DWD's Reviews

A competent, but not great audiobook Published in 1999 by HarperAudio Abridged audiobook Format: Cassette Duration: Approximately 3 hours Read by Bruce Harwood Bruce Harwood I heard  Skin as an abridged audiobook. It was narrated by Bruce Harwood, who portrays the most 'normal' of the conspiracy-addicted threesome known as 'the Lone Gunmen' on the X-Files TV show. Harwood does a competent, but ultimately uninspiring job of narrating the story. In fact, this is also a decent description of the book as a whole. It is okay, but not great. The characters act like they are supposed to, but those wry comments from Fox are mostly non-existent and Scully is just not quite right throughout most of the book. I am sure that the abridgment is at least partially to blame. The unabridged version is 8 and 1/2 hours. This one clocks in at three hours. Something had to give and it sounds like this one gave away its personality. The plot itself was okay. The e...

My opinion is all over the place with this movie Originally released in 1977. Another reviewer described  Wizards accurately when he said it was "a weird, horrible, funny, enthralling cartoon movie". That is dead on. The animation is both bad and wonderful. The plot is epic, wonderful and poorly thought out and petty. Ralph Bakshi So, here are some random thoughts:  The animation: I LOVE the fact that Bakshi used a variety of animation styles and techniques. It made the movie visually interesting and some of the animation is great enough to rival Disney animation at its very best. Sometimes, however, the animation is of such poor quality that it distracts from the action. At times, the animation is worse than SeaLab 2021 on Adult Swim - and they intentionally make the animation bad! Money became an issue as the movie was being animated and it is, at times, quite obvious that they cut corners in some segments. The characters and...

A Great Read! Originally published in 1994 Synopsis: Detective Harry Bosch of the LAPD shot and killed a suspected ritualistic serial killer in a controversial but "righteous shoot" several years before. Now, the killer's widow is suing the city for killing the wrong man and new victims of the serial killer are showing up - victims that definitely were killed after Bosch shot his man. First - let's address the title. There are actually two concrete blondes in the book. One is the concrete statue of lady justice outside the courtroom. The other is one of the victims - a blond prostitute/porn actress who was found encased in the concrete floor of a self-storage unit. Michael Connelly Second - this is a great cop story. I won't go into much plot detail, but I will say that the story twists and turns in so many directions that it is hard to put down. Just when you think you have got it figured out, you find that Connelly has been waiting for you and your er...

  Tedium followed by tedium. Did I mention the tedium? Synopsis: 83-year old Benjamin Stillman dies and leaves $8 million to a local synagogue in his will. No big deal, except that no one can figure out where this bookkeeper for a brokerage house got $8 million. Oh, and there's one other little fact: Stillman was not Jewish and had never even set foot in the synagogue. A legal wrangle develops and everyone "lawyers up": the synagugue, the brokerage house, Stillman's doctors come up with another will leaving all of the money to their cancer treatment center and there's even a class-action lawsuit is filed by a sleazy lawyer looking to make a name for himself. The Review: Undue Influence  was tedious. It started out well but I soon got very tired of all of the legal wrangling. It just got irritating to me and it made me very glad that I did not become an attorney. This book's genre was legal "thriller" but I was tempted just to skip to...

Disappointing So,  Speedweeks: 10 Days At Daytona is yet another coffee table book. See, what it is is that I have a friend who knows I am a NASCAR fan so he didn't know what else to get me for Christmas so he got me 3 NASCAR books. One of them was this one and I was fairly disappointed, mostly due to the fact that the title does not accurately describe the book. Nor does it accurately describe Speedweeks, which lasts longer than 10 days. For example, the 2011 Speedweeks events have one event in early January and then really go hot and heavy for about 3 weeks beginning on January 27 and culminating in the Daytona 500 on February 20. See, Daytona Speedweeks is a racing happening. There are a dozen motorsports events, culminating in the Daytona 500. There's a 24 hour race, an ARCA race and literally a half-dozen NASCAR races. Check their website ! This book, however, focuses primarily on the Daytona 500 (90%) and barely mentions the other non-NASCAR events. In fact...

 As the title suggests, America's Strangest Museums: A Traveler's Guide to the Most Unusual and Eccentric Collections  is a tour of more than 100 bizarre little museums people (and a few corporations) have set up across the USA ( and a couple in Canada). Some include: -The Museum of Menstruation (started by a single man in his 50s) -The Tooth Fairy Museum (now closed) -The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices (closed now, unfortunately) -Spam has a museum -So does Combat, the bug spray company. They also have a contest in which you can send them dead roaches dressed up in dioramas. -The Bull Hall of Fame. Since I am a proud Hoosier, I'm pleased to note that Indiana offerings include: -The Old Jail Museum in Crawfordsville -The Dan Quayle Center and Museum in Huntington -Drake's Midwest Phonograph Museum in Martinsville -The Bird's Eye View Museum in Wakarusa. My favorite is The Museum of Bad Art (MOBA)  in Massachusetts. Anyway -...

                      Not so hot . Nest of Vipers features Sarah Jensen, a young, gorgeous, exceedingly bright (When are we going to have a book about an ugly, old not-so-bright heroine?) currency trader who is asked by the British version of the Federal Reserve President to go undercover at a trading house and see if they are using inside information to make millions of pounds. Much trouble ensues. Linda Davies The female lead is a little too well-connected (she always knows just the right person to help her when she needs something) and I was kind of bugged that the characters used dollars and pounds interchangeably in their financial wheelings and dealings. Maybe that's the reality of international currency exchange and the power of the United States. If so, "Go USA!" Back to the book - It's better than reading nothing, but you might want to read an old National Geographic instead.   I rate this book 2 sta...