DWD's Reviews

An Honest Look at Urban Schools Published in 2014 by Three Clover Press Throughout the 1994-95 school year Lloyd Lofthouse, a veteran high school English and Journalism teacher teaching in a rough "inner city" type of environment in California, kept a daily journal of his experiences. Finally, he worked them up into the book Crazy Is Normal . First, I think that I need to tell you that I am a 25 year teacher and I have spent 15 of those 25 years teaching in what some would euphemistically call "urban" schools. I also agree with Lofthouse's comments about so-called education reform and fads in education like the self-esteem movement.  For those reasons I found this book to be compelling - I simply flew right through it. The book is mostly a set of journal entries with the occasional expanded commentary and, rarely, a reference to an article or a study about education. The way the book is set up is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness...

  My daughters and I give it 5 stars Published in 2007 by HighBridge Company Multicast performance Duration: approximately 1.5 hours NPR has a series of audiobooks published through HighBridge Company called Driveway Moments with the added thought that these are "radio stories that won't let you go." These are designed to be the types of stories that you sit in the car in your driveway and continue to listen to after you've arrived home. In this collection the stories are about animals. We've got cats, dogs, raising baby hummingbirds and letting them go (it brings a tear to the eye), a giant turtle in Vietnam, a drive through pig semen store, a parrot that talks with the voice of the storyteller's deceased mother's voice and a farm for retired racehorses. There is also a long story about how pets made it through the chaos of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. This is a tough story with lots of sad stories and great stories of re-uniting people...

The twisted tale of a paramedic, an albino with a vampire fetish and a blood researcher... Published in 2012 by MCM Publishing Code Blood is the story of three people whose lives are tied together in this thriller but barely interact throughout the book. Photo by Werner Vermaak Colt Lewis is a brand new paramedic in the Los Angeles area who is struggling with the emotional toll this sort of job can cause. He is an open young man who became a paramedic because he truly cares about people and wants to help them. But, he is struggling with the reality that some of the victims he helps just cannot be saved. He keeps on going back to his first run and the beautiful young woman who was found on the side of the road after having been hit by a hit and run driver. She died while Colt was reassuring her because her foot had been amputated in the accident. Strangely, the foot was never found and Colt starts to obsess about this woman, the tragic loss of such a young life and the total cr...

Very well-written and guaranteed to make you think. Originally published in 2007. Approximately 346 pages. Set in America's near future, Republic is a look at the authority of the federal government run amok in the name of national security. Imagine, if you would, the government's reaction to a series of timed bombings that target the Pentagon and the first responders that come to save as many of the victims as they can (as was common in the Iraq War) but instead of a foreign attacker, the culprit is a domestic terror group. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sweeps in and starts to get very nervous about every sort of domestic disturbance. In this environment a profitable factory closes down in a small West Virginia town that depends on this employer for its very existence. The profitable factory closes because its holding company determined that it can make an even larger profit by relocating to Indonesia. When the newly unemployed American workers trespass an...

  It's not great literature but it is certainly entertaining. Originally published in October of 2012 John Grisham and I have an on again, off again relationship (as reader and writer, I have not had the pleasure of meeting the gentleman in person.) I grew tired of his legal thrillers and of late I have been occasionally listening to his regular novels like A Painted House or Bleachers .  The Racketeer is my first legal thriller of Grisham's that I have read in more than five years, but even Grisham admits in the author's note that as a thriller it's fairly long on story and not so deep on the minutiae of the courthouse. All that is true, but it is a compelling read - a real page turner that I blasted through at a very fast pace for me (I tend to doggedly plod through books rather than blast through them). The story starts out simply enough. A small town black lawyer named Malcolm Bannister gets caught up in a real estate scheme thought up by a Wa...

Published in 2013 as an e-book short story. Approximate length: 46 pages. Alan Parker is a professional killer who works for an employer called The Company. His wife also works for The Company but she is currently in the last stages of an unsuccessful fight with cancer. It is not really clear if The Company is a government entity or not, but any way you slice it The Company has lots and lots of resources, including an impressive list of hired assassins. Parker (nicknamed "Boom") is one of the very best, but a series of mistakes made his last hit a failure and The Company rarely forgives failure. Photo by Niels Noordhoek So, "Boom" Parker knows that he cannot mess up his new assignment. He has been sent to kill a female scientist that is working on a bio-fuel that threatens the big oil companies. But, this case starts out badly (it looks like someone has already killed his target or, at least, botched an attempt on her) and as he looks for her he finds ...

How Hard Is It to Nail Down Superman's Personality? Published by GraphicAudio in March of 2014 Adapted from the novel It's Superman by Tom De Haven Multicast performance Duration; Approximately 7 hours Let me be clear from the beginning about two things: 1) I am a Superman fan 2) I do not mind re-makes or re-interpretations so long as they are done respectfully of the source material. However, It's Superman does not do that, with the exception of Lex Luthor. This re-imagined world of Superman is set in the 1930s, which I liked as a choice because that's when Superman was created. Most of the first part of the book deals with a struggling Lois Lane living with a a freelance photographer named Willi Berg in an apartment in New York City (the book dispenses with the Metropolis conceit). Lois is much more worldly than I have ever seen her, but I was fine with that.  Willi Berg witnesses Lex Luthor, a New York City politician, in the middle of a crime and d...