DWD's Reviews

Published in 2009 by Random House Audio. Narrated by Mirron Willis Duration: 11 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. The author, Colson Whitehead. It is 1985. Benjie Cooper and his brother are spending the summer at the resort town of Sag Harbor, New York. This Long Island resort town is actually two resort towns - one white and one black. The Coopers are part of a very close-knit African American community of New York City professionals that started their part of Sag Harbor two generations earlier. During the summers, families head out on the weekends and older kids are often left out in Sag Harbor for the summer. Benjie and his brother are in high school and a group of high school boys hang out together all summer. Benjie is desperate to be cool (being on Dungeons and Dragons-playing Star Wars fan doesn't help - take it from a kid who was both in high school at the same time). They get summer jobs, they hit the beach, they look for girls, they try to get into concerts at local ...

Published in 2013 by Eastern National Manuelito (c. 1818 - 1893) One of the best things about visiting a National Park is visiting the book section of the gift shop. If you visit a Civil War-related site, the book sections are a rare treasure trove of high quality books all gathered in one place. Nestled in among the books are a series of attractive books printed by Eastern National. Physically, they remind me of the old style of National Geographic. They are bound similarly and, most importantly, they are chock full of color photographs like National Geographics were. The pictures are truly the strong point in this book, however. The text of the book is a series of essays written by different authors from the points of view of several different Native American groups. There is a lot of overlap and a lot of gaps because they are not edited together into a coherent narrative. The perspective provided by the book is a welcome one, but the book would have been much strengthened ...

Originally published in 2014. Audiobook version published in 2018. Read by the author, Ron Stallworth. Duration: 5 hours, 50 minutes. Unabridged. Black Klansman is the memoir of Ron Stallworth, at the time the only African American detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department (this was the 1970's), wrote a letter in response to a classified ad. It was looking for recruits to the Ku Klux Kan. Stallworth expressed his interest and thoughtlessly signed his own name, rather than an undercover name. Soon enough, the Klan leader called the number and Stallworth found himself being recruited. Clearly, Stallworth couldn't show up in person so he created a little task force complete with a white undercover officer pretending to be Stallworth, when needed. Eventually, Stallworth had a membership card (!) and having frequent phone conversations with David Duke, the most famous KKK leader in the country. The premise of the book was, sadly, more interesting than the follow through. ...

Published in 2018 by Random House Audio. Read by Scott Brick. Duration: 12 hours, 51 minutes. Unabridged. Jack Reacher is in New Hampshire and is working his way cross-country to San Diego. As normal, he is hitchhiking. He gets dropped off near the town where his father was born, Laconia. He has never been there and decides to check it out. His father has been dead for thirty years but he might find someone who remembers him.  The more  digs, the more he finds that this father's backstory doesn't quite jive with what he is discovering on the ground... Meanwhile, a Canadian couple is travelling through New Hampshire on their way to New York City. They are carrying a mysterious cargo in the trunk of their rattletrap Honda. When the Honda dies in the parking lot of a lonely hotel, the owners of the hotel convince the couple to check in for the night and try to find a mechanic in the morning. But, something doesn't seem right... This book had all of the pieces to make a...

Originally published in 2009. I am a big fan of Berkeley Breathed and have been for 35+ years. I have multiple volumes of his Bloom County books, I enjoyed his movie Mars Needs Moms so much that I went out and bought it after I had rented it. I love his children's book Pete and Pickles . This book, however, is a rare misfire. To begin with, the book assumes that you read an earlier childrens book called Flawed Dogs: The Year End Leftovers at the Piddleton "Last Chance" Dog Pound . This book is like a catalog of dogs that no one will adopt because of their flaws. The dogs from the first book are thrown into the Flawed Dogs: The Novel with little or no introduction - just a pack of dogs with names and skills and oddities that the reader had better remember. No character development, no real chance to get to know any of them. There was a whole dog that I had no idea was even in the book until he was shown in an illustration. The main character of the book is a dachshund ...

Originally published in 1970. I did not know this was a novel until just a few months ago when I found my copy of this book in a thrift shop. I was familiar with the 1979 movie starring Peter Sellers in an Academy Award-nominated performance, but had no idea it was originally a book. A little research has told me that this book has a troubled history. The author, Jerzy Kosinski, plagiarized the book. The original book was a Polish author from the 1920's and 1930's named Tadeusz Dolega-Mostowicz.  He died at the beginning of World War II while fighting the Soviet Union during the Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland in 1939. His book was called The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma .  Being There follows the adventures of Chance, an uneducated gardener who works for an elderly rich man. Chance is probably on the autistic spectrum and has grown up in the rich man's household. He knows nothing about the outside world except for what he has seen on television. However, he has an intu...

Published in 1959 by J.B. Lippincott Company. Confederate Colonel John S. Mosby (1833-1916) Back in the 1950's and 1960's several publishing houses put out series of biographies aimed at upper elementary students. The most famous of these was Random House's Landmark Series . They were small hardback books with thick pages and lots of line drawings. They were long on action and short on analysis. This book is similar in every way to that series except that it was printed by the J.B. Lippincott Company. There is literally nothing about John Mosby's childhood in this biography, which is a little odd since there was a similar series at the same time, with the same physical format called Childhood of Famous Americans published by Bobbs-Merrill. John Mosby was a Confederate cavalry officer in the Civil War who became a Partisan Ranger. Partisan Rangers were irregular forces, not really part of the armies they supported and able to take shares of any spoils of war tha...