DWD's Reviews

Published in 2016. This little biography is part of an extensive series of short histories produced by Hourly History. The idea is to be a history or a biography that you can read in an hour. Amazon says that his particular biography is the equivalent to 48 pages long.  Some historians have asserted that there are more biographies written about Lincoln than anyone else in history, with the exception of Jesus. This is the 73rd book that I've reviewed that with the #tag of "Abraham Lincoln." What does this book have to offer that literally thousands of biographies and histories haven't already covered? To be honest - nothing. But, it is exactly the sort of biography that someone who hates history might pick to read because it is not an intimidating length and it is not written in highfalutin language.  There is nothing in this biography that is inaccurate, just a matter of what the Hourly History people decided to highlight and emphasize. I rate this kindle book 3 stars...

Be Warned - it changes tone quite abruptly Published in 2015 by ChristianAudio.com Read by the author, Caleb Kaltenbach. Duration: 6 hours, 3 minutes. Unabridged. I checked out the audiobook version of Messy Grace from my local library using the Overdrive app. I highly recommend this app, but it does have a small failing - it does not include any sort of reviews of the digital ebooks or audiobooks. It only includes the publisher's description and the publisher's description of this audiobook only tells part of the story.  As the title says, Kaltenbach did indeed grow up with gay parents. They married young and divorced after a few years. His mother lived life as a married couple with another woman (this was pre-gay marriage) and his father lived as a closeted gay man. His mother hated Christians because of Westboro Baptist Church -type protesters, but to be fair to his mother, there are plenty of people that express the same thoughts that they publicly proclaim in private sit...

  Published in 2014 by The New Press Synopsis: It is 1914 and World War I is starting. This story is about 5 young men who live in a small town in France leave together to join the fight.  If you have studied this war, you know that this war was a meat grinder from one end of it to the other, but the beginning of any war is especially rough. The technologies have changed but the techniques have not kept up. Men die and get maimed out of ignorance. This war is no different. My Review: I have no problem with the depiction of anything in this book. But, I do have a problem with the book's lack of passion. No one is particularly excited about life before the war, during the war and definitely not after the war. Everything is stated matter of factly. I lnow it's a style thing but it served to push me away from the story rather than draw me in. If the characters can't muster enough interest to care, why should I? I rate this book 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com he...

Published in 2012 by Vanguard Press. Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) is from Indianapolis, the city I have lived in since 1998. He was always proud to be FROM Indianapolis but never moved back once he and his family moved away right after World War II. His sense of humor and cynical/sarcastic of view has often been compared to Mark Twain, but I am reminded of the humor of another Indianapolis boy a few years later who also went off to the big city and made it big - David Letterman.  We Are What We Pretend to Be contains the first real story written by Vonnegut and the beginning of the novel he was working on when he passed away. These are the bookends of his literary career.  The first story is called Basic Training . It was written when he was about age 30 and was never published. His daughter describes stacks of rejection letters and one can assume that this story helped create that stack.   The giant mural honoring Vonnegut in downtown Indianapolis.  The story is ...

Audiobook published in 2009 by Blackstone Audio..  Originally published in book form in 1988. Read by Grover Gardner. Duration: 8 hours, 44 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Falling Free is entry #4 in a long series of published books and short stories. Leo Graf is an engineer. Actually, he's more than an engineer. He's a space engineer - he builds habitats, space stations, space ships and more. And - he's really good at it. He has been brought by his company to a space station in orbit around an out of the way space colony to teach outer space welding. But, his students are not what he expects. He finds the station has nearly 1,000 genetically modified residents that are named quaddies. They are designed to work in no gravity environments - they have no legs. Instead of legs there is a second set of arms. They can grip onto something and still have two or three hands to work with - especially welding together new space stations and expansions to current space stations.  Graf...

  Published in 2016 by The Great Courses. Read by Natalie Schilling. Duration: 5 hours, 55 minutes. Unabridged. If you are not aware of The Great Courses, they are basically college-level lectures (undergrad) on a topic. Most of them clock in at around 20 hours in length, but this one came in at just under 6 hours.  When I saw that the subtitle of English in America was "A Linguistic History", I thought the audiobook would be a more formal history. Rather than present it in a typical history format, the book was presented in a scattergun type style. Everything she covered was perfectly fine to put in her presentations and sounded perfectly good to me - I've listened to and read a few books on this topic (not enough to make me any sort of an expert). She discusses such topics as how English may have sounded when the first English colonies were established, how American English developed new words, influences on American English from immigrants groups, African American dia...

  Published in 2013 by Blackstone Audio. Read by Joe Barrett. Duration: 7 hours, 11 minutes. Unabridged. At the very end of World War II there was an extraordinary pairing of German soldiers and American soldiers to protect French dignitaries and celebrities being held in an Austrian castle prison. How late was it in the war? Hitler was already dead. The Allies were well into Germany and Americans had pushed all of the way into Austria.  But, that does not mean that the German military was without power. They had fantastic equipment and there were still plenty of "true believer" SS troops insisting that the war wasn't over - or it it was over, the Allies should pay for every inch of territory until the last German soldier fell. The unlikely alliance happens when a Austrian-born German officer comes to an agreement with the leaders of the local anti-Nazi resistance movement in Austria. Technically, Austria was a part of Germany but it had only been a part of Germany for 7 ...