DWD's Reviews

  E-book published in October of 2022 by Lake Union. Synopsis: Jack Parker is a stay-at-home dad - but not really by choice. He used to be a big executive in a growing company, but a series of mishaps one Saturday morning led to him being fired and ending up in a humiliating viral video. So, he is at home taking care of a toddler and a kindergartner while his wife is moving up the corporate ladder (different corporation, thank goodness.) He is nervous about his kindergartner starting school and is contemplating going back out in the job market because he can see that the need for a full time stay at home dad during the day is coming close to its end. When he meets his high school bully and nemesis at a local park, he is dismayed. He is more upset to find out that his bully also has a student entering kindergarten at the the same school as his daughter. He decides he has to act when he finds out that the bully is running to be the president of the parent council and is proposing policie

  Published by Listening Library in 2018. Read by Will Damron. Duration: 8 hours, 39 minutes. Unabridged. The books in the D.C. Icons series are a re-writing of the origin stories of D.C. Comics' iconic characters. To be fair, these YA stories are not complete re-writes. Instead, they are basically about the largely unexplored teen years of these characters (the exception being the 10 year run of the  Smallville TV show featuring a teenaged Superman.)  In this book we meet Bruce Wayne in the 12th grade and he is turning 18 - the age where he inherits the Wayne family fortune and the family business. He may be a legal adult, but he is still an impulsive teen. Bruce joins in on a police chase with a high-tech car created by Wayne Industries. He helps catch the bad guy but he gets arrested for getting in the middle of a police chase. Wayne gets assigned community service in, of all places, Arkham Asylum. Can you imagine why anyone would assign anyone community service at Arkham Asylu

  Published by Macmillan Audio in July of 2022. Read by Ari Fliakos. Duration: 10 hours, 30 minutes. Unabridged. Malcolm Nance served for 20 years in the U.S. Navy in cryptology. His work led him to work in intelligence and counter-terrorism. Since his retirement from the military he has worked an additional 20 years as a consultant to the military, as a college lecturer on the topic of counter-terrorism, and as the head of a think tank. Nance applied what he knows about terrorism to the January 6 Riot and comes up with a series of disturbing conclusions. Nance is concerned that the most extreme elements of the MAGA movement have gone beyond rhetoric and casual flirtation with militia movements and have actively engaged with them. This book was published in July of 2022 but yesterday (November 29, 2022) two leaders of the Oath Keepers militia were found guilty of seditious conspiracy for their actions at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Why was a fringe militia group in Washington

  Published in 2020 by Seven Stories Press. Edited by Dan Wakefield. Introduction by Dan Wakefield. Many of the well-known quotes from Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) were not actually in his novels - they came from speeches he gave (mostly) in the latter half of his career. Vonnegut became quite a popular deliverer of graduation speeches. And why not? He was witty, irreverent and sometimes came up with a great quote like this one: "Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody want to maintain it." (p. 230) The title of this book comes from a story that Vonnegut has included in other essays. Vonnegut had two uncles who responded very differently to his World War II experiences. His Uncle Dan congratulated Vonnegut for having gone to war as a boy and come back as a man.  His Uncle Alex was a different sort of man. The kind of man who encouraged everyone to notice the good things of life as they happen around us. "...when life was most agreeabl

  Published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company in October of 2022. Read by Shamaan Casey. Duration: 10 hours, 57 minutes. Unabridged. Jackie Robinson.  He is an icon of sports. And politics. And American history. All fans of baseball know at least the broad strokes of the story of Jackie Robinson (1919-1972) and how he integrated baseball. This book offers a detailed re-telling of that story with a twist - a look at how Jackie Robinson's faith led him to this path and helped sustain him. Robinson's early life, his time in service during World War II and his college sports career and his relationship with his wife are all covered. The biggest single part of the book is, appropriately, the story of how he and Branch Rickey (the head of the Brooklyn Dodgers) worked together to integrate Major League Baseball in 1947. The book also looks at how Rickey's faith led him to act to make the world a more just place by acting in such a symbolic manner. Jackie Robinson stealing hom

  Published in 2008 by Blackstone Audio. Originally published in 1963. Read by Jesse L. Martin. Duration: 2 hours, 45 minutes. Unabridged. James Baldwin (1924-1987) was an African-American essayist, playwright, poet and novelist. This book is a collection of two lengthy essays on race and religion in the United States. The book comes from a line from the song Mary Don't You Weep : God gave Noah the rainbow sign No more water, the fire next time. The first essay is in the format of a letter to his nephew entitled " My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation ."  As suggested by the title, it is about America's ugly racial history, including incidents from Baldwin's life. The second, longer essay is " Down at the Cross: A Region in my Mind. " This is a discussion of religion in America, including how Christianity had been warped into a tool to prop up a social structure that kept whites on top and blacks on th