DWD's Reviews

Published in 2008 by Crown Publishing Matt Freed is summoned on very short notice to Bucharest to interview a member of Iran's intelligence community. He was unrecruited, meaning that he is a "walk-in" - literally someone who walked into the embassy and offered information that the American government would want. Freed has been asked to talk to this man because he is an expert on Iranian politics and he speaks the language. He is also an extremely capable intelligence operative. The interview yields valuable and very scary information. Freed starts to act on it and soon discovers that there may be more to this situation than he has been led to believe. He starts his own investigation and becomes convinced that this may be a double cross. His superiors disagree and it becomes a race against time with Freed working against foreign governments and his own... This is a middle-of-the-road spy novel. The action was good but sometimes the narration needed to be made more c...

Published in 2015 by Cumberland House 273 pages including end notes and a bibliography Lincoln's Gift: How Humor Shaped Lincoln's Life and Legacy is an excellent short biography of our sixteenth president with a special focus on his legendary storytelling abilities. When one considers who integral Lincoln's humorous stories were to his successes both as an attorney and as a politician, I felt that this biography is one of the few biographies or histories that gave me much of a sense of Lincoln as a man. Leidner wisely chooses to provide a lot of detail about Lincoln's life before he became a national figure - these stories give the reader a feel for the man long before he became president and give a frame of reference for his reactions and his stories while he was in office. Very few of his stories are truly laugh out loud funny, but he often told humorous or rustic tales to make his point or distill a complicated idea into something very simple. A classic example...

An Exceedingly Well-Written History Published in April of 2017 by Random House Audio Read by Arthur Morey Duration: 18 hours, 46 minutes Unabridged Winston Churchill (1874-1965)  and Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970) As Europe collapsed before the Nazi onslaught several governments-in-exile retreated to the United Kingdom in an effort to support their struggling underground resistance movements and to remind the world of their plight. Some brought a lot of soldiers (Poland), some brought money, some brought civilian ships and some brought not much more than a loud voice and the will to use it. This was not an easy alliance. The UK was xenophobic and stunned at the rapid fall of France and many of the governments in exile were being ripped apart from their own internal politics. Misunderstandings, patronizing attitudes and differing agendas make everything more difficult. When America and the Soviets joined the war the UK shifted its attention away from the governments-in-ex...

Published in June of 2017 by Dancing Lemur Press LLC Read by Michael Burnette Duration: 9 hours, 19 minutes Unabridged In a future America, religion is nearly a thing of the past. A man-made super-flu not re-wrote the genetic code of its victims, nullifying the combination of genes that allow human beings to express religious belief. The government actively hunts down anyone who was immune to the changes through a combination of an elaborate spy network and implants installed in people's brains at birth that allow the government to track people. Colton Pierce is a pompous, clueless "extractor" who works for the Center for Theological Control. He apprehends religious people and sends them to an island where they live out the rest of their lives in quarantine. That is until now - the government plans to kill them all off, a move that Colton supports until his son gets caught up in a raid and will soon be sent off to the island... I had two serious issues with this bo...

Published by Tantor Audio in February of 2017. Read by David Colacci. Duration: 6 hours, 23 minutes. Unabridged. Broken features Daniel Briggs, a former sniper and a war veteran who is struggling to incorporate himself back into society. He suffers from PTSD in the form of anger control issues. Until recently, he copes by drinking, although in this book he has put the bottle aside. He also copes by drifting from job to job and place to place, avoiding deep connections. While in Seattle, working at a fish market, Briggs encounters an elderly woman wandering the streets with an 8x10 photo of her son, a war veteran who disappeared when he returned. Briggs decides to look into the situation and soon discovers that there are a lot of missing veterans and this is part of something much larger then he had ever imagined. The Daniel Briggs character is reminiscent of Lee Child's Reacher character and fans of Reacher might want to check this series out. I liked the Briggs character but...

Published in April of 2017 by Simon and Schuster Read by the author, David McCullough Duration: 4 hours, 13 minutes Unabridged The American Spirit is a collection of speeches delivered by the two time Pulitzer Prize winning author. The topics vary in length and topic but are all bound by two common themes: American history and the importance of knowing that history. I listened to this collection as an audiobook over a period of about a week and found it to be quite enjoyable as I walked the dog every evening. The speeches are usually not too long and not too short, informative, interesting. McCullough has re-recorded these speeches for this audiobook and his voice does show a little age, but it is still a wonderful voice to listen to and his delivery, combined with his words help make this an enjoyable audiobook.  I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The American Spirit .

Published in June of 2017 by Blackstone Audio Read by Liisa Ivary Duration: 3 hours, 28 minutes Unabridged This small book grew from an article that the author wrote after the 2016 Presidential Election. She wrote this article to explain the results to her friends in what she calls the "professional elite". The article created a lot of buzz so she expanded it into a small, accessible book that I found to be very accurate. Williams distinguishes the working class from the poor and the professional elite. In layman's terms, the working class is the middle class. It consists of factory workers, teachers, police officers, mechanics and restaurant managers. People with training and skills that literally go to work every day. The professional elite are doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, professors at elite universities and the political class. Williams details why the working class looks at the world differently than the professional elite and why the policies and ...