DWD's Reviews

Originally Published in 1999. This audio edition published by Pottermore in 2015. Read by Jim Dale Duration: 11 hours, 49 minutes. Unabridged I am 21 years late to the Harry Potter party. I had seen the first movie and some of the second one but I knew nothing of this novel so I was able to come to it without having already formed any sort of impression. The first part of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban disappointed me. The tried and true plot points of the first two novels were brought back (Harry and his horrible muggle family, yet another shopping trip for school supplies, a new super-fast broom was being sold, and a focus on the strange candy.  The monster books that were actually monsters themselves probably delight children (and it is a children's book so that it is appropriate), but this middle-aged teacher kept wondering what is wrong with the administration at Hogwarts when they let a teacher order a book like that! A little past the halfway point, the novel ta...

Published in 1992 by Reader's Digest. Back in the day, Reader's Digest was famous for taking a popular novel and editing it down without losing the essence of the story. They were so good at it that the phrase "the Reader's Digest version" was a common way of saying getting the short version of a story. In this case, Reader's Digest has provided a short, easy-to-read and easy-to-follow history of Christianity from the death of Christ to the rise of Islam in 321 pages. It is also a passable history of the Roman Empire for the same time period. Technically, this is a re-read for me. I enjoyed it thoroughly more than 20 years ago and to my surprise, i enjoyed it just as much the second time around. Look through 3 or 4 pages and you will see several full color photos of ancient art, artifacts or locations and, most importantly, get a solid rundown of the people, ideas and controversies of the era. The only weakness is the periodic inclusion of illustrations from...

Published by Simon and Schuster in June of 2020. Read by one of the authors, Chris Wallace. Duration: 8 hours, 40 minutes. Unabridged. The 116 days referred to in the title is the time between the day that Harry S. Truman became President and the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Chris Wallace quickly catches the reader up on what was going on and then uses a countdown for the chapters to add a sense of drama - will the scientists make it on time? Of course, we know that they do succeed - the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are one of the most well-known historical facts of the 20th century. Wallace's re-telling of the story in Countdown 1945 is full of facts but not particularly told in an interesting way. For example, there is a great deal of information about the Potsdam Conference (July 17 - August 2, 1945) that met in Germany. The Conference was important because it included the leaders of the USSR, the United States and the UK and in many ways it paved the pat...

Published by HarperAudio in June of 2020. Read by the author, David Litt. Duration: 11 hours, 51 minutes. Unabridged. David Litt is a former speech writer for President Obama. You need to know that before you read Democracy in One Book or Less , David Litt is unapologetically liberal. If that is a deal breaker for you, don't even bother to pick this book up. Personally, I am not a liberal, but I do enjoy political discussion and hearing different people's points of view. Litt offers plenty of both. The book starts off with a weird stunt involving Mitch McConnell's former fraternity house. This almost made me abandon the book, but the book got better pretty quickly. The primary point of the first half of the book is that state and local governments work very hard to make sure that voting is not particularly easy, especially when compared to other countries. For example, Texas has especially tough voter registration laws that make it hard to organize registration drives. ...

Published in May of 2020 by Little, Brown and Company. Read by Peter Giles and Zach Villa. Duration: 10 hours, 20 minutes. Unabridged. This is the third book in a very slowly unfolding series featuring journalist Jack McEvoy - 25 years in the making so far. Jack McEvoy started out the series as a reporter in Colorado who discovered a serial killer and stopped him. 15 years later, he is a reporter who is being let go as part of a series of layoffs from the LA Times and he discovers a serial killer and stops him. Now, 10 years later, he is working for a news website called Fair Warning  and he once again discovers a serial killer. Interestingly, Fair Warning was an actual real-life news site when this book was written. A controversy in 2021 caused it to disband The story starts out with McEvoy being questioned because he happened to have gone on one date nearly a year ago with a recent murder victim. They found his name on the contact list on her phone and the lead detective recogni...

Published in 2007 by W.W. Norton and Company. First a bit of traditional blogging. I was going through some old receipts because I had plenty of time on my hands thanks to the Coronavirus lockdowns. This pile of receipts was 12 years old. It included some golden oldies like a Blockbuster receipt. I also found a receipt for this book. I had gotten a great deal on For Liberty and Glory - and it sat in my To-Be-Read pile for 12 years. I had no idea it was in that pile for that long. If you had asked me before I found the receipt, I would guess it had been 4 or 5 years at most. At that moment, this book moved to the top of my To-Be-Read pile. I should have read it long before now - it was an excellent read. Originally, I picked up this book because I simply didn't know much about Lafayette. I've read plenty of biographies of Washington and histories of the American Revolution. Lafayette always comes into the story somewhere in the middle. There's always a build up, with the ...

Published in 2010 by HarperAudio. Read by Paul Boehmer. Duration: 14 hours, 37 minutes. Unabridged. Stephen Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University. The purpose of God Is Not One is to inform the reader of the eight greatest world religions, their philosophies and their way of looking at the world. Prothero is very aware that choosing just eight religions is fraught with problems. How do you choose? Is it based on influence? Number of adherents? Importance of the countries it is in? He went through all of those questions again once again when he chose the order he would present the religions he picked. The religions he profiled are: Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Judaism, Yoruba religion, and Daoism. He spends about 90 minutes discussing each religion and includes nearly an hour on Atheism at the end, on the theory that militant Atheism (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens) behaves much like a religion, complete with evangelistic movements...