DWD's Reviews

  Published by Random House Audio in 2008. Read by Dick Hill. Duration: 14 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. I think that I have worked my way through all of the Jack Reacher novels and short stories over the last 5 years. This is the last one (I think). I read them all out of order, but fans know that that is okay since they were never written in order in the first place. Sadly, this was one of the weakest of the entire very large collection.  Reacher is travelling from Maine to San Diego just to see the country. He notes that Colorado has two towns with interesting names very close to one another: Hope and Despair. The author, Lee Child. Hope is a pleasent enough place with a hardware store and a hotel and diner. Reacher decides to hike to nearby despair and is immediately arrested for being a vagrant. Technically, he is a vagrant. He has no job, no fixed address and no plans to acquire either.  Despair locks him up (after a bit of a fight) and runs him through a kangaroo court, finds h

    Published in June of 2021 by Penguin Audio. Read by Fred Sanders. Duration: 12 hours, 15 minutes. Unabridged. This is the second book that I have read because a governor took steps to keep people from hearing about the book. The story of the first is detailed here .  In the case of this book, the Governor and especially the Lt. Governor of Texas had an event featuring a discussion of this book removed from the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, Texas. They acted in early July of 2021 because they were not happy about how it questioned the way the history of the Alamo (in San Antonio, Texas) is traditionally taught at the Alamo itself and in textbooks, classrooms, movies and books. Here is the text of the Lt. Governor's Tweet from July 2, 2021: " As a member of the Preservation Board, I told staff to cancel this event as soon as I found out about it. Like efforts to move the Cenotaph, which I also stopped, this fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place @Bull

  Published in April of 2019 by Princeton University Press. Read by Katherine Fenton. Duration: 6 hours, 49 minutes. Unabridged The key to this book is to understand the difference between a conspiracy theory and the new conspiracism.  Conspiracy theories are the classic hobby of odd people that we all know. They collect reams and reams of information to prove that the lunar landings were faked, that LBJ had JFK killed, or to prove that 9/11 was an inside job. They work very hard to prove their point. They collect video evidence, find paper trails, produce flow charts and maybe have a wall dedicated to showing how all of the data points connect. There is a logic to conspiracy theories, even if most people find them weird.  The new conspiracism is often incoherent because it demands no logic - it depends on being repeated over and over again and a strong assertion that "people are saying" it is true. There are no documents that back it up. There are no elaborate theories. Just

  Published by John F. Blair in 1997. There are several books like this one on the market. History books are full of interesting, odd stories that add a little spice to the narrative and there is a certain logic to having a book of just the spice.  This book is organized in a loose chronolgical order, rather than by theme. Sometimes the stories blend into each other, sometimes not. There was nothing particularly good or bad about this collection. Some of the stories are more amusing than outright blunders and there is a bit of anti-Union and anti-Lincoln bias that can be detected, especially at the beginning. But, not enough to derail the book. I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  Civil War Blunders by Clint Johnson.

  Published by HarperCollins Publishers Limited in 2016. Read by Mike Grady. Duration: 7 hours, 33 minutes. Unabridged. Peter Wohlleben is a forester in Germany, meaning that he manages a commercial forest in Germany but he is a real fan of true "old growth" forests. Over the years he has gone out of his way to really study the way forests work as a complete unit.  His observations and research combine to tell an active, but very slow story of trees. Compared to people, many trees live a much slower life (centuries vs. decades), but a forest of trees is more than just an accidental accumulation of trees whose seeds all landed in the same place.  In many ways, a healthy forest is a lot like a giant organism - it shores up its weak parts, it sustains itself, it is extraordinarily complicated and if one part is out of whack, the whole thing can suffer. Wohlleben explores these themes in some detail with a lot of surprising details. But, a forest is also a place of deadly competi

  Published by Thomas Nelson in 2017. Read by Simon Bubb. Duration: 6 hours, 36 minutes. Unabridged. Dion Leonard is an ultramarathon runner. Ultramarathons are technically marathons that are longer than a traditional 26.2 mile marathon, but Dion Leonard likes to run extended multi-day ultramarathons. He was running a multi-day race in the Gobi Desert in China when he met a scruffy little dog as he was lining up to start day two of the race. To be accurate, the little dog was attracted to him - it wouldn't leave him alone! Gobi with Dion Leonard When the race started, Leonard assumed that the dog would follow for a while and then return home, wherever that was. But, the dog followed him every step of the way - 23 miles. That night, the dog stayed with Leonard in his tent and went with him again on the 3rd stage of the race. As they headed into the desert, Leonard worried that the dog could be hurt by the higher temperature more brutal landscape. So, he arranged for the dog to be ca

  Published in 2020 by Workman Publishing. Read by Geoffrey Cantor. Duration: 7 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. Connor Towne O'Neill was attending the 50th anniversary recognition of the Selma to Montgomery March when he discovered something unexpected. The Selma to Montgomery march ended when Alabama State Troopers joined local deputies at the Edmund Pettus bridge and beat them until they retreated. The bridge is named for a Confederate General and a Grand Dragon of the Alabama KKK. O'Neill was looking for a place to park and drove into a graveyard. In the graveyard, he discovered a group prepping a part of the graveyard for the re-installation of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest (the original had been stolen) in the graveyard. It was on a piece of property owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the middle of the graveyard. O'Neill sensed that this was the more powerful story, no matter how dramatic that moment on the bridge had been 50 years earlier. He decide