DWD's Reviews

  Published in 2020 by Listening Library. Read by Kathleen McInerney. Duration: 8 hours, 29 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: The DC ICONS series tells alternate origin stories for DC superheroes, focusing on them in their high school years. This is the fourth in this YA series that I have listened to as an audiobook. My previous ones were the "big three" of the DC Comics Universe - Superman , Batman , and Wonder Woman . This time I listened to an often overlooked character, Black Canary.  To be clear, this book focuses on Dinah Lance, the daughter of the original Black Canary. Black Canary was talented at martial arts but her main power was the ability to use her singing voice as a weapon. The book is set in a dystopian future Gotham City. Think Gotham City meets The Handmaid's Tale . It is a generation after Batman and Commissioner Gordon have passed away.  Based on a single comment from one of the characters, women's rights have been rolled back across the country. Th

  Published by Hourly History in 2021. Hourly History  publishes histories and biographies that you can read in about an hour. That can be a tough job for larger topics in history like "The Industrial Revolution" or "The Roman Empire" but it works out about right for this short war (1763-1766.) The war arose directly from unaddressed issues as a consequence of the French and Indian War (1754-1763.) In the French and Indian War, the American frontier became a battlefield. American settlements were wiped out, Native American villages were destroyed. French and English soldiers participated and ultimately agreed to a settlement that ignored the realities of the vast borderlands between the colonies and the Native Americans. The biggest issue was constant push westward from European (American) settlers into areas that were already inhabited by Native Americans. The colonies were all for this westward push, even if the British government was ambivalent or even against t

  Published in May of 2023. Winner of a 2024 Webby Award The author of this short book (129 pages) makes it clear that he has no particular grudge against South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. Lindsey Graham serves as a stand-in for the Republican Party in general. He is a particularly good stand-in because he was there from the very beginning of the Donald Trump phenomenon because he was one of the many candidates for the 2016 Republican nomination.  President Donald J. Trump and Senator Lindsey Graham Graham is also an amazingly frequent guest on the Sunday morning political talk shows, the evening shows on Fox, local TV, and talk radio. Graham loves to talk into microphones and because of that it is very easy to track his gradual moves from being a loudly outspoken opponent of Trump to the most vociferous defender of and apologist for the former president.  Saletan thoroughly documents this transition and backs up each of these subtle changes with hundreds of actual links to videos

  Originally published in 1942 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc. I read a 2009 re-print published by Konecky and Konecky. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) In 1940, the famed poet, journalist and author Carl Sandburg won a Pulitzer Prize for his four volume biography Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (published in 1939.) In 1942, his publishers came to him and asked him to re-work the biography into a history of the Civil War in response to America's recent entry into World War II.  The result is a pretty solid history of the Civil War from basically the Union point of view.  Carl Sandburg is best known as a poet and that shines though with some of his prose. From time to time, he comes up with a different and interesting way of telling the story of the war.  The most obvious weakness to this history is the story of African-Americans in the war - the free, the enslaved, the recently freed, the soldiers and others. He mentions them, but does not look at them very hard. To be fair to Sandbