DWD's Reviews

Published in 2018 by Blackstone Audio. Read by Donald Corren. Duration: 8 hours, 38 minutes. Unabridged. Rus Bradburd's All the Dreams We've Dreamed is both a complicated story and a simple story of two Chicago men whose lives have revolved around the game of basketball. It's a story of a coach and a player.  It's a story of connections between people and also a story of bureaucratic neglect.  It's a story of remorse and shame and a story of pride of place and love for one's teammates and players. It's a story of love and a story of catastrophic violence. Mostly, because it is set in the free fire gun zone of Chicago's West Side, it is a tragedy. The book centers on Marshall High School and its basketball program. Perhaps you have heard about the wave of gun violence that has swept through Chicago's South and West sides, earning it the nickname "Chi-raq" because it is reminiscent of Iraq during the bad old days of The Surge at t

Published by Brilliance Audio in 2005. Read by Dick Hill. Duration: 14 hours, 37 minutes. Unabridged. Lee Child Technically, this is the ninth Jack Reacher book that Lee Child has published, but since Lee Child doesn't write the books "in order" there are two broad time periods that Jack Reacher novels occur in: 1) In the Army, 2) post-Army. This is post-army book. It is also the book that inspired the first Tom Cruise Jack Reacher movie, but if you have seen the movie you can read this book and have an entirely different experience. It inspired the movie, the movie didn't follow it too closely. Reacher doesn't appear for the first hour and ten minutes of this audiobook. Instead, the readers are witness to a mass shooting in southern Indiana that draws Reacher from Florida because he knew the accused shooter in the Army. Once he arrives, Reacher immediately knows that something off and finds himself in a rare moral quandary. But, Reacher figures out how

Published by Amazon Publishing in 2017. Janet Guthrie becomes the first woman to qualify for the Indy 500 in 1977. Every racing fan has heard of Danica Patrick. She raced successfully for seven years in IndyCar, raced in 8 Indy 500s (with 6 top ten finishes) and 7 years in NASCAR (with less success). Long before Danica there was Janet Guthrie - a true pioneer in motorsports. This short kindle book puts Guthrie's achievement in context in two ways. First, it details how truly startling it was to the drivers at the top levels of NASCAR and IndyCar for a woman to show up and try to add a little diversity to the field. Drivers that I always looked up to, like Richard Petty, said startlingly sexist comments about Guthrie. The second way the book puts Guthrie's achievement in context is the more important one.  The author, Stephan Talty, describes how Guthrie worked her way up the ranks, tore apart engines, suspensions and body work and worked on her cars in her spare time as

Published in 2018 by G.P. Putnam's Sons. Game Warden Joe Pickett and the new governor of Wyoming have a turbulent relationship at best. The previous governor used Joe as his own personal law enforcement officer from time-to-time. This wasn't because Joe was some sort of rogue cop - quite the opposite. He knew that Joe was a dogged investigator who had a talent for following clues where they led him - or at the very least stumbling around blind and stepping in the middle of the problem on accident. Sure, it had a real cost in damage to trucks (a tradition continued in this book), but Joe could be trusted to do the right thing. The new governor found about Joe and has tried to use him to deal with political problems masked as law enforcement problems. Joe has refused and the new governor does not deal with rejection well. However, this time there is a real-life law enforcement issue to deal with. A female British executive and media darling has disappeared after vacationing

Published by Penguin Audio in May of 2018. Read by the author, Charlie LeDuff. Duration: 7 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged. Charlie LeDuff has done a lot of things, but mostly he's been a reporter. He's worked all over the place, he won a Pulitzer Prize in New York City but lately he's settled down in Detroit. He told his irreverent version of the collapse of Detroit in Detroit: An American Autopsy . He takes that same vision outside of Detroit and talks about the rest of the country and finds that Detroit may be a mess, but it's hardly unique. In 2013, LeDuff was offered a job at Fox News travelling the country and taking a look at regular Americans and their struggles in a segment called The Americans . He jumped at it and went all over the place. He went to New York City to look into topless women in Times Square (it's legal). He went to both of the Bundy family standoffs and spent most of his time talking to the hangers on that joined the family. He looke

Published by Tantor Audio in 2016. Read by Guy Bethell. Duration: 7 hours, 20 minutes. Julius Caesar (100 B.C. to 44 B.C.) Unabridged. The entire history of the world is less than 7 and 1/2 hours? Yep, that's what Christopher Lascelles purports to offer in his A Short History of the World . He acknowledges that this is not a complete history - he never intended it to be. Instead, his aim is to connect some of the dots that the average reader may have picked up in history class, movies and History Channel documentaries (and hopefully spark a bit more interest). Lascelles does succeed in hitting many of the high points and certainly does a better job at not being as Eurocentric as other short world histories have been, such as A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich. Lascelles spends quite a bit of time discussing China, Japan, India and Mongolia. All that being said, there are entire civilizations that are ignored or get nothing more than a passing nod. That is al