DWD's Reviews

  Published in 2014 by Simon and Schuster Audio Multicast performance, mostly read by the author, Cary Elwes Duration: 7 hours, 1 minute Unabridged. If you are a fan of the movie The Princess Bride , like I am, this is a must-read book (or must-listen if you are an audiobook listener like me). Cary Elwes, if you don't know, stars in the movie as Wesley/The Dread Pirate Roberts. Elwes interviews all of the major actors in the movie who are still with us and tells the story of the creation of the movie from the writing of the original script by William Goldman all the way through the eventual success of the movie in the video rental market. Goldman is the author of the book that the movie is based and was an experienced and well-respected writer of screenplays, having written the Academy Award-winning scripts for All the President's Men and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid . He also said that The Princess Bride was his favorite script and he wouldn't trust it to just anyo...

  Published by Hourly History in 2020. One of the nice things about the e-books that Hourly History publishes is that they offer free books every week and they cover a wide range of topics in a manageable size. This book is a great example. There is no way that I would have read a 400 page history of this war simply but I was perfectly willing to read about it for an hour while while waiting for an appointment. If you have never heard of the Mahdist War, join the club. This is one of the seemingly never-ending series of colonial wars that Britain took up as the European powers divided up Africa in the 1800's.  The Mahdist flag In this case, Sudan rose up and threw out their joint Ottoman/Egyptian overlords, which caused a lot uproar in the area. The British thought it would be a danger to their vassal state of Egypt and possibly Ethiopia, Somalia and may even threaten shipping along the Horn of Africa and access to India. This was probably an overreaction, but the British dec...

  Published by Tantor Audio in 2019. Read by Rebecca Gibel. Duration: 5 hours, 57 minutes. Unabridged . Lilliana Mason is an associate research professor at Johns Hopkins University. She collects, analyzes and breaks down the raw data that tells us what we already know about American politics right now - we are polarized. For me, the most interesting part in when she looks at what that means and who is actually being polarized here. If you are a true political junkie - the type of person that reads a lot of news, watches the Sunday morning talking head shows and the has clearly identifiable ideological positions you can be very partisan, but are unlikely to be truly polarized.  The true insight in this book came from a deep look at the most polarized people - the people that truly believe that the other party is a clear and present danger to the country and that all Republicans are clearly Nazis or all Democrats are clearly communists. You run across the people in the comment ...

  Published by Macmillan Audio in 2021. Read by the author, Dax-Devlon Ross. Duration: 5 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. Dax-Devlon Ross makes a simple observation that it is entirely possible to participate in a racist system and not be racist. Not only is it possible, it is quite common. A person can participate in a system that looks fair on the surface, but somehow always results in the same kinds of people and the same kinds of people at the bottom.  He notes that this is not a particularly popular idea among white Americans, especially white male Americans. But, he also noted that the death of George Floyd caused a lot of white people to reconsider what they thought they knew.  This book offers an explanation of structural racism and gives concrete examples from the author's life and recent American history and offers some suggestions as to how to identify structural racism and break it up. That is good. On the other hand, there is some Human Resources jargon that I h...

  Published in 2010 by Hachette Audio. Read by Robert Petkoff. Duration: 13 hours, 33 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Eric Shaw is a down on his luck film maker who has moved back to Chicago from Hollywood. His marriage is on the rocks, he feels sorry for himself and he is making ends meet by making little movies out of family photos for funerals. He is good at his job - so good at it that he is offered a special job. A woman asks him to travel to French Lick, Indiana and research the early years of her father-in-law, an eccentric billionaire. The only clue he has is a strange bottle of Pluto brand mineral water, bottled in French decades earlier. The bottle seems to be forever cold and the water inside looks strange. Once Shaw arrives in French Lick the water is not the only strange thing he encounters... ******* My Review: This is good supernatural thriller. I did not realize this when I started listening because I had picked out this book because it was set in the French Lick are...

Originally Published by The Great Courses in 2012. This version published by The Great Courses in 2013. Read by the author, John McWhorter. Unabridged. Linguist John McWhorter takes a look at the history of the English language in this 24 lecture presentation. He includes the origins of some of our more unique features and also the origins of some of our "rules" that aren't really rules at all. The author, John McWhorter McWhorter takes a long view, going all of the way back to English's roots in proto-Indo-European. Proto-Indo-European language from the Caucus mountains region that spread all over the place and eventually became lots and lots of modern languages, including English. For me, the most interesting theory was based on English's relative lack of verb endings. If you have ever studied Spanish, like me, than you remember the endless verb charts and verb endings. The same goes with French and German. Why doesn't English have all of those endings? We u...

  Published in 2020 by Recorded Books. Read by David Chandler. Duration: 10 hours, 35 minutes. Unabridged This book is the 20th in the Joe Pickett series, but in a lot of ways it is the sequel to the 19th book in the series: Wolf Pack . More about that below. The book starts out with Joe in the deep woods on an investigation of a bear attack. But, he is called back to Saddlestring, Wyoming on an emergency run. The wife of a legendary local judge was shot during a presumed attempted very long range sniper attack on the judge. The judge has demanded that every law enforcement officer in the area investigate immediately, including Game Warden Joe Pickett. Of course, things are more complicated than that... ************Spoilers************* In Wolf Pack  a Mexican drug cartel assassination team shot up Saddlestring, killing the sheriff, the prosecutor, critically injuring an FBI agent and more. Nate Romanowski killed the leader of the hit squad and in this book their best assassin...