DWD's Reviews

Published by Penguin Audio on March 31, 2020. Read by the author, Jonathan Karl. Duration: 10 hours, 16 minutes. Unabridged. Jonathan Karl has had a long relationship with Donald Trump. Karl is a reporter Jonathan Karl and Donald Trump in 1994 and nowadays. ( The New Republic , The New York Post, CNN and ABC) and he first met Donald Trump in 1994. Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley had just gotten married and were staying in Trump Tower for their honeymoon. Karl convinced Trump to do an interview about why celebrities would want to stay in his building. Trump personally led Karl on a tour of the building. Over the years, Karl interviewed Trump multiple times for multiple reasons. Because of this relationship, Karl was called on to interview Trump when he toyed with the idea of running for president before 2016 (5 times). Karl moved on to be the White House correspondent for the Obama administration for ABC and stayed when Donald Trump was elected. This book will not change

Hessian soldiers. Originally published in 1972. Howard Fast (1914-2003) was a prolific author with a particular love of historical fiction. He is most famous for the novel Spartacus , the book that the famous movie is based on. This book is set in rural Connecticut late in the Revolutionary War. The war has moved on south of Connecticut. The main character is Dr. Feversham, a veteran of the Revolutionary War and wars in Europe who is sick to death of war. He is not a particularly pleasant man. He is a lapsed Catholic while most of his neighbors are Protestants. There is also a scattering of Quakers in the area. A British ship dropped off a squad of 16 Hessians who cause a panic. Hessians are German soldiers hired by the British to help supplement their soldiers during the Revolutionary War. They were particularly hated and feared because they were mercenaries (and they fought very well). The Americans could understand why the British fought, but what was the motivation of soldiers

Originally published in book form in 1990. Published in 2017 by Blackstone Audio. Read by Paul Heitsch. Duration: 12 hours, 33 minutes. Unabridged (see below) Clocking in at 12 and one-half hours, this book is an abridgment of a larger work in Reconstruction that Foner published in 1988.  Still, it is plenty long enough to reveal the scope of the tragedy that was the post-Civil War Reconstruction. President Andrew Johnson (1808-1875) Abraham Lincoln often thought about the conditions necessary to bring the seceded states back into the Union. He called that plan Reconstruction because the separate state governments would be rebuilt and then the Union itself would be reformed. There were certain ground rules, including not letting power players in the Confederate and seceded state governments return to power. Most importantly, slavery had to be ended in the areas under the authority of the Emancipation Proclamation that was effective on January 1, 1863. When Lincoln was as

Published in 2009 by Hachette Audio. Read by Peter Giles. Duration: 11 hours, 15 minutes. Unabridged. The author, Michael Connelly The Scarecrow is a sequel to one of Michael Connelly's earliest books - 1996's The Poet.  In The Poet, newspaper reporter and FBI agent Rachel Walling solve a murder mystery and defeat a serial killer. Since that time, McEvoy wrote a book about his experiences, moved from Colorado and took a job with the LA Times . Now, 12 years later, he is being let go as the Times is going through a round of lay-offs. He has been given two weeks notice and told to train his younger replacement on the crime beat. Meanwhile, a parent calls to complain to McEvoy about an article he wrote saying that her teenaged child had killed a woman and stuffed her body in the trunk of a car. McEvoy decides to look into the case and he and his reporter-in-training uncover some interesting facts that make it clear that the boy didn't do it. Instead, McEvoy is on the

Published in 2013. If you were a kid in central Indiana in the 1960's, 1970's and 1980's you knew the local kid's TV show stars of Channel 4: Janie, Cowboy Bob, and Peggy. If your parents let you stay up late to watch scary movies, you also know Sammy Terry and his evil laugh. This book tells the story of how these characters came to be, why the television landscape favored these types of shows at the time and why they are no longer around nowadays. Getting to know a little about each of the actual people behind the TV characters was a lot of fun. Sammy Terry - an all-around TV guy and the owner of a music store. Janie - an elementary school teacher. Cowboy Bob - a musician and a TV cameraman who got a big break. Besides the big names, the book also tells about Brian (Jerry) Reynolds who started at WTTV while he was still in high school and soon enough was writing and producing for the various live action shows on WTTV. It was a small station and everyone had mu

Published in January of 2016 by HarperAudio. Read by Tristan Morris. Duration: 10 hours, 42 minutes. Unabridged. Stephen Prothero takes a look at American history through the lens of "culture wars". Culture wars, for Prothero, are more than the typical left-right discussion  - they are a left-right discussion with serious religious overtones. Prothero's thesis is that the major debates in American history have been those types of debates. He looks at 5 areas: 1) The fight over who would run the country after George Washington - the John Adams (1735-1826) inheritors of the Calvinistic Puritans (John Adams) or those with a vaguely defined faith (Thomas Jefferson); 2) Catholics vs. Protestants; 3) Everyone vs. Mormons; 4) Fundamentalism vs. Modernism as commonly typified by the Scopes Monkey Trial (which only gets a passing mention in this book); 5) Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority types vs. abortion, gay marriage, the Equal Rights Amendment and more. While h

Originally published in 1984 by The Free Press. Note: This is a review of the original version of this book, published in 1984 and ending with the first Reagan administration. It has been expanded and updated to include events up to 2012. Soldiers in the Korean War in 1950. Way back in my undergrad days at Indiana University I took a class called American Military History . It was taught by a visiting professor from West Point and this book was an excellent choice for the text for the class. For 30+ years I have carried this book around with me - through 5 different moves and who knows how many book shelves this book was the anchor of my history section because it is quite beefy. But, I decided it was time to clear out some books. Technically, this book was a re-read but I didn't really remember anything from all of those years ago so... The book starts with colonial defense and moves along with the same format up through the early 1980's. There is a chapter about a