DWD's Reviews

  Published by Pandamoon Publishing in August of 2021. Synopsis: Waterfront in Portland, Maine Dee Rommel is at a crossroads of her life. She is on leave from the police department of Portland, Maine because she lost half of one of her legs on duty. After months of diligent physical therapy (and less then diligent psychiatric therapy) she is being pushed to decide if she is coming back to work or not. She has been helping her godfather Gordy, her deceased father's best friend. He is a private detective and she feels very comfortable with the paperwork and the billing. When Gordy takes some time off to donate a kidney in Florida, a situation arises. One of Gordy's lifelong friends urgently needs help now and Dee is asked to step in and do some investigating while Gordy is down and out from the surgery. The friend is a famous billionaire named Claren - Maine's version of Bill Gates. A local boy who made it big in the tech business. Claren's twenty-something daughter is al

  Published in 2019 by Random House Audio. Performed by multiple readers. Duration: 6 hours, 21 minutes. Unabridged . Part of the new Disney "canon" books, Dooku: Jedi Lost is a look at the origins of one of the characters of the Star Wars prequels - Count Dooku. It is part of a series of "stand alone" books. For me, Dooku just shows up in the movies with a minimum of explanation - not nearly enough.  We learn a lot more about him in the Star Wars: Clone Wars cartoon show but not enough for me. Dooku is interesting as the original model for Anakin Skywalker - the talented Jedi who often argues with the Jedi Council and eventually falls to the Dark Side. This book tells little about Dooku's activities during the Clone Wars. Even though it is set in the first half of the Clone Wars cartoon series, that is mostly a frame that is used to lead the reader through a series of flashbacks that tell about Dooku's early life. The use of all of the flashbacks was anno

  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.