DWD's Reviews

Published by Indiana University Press in 2000. Russell F. Weigley (1930-2004) was a professor of military history at Temple University for 36 years. He wrote a whole bookshelf full of military histories, but only one book that focused exclusively on the Civil War (however, he was working on a multi-volume study of Gettysburg when he passed away).  A Great Civil War is an excellent single volume history of the Civil War saddled with an unfortunate piece of art done in American primitive style that makes it look like it was illustrated by the author's elementary school-aged great-grandchild. I know you aren't supposed to judge a book by its cover, but this cover makes the book look like a children's book. This is far from a children's book.  No more than a page or two is spent on the issues that brought on the war and no more than a page is spent of Reconstruction, but t his is a Civil War history for people who have read a lot of Civil War histories. It tells the s...

Published in 2010 by Random House Audio. Read by Dick Hill. Duration: 13 hours, 45 minutes. Unabridged. Fresh off of the action in 61 Hours , Jack Reacher is hitching his way to Virginia. He is nursing his injuries from that adventure and has made it from South Dakota to a lonely hotel in rural Nebraska. When he is drinking coffee at the hotel bar the local drunk gets a call at the bar. Turns out he's also the local doctor and Reacher shames him into going to treat the woman who called to ask him to treat a bloody nose that won't stop bleeding. Reacher suspects she's a victim of spousal abuse and it turns out he's correct. The doctor has been told not to treat her by her husband's family. They rule the area with an iron fist and maintain a crew of 10 former Nebraska Cornhusker college football players to make sure no one steps out of line. Reacher steps out of line, though. He tracks down the abused woman's husband, takes out his bodyguard, breaks the husband...

Published by Disney in May of 2018. Read by Tom Taylorson. Duration: 4 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. Brandon T. Snider was stuck in a hard place when he was picked to write this book. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) had just released Infinity War and there was no way that Snider was going to be allowed to release any spoilers for Endgame . In fact, there was really no way that he was going to be allowed to move anything forward in any meaningful way. The ABC TV show AGENTS of SHIELD has been dealing with this problem for years - how do you tell an interesting story when you are so constricted in what you can write about? Well, in this case, he pretty much failed. The story centers around two brothers who are MCU characters. No, not Loki and Thor. They are the Collector (featured in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie and played by Benicio del Toro) and the Grandmaster (featured in Thor: Ragnarok and played by Jeff Goldblum). The book is set after Thor: Ragnarok  an...

Published in 2017 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by Robin Miles. Duration: 6 hours, 45 minutes. Unabridged. Never Caught is the story of Ona Judge. Ona (Oney) Judge was Martha Washington's personal body servant - the person that brushed her hair, sewed her clothing and generally made sure she was taken care of as she went through her day. The Washingtons were living in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of government for the fledgling United States while Washington, D.C. was being designed and laid out. The problem with Philadelphia (for the Washingtons) is that it was in the middle of a change. Pennsylvania had been a slave state, but it was becoming a free state. In fact, Pennsylvania was taking the first steps towards becoming an abolitionist stronghold. Technically, the Washingtons could keep their slaves, but after six continuous months of residence in Philadelphia they were technically allowed to start the process to become free people. George Washington and his lawyers ...

Published by Brilliance Audio in 2015. Read by James Patrick Cronin. Duration: 11 hours, 54 minutes. Unabridged. Gibson Vaughn is an unemployed computer whiz. This former Marine was a world-class hacker before he went into the Marine Corps. It would be more accurate to say that he was forced into the Marine Corps because he hacked into a Senator's computer and found documents showing that he was stealing his own campaign funds. But, it turns out that he wasn't and Vaughn was giving the choice of prison or the Marines. The problem is, now that Vaughn is back in the civilian world the former Senator (now Vice President and leading candidate for President) has blacklisted him. Vaughn gets a job offer that he can't turn down - a chance to use his computer skills to act on a new clue to find a girl who was abducted 10 years ago. But, there is a complication - this girl is the daughter of the Senator that he hacked... The Short Drop has a complicated plot, but it flows we...

Published in 2018 by Beacon Press. Read by Amy Landon. Duration: 6 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged. Robin DiAngelo is a diversity trainer. She also happens to be white. She has noticed that it is very common for white participants to react very negatively during these training sessions, often acting very defensively and offering a lot of excuses. In this book, she looks at those excuses and lays out the refutations of those excuses. The good: This book offers a very useful definition of racism. Hint: it is not just people acting horribly to other groups of people, it is a whole cultural system that we absorb. It also offers some practical advice about how to deal with your own prejudices. The bad: White Fragility is a repetitive book. It could have easily been edited down by one-third without a loss of any new material. Another weakness is that it doesn't really offer a list of common racist behaviors that people complain about. For example, I have heard African-Americans...

Published in 2007 by Worldwide Library (Worldwide Mystery). Originally Published in 2005. Historian Miranda Lewis has been invited to a Gettysburg re-enactment on the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3) by her old college roommate, Ginny. She accepts for two reasons - she wants to see her old friend and she has a serious crush on her friend's father, a retired judge and amateur historian who will also be there. She has been nursing this crush since she was 19 years old and he took her on a tour of the battlefield and taught her all about the battle. Things get complicated, though, when Ginny's estranged husband Wiley shows up. He is a hardcore Civil War Confederate reenactor, the sort of man who starves himself to the point of being ill just to look more authentic. The sort of man who decorates his personal vehicle (called the "Battlemobile") with little plastic Civil War army men. Wiley has been gone on the reenactor circuit for a while, traveling f...