DWD's Reviews

Museums, parking duty, and the point of it all. This book was originally published in 2017 by Abingdon Press. I had a week off of school for fall break last week. During that week I had three experiences of a religious bent (beyond my weekly church attendance): 1) I read Living for Another: More of Others, Less of You , 2) I helped park cars for my church's annual "Trunk or Treat" that we host for the community, 3) I visited the Creation Museum in Kentucky. I listed the activities in this order because that is the order of importance on a spiritual level. The Creation Museum is an impressive and beautiful 75,000 square foot facility that, to me, is just the wrong approach to Christianity. It is so bent on proving that every little sentence fragment in Genesis is accurate that it almost entirely misses the point of Christianity. I felt no love or comfort there. It reminded me of the passage from 1 Kings Chapter 19: " 11-12  Then he was told, “Go, stand on the mou...

Published in May of 2018 by Macmillan Audio. Duration: 6 hours, 58 minutes. Read by Holter Graham. Unabridged. A.D. Jameson is a student of cinema - not just science fiction and fantasy movies, but of cinema in general. I used the word "student" in the previous sentence carefully because he is not just a fan of movies, he studies the directors, the movements and the ideas behind the movies. Photo by DWD But, he is also a proud geek - a fan of sci-fi and fantasy literature and movies. Like me, he was really into those genres in middle and high school, moved away from them for a while during and after college and then came back to them in a big way when the Star Wars "Special Edition" movies were released. My own children do not believe me, but there was once a time when the mere sight of a Star Wars t-shirt or bumper sticker was worthy of comment. Now, they are everywhere. My family probably owns more than 20 Star Wars -related t-shirts alone. A.D. Jameson...

First published in 1999. Tripwire is the third book in publishing order in the Jack Reacher series (the sixth in chronological order - as of right now). Jack Reacher starts out in the Florida Keys. He is digging swimming pools by hand during the day, working as a bouncer in a strip club at night and drinking lots of bottled water. It is mindless work, but he is getting enjoying that aspect of it. Then, a man from New York City comes to the bar where he is drinking a bottled water and asks if anyone knows Jack Reacher. Reacher lies and says he never heard of the guy. Composition with Red Blue and Yellow  by Piet Mondrian. Reacher's favorite piece of art, according to this novel. Two more guys from New York City find Reacher at the strip club. They are different than the first guy - pushier and rougher.  Reacher has to get physical with them. When he finds the first guy dead on the street, he decides to head off to New York City to see if he can figure out who is looking for hi...

Published by Dreamscape Media in 2014. Read by George Newbern. Duration: 9 hours, 9 minutes. Unabridged. Ove (pronounced ooo-vah) is a 59 year old grump in Sweden. His wife has passed away, he has no children, no pets and no job since he has been forced to retire. He keeps himself busy by keeping an eye on the neighborhood - he yells at the neighbor lady that lets her dog pee in front of his house, he yells at people who drive through the neighborhood (it has a parking area so that the entire area is pedestrian friendly), he yells at bureaucrats, bad drivers, hipsters, immigrants and...well, he just yells. Ove has determined that the best thing about his life left when his wife passed away. He was filling in that hole in his life, at least a bit, with his work. But, since his forced retirement, he has nothing. So, he is planning his suicide to join his wife. Then, a tough old homeless cat shows up. After that, a hipster father with an immigrant wife and two little girls moves in acr...

Originally published in 1960. New translation published in 2006. Read by George Guidall. Duration: 4 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel's famed book Night is a standard, perhaps THE standard, that all Holocaust literature is judged by. Originally, this was written as an immense memoir in Yiddish, but during the process of translating the book to French, it was pared down to about one-fifth of its original size. The paring down resulted in a more literary work - a work that feels almost fictional because it is so selective as it tells the true story of how Elie Wiesel's childhood, his family, his community and his religious faith was destroyed by the Nazis. Slave Laborers liberated by U.S. Army soldiers under the command of General Patton. Photo taken by Private H. Miller. Wiesel is in the picture. He is on the second row from the floor, the seventh prisoner from the left (by the post) The book begins with his little Jewish neighborhood ...

Originally published in 2003. The most likely candidate to win the presidency is an Oregon Senator. He has a winning public personae, but he is a violent, horrible man in reality. He beats a high end prostitute to death simply because he enjoys inflicting violence. His people cover it up. Everyone is shocked when this Senator is found beaten to death. It looks like the prostitute's pimp killed him. When the pimp kills his court-appointed attorney in the lock up, no one will defend him until Amanda Jaffe is convinced to do it. Once Amanda starts her investigation, it turns out that things are a lot worse than she thought... I almost stopped reading this book after the first 50 pages or so. There are very few likable characters anywhere in this book. Everyone seems to be outright evil or compromised.  The only real positive was that the horrible Senator character died a violent death. Let's face it, that's not much of a positive. But, I stuck with it and, eventually, this boo...

