DWD's Reviews

  Book published in 2018. Audiobook published in 2023 by S.D. Falchetti. Read by Shamaan Casey. Duration: 7 hours, 59 minutes. Unabridged. Hayden's World: Volume 1 is a collection of 5 short stories in a single "universe" centering around a corporation that is in the forefront in the exploration of our solar system.  Roughly the first half of the book is about top executives of the company and their new drive system that will push a ship to nearly light speed. There are a lot of high-minded speeches about mankind and the need to keep pushing boundaries. When I say speeches, I mean literal speeches lifted from testimony to some sort of U.N. body.  Speeches are not the best way to introduce a book, in my opinion. The first part is just slow. I nearly quit listening to the audiobook multiple times in the first hour or so. The first story has an exciting, game-changing twist at the end that is simply dropped. The last two stories are great examples of hard science fiction in...

  Published by Blackstone Publishing in September of 2022. Read by Nicole Zanzerella. Duration: 12 hours, 6 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: An Enigma Machine from World War II. Patton Harcourt is a very small town librarian in North Carolina. One morning, while cooking in the kitchen, a sniper round comes through her window and nearly hits her. She reacts well (thanks to her previous career in the military) and finds a stranger at her door.  He is not the sniper, but he is an assassin that was hired to kill another person in town. Against her better judgment, she joins with the assassin to elude the sniper team. All of that happens in the first 10 minutes or so of this audiobook. From there, they discover a handmade copy of World War II Enigma machine (the British machine that broke the German secret codes) and are off to confront modern-day Neo-Nazis... My Review: This book was certainly action-packed, extremely fast-paced ,and had some good moments. But, it also had some prac...

  Originally published in 1925. This audiobook version was published by HarperAudio in 2004. Read by Tim Robbins. Duration: 5 hours, 3 minutes. Unabridged.   Way back in the 1980s, I read The Great Gatsby . I remembered very little about it except that a rich guy was pining over a woman throughout the book. I also misremembered a few plot points. For example, I remembered Gatsby's car being dumped in a swimming pool or maybe in the bay. I have been reminded of the book on a regular basis because I teach in a high school and the book is read yearly by some English class or another. I usually ask a student if they like the book and tell them that I read it in high school. If they ask them if I liked it, I usually respond that I barely remember the plot except for "rich man - sad." When my daughter read it in her high school English class, I decided that it was time to re-visit the book.  Synopsis: Nick Carraway is newly arrived in New York City. He is a World War I veteran ...

Originally published in 1952. Synopsis: Paul Proteus is the director of the Ilium Works in New York State in an alternate timeline to our current one. It is roughly the 1950's after yet another World War.  That war taught the engineers to trust mechanization and the government to continue the central planning model that won the war (a more extreme model of the system the real United States used during World War II.) In the Ilium works there are multiple factory buildings full of machines, but there are no people because the whole thing is automated. Proteus and the other engineers replaced all of the people with machines in the name of efficiency. Even the best human workers make mistakes or get an illness and miss work or, eventually, die.  The machines don't have that problem. They work and work and work until the day they are replaced with even faster machines. Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) in 1952 This is the source of the title, Player Piano . A player piano plays itself than...

  Published in 2016 by Marvel Enterprises. Illustrated by Marco Checchetto, Angel Unzueta, Emilio Laiso, and Tony Harris This is an attempt to bridge some of the space in the Star Wars story line between  Episode VI: Return of the Jedi and Episode VII: The Force Awakens . It starts (oddly, in my mind) at the beginning of the last big battle over the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi and introduces Poe Dameron's parents. His mother is a pilot who flew in the attack on the second Death Star and his father was in the ground forces that fought alongside Han Solo.  There is plenty of action, but I found the art did a "meh" job of conveying the action of a space battle and there were lots and lots of them. The story really depended a lot on space fighting action and was pretty shallow. I did enjoy the last story. It was done by a different artist, written by a different author, and is not connected to the main story line. It features C-3P0 and is actually touching. ...

  Published by Imbrifex Books in March of 2023. Read by Mark Sanderlin. Duration: 8 hours, 49 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Dan Renfrew is a self-described homeschooled nerd and his life has been turned upside down. He watched his father get stabbed by a stranger who invaded their house and he has no idea if he is even alive.  Now, thanks to a magical device, Dan is in Medieval England and caught up in an army on the move. He learns that his father is a "time jumper" - men tasked to fix glitches in time and make sure the timeline plays out the way it is supposed to. The year is 1066 - just a few days before King Harold Godwinson meets and defeats one of the last Viking invasions of England at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Even more importantly, King Harold will be forced to meet the forces of William, the Duke of Normandy in just a few days and will be defeated at the Battle of Hastings. But, something is wrong and even though Dan has almost no idea what to do, he has to ma...

  Published by Recorded Books in February of 2023. Read by David Chandler. Duration: 9 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Game Warden Joe Pickett is out in a snowstorm chasing down an elk with a broken leg. An out of state driver plowed into an elk herd while consulting the GPS app on his phone and an injured elk somehow limped away.  Joe and his dog Daisy are on a big ranch owned by an out of state multi-millionaire trying to track down the elk to put it out of its misery. Joe finds the elk, an SUV from a different part of the state, a metal building that is very out of place in this out of the way valley, and a dead man.  Joe starts to nose around and gets shot at twice by snowmobilers at the top of the valley and that's just the beginning of his troubles... My review: For the past 13 years I have been happily reviewing C.J. Box's novels. I went back and looked at those reviews and bit-time politics has been a part of them since almost the beginning. His early book...