DWD's Reviews

  Published in May of 2021 by Penguin Audio. Read by the author, John McWhorter. Duration: 6 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged. John McWhorter is a linguist who teaches at Columbia University. He does the nitty gritty linguistic work that professional linguists love to read about, but he also is pretty good at explaining linguistics to the non-professionals as well. The author, John McWhorter In Nine Nasty Words , McWhorter explores the origins of nine taboo words in English. Naturally, this brings to mind the familiar cast of "four letter words", but he also looks into other words that are similarly potent, such as the infamous "n word". I found the book to be entertaining and an accessible look at how language changes over time - and sometimes it changes very quickly. McWhorter cites written sources, music, plays, musicals, TV shows and movies as artifacts to show when the words were used, how they were used and if there was a change in their use. For example, the wor...

  Published in 2019 by SOHO Press. I received a gift card from a book store and I decided to get this book by a local author for several reasons: 1) it is set in my area; 2) it deals with the opioid crisis; 3) I like to encourage local authors.  Turns out that the author is NOT a local (Indiana) author - he is from Texas . Small town Texas and small town Indiana do have a lot in common when it comes to drugs and alcohol, though. Riggle is 17 years old and lives in a town in central Indiana and suspended from high school for a week due to a suspension for having a vape pen at school. His week won't be used to lay around in bed or play videogames, though.  Riggle lives with his uncle, his sole guardian after the deaths of his parents and his uncle has gone missing. His uncle's live in girlfriend (not much older than Riggle) has no idea where his uncle is. This is not necessarily an unusual thing - he has been know to abuse substances and go on all night benders, but he's be...

Published in 1999 by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday. The Desire of the Everlasting Hills  is the third book in  The Hinges of History Series  by  Thomas Cahill.  It is a series of histories that look at important long term movements in history that helped create Western Civilization.  Nearly 20 years ago I read this book and the second book in this series,  The Gifts of the Jews   and then parked them on a bookshelf. I never read more books in the series and simply forgot all about them. With the pandemic quarantine came a purging of the bookshelves and these books returned to the to-be-read pile.  Overall, I enjoyed The Gifts of the Jews , despite some slow spots. I had high hopes for this book because I thought it would fit in well with the strongest parts of its predecessor. But, I found this book to be a mostly plodding history with an absolutely excellent and inspiring last chapter attached to it.  And, I have solved the mys...

  Originally published in 2000 as Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner . F.X. Toole (1930-2002) worked as a trainer and as a corner man in support of boxers for decades.  Think of the character Mickey in the Rocky movies and you have an idea of what he did. But, unlike the barely literate Mickey , Toole was a powerful writer of boxing short stories. All I know about boxing comes from having watched all of the Rocky and Creed movies, so I freely admit that I know almost nothing about boxing. But, that did not matter because Toole made these short stories compelling, even if they were full of boxing jargon and practices that I was unfamiliar with.  There are six stories, most are very good. The story that the Clint Eastwood movie Million Dollar Baby was adapted from is extraordinarily powerful and haunting. The story that was original title story for this collection, Rope Burns , started out very strong, but the ending was so over the top that it ended up being the wors...

Published in 2005 by Random House Audio. Read by Stephen Hoye Duration: 12 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged Scott Fenney has it all. The former college football star is a partner in the premier law firm in Dallas. He has a beautiful wife, a daughter that adores him, a Ferrari and a house in an elite neighborhood.  Dallas, Texas One day, a federal judge asks Fenney to take on a tough case. The son of a prominent resident of Dallas is alleged to have been murdered by a prostitute that he had picked up earlier in the evening. He was shot in the head by her pistol and her pistol was found by his body. Fenney was asked to defend the prostitute in court because the judge was convinced by a speech Fenney gave about how Atticus Finch from the novel To Kill a Mockingbird should be the role model for all lawyers. Plus, Fenney's big-time law firm actually has access to the resources needed to defend a death penalty case It is a federal crime because the victim held a federal job. He held that j...

  Published by The Great Courses in 2014. Lectures delivered by the author, Gregory S. Aldrete. Duration: 18 hours, 29 minutes. Unabridged. As long as there has been war, there has been discussions about which battles were the most important, the most pivotal. This takes some analysis, since the temptation might be to simply discuss the battle that finally ended a long conflict, like Appomattox was the functional end to the American Civil War.  The temptation might also be to collect a list of the biggest battles of history, but that would exclude Aldrete's tiniest choice - the Battle of San Jacinto. While that battle had less than 2,500 soldiers, he persuasively argues that the battle not only made Texas independent from Mexico, it also set off a chain of events that led directly the the American Civil War, Reconstruction and more. In The Decisive Battles of World History , Adlrete presents the battles in chronological order and spends at least as much time on the background ...

  Originally published in book form in 1996. Published in 2019 by Marvel. Read by James Patrick Cronin. Duration: 2 hours, 15 minutes. Unabridged (but maybe not - see below) As the Avengers settle down for a Christmas Eve dinner in Tony Stark's mansion (which doubles as Avengers headquarters), they are interrupted by news of a robot attack on a super secure research facility. TESS-One, a World War II era robot designed to counter super serum soldiers if it turned out to be necessary has returned from the dead. Can robots die? No matter - this robot was thought to be disposed of, but it is back.  TESS-One Even worse, it is under the control of another robot - the dreaded Ultron. He was also thought to have been killed/destroyed, but he is back and is pursuing his goal to kill off humanity... My take: ******Caution - spoilers******* The Iron Man: Steel Terror audiobook was created from a 160 page novel published in 1996 by Pocket Books that was aimed at 12-15 year-olds. If you ...