DWD's Reviews

  Published in 2015 by Penguin Audio. Read by the author, Dan Jones. Duration: 7 hours, 12 minutes. Unabridged. The Magna Carta is commonly considered to be the founding document of Western Democracy. Many believe that there is a direct line goes from the Magna Carta to the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries) to the Declaration of Independence (1776) to the Bill of Rights in the American Constitution (1791)  to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1791) to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Jones believes that there is a whole lot of truth to this. but he spends a lot time explaining why the "direct line" is not as straight as many think. King John (1166-1216) signing the Magna  Carta in 1215.  Jones does an excellent job of explaining the political situation in England that led to the Magna Carta in 1215 in reasonable, layman terms. Once the reader understands how the system was supposed to work, Jones demonstrates that King John ...

Originally published in 2016. English translation published in 2018 by Penguin Press. Before reading this massive 421 page graphic novel, I knew relatively little about Che Guevara (1928-1967.) I knew that he was from South America, he was famous for his part in the Cuban Revolution and that he died trying to lead a revolution in Bolivia. And, of course, I knew him from the famous picture. This graphic novel filled in a lot of blanks for me. It is a friendly biography of Che but doesn't glorify him. When I got to the end I was struck by how much of a failure Che actually was after he left Cuba. He tried to replicate the success of the Cuban Revolution but he could not. It's hard to tell if counter-revolutionary measures from the governments he was trying to overthrow (and the U.S.) were simply more successful than Batista had been in Cuba or if they were missing an additional spark like the Castro brothers had provided. The graphic novel was put together well. It had no confusi...

  Published in 2018 by Penguin Audio. Read by Stephen Mendel Duration: 10 hours, 44 minutes. Unabridged Synopsis: The third entry in the Peter Ash series begins with Peter Ash working on a team rebuilding hiking trails in Oregon and writing long heartfelt letters back to his love interest from the second book. He makes friends with an older man named Henry (a Vietnam vet, as opposed to Ash being a vet of Iran and Afghanistan.) Henry gets a call from his daughter in Colorado and asks for Henry's help with her business that provides security for some of the legal marijuana businesses. Turns out that these businesses have to operate completely in cash because marijuana is still illegal so far as the federal government is concerned so banks cannot take credit cards, debit cards or even deposits because it would be considered helping to traffic drugs. This means that there are shipments of pot and shipments of cash coming and going and that can attract bad guys. An entire security crew ...

  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...