DWD's Reviews

Looks at both sides of the Atomic Bombing debate Hiroshima: Fifty Years of Debate is intended for middle and high school students. It is designed to give them both sides of the debate over whether or not the United States should have dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. It offers a short re-cap over the issues involved, including a short synposis of the war. It includes fairly comprehensive arguments from both sides and shows pictures of the results of the bombings. I would have only added one thing to the arguments: the United States was unwilling to trust its intelligence estimates of Japan's ability to continue the war since it had bungled on the German front the year before and nearly lost everything in the Battle of the Bulge (there were 75,000 American casualties) - a battle that was considered impossible by Allied intelligence since the German's were supposed to be close to surrender by that point. I will

Entertaining but of questionable value I have read Freakonomics and Naked Economics in the past 6 months and thoroughly enjoyed them. I was hoping to get more of the same with The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas . It caught my eye because it is nearly the exact same color as Naked Economics (Hmmm, I wonder if the economic naturalists would care to speculate on products that intentionally look similar to better-known products...) and I was hoping to get some more economic enlightenment. Sadly, the book reads a lot more like an extended session with Yahoo! Answers than anything else. It's interesting, but there are times when you have to wonder why anyone would be wondering these things and there are times when you have to wonder if he actually ran these answers by anyone else in another department at Cornell to see if the economic answer was right or if another answer was correct. For example, he talks about Germany having a

A fun read. Not real deep, but fun. Good vacation read for history buffs. Richard Brookhiser got the idea for What Would the Founders Do?: Our Questions, Their Answers from the questions from his audiences when he would give a public lecture on the founders. "Richard, what would the founding fathers have said about...(illegal immigration, marijuana, the war in Iraq, etc.)? So, he collected a number of those questions, did a little research and wrote this fun little book. Richard Brookhiser is the writer of the best overall biography of George Washington that I have read, Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington . This one is not the same quality, although I am giving them both the same score: 4 stars. Gouverneur Morris Why? A book of this sort is just different creature than a biography. By its very nature it is a series of starts and stops (the question and answer format). This inhibits the flow of the book in many ways, but does make it good for t

The next best thing to The Far Side Speed Bump is the next best thing to The Far Side - it is one of those smart and funny comics that make you think and laugh all at the same time. If you're the kind of person that cuts out comics and sticks them up at the office, this is your type of comic. Coverly has Just One %$#@ Speed Bump After Another broken up into themes and has a little introduction (one written by Rick Kirkman, the guy who draws "Baby Blues.") These are all clever (especially the one in which he describes a typical cartoonist's day). Well, you'll have to excuse me now, I'm off to the scanner to make a few copies of some cartoons for the office! I rate this collection 5 stars out of 5. This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Speed Bump by Dave Coverly . Reviewed on June 20, 2008.

Entertaining, not terribly deep Much like a typical day on Glenn's show, An Inconvenient Book: Real Solutions to the World's Biggest Problems is fun, easy to digest, all over the place and sometimes a bit kooky. Glenn starts out with a bang with his anti-Al Gore chapter and it is strong. In the middle he gets off track with chapters like the one about chick flcks and guy movies, blind dates and the one about aging (I fail to see how wearing a toupee or not is one of the world's biggest problems). His constant cheap shots on overweight people is not endearing, either. However, his chapters on the United Nations, political correctness, college education and the minimum wage are all very strong. He ends up with his pet theory that America is being led towards a Mexican-American-Canadian united country. He discusses this from time to time on his show. He makes a weak case in his book and it is a dud of a chapter to end with. Not having footnotes, endnotes o

A solid bit of historical fiction For this Hoosier reviewer, The Massacre at Fall Creek is most interesting since the places involved are no more than a 45 minute drive from my house. Jessamyn West  (1902-84) Jessamyn West does a great job of getting the "feel" of an 1824 frontier community - how small it was, how truly far away it was from "civilization" and how that isolation created a unique culture. The storyline is based on a real incident in which several white men from a community to the north of Pendleton, Indiana killed two families of Indians, including their children and stole their furs. Records from those days are "iffy" at best so West has to fill in a lot of blanks as she goes along. In fact, she even uses fake names for the white men involved, although it may be that in the 33 years since her book was written additional research has revealed the names of the men. Of course, the Indians were outraged at this treaty