DWD's Reviews

Published by Tantor Audio in 2013. Read by Emily Woo Zeller Duration: 8 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged Mary Roach focuses her often-humorous, always oddball approach to science on the human digestive tract in GULP , a book that always entertains, even if it doesn't always stay on topic. To be fair, she stays in the general area of the topic. For example, when she talks about how much your sense of smell affects your sense of taste she goes into a long (and interesting and sometimes gross) look at the pet food industry and how they convince dogs and cats to eat gross food by making it smell really, really enticing.  Topics include: saliva, how much a human stomach will actually hold, why lots of animals eat their own poop, why cows ruminate, the role of bacteria in digestion, enlarged colons, why prisoners sneak things into jail by putting them up their rectum but terrorists don't put bombs in the same place, why farts smell and, in an off-topic moment, she discusses if th...

Originally published in 1999. Unabridged audio edition published in 2012 by Random House Audio. Read by Rob McQuay. Duration: 9 hours, 47 minutes. Bill Bryson discovered that he lived near the Appalachian Trail, which is no surprise since it winds more than 2,200 miles from northern Georgia to Maine and literally runs within an hour drive for millions of people. After looking into a little, Bryson decided to walk the trail. Why not? He had no equipment, no real experience in wilderness hiking and was woefully out of shape. What could go wrong? He is joined by his friend, Stephen Katz (not his real name), who is even more out of shape than Bryson and off they go to northern Georgia. The book is more than just a story of their hike, though. It is also a running commentary on consumer culture, the irksome (and all-too-often) ineptitude of the National Park system, the camaraderie of almost every hiker he met, friendship, compulsion, the experience of walking in a society that has...

Published by Hachette Audio in July of 2017. Read by Katherine Moennig Duration: 9 hours, 22 minutes Unabridged Michael Connelly. Photo by Mark Coggins. Michael Connelly moves away from the aging Harry Bosch character and starts a new character firmly in his literary universe. Renee Ballard is a detective that works the night shift. Most of her cases aren't really her cases at all - her job mostly consists of taking names, doing preliminary interviews and then turning everything over to the day shift to finish. This job was a demotion because she filed a righteous sexual harassment claim on a boss but was not backed up by her partner who was more interested in sucking up to his boss for a promotion than doing the right thing. So, Ballard tries her best to do more than just be the person that hands the cases off to other guys. She is a good cop with shades of Harry Bosch, meaning she can get obsessed and play with the rules if she feels like the rules get in the way. When...

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 clear...

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 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-exile to its new, much more potent allies and those new allies had different...

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...