DWD's Reviews

Wonderful I absolutely love the Bill Gastner series. I have read a few unsatisfying novels lately and Dead Weight was a real joy. Gastner is the nearly 70-year-old insomniac sherrif of a small town in New Mexico. He consumes great quantities of coffee and very spicy Mexican food (even for breakfast!) while he juggles a homicide investigation, a mysterious accusation against one of his officers and a landlord/renter dispute. Small town politics and good police work don't necessarily go hand-in-hand, but Gastner makes it work anyway. Havill's characters remind me very much of those of fellow New Mexican author Tony Hillerman. For me, this is very high praise since I absolutely love the Leaphorn/Chee novels. If Havill and Hillerman are par for the course in the world of New Mexican authors than I am going to looking for more of them. Truly a delightful read. I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Dead Weight by Steven H

Audio Version a real treat Read by John Ritter Duration: 2 hours, 33 minutes Dave Barry Dave Barry's Greatest Hits was read by John Ritter who was one of the few people who could actually read Dave Barry correctly - he put the emphasis in the right places and pauses to make the jokes work perfectly. On to the material - Pulled from Barry's earlier material in the early 1990s, it was a bit up and down, but mostly up (even the downs weren't down very far). His time-share condo essay is a gem that should be printed off and handed out to people before they go into any time-share condo presentation. His "Diplodocus" essay was funny and touching all at the same time. One of his best ever. The "Can New York Save Itself?" essay was a prime example of Dave taking a joke and running it into the ground. It was mildly amusing but it kept going and going and going and going and ... you get the point. I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of

Lovely speech - a joy for any history lover David McCullough Narrated by the author, David McCullough Duration: About 40 minutes I am a high school history teacher - not the type of history teacher who got into it so he could also coach. I am a REAL history teacher. I love history. I read histories for entertainment. I go on trips to see historical places. History is exciting and important to me. The Course of Human Events , McCullough's wonderful 40 minute speech on the Founding Fathers, history and great literature made my soul sing. I learned a lot but mostly I found the joy of listening to a kindred spirit discuss history and its importance and the joys of learning.  McCullough is a two time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a winner of the National Book Award for his histories. I also found myself being a bit envious of McCullough's wonderful speaking voice and the fact that he writes so well. However, I quickly recovered since McCullough is not sting

Really, really bad John Trenhaile lives in England - and this is an important fact for the rest of this review. He lives in England and he has written a mystery set in California. Now, it seems to me that a mystery set in 1990s California should feature characters that sound like Californians, behave like Californians and follow Californian police procedures. Instead, in A Means to Evil Trenhaile has characters that speak like they live in England, they behave like the English and they follow insanely ridiculous police procedures. By page 150 of this 388 page book I was sick of the meandering story and the unprofessional behavior of the psychologist. But then I started to fold over the pages that had silly comments, unlikely technical achievements and flat out use of non-American English. I ended up with well over 30 folded pages. Examples of non-American English: Police chief yelling at reporters before a press conference: "Give way!...Give way to the fron

Keefe's "voice" captured perfectly on this version of the audiobook   Ring Lardner (1885-1933) Read by Barry Kraft Duration: 3 hours. Publisher: Book of the Road (August 1990) You Know Me Al: A Busher's Letters consists of a series of rather detailed letters written by a bush-league ballplayer named Jack Keefe. Keefe has been called up from the Terre Haute team to join the Chicago White Sox. He is writing to one of his former bush-league teammates in Bedford, IN. Keefe is truly a country bumpkin, a rube, a bumbling fool who does not understand the more sophisticated world of the major leagues, but who still succeeds based on the strength of his pitching arm. The reader gets a kick out of seeing the world through his eyes but really understanding the situations he is in, similar to Forrest Gump , except that Jack does not have a disability - he is just ignorant. The audio version I heard (Book of the Road's version) is wonderfully performe

How can I effectively heap praise on a book that has already won the Pulitzer Prize? Originally Published in 2003. What else can I do but chime in with my own little two cents worth of opinion and join the crowd? The Known World is a complex, rich, frustrating, fascinating, compelling, comforting, detailed work that is filled with 3-dimensional characters that draw the reader into the complex, confusing, often brutal world of slavery on the Virginia frontier in the 1800s. Set in a fictional county in Virginia, The Known World revolves around the Townsends, a family of ex-slaves. Henry Townsend is a former slave who owns a plantation replete with slaves. The irony of that situation strikes one his slaves who notes to himself that it is odd for a black man to own slaves, but really no odder than the very idea that one person may own another in the first place. The author, Edward P. Jones, does not tell the story in a linear fashion. Instead, he bounces his readers al

The cover and the title make you think you're in for more than this movie delivers As fans of Starship Troopers know, the very name Starship Troopers implies a galaxy-sweeping epic with lots of violence, gore, heroism, humor, drama and tons of big-budget special effects. This one is limited to one location, his lots of gore but little in the humor, drama and big-budget special effects department. One has to wonder at the thought processes in Hollywood. Starship Troopers was a big success. Sure, it was expensive, but it is also a regular staple on cable TV and it continues to sell well. One would think that a Starship Troopers 2 would have been in the works for a long time - perhaps a final push to the bug home system. Instead, according to the director's commentary track, the special effects director of the original Starship Troopers came up with this simple, low-budget plot that he wanted to direct. Somehow sold it to the powers-that-be at Sony and th