in Europe, but not as well known as the Pilgrimage of Compostela in Spain.  Egan gives the listener little history lessons as he tells the story of his own pilgrimage through Europe. Those are usually interesting and informative. He tells his thoughts about faith and Christianity as he travels as well. When possible,...

Originally published in 1982. Published in 2010 by Simon and Schuster. Read by Kevin Kenerly. Duration: 7 hours, 42 minutes. Unabridged. Stephen King's long and storied career is legendary. At this point, he has 61 novels, including 7 written under the pen name Richard Bachman. At first, he wrote books under the Bachman pen name because the publishing industry had a rule of thumb - no more than one book per year per author. Clearly, with a prolific author like Stephen King that rule would be problematic. This edition of The Running Man includes an essay by Stephen King that talks about Richard Bachman and his relationship with his pen name. The Bachman books have a darker tone than the Stephen King books by design. The Running Man has a particularly dark tone. Set in 2025 in an alternate history (even though it was written in 1982, it refers to things in 1978 that did not happen) in which America has become a corporate oligarchy. The economy is ruled by a company called Genera...

Originally published in 1994. Joseph F. Girzone (1930-2015) discusses faith, prayer and God in this short book. Girzone is best known for his book Joshua , a powerful and effective re-telling of the Jesus story in the modern world. NEVER ALONE: A PERSONAL WAY to GOD is a pleasant read, but it doesn't deliver the emotional impact of Joshua . For me, the strongest part of the book was his discussion of how the modern church is great on staking out positions on social issues, but they miss "...the fundamental purpose of religion, to foster and mold spirituality among its members..." and "...to teach their people the ways of prayer and how to develop a deeper intimacy with God." (p. 8) He continues, "We are brought up to follow unquestioningly the practices of our religion, whatever our denomination." This has value, but too often we "...are not familiar with the message as Jesus delivered it." Following the practices of a religion are a ...

Published in 1973. I n 1973, undoubtedly to prepare for the upcoming 1976 bicentennial of the American Declaration of Independence, BBC reporter and author Alistair Cooke released a book and a television mini-series telling the history of the United States to the U.K. The book and the series came to America as well with the book selling nearly 2 million copies. This massive "coffee table" type book has 393 pages and weighs in at 3 pounds, 9 ounces (compare that to a random paperback book I weighed at just 5 ounces). Photo by Lewis Hine Cooke presents a straight-forward history of America, skimming over lots of details but getting the highlights. This has to be the case when you cover more than nearly 500 years of history in less than 400 pages. He focuses half of the book on the exploration/colonial/Revolutionary War/Constitutional era and it is by far the strongest part of the book. This book is filled with beautiful, sometimes profound photographs. On pages 312-313 ...

Published by Penguin Audio in 2019. Read by Will Damron. Duration: 10 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. In Range David Epstein presents a strong argument that lateral thinkers (people that know a little about a lot of things) are stronger members of a team than the experts that know a whole lot about a narrow subject. He also argues that people who pick a specialty later in life have a wider perspective on things and can bring fresh ideas into a stale discussion. I literally have no problems with anything he says in this book, but I did find the book to be poorly put together. It just rambles along from one (usually, but not always) interesting topic to another and makes all of them about 30% too long.  So, I am going to rate this book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  RANGE: WHY GENERALISTS TRIUMPH in a SPECIALIZED WORLD . 

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2016. Read by Andrew Elden. Duration: 7 hours, 44 minutes. Unabridged. In 2012, Ken Ilgunas embarked on a 1,900 mile hike from the beginning of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline in Alberta, Canada to its terminus on the Gulf Coast of Texas.  He did this because he is opposed to the pipeline and is very concerned about the expanded use of fossil fuels, the environmental damage caused by the mining of oil sands and the potential for spillage from the pipeline. Along the way, he blogs about his experiences with his iPad in the hopes of creating a little buzz about the topic. He was inspired to do this by a series of conversations he and a friend had during a stint in the kitchen at a Prudhoe Bay oil drilling site. They were going to hike the entire length together, but his friend begged off and fell into a support role, occasionally mailing him food and replacement pieces of equipment and boots (he went through 3 pairs of boots on this hike). Ilgun...

Originally published in 2001. The greatest argument among people who study the Civil War isn't who was the best general or what would have happened if Lincoln hadn't have been assassinated or even what would have happened if the Union had lost at Gettysburg. No, the greatest argument is this: What caused the Civil War? For the better part of the last century, the argument has been that the Confederacy seceded in order to protect "their rights". The counter-argument has always been to protect "the right to do what?" For me, the answer has always been a simple one - they fought for their right to own people and to keep African Americans at the bottom of the heap in Southern society. For the Confederate States of America, slavery was the reason to fight. For the Union army, maintaining the Union, with or without slavery, was the reason to fight - a goal claimed many times by Lincoln himself.  There will be arguments that claim that Confederate states secede...