DWD's Reviews

  Originally published in 1999. Version with Neil Gaiman foreword published in 2010 by Seven Stories Press . Synopsis: In the late 1990's Kurt Vonnegut made a series of 90 second recordings for WNYC, the local NPR station for New York City. The premise of each spot was simple enough - Vonnegut travels to the afterlife to conduct a very short interview with someone (some famous, some not) and then he brings word back to the land of the living to tell us the wisdom he has learned. How does he get to afterlife? Dr. Jack Kevorkian , the creator of the assisted suicide machine works with Vonnegut to render him about 3/4 dead in the very room and on the very bed where the state of Texas administers the death penalty via lethal injection. One of the people he interviews is a murderer who had just been executed - Karla Faye Tucker, although Vonnegut misspells her first name as Carla. The Vonnegut mural in his hometown of Indianapolis. Photo by DWD. Since he is 3/4 dead, Vonnegut is able to

Published in 2003 by HarperTempest. Synopsis: This book features two high school juniors - Matt Donaghy (Big Mouth) and Ursula Riggs (Ugly Girl.) Matt Donaghy's a popular guy, but not the most popular guy in school. He's got a reputation as a funny guy and his mouth gets the best of him sometimes. His world gets turned upside down when he makes a joke that is wrongheadedly "misinterpreted" as a serious threat. The police are called and Donaghy is taken into custody and suspended. His name is kept out of the papers, but schools are like small towns - everybody knows all of the details (or thinks they do) soon enough. Ursula Riggs is a star athlete.  Her mom clearly prefers her little sister who is a ballerina and her dad is always away on business. Ursula  is big for a girl and feels like she is out of place. She adopts the persona of "Ugly Girl" as a way of coping. "Ugly Girl" is a heartless warrior on the basketball court and acts the same way in

  Published by HarperAudio in 2019. Read by the author, Tia Torres. Duration: 5 hours, 50 minutes. Unabridged. Tia Torres is the director of the Villalobos Rescue Center, a dog rescue center featured on the Animal Planet TV show Pitbulls and Parolees . The rescue center used to be primarily for wolves and wolf hybrids but it morphed into pit bulls when police departments and city animal shelters would ask them to take in pit bulls on the theory that if you could handle a wolf you could handle a pit bull. Turns out, they were right. Now she runs one of the largest pit bull rescue centers in the country. This memoir talks about Torres' early life, her family and her early experiences with animals. But, the primary focus of the book are the special dogs that she and her family have had over the years.  The author and one of her dogs I have to confess to being a fan of the show. My wife started watching it and I was drawn in. Soon enough, we had marathoned through all 18 seasons of the

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2008. Read by Lorna Raver. Duration: 10 hours, 54 minutes. Unabridged. This unique Civil War history isn't driven by the timeline of the Civil War, the strategies, or the personalities. Instead, it is a look at how the soldiers, the government, the families on the home front and post-war politics were affected by the massive amount of death that the war created as it ground on. In all previous wars, the U.S. government did not worry too much about how to bury the dead because there just weren't that many when compared to the Civil War. Soldiers were properly buried, but there wasn't much thought given to keeping records about where they were buried, marking their graves or even keeping track of who had died. The sheer quantity of death in the Civil War made the government change its approach.  The book starts with a look at how dying a glorious death was all everyone wrote about. But, once the reality of the war was apparent, the talk shifte

  Book originally published in 1981. Audiobook edition published in 2019 by Tantor Audio. Read by L.J. Ganser. Duration: 7 hours, 36 minutes. Unabridged. This book is the inspiration for the much-celebrated Disney movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? but readers should know that it is not much like the movie. Three of the main characters are the same - Private Investigator Eddie Valiant, Toon movie star Roger Rabbit and his Toon wife Jessica Rabbit. But, the world they inhabit is different than the world in the movie. In the movie, Toons make cartoon movies. They are filmed like regular movies. In the book, Toons don't make movies, they make comic books and comic strips. Toons in the book have the little voice bubbles that appear over their heads just like you see in comic books and comic strips. The actors pose for the comic strip pictures and photographers take their pictures. A quote from the book. Also, a very true statement. In the book, Roger Rabbit is actually killed and Eddie Va

  -Originally published by Harper's Magazine in 1964 and in book form by Alfred A. Knopf in 1965. -Audiobook published in 2018 by Tantor Audio. -Read by Keith Sellon-Wright. -Duration: 10 hours, 44 minutes. -Unabridged. Award-winning historian Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970) wrote these essays over a series of years and compiled them into a collection with a loose theme of how American politics is affected by paranoid conspiracies.  Barry Goldwater (1909-1998) He starts with the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater and the political commentary of groups like the John Birch Society. His descriptions of the Goldwater campaign sound so much like the Trump campaign of 2016 that a reader can almost replace the name Goldwater with the name Trump. The details are, of course, different, but the tone is practically the same.  The ideological framework of the John Birch Society is replaced with QAnon, the fear of communism is replaced with the fear of immigrants but the tone is practica

  Published in February of 2022 by Brilliance Audio. Read by Seth Podowitz. Duration: 10 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Devin Gray is a retired military operator working for a high-end private security contractor. He is on assignment that goes a little sideways in the D.C. metro area and he is sent away to let things cool off. While packing up to go, he is contacted about his mother. She is estranged from the rest of the family because she is always off researching a conspiracy theory, which is kind of ironic because she works in a government intelligence agency that looks for conspiracies. She is dead after some short of shoot out in Tennessee and everyone is keeping it quiet. Gray discovers a note from his mother to him with instructions. It turns out to lead to her evidence that proves the conspiracy and he finds it to be plausible enough to reach out to others. Once they start digging, they find more than it is worse than they ever imagined... My review:  I was excited ab