DWD's Reviews

Originally Published in 2006. Audiobook edition published in 2008 by Brilliance Audio. Read by Christopher Graybill Duration: 9 hours, 23 minutes. Unabridged. Named Best Crime Novel of the Year by the London Evening Standard. Named one of the Top Ten Crime Novels of the Year by The New York Sun and the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel. Audiobook version named a finalist for the Audie Award. Veteran writer Robert Crais is mostly famous for his Elvis Cole/Joe Pike novels. The Two Minute Rule is on of his few stand alone novels. It features a former bank robber named Max Holman.  Synopsis Holman has a son that he barely knows because of Holman's life of crime and his subsequent prison term. All he really knows about his son is that he has become a policeman in LAPD - and Holman couldn't be more proud. That pride turns into sorrow on the day of Holman's release from prison. As he is packing up, he gets a message that tells him his son has died as a result of a shooting along with ...

Originally published in 1968. Audiobook published in 2016 by Random House Audio. Read by Erik Singer. Duration: 4 hours, 3 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis Major James Brionne is a Virginian and a confidante of President Ulysses S. Grant. He helped pacify the region immediately after the war, including hanging a criminal named Allard. The rest of the Allard family gang, bushwackers from the brutal Missouri theater of the Civil War, comes to Virginia to kill Brionne. They don't find Brionne, but they do find his wife and son at Brionne's plantation house. She takes out one of the Allard gang and then kills herself rather than be brutalized by them. The Allard gang never finds Brionne's son, who had hidden himself in a little cave nearby. Brionne decides he needs a massive change of scenery. He takes his son out West on a train, to a region he had explored as part of a military mission years earlier. He wants to find a place to start over with his son - Utah. But, Briolle gets t...

Published in July of 2025 by Hourly History. Hourly History specializes in little histories that take about an hour to read. For me, an hour of reading about the Hindenburg is about right.  The Hindenburg Disaster is a short history that details the beginnings of zeppelins/blimps through the tragedy of the complete destruction of the German zeppelin Hindenburg in just 32 seconds in New Jersey in 1937.  Germany was a focal point for building blimps/zeppelins during World War I and before World War II. The blimps went from being potential military airships to being experimental ways to travel. One has to remember that airplanes were even more experimental way to travel. Any sort of air travel was going to be prohibitively expensive - only the richest of the rich could afford it. Blimps/zeppelins offered a stately, luxurious ride - planes were seen as a noisy and cramped and inferior alternative. This short history chronicles the struggles of the blimp/zeppelin industry during t...

Originally published in 2007. Edward Bonekemper was a Civil War historian who came to the game kind of late in life - after he retired as an attorney for the federal government.  However, he brings his skills as an attorney to this book. Imagine a regulatory attorney bringing all of his research to bear in order to win a case by simply  overwhelming the other side with binder after binder of evidence. In this case, the evidence is almost 200 pages of appendices, endnotes, and a bibliography.  Bonekemper makes an argument in this book that Grant was undoubtedly the superior general when compared to Lee. In fact, he makes the arguments that Grant was the best general in the Civil War by far and Lee squandered his soldiers and his resources by going on the offense almost all of the time. Being the best general does not mean Grant made no mistakes. It does not mean Grant was perfect. Bonekemper acknowledges mistakes by Grant in every campaign and gives Lee his due from time t...

This is a "best of" list based on the 84 books I read and reviewed in 2025. I do not focus on new books, so there are books on this "best of" ranging from being published in 1973 to being published in 2025. The titles are active links to my reviews. *** = Best of the best in that category MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY I acknowledge that it is odd that I found a 39 sports autobiography to be the best book in this category, but I found this to be thoroughly enjoyable read. The cover has a blurb from Playboy saying it was the "best sports book of the year." They may have been right - it is very good. If you are an old fan of NASCAR, this will be a fantastic read for you. *** King Richard I: The Autobiography of America's Greatest Auto Racer by Richard Petty with William Neely. A Paper Orchestra by Michael Jamin. Brian Epstein: A Life from Beginning to End by Hourly History. Our Subway Baby by Peter Mercurio. John Wesley Hardin: A Life from Beginning to End by Hou...

Published in August of 2025 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, John Fugelsang. Duration: 9 hours, 24 minutes. Unabridged. John Fugelsang is seemingly omnipresent on the cable TV news/political talk show circuit. He is a talented debater because he knows how to bring the goods to an argument, especially when Christian Nationalism is involved. Fugelsang had a unique upbringing in a super-Catholic household. Why was it unusual? His mother was a former nun and his father was a former Franciscan friar. They fell in love, had a bunch of kids, and made sure that they all went to church whenever it was having a service.  In a a lot of ways, this felt a lot like my childhood. No - my parents weren't nuns or priests. But, I grew up in rural setting where my Lutheran church was one of the centers of my life. Church every weekend, most of the holiday services, Sunday school, Christmas programs, church youth group, vacation bible school, and I worked at a church summer camp for fi...

Originally published in 1985. Audiobook published in 2012 by Audible Studios. Duration: 16 hours, 26 minutes. Read by Paul Boehmer' Unabridged. I distinctly remember loving this series 40 years ago and excitedly visiting my local bookstore to pick up a new one when they were published. I was an avid player of Dungeons and Dragons and a book series released by the publishers of Dungeons and Dragons was a guaranteed win. As the series continued to print new books, I kept on buying them. I probably owned dozen or so of them. Somewhere along the way I sold off my Dragonlance collection. I worked part time at a used bookstore at one point and they probably ended up there. When I found the books in audiobook format, I decided that it was time to revisit these books and see if they held up to my memories of uncritical acclaim. Synopsis: In The Dragons of Spring Dawning , the forces of the Dragon Queen are rolling up victory after victory. But, rather than confidently rolling up the scatt...