DWD's Reviews

Published by HarperAudio in December of 2023. Read by the author, Tim Alberta. Duration: 18 hours, 16 minutes. Unabridged. Tim Alberta is a writer for The Atlantic and also an Evangelical. He grew up in the faith, but is very troubled by the tendency towards Christian Nationalism. He was inspired to write this book after an incident at his father's funeral at the church he grew up in.  Alberta embarked on a cross-country exploration of the intersection of Evangelicals and politics at Christian Nationalism - and how this combination is changing Evangelicals and they way they are perceived. Alberta does not come at this as an outsider. As I already noted, he grew up in the church - and still belongs to a church. To me, this is important. I read another book with a similar theme ( The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism ) that just didn't hit the right tone and answer the right questions because the author was coming from the outside. She didn...

  Published in 1981 by Delacorte Press. Kurt Vonnegut offers this collection (he calls is a "collage") of fiction, non-fiction, interviews, and even a musical based on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  As is the case with all collections, some parts of the collection are excellent and some parts are not very good. I believe that he first half of the collection is the best, mostly because of the inclusion of a history of the Vonnegut family in Indianapolis. Ironically, it was not written by Vonnegut, but by a family member who had married into the Vonnegut family.  Indianapolis is my adopted hometown and this Vonnegut family history reads like a history of the city from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. I found it fascinating reading, especially the story of the subscription brothel gentlemen's club that was frequented by the city's elite in an area that still has political "clubs" with fancy dining and smoking rooms more than 100 years later. It would be tacky to pay ...

Published in 2021 by DC Comics   When I first heard of this crossover graphic novel I thought to myself that this could be a horrible mess of a book. I actually flipped through it just to be ready to make fun of it. After all, how could a book based on a videogame that's using Batman as a promotional gimmick be any good?  Turns out I was wrong.  The plot makes sense. Even more importantly, it is an interesting and compelling read. In the story, what Batman suspects is a crack in time and space opens up over Gotham City. People are fleeing. Batman consults with Chief Gordon and learns that some people are actually drawn to this tear in reality.  As Batman gets closer to investigate he finds Harley Quinn. She is heading directly towards the tear and Batman cannot stop her. However, his efforts have placed him in a vulnerable position and a shadowy figure pushes Batman in. Batman arrives in the world of Fortnite with no memory and surrounded by violence. The world gets ...

  Published in 2015 by Now What Media, LLC Synopsis: Set in Czechoslovakia during World War II, The Golem's Voice  is the story of a young Jewish mom and her two sons trying to escape relocation by the Nazis. This was in the time when the Nazis were still telling Jews that they were relocating them to alternate settlements rather than just taking them to work and death camps. As they are being loaded onto trains, the mom gets a bad feeling and tells her boys (Yoakim and Yakov) to just run. She does not join them because they are much faster than her and she just wants them to escape and live. Her boys run under the trains and, at first, things look good. But, soon enough, Nazi soldiers are in full pursuit and Yoakim is shot providing cover for his little brother. Yakov continues to run to the only place the knows - the Jewish ghetto neighborhood that he just came from. He hears a voice in his head calling him to the home of a long-dead rabbi named Yudah Loew . Legend has it th...

Originally Published in 1983. Read by the author, Sandra Cisneros. Duration: 2 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged The House on Mango Street is the story of a Hispanic girl named Esperanza who grows up in a little house in a poor neighborhood in Chicago. Her story is told in a series of unrelated vignettes (44 in all) that tell some sort of story about her family life or the neighborhood itself. In some, the main character clearly has no idea of the more adult themes that occur around her, while in others she is very astute and understands the larger implications.  At first, Esperanza's family intends that the house is going to be a temporary stop on their climb towards economic success in America. But, they never quite are able to move out of this troubled neighborhood and the reader is able to see how the neighborhood affects the lives of everyone around Esperanza as she grows up. To be fair, the neighborhood is not all bad, but it is a tough place for children to grow up and keep the...

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in November of 2013 Read by the author, Brian Stelter Duration: 11 hours, 16 minutes. Unabridged Brian Stelter is a former CNN commentator. While in college, he started a blog about news commentary shows and the personalities that make them what they are. In a way, he has been working on this book for more than 15 years.  Stelter pored over the paperwork from the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News to help write this 2020-2023 history of the cable news giant.  He spends the most amount of time looking at the biggest show with the biggest host on Fox News at the time - Tucker Carlson. He goes over a litany of Tucker's Greatest Hits - the Great Replacement Theory , The January 6 Insurrection was just a tourist event , Ukrainian biolabs , transgender conspiracies , and, of course, the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen . He looks at the power dynamics at the top of Fox News, including Rupert Murdoch, the board at Fox ...

Published in 2023 by Little, Brown, and Company. Read by the author, Curtis Chin Duration: 8 hours, 12 minutes. Unabridged. Curtis Chin grew up in the 1980s in and around Detroit, Michigan. His immediate family and his extended family shared ownership in a Chinese restaurant in Detroit's Chinatown. Chin spent a considerable chunk of his early life working, eating, and doing homework in the restaurant. Chin tells about how his family ended up in Detroit, how his parents met and got married, the sometimes uncomfortable extended family dynamic, and the decline of Chung's Cantonese Cuisine's once vibrant neighborhood. There is also plenty of discussion about school from kindergarten through a four year degree at the University of Michigan. These parts of the story often discussed the racial dynamics of going to school in Detroit's majority minority school system. Later, when the family joined the white flight to the suburbs, there was a new dynamic of going to a school wher...