DWD's Reviews

  Originally published in 1945. John Steinbeck (1902-1968) The Red Pony is a standard novel to be read at the middle school level across the country. I remember I read the first third of the book as a part of my 7th grade literature class textbook, but the rest of the book was new to me. As I mentioned, The Red Pony is split into sections - three of them. In actuality, they are 3 coming-of-age short stories about Jody, a boy growing up on a northern California ranch.  Being Steinbeck stories, they are well-written, brutally realistic and every one has a sad twist.  I like Steinbeck, but it has to come in small doses. I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Red Pony by John Steinbeck .

  Published in 2014 by The Great Courses. Read by the author, Steven L. Tuck Duration: 11 hours, 48 minutes. Unabridged. The publishers of The Great Courses offer college level lecture classes (100 or 200 level) as audiobooks and/or videos.  As the title says, this book is about cities of the ancient world. It begins with a discussion of the earliest cities and then moves on to significant cities that came along later. To be a significant city it had to start a new pattern - cities built on rivers, cities built on defensive hills, cities built to take advantage of sea trade, cities with a clear plan, cities built with a plan to mix to allow people of different ethnicities to live together (separately) and so on. The Roman Colosseum I very much enjoyed the first part of these lectures. But, once we got to Tuck's specific areas of expertise (Greek, Hellenistic, Roman) the audiobook got bogged down. His last lecture about some of the lessons of ancient cities that have been adopted

  Originally published in 2002. Published in 2010 by Recorded Books. Read by David Chandler. Duration: 8 hours, 48 minutes. Unabridged. I have been reading the Joe Pickett series for the last 10 years and I have been reading them all out of order. I started with book number one, went on to number thirteen and so on... So, here I am ten years later with a review of book number 2.  The book starts out from the perspective of a radical environmentalist who leads a national organization. However, he is tired of using lawsuits to fight for the environment. He likes to get his hands dirty by spiking trees and cutting fences. While he is out doing that he gets blown up by a bomb that was strapped to a cow.  Photo by DWD Joe Pickett gets called out to the explosion site because there may have been wildlife injured or killed. He finds a horrible mess and soon enough gets sucked into another, much larger situation... This is Box's sophomore effort and there is evidence of a sophomore slump

  Published by Macmillan Audio in 2019. Read by Stephen Graybill. Duration: 11 hours, 5 minutes. Unabridged. Lucas Page is a certified genius (an astrophysicist) with a special talent - he can envision the relations between the stars as they rotate in the sky above and predict where they will go mathematically. It is a natural talent, one he's had since he was a little boy. He can apply this skill to crime scenes as well. He can eyeball a crime scene and tell from what direction and angle a shot came from without having to take all of the steps that Crime Scene Investigators usually have to take.  But, he was seriously injured while on the job with the FBI several years ago. The incident took an eye, a hand and part of a leg. He gladly walked away from the FBI and became a college professor. But, when his old partner is killed by a sniper with a very long-range shot on a busy road in New York City in the middle of a snowstorm, Lucas Page is reluctantly called back into duty. He eas

  Originally published in 2010. Re-published in 2017 by Regnery History. Do you remember back in school when you would get a topic to argue for in an essay? That's pretty much what this book is. The topic is "Grant has the reputation for wasting his men in useless attacks. Is Grant's reputation as a butcher justified?" Ulysses S. Grant: A Victor, Not a Butcher might be mistaken as a biography of Grant, but it is not. What it is is a fantastic defense of Grant's record in the Civil War. Bonekemper was a federal government regulatory attorney for 34 years before he started writing books, delivering lectures, hosting discussions and teaching classes on the Civil War as a second career after he had retired. All that practice of 34 years of digging through books and digging through stats and regulations shines through this book. You would think that what I just described is a boring book, but it is well-written and flows smoothly from one campaign to the next. Very rea

  Originally published in 2003. Published by Pottermore Publishing. Read by Jim Dale. Duration: 26 hours, 29 minutes. Unabridged. Harry Potter has verified that the Lord Voldemort has returned - but the Ministry of Magic (the UK government for the Wizarding World) officially denies it. A team of wizards and witches have secretly formed a group called The Order of the Phoenix featuring a mixture of characters from the other books. Their purpose is to protect Harry Potter and try to figure out what Voldemort intends to do next.  At Hogwarts, things are going poorly. The Ministry of Magic has created a new position (the High Inquisitor) and her job is to root out anyone who disagrees with the official Ministry of Magic position on Lord Voldemort (meaning that he has not returned) and end the independent nature of the Hogwarts teaching staff.  The reader, Jim Dale Jim Dale's reading is always a mixed bag for me because his characterization of Hermione Granger comes off as whiny and ann

  Published in 2016 by Tom Doherty Associates (A Tor Book) Harry Turtledove specializes in alternate histories. Usually, he has a big twist - what if the South won the Civil War? What if Atlantis were a real continent? What if the Colonies lost the Revolutionary War? What if MacArthur actually dropped atomic bombs during the Korean War? The House of Daniel is a different kind of story, with a twist. To be perfectly honest, I read the description of this book, with its references to The Great Depression, baseball, "hotshot wizards" and zombies and missed the fact that it was actually referring to actual wizards and zombies, not metaphorical wizards (the whiz kid experts that FDR hired) and zombies (the unemployed masses who are desperate for work). I really thought that Turtledove had just written a straight book about semipro baseball in the Great Depression. And, basically he has. 85% of this story is about baseball. Jack Spivey does odd jobs, plays semipro baseball for a f