DWD's Reviews

  Published in 2014 by Lyons Press. This is my 142nd Civil War-related review. When I found out about this book, I found myself wondering how these 5 living former Presidents reacted to the Civil War. I also found myself wondering how no one else thought to write this book before. Former presidents have their own political power and impact current events. Nowadays, you can see this with Jimmy Carter's modeling of volunteerism and his attempts to be a peace mediator in the 1980s and 1990s, Bill Clinton's maneuvering to remain relevant, George W. Bush's refusal to endorse or approve of anything done by Donald Trump, the calls that the Biden Administration is really just the third Obama Administration and, obviously, the 45th President's refusal to admit he lost the 2020 election. DeRose starts with a rundown of the political careers of each politician involved: John Tyler, Martin Van Buren, James Buchanan, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and Abraham Lincoln.  Then, he d

  Published in 1996 by Indiana University Press and Indiana Department of Natural Resources. From 1993 to 1995 the two authors combined to take pictures of Indiana from an Indiana Department of Natural Resources helicopter - one was the pilot and one was the photographer. They chose 100 pictures of the state for this coffee table book. There are 92 counties in Indiana, but there is not a picture of each county. However, these pictures are a good representative sample of the state ranging from the Indiana Dunes on Lake Michigan to the fossil bed at the Falls of the Ohio. The pictures include urban areas, suburbs, small towns, farms and pictures of Indiana's understated beauty. There are no commanding views like the Grand Canyon or the Rockies, but it is beautiful in its own way. Since the book is more than 25 years old, it was interesting to note some of the changes. The Indianapolis skyline has changed with the addition of at least two very large buildings on either side of downtow

  Published in 2017 by Hourly History. I am an avid reader of history, but I have areas of weakness that I am perfectly willing to shore up a bit, but I don't want to invest a ton of time in. Francisco Franco  was one of those people for me.  I came into this biography knowing only the barest of facts about the long-time dictator of Spain. Franco ruled from 1939 until his death in 1975. This biography spends little time on his early life and could have expanded on the Spanish Civil War that brought him to power. For example, the most famous image of the war is the painting Guernica .  Guernica by Pablo Picasso (1937) Guernica is one of the most famous paintings of the 20th century. It depicts the chaos of an attack by the German air force on the city of Guernica. Guernica was holding out against Franco's forces and Franco enlisted German help to deal with the city. German and Italian bomber planes tried out the relatively new technology in real life. Pablo Picasso painted Gue

  Published in 2022 by Simon and Schuster Audio Read by Lorelei King Duration: 7 hours, 26 minutes. Unabridged. Janet Evanovich's The Recovery Agent features Gabriela Rose. Recovery agents can be another term for bounty hunters who look for fugitives, but Gabriela Rose is not a bounty hunter. She searches for missing property. Sometimes it's insurance fraud, sometimes it's stolen property and sometimes it's just looking for something rare for a wealthy client. She is based in New York City, is quite successful and flies all over the world recovering items.  Gabriela Rose is dismayed to hear that her hometown in North Carolina has suffered a direct hit from a hurricane and (somehow) won't get any help from FEMA or any other government recovery program. The town is dying but Gabriela's grandmother knows where a fortune might be found. She was somehow told about the fortune by the ghost of her dead grandmother. In that fortune there is a ring called the Seal of So

  Published in 2019 by Macmillan Audio. Read by Anne-Marie Gaillard, Duration: 5 hours, 33 minutes. Unabridged. Set in a dystopian future in Ireland, Last Ones Left Alive is the story of Orpen, a teenage girl. The world is overrun by "skrakes". The reader is never exactly told what skrakes are, but it is useful to just think of them as a sort of zombie. Skrakes hunt humans and when a human is bitten by a skrake, the human gets an infection and becomes a skrake.  Orpen grew up on an island off of the coast of Ireland. There are three of them - Orpen, her mother and another woman named Maeve, The skrakes never come to the island, but from time to time her mother and Maeve must leave the island to scrounge for supplies and hunt. The story is told in chapters that alternate between the present and flashbacks to Orpen's childhood. There  are hints as to what Maeve and her mother did before they came to the island. It is clear is that they have extraordinary hand-to-hand comba

  Published in 2021 by Harper Horizon. Read by co-author Turk Pipkin Duration: 3 hours, 6 minutes. Unabridged. During the Covid-19 lockdowns Willie Nelson decided to write a book. This is not an unusual thing for Willie - he has written a handful of memoirs focusing on various parts of his almost 80 years as a professional musician (he was paid to play in a local band at the age of 10) and this book almost certainly overlaps with other books.  The format of Willie Nelson's Letters to America is that Willie is writing thank you letters to various people, places and things that influenced his life and his career. He has a letter to his hometown, his grandparents, his sister, various members of his band over the years, his ex-wives, his wife, his kids, the fellow members of the supergroup The Highwaymen, among others. Nelson's guitar, Trigger There is also a letter to his guitar, Trigger. Nelson bought Trigger, sight unseen, in 1969 because he needed a new guitar after someone ac

  Published in January of 2022 by Random House Audio. Read by Beth Hicks. Duration: 7 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. The author of How Civil Wars Start has an extensive background in studying exactly why some countries collapse into Civil War and other countries don't, even when everyone thinks they will, like South Africa after Apartheid. The first half of the book is a look at countries that slid into Civil War and specific characteristics that tend to make Civil War more likely. Her team has come up with a scale and they get concerned when societies move quickly on that scale. It doesn't matter if they move quickly away from democracy or towards it - generally speaking moving quickly means that groups in power lose power and they don't like it and they lash out. A classic example of this is Iraq. The Sunni had almost all of the power under the dictatorship Sadam Hussein, but once he was overthrown the Shia majority took power and decided that it was time to get even - d