DWD's Reviews

Museums, parking duty, and the point of it all. This book was originally published in 2017 by Abingdon Press. I had a week off of school for fall break last week. During that week I had three experiences of a religious bent (beyond my weekly church attendance): 1) I read Living for Another: More of Others, Less of You , 2) I helped park cars for my church's annual "Trunk or Treat" that we host for the community, 3) I visited the Creation Museum in Kentucky. I listed the activities in this order because that is the order of importance on a spiritual level. The Creation Museum is an impressive and beautiful 75,000 square foot facility that, to me, is just the wrong approach to Christianity. It is so bent on proving that every little sentence fragment in Genesis is accurate that it almost entirely misses the point of Christianity. I felt no love or comfort there. It reminded me of the passage from 1 Kings Chapter 19: " 11-12  Then he was told, “Go, stand on the mou...

Published in May of 2018 by Macmillan Audio. Duration: 6 hours, 58 minutes. Read by Holter Graham. Unabridged. A.D. Jameson is a student of cinema - not just science fiction and fantasy movies, but of cinema in general. I used the word "student" in the previous sentence carefully because he is not just a fan of movies, he studies the directors, the movements and the ideas behind the movies. Photo by DWD But, he is also a proud geek - a fan of sci-fi and fantasy literature and movies. Like me, he was really into those genres in middle and high school, moved away from them for a while during and after college and then came back to them in a big way when the Star Wars "Special Edition" movies were released. My own children do not believe me, but there was once a time when the mere sight of a Star Wars t-shirt or bumper sticker was worthy of comment. Now, they are everywhere. My family probably owns more than 20 Star Wars -related t-shirts alone. A.D. Jameson...

First published in 1999. Tripwire is the third book in publishing order in the Jack Reacher series (the sixth in chronological order - as of right now). Jack Reacher starts out in the Florida Keys. He is digging swimming pools by hand during the day, working as a bouncer in a strip club at night and drinking lots of bottled water. It is mindless work, but he is getting enjoying that aspect of it. Then, a man from New York City comes to the bar where he is drinking a bottled water and asks if anyone knows Jack Reacher. Reacher lies and says he never heard of the guy. Composition with Red Blue and Yellow  by Piet Mondrian. Reacher's favorite piece of art, according to this novel. Two more guys from New York City find Reacher at the strip club. They are different than the first guy - pushier and rougher.  Reacher has to get physical with them. When he finds the first guy dead on the street, he decides to head off to New York City to see if he can figure out who is looking for hi...

Published by Dreamscape Media in 2014. Read by George Newbern. Duration: 9 hours, 9 minutes. Unabridged. Ove (pronounced ooo-vah) is a 59 year old grump in Sweden. His wife has passed away, he has no children, no pets and no job since he has been forced to retire. He keeps himself busy by keeping an eye on the neighborhood - he yells at the neighbor lady that lets her dog pee in front of his house, he yells at people who drive through the neighborhood (it has a parking area so that the entire area is pedestrian friendly), he yells at bureaucrats, bad drivers, hipsters, immigrants and...well, he just yells. Ove has determined that the best thing about his life left when his wife passed away. He was filling in that hole in his life, at least a bit, with his work. But, since his forced retirement, he has nothing. So, he is planning his suicide to join his wife. Then, a tough old homeless cat shows up. After that, a hipster father with an immigrant wife and two little girls moves in acr...

Originally published in 1960. New translation published in 2006. Read by George Guidall. Duration: 4 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel's famed book Night is a standard, perhaps THE standard, that all Holocaust literature is judged by. Originally, this was written as an immense memoir in Yiddish, but during the process of translating the book to French, it was pared down to about one-fifth of its original size. The paring down resulted in a more literary work - a work that feels almost fictional because it is so selective as it tells the true story of how Elie Wiesel's childhood, his family, his community and his religious faith was destroyed by the Nazis. Slave Laborers liberated by U.S. Army soldiers under the command of General Patton. Photo taken by Private H. Miller. Wiesel is in the picture. He is on the second row from the floor, the seventh prisoner from the left (by the post) The book begins with his little Jewish neighborhoo...

Originally published in 2003. The most likely candidate to win the presidency is an Oregon Senator. He has a winning public personae, but he is a violent, horrible man in reality. He beats a high end prostitute to death simply because he enjoys inflicting violence. His people cover it up. Everyone is shocked when this Senator is found beaten to death. It looks like the prostitute's pimp killed him. When the pimp kills his court-appointed attorney in the lock up, no one will defend him until Amanda Jaffe is convinced to do it. Once Amanda starts her investigation, it turns out that things are a lot worse than she thought... I almost stopped reading this book after the first 50 pages or so. There are very few likable characters anywhere in this book. Everyone seems to be outright evil or compromised.  The only real positive was that the horrible Senator character died a violent death. Let's face it, that's not much of a positive. But, I stuck with it and, eventually, this boo...

Published in 2008 by HarperAudio. Read by Simon Jones. Duration: 7 hours, 22 minutes. Unabridged. Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist. This book looks at the assumption made by economists that people make rational decisions based on their input. Ariely delights in pointing out that oftentimes we don't make rational choices - we make irrational ones and we keep making the same types of irrational choices time after time after time. For example, if you own a restaurant and you want to sell more of your most expensive dish, all you have to do is place an even more expensive meal on the menu. It could be that no one will ever buy that most expensive meal, but they will buy more of what used to be the most expensive meal because it now looks like a comparative bargain. I enjoyed the commentary on the old marketing campaign called The Pepsi Challenge . In blind taste tests, Pepsi beat Coca-Cola by a wide margin. But, when the taste testers could see the cans of soda, Coca-Cola won b...