Published in 2008 by HarperAudio. Read by Simon Jones. Duration: 7 hours, 22 minutes. Unabridged. Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist. Predictably Irrational looks at the assumption made by economists that people make rational decisions based on their input. Ariely delights in pointing out that oftentimes we don't make rational choices - we make irrational ones and we keep making the same types of irrational choices time after time after time. For example, if you own a restaurant and you want to sell more of your most expensive dish, all you have to do is place an even more expensive meal on the menu. It could be that no one will ever buy that most expensive meal, but they will buy more of what used to be the most expensive meal because it now looks like a comparative bargain. I enjoyed the commentary on the old marketing campaign called The Pepsi Challenge . In blind taste tests, Pepsi beat Coca-Cola by a wide margin. But, when the taste testers could see the cans of soda, Coc...

Published by Broadside Books (a division of HarperCollins) in 2013. Daniel Hannan is a prominent Conservative Party author and politician in the UK. His book Inventing Freedom  is a celebration of the political ideas that are the foundation of what he calls the "Anglosphere". Hannan's thesis is that the idea of government based on an evolving body of law (he probably would hate the fact that I used the word evolving, but that is what the English Common Law is) that values the rights of the individual before the rights of the state and its leaders is an English invention that has spread and amplified throughout the "Anglosphere". This type of government encourages capitalism due to its influence on the individual. The Anglosphere  consists of The United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, other former British colonies that comprise the Commonwealth . These include Kenya, South Africa, India and dozens of more countries. The ...

Published by Disney in 2018. Read by Tom Taylorson. Duration: 10 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. Thanos: Titan Consumed is a prequel to the record-breaking  Marvel Cinematic Universe's Infinity War  movies, telling the early life story of the villain - Thanos. The story starts with the birth of Thanos on the planet Titan. Thanos is born deformed. His face is deformed, he is freakishly large and he is purple on a planet where people are born all sorts of colors, but not purple. Purple is the color of death. And so starts the tragic story of Thanos... Well, it's sort of tragic. Thanos has a horrible early life but he is pretty horrible in his own ways, even without external prompting. The author, Barry Lyga does a commendable job of breathing life into this story and making Thanos a character that the reader alternately hates and pities. The journey from Thanos: the scorned child to Thanos: the Mad Titan and Destroyer of Worlds makes sense in this telling. I found myself wishi...

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in July of 2019. Read by Kristin Millward. Duration: 7 hours, 15 minutes. Unabridged. Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, a Norwegian ecologist, specializing in insects, has written an interesting, often funny and thought-provoking introduction to the world of insects with Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects . She gives the reader lots of interesting trivia, such as the story of male bugs that die at the climactic moment of mating due to their genitals exploding. She also tells of plants that trick dung beetles into planting their stinky seeds for them, the importance of wood beetles to keeping soil nitrogen-rich and the super-long (and boring) lives of the 17-year cicada. None of these insects gets an in-depth look because this book is an introduction because you can't seriously expect any book to cover the hundreds of thousands of species of insects in any sort of depth She looks at how insects could be helpful in the fight against pollution and cou...

Published in 2018 by Tor. In Head On , a near-future sci-fi novel, a horrible disease called Haden's Syndrome has struck, leaving many people stuck in bodies that simply won't obey the commands of their brains. The response was a technological blitz that created an online world for these people (called Hedens) accessed by a technological interface. Later, these interfaces were used to control androids called "threeps" to walk around in the real world. They can actually feel what the android feels. And, someone figured out how to turn this into a sporting event. Two teams of threeps carrying medieval weapons line up on a football field. On each team one person is "it". The other team is supposed to go after the threep who is it, bash or cut his/her head off, pick it up and get it to the end zone for a score. It has all of the violence with none of the real world consequences because the threep pilot cannot be hurt by this. Until one of the threep pilots dies,...

Published in 2015 by GraphicAudio. Performed by a multicast. Duration: 5 hours, 35 minutes. Unabridged. Set in the days after the conclusion of the superhero Civil War , this book deals with the aftermath of the assassination of Steve Rogers (aka Captain America) on his way to a courthouse to face a judge for not complying with a superhero registration policy. If you are only familiar with the Marvel movie Captain America: Civil War, this movie will be confusing. The movie is inspired by this comic book series, but does not follow it. The superhero world (and the regular people, too) is mourning the murder of Captain America. In particular, Bucky Barnes (aka The Winter Soldier) is on the hunt for the killer. He is not alone. Falcon, Black Widow, Nick Fury and Sharon Carter are also looking. Turns out that even though Captain America is gone, many of his oldest enemies are still on the prowl... I really enjoyed Civil War , but the follow up was just so-so. The big plot from the bad guys...

Published in 2018 by Simon and Schuster Audio Read by Beau Bridges. David Morse, Richard Thomas, Jay O. Sanders and the author. Duration: 18 hours, 5 minutes. Unabridged. Doris Kearns Goodwin often is labeled with the title "presidential historian" and, really, that is a pretty accurate term for her. As a young historian, she worked personally with Lyndon Johnson on his presidential memoirs. She has written about both Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Her book Team of Rivals is a modern classic and has redefined the popular image of the Lincoln administration. In Leadership: In Turbulent Times , she looks at various qualities of leadership that each of these very different men exhibited. She begins with interesting pre-presidential biographies of each of these men. She focuses on Lincoln's expressed desire to become a person that was worthy of the esteem of his community. Theodore Roosevelt's ceaseless energy and desire to experience new things le...

Published by Indiana University Press in 2000. Russell F. Weigley (1930-2004) was a professor of military history at Temple University for 36 years. He wrote a whole bookshelf full of military histories, but only one book that focused exclusively on the Civil War (however, he was working on a multi-volume study of Gettysburg when he passed away).  A Great Civil War is an excellent single volume history of the Civil War saddled with an unfortunate piece of art done in American primitive style that makes it look like it was illustrated by the author's elementary school-aged great-grandchild. I know you aren't supposed to judge a book by its cover, but this cover makes the book look like a children's book. This is far from a children's book.  No more than a page or two is spent on the issues that brought on the war and no more than a page is spent of Reconstruction, but t his is a Civil War history for people who have read a lot of Civil War histories. It tells the s...

Published in 2010 by Random House Audio. Read by Dick Hill. Duration: 13 hours, 45 minutes. Unabridged. Fresh off of the action in 61 Hours , Jack Reacher is hitching his way to Virginia. He is nursing his injuries from that adventure and has made it from South Dakota to a lonely hotel in rural Nebraska. The action in Worth Dying For starts with Reacher drinking coffee at the hotel bar. A drunk patron gets a call. Turns out he's also the local doctor and a local woman called to help her treat a bloody nose that won't stop bleeding. Reacher shames him into going to treat the woman. Reacher suspects she's a victim of spousal abuse and it turns out he's correct. The doctor has been told not to treat her by her husband's family. They rule the area with an iron fist and maintain a crew of 10 former Nebraska Cornhusker college football players to make sure no one steps out of line. Reacher steps out of line, though. He tracks down the abused woman's husband, takes ou...

Published by Disney in May of 2018. Read by Tom Taylorson. Duration: 4 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. Brandon T. Snider was stuck in a hard place when he was picked to write this book. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) had just released Infinity War and there was no way that Snider was going to be allowed to release any spoilers for Endgame . In fact, there was really no way that he was going to be allowed to move anything forward in any meaningful way. The ABC TV show AGENTS of SHIELD has been dealing with this problem for years - how do you tell an interesting story when you are so constricted in what you can write about? Well, in this case, he pretty much failed. The story centers around two brothers who are MCU characters. No, not Loki and Thor. They are the Collector (featured in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie and played by Benicio del Toro) and the Grandmaster (featured in Thor: Ragnarok and played by Jeff Goldblum). The book is set after Thor: Ragnarok  and be...

Published in 2017 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by Robin Miles. Duration: 6 hours, 45 minutes. Unabridged. Never Caught is the story of Ona Judge. Ona (Oney) Judge was Martha Washington's personal body servant - the person that brushed her hair, sewed her clothing and generally made sure she was taken care of as she went through her day. The Washingtons were living in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of government for the fledgling United States while Washington, D.C. was being designed and laid out. The problem with Philadelphia (for the Washingtons) is that it was in the middle of a change. Pennsylvania had been a slave state, but it was becoming a free state. In fact, Pennsylvania was taking the first steps towards becoming an abolitionist stronghold. Technically, the Washingtons could keep their slaves, but after six continuous months of residence in Philadelphia they were technically allowed to start the process to become free people. George Washington and his lawyers ...

Published by Brilliance Audio in 2015. Read by James Patrick Cronin. Duration: 11 hours, 54 minutes. Unabridged. Gibson Vaughn is an unemployed computer whiz. This former Marine was a world-class hacker before he went into the Marine Corps. It would be more accurate to say that he was forced into the Marine Corps because he hacked into a Senator's computer and found documents showing that he was stealing his own campaign funds. But, it turns out that he wasn't and Vaughn was giving the choice of prison or the Marines. The problem is, now that Vaughn is back in the civilian world the former Senator (now Vice President and leading candidate for President) has blacklisted him. Vaughn gets a job offer that he can't turn down - a chance to use his computer skills to act on a new clue to find a girl who was abducted 10 years ago. But, there is a complication - this girl is the daughter of the Senator that he hacked... The Short Drop has a complicated plot, but it flows well a...

Published in 2018 by Beacon Press. Read by Amy Landon. Duration: 6 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged. Robin DiAngelo is a diversity trainer. She also happens to be white. She has noticed that it is very common for white participants to react very negatively during these training sessions, often acting very defensively and offering a lot of excuses. In this book, she looks at those excuses and lays out the refutations of those excuses. The good: White Fragility offers a very useful definition of racism. Hint: it is not just people acting horribly to other groups of people, it is a whole cultural system that we absorb. It also offers some practical advice about how to deal with your own prejudices. The bad: White Fragility is a repetitive book. It could have easily been edited down by one-third without a loss of any new material. Another weakness is that it doesn't really offer a list of common racist behaviors that people complain about. For example, I have heard African-Americ...