DWD's Reviews

Published by Books in Motion Read by Rusty Nelson Duration: 6 hours, 55 minutes Unabridged Sixty-two year old Undersheriff Bill Gastner is recovering from heart surgery. He has been told to get out and exercise more and to get away from work. You see, Gastner has a lot of bad habits when he works. He doesn't sleep, he gets involved in things that get him hurt and he eats large, spicy burritos. So, Bill decides to go on a camping trip and visit a former colleague, Estelle Reyes-Guzman, who has taken a job in the sheriff department of a different county in New Mexico - up in the mountains. But, while he is trying to sleep in a campground he hears sirens and sees lights so he decides to go check it out. Soon enough, Bill is working with Reyes-Guzman and investigating a murder, looking into a smooth-talking hippie-type who quotes the Bible and brandishes a gun and eventually ends up questioning a priest. Heck of a vacation, huh? This was an interesting change of geography fo

Published by Tantor Audio in 2004 Read by Shelly Frasier Duration: 8 hours, 5 minutes Unabridged One fact about life on this planet - we are all going to die. Mary Roach takes a look at what happens once we're dead and asks what happens next? She's not exploring the afterlife - she is looking, literally, at what happens to our bodies when we "shuffle off this mortal coil." Roach explores what happens when you donate your body to science - everything from a medical school to a once-living crash test dummy. Or, you can donate your body to a mortuary school so prospective morticians can practice their future craft. Maybe you don't want to donate your entire body. What happens if you just donate some of your organs? What if you are not donating anything. What happens when you have a traditional funeral? How about if you are cremated? There are new ways to dispose of a body as well, including one that pretty much cooks the meat off of your bones and one that

Published by Random House Audio in 2014 Read by Dick Hill Duration: 7 hours, 9 minutes Unabridged This collection of Jack Reacher short stories. All are prequels to the current Reacher timeline. Two are set in Reacher's childhood and one is set during his service as an officer in the Military Police. 1) Deep Down is set during the 1980s. Reacher is asked to investigate a potential leak of military secrets to the Soviet Union via fax machine from the U.S. Capitol building. The potential leakers are a set of officers working in a committee to flash out the characteristics needed in a new sniper rifle should the Congress decide to fund the creation of a new sniper rifle and buy it. Reacher is added to the committee as part of an undercover operation to figure out who the bad guy is. This is the strongest story in the collection. 5 stars. Lee Child 2) In  Second Son , Lee Child takes us all the way back to 1974. Jack Reacher is 13 years old and his father has just been t

Published in 2013 by Penguin Audio Read by Chris Sorensen Duration: 12 hours, 58 minutes Unabridged Nathaniel Philbrick's Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution is mis-named. While the battle is in the book, it is only a part of the story. In reality, this book is a history of Boston from the 1750s and 1760s right up to the Declaration of Independence. In a lot of ways this book is much more of a biography of Dr. Joseph Warren, one of the leaders of the Sons of Liberty movement, along with Samuel Adams, John Adams and John Hancock. Warren is often overlooked nowadays because he died at Bunker Hill (which was really mostly fought on Breed's Hill). The excessive focus on Warren was, in my mind, one of the great weaknesses of the book. Philbrick spent too much time worrying over Warren's alleged personal failures and not enough time getting on with the story. It just bogged things down. Philbrick does not gloss over the warts of our Founding Fathers, noting tha

Originally published in 1964. This book is Martin Luther King's well-written defense of the Civil Rights Movement. As the title suggests, it is the argument detailing why African-Americans could no longer wait for the rights that they were guaranteed by the Constitution to be eventually given to them and the best way to do that was the application of nonviolent direct action.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) The strongest part of the argument is the middle third - the entire text of his famed Letter from Birmingham Jail .  I think Letter from Birmingham Jail is one of the most profound documents in American history. Its arguments pull from multiple points and authors in history, the very documents and history that white Americans prided themselves as the roots of their own country while King sat in a jail - and shows that those roots were being ignored in defense of the indefensible when it came to African-Americans. It is truly a brilliant piece of writing becau

Published in 2015 by Scholastic  Paul Beck's SOLDIER! looks at 15 examples of soldiers throughout history, starting with Imperial Roman infantry and ending with a U.S. Navy Seal. It is composed of 48 8.5 x 11 inch pages and includes a full-color tear-out poster of every soldier.  Most descriptions are 4 pages, including a map where the soldiers would have operated. It also includes a full page drawing of the soldier with notes about the weight and length of their weapon(s). The third and fourth pages include more information about optional weapons, training or tools.  The only complaint I have about the book is that it could have included a little more diversity. 12 of the 15 soldiers came from Europe or America. For example, the Aztec warriors that confronted Cortes had unique weapons and armor and would have been a great addition.  That being said, the book was well-done. The pictures were interesting as were the factoids. This would be a good book for students from