DWD's Reviews

  Published by John F. Blair in 1997. There are several books like Civil War Blunders on the market. History books are full of interesting, odd stories that add a little spice to the narrative and there is a certain logic to having a book of just the spice.  This book is organized in a loose chronolgical order, rather than by theme. Sometimes the stories blend into each other, sometimes not. There was nothing particularly good or bad about this collection. Some of the stories are more amusing than outright blunders and there is a bit of anti-Union and anti-Lincoln bias that can be detected, especially at the beginning. But, not enough to derail the book. I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  Civil War Blunders by Clint Johnson.

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Limited in 2016. Read by Mike Grady. Duration: 7 hours, 33 minutes. Unabridged. Peter Wohlleben is a forester in Germany, meaning that he manages a commercial forest in Germany. Even though he manages a commercial forest, he is a real fan of true "old growth" forests. Over the years he has gone out of his way to really study the way forests work as a complete unit.  In The Hidden Life of Trees , his observations and research combine to tell an active, but very slow story of trees. Compared to people, many trees live a much slower life (centuries vs. decades), but a forest of trees is more than just an accidental accumulation of trees whose seeds all landed in the same place.  In many ways, a healthy forest is a lot like a giant organism - it shores up its weak parts, it sustains itself, it is extraordinarily complicated and if one part is out of whack, the whole thing can suffer. Wohlleben explores these themes in some detail with a lot o...

  Published by Thomas Nelson in 2017. Read by Simon Bubb. Duration: 6 hours, 36 minutes. Unabridged. Dion Leonard is an ultramarathon runner. Ultramarathons are technically marathons that are longer than a traditional 26.2 mile marathon, but Dion Leonard likes to run extended multi-day ultramarathons. He was running a multi-day race in the Gobi Desert in China when he met a scruffy little dog as he was lining up to start day two of the race. To be accurate, the little dog was attracted to him - it wouldn't leave him alone! Gobi with Dion Leonard When the race started, Leonard assumed that the dog would follow for a while and then return home, wherever that was. But, the dog followed him every step of the way - 23 miles. That night, the dog stayed with Leonard in his tent and went with him again on the 3rd stage of the race. As they headed into the desert, Leonard worried that the dog could be hurt by the higher temperature more brutal landscape. So, he arranged for the dog to be ca...

  Published in 2020 by Workman Publishing. Read by Geoffrey Cantor. Duration: 7 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. Connor Towne O'Neill was attending the 50th anniversary recognition of the Selma to Montgomery March when he discovered something unexpected. The Selma to Montgomery march ended when Alabama State Troopers joined local deputies at the Edmund Pettus bridge and beat them until they retreated. The bridge is named for a Confederate General and a Grand Dragon of the Alabama KKK. O'Neill was looking for a place to park and drove into a graveyard. In the graveyard, he discovered a group prepping a part of the graveyard for the re-installation of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest (the original had been stolen) in the graveyard. It was on a piece of property owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the middle of the graveyard. O'Neill sensed that this was the more powerful story, no matter how dramatic that moment on the bridge had been 50 years earlier. He decide...

  Published in 2016 by Macmillan Audio. Read by the author, Giles Milton. Duration: 4 hours, 53 minutes. Unabridged. Giles Milton is a prolific British writer of histories and historical fiction. This is a collection of odd stories of history that he has run across doing his research. Lenin, preserved in his tomb.  He has gone from being an  object of reverence to a tourist attraction. There are the two stories mentioned in the title - Hitler using stimulants and Lenin's odd burial, but there are a lot more from several different time periods. The problem is that there were a lot of similar stories and some weren't really from "unknown" chapters. Lots of Nazi-related stories and three separate stories of cannibalism (a plane crash, a sailing ship caught in the duldrums and a prison escape in an isolated area). That's a lot of Nazis and cannibals for a 5 hour audiobook. I found this stories to be neither great nor bad and often repetitive. I rate it 3 stars out of...

  Originally Published in 1990 as part of the book Four Past Midnight . Audiobook published in 2016 by Simon and Schuster. Read by Willem Dafoe. Duration: 8 hours, 46 minutes. Unabridged. More than 30 years ago Stephen King released a collection of four large novellas (each was certainly large enough to be a stand-alone book) called Four Past Midnight . I snapped it up and read it right away because I was an avid fan of King's work at that time  and read everything of his as soon as it arrived in my local library.  I rem embered this story as one that I did not enjoy but I also remembered that they had made a mini-series based on this story so maybe I just missed something. After all, who puts money into making a mini-series based on junky source material? Simon and Schuster decided to start breaking up King's short story and novella collections into separate, smaller stories a few years back. When I found this audiobook for The Langoliers , I decided to listen to it this...

  Published in 2017 by HarperAudio. Read by Eva Kaminsky. Duration: 10 hours, 26 minutes. Unabridged. Brittle is a caretaker robot in a future United States.  Sort of. In Sea of Rust , the United States is dead and gone due to a war between humanity and its robot servants 30 years earlier. Robots were everywhere. They were maids, gardeners, factory workers, delivery drivers, lovers, nurses, nannies, cooks, wait staff and more. On top of that, Artificial Intelligence (AI) super computers were built to do the math and research that human beings struggled to grasp.  Humans struggled to deal with the concept of robots as thinking beings. The AI super computers were clearly smarter than any individual human and the robots clearly possessed an intelligence of their own, even if it wasn't exactly like human intelligence.  The author, C. Robert Cargill As humanity seemingly made a breakthrough in its acceptance of robots as possible equals, a shocking act of political violen...