DWD's Reviews

  Originally published in 2009. Published by Pottermore Publishing in 2015. Read by Jim Dale. Duration: 18 hours, 32 minutes. Unabridged. The Half-Blood Prince is the book that one of my daughters complained about several years ago when she read it. She said it was too much talking and not enough action. Certainly when compared to the previous two books, there is a lot less action and a whole lot more talking. Rowling changed up the narrative and tells the back story of the villain of the series, Lord Voldemort, by way of an investigation by Dumbledore and Harry. The pace is certainly slower, but the information was valuable. Perhaps it might have been delivered differently, but I was glad to have it.  The last two hours of the audiobook were full of nothing but action and consequential moments.  Jim Dale continued to do a great job with the book, with the exception of the voice of Hermione.  This is my favorite cover of the entire series. Once you get done wit...

Originally published in 1963. 27 years ago I took a night class about the Civil War offered by Ball State University in a middle school off campus. It was a great class and Lincoln and the First Shot was the first book that we discussed. The book covers the two month period from the day that Lincoln arrived in D.C. after he was elected President and the day that P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter at Charleston, South Carolina. When the Confederate states seceded they took over all Federal property, including forts and military bases. Two forts were not surrendered - Fort Pickens in Pensacola and Fort Sumter. Fort Sumter was always the most argued over because of the symbolism of being smack in the middle of the main port of the first state to secede.  Lincoln refused to give up the fort because he refused to give up any of the seceded states. South Carolina demanded the fort because they insisted they were part of a new country and they did not want a foreign power to ha...

  Published in 1982 by Pocket Books (a Timescape book) Back in the 1980's Simon and Schuster had a division called Pocket Books that specialized in paperback books. Pocket Books had an even smaller division called Timescape . Timescape published sci-fi books, including some of the earliest of the Star Trek novels so they were quite a successful line. Soldier Boy is part of that Timescape line. Michael Shaara (1928-1988) Michael Shaara won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1974 novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels . Shaara had knocked out a few novels before then, but none were about the Civil War. Instead, a great deal of his writing was sci-fi. He started out selling stories to magazines in 1951. This book is a collection of 14 of those short stories. If you read this book, I recommend reading the Author's Afterword first. He wrote commentary on every story and I used those notes as an introduction to each one.  Like all short story collections, they vary in qu...

  Published in 2019 by Macmillan Audio. Read by Christian Delaine. Duration: 9 hours, 49 minutes. Unabridged. In The Bitterroots , Cassie Dewell has left her career in law enforcement and is now a private investigator in Montana. This is perhaps the first series featuring a private investigator in Montana because there can't be that many private investigators in Montana. Box notes that she is actually doing quite well for herself because there are so few private investigators in Montana. A lawyer who is also the daughter of a man she owed a favor to contacted her to do some investigating work. The attorney had been hired to defend a man who was accused of raping his niece. His case had been moved away from his home county due to pre-trial publicity and Cassie Dewell soon discovers that his home country. That county, despite being physically large, feels like small because everyone knows everyone else and one family runs everything through a combination of physical and financial int...

  Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in October of 2020. Read by the author, Pete Buttigeig. Duration: 4 hours, 46 minutes. Unabridged.   Pete Buttigeig was, for me, the most interesting Democrat that sought the 2020 nomination. The first I ever heard of was a lengthy interview he gave on NPR when no one on the national level had ever heard of him. I found him to be thoughtful and serious and open to new ideas and discussion.  This book is a short discussion on how politics (and life in general) depends on a certain level of trust to proceed. There is nothing really new here, but it is a worthwhile discussion and it is good to hear it reiterated in a time when trust is so short. To his credit, Pete Buttigeig doesn't feel the need just to stretch out a book just to pad the number of pages. At the end of the audiobook is a recording of Mayor Pete's speech where he announces that he is ending his Presidential campaign. I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be fou...

  Originally published in 1945. John Steinbeck (1902-1968) The Red Pony is a standard novel to be read at the middle school level across the country. I remember I read the first third of the book as a part of my 7th grade literature class textbook, but the rest of the book was new to me. As I mentioned, The Red Pony is split into sections - three of them. In actuality, they are 3 coming-of-age short stories about Jody, a boy growing up on a northern California ranch.  Being Steinbeck stories, they are well-written, brutally realistic and every one has a sad twist.  I like Steinbeck, but it has to come in small doses. I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Red Pony by John Steinbeck .

  Published in 2014 by The Great Courses. Read by the author, Steven L. Tuck Duration: 11 hours, 48 minutes. Unabridged. The publishers of The Great Courses offer college level lecture classes (100 or 200 level) as audiobooks and/or videos.  Cities of the Ancient Word begins with a discussion of the earliest cities and then moves on to significant cities that came along later. To be a significant city it had to start a new pattern - cities built on rivers, cities built on defensive hills, cities built to take advantage of sea trade, cities with a clear plan, cities built with a plan to mix to allow people of different ethnicities to live together (separately) and so on. The Roman Colosseum I very much enjoyed the first part of these lectures. But, once we got to Tuck's specific areas of expertise (Greek, Hellenistic, Roman) the audiobook got bogged down. His last lecture about some of the lessons of ancient cities that have been adopted by modern cities or are becoming p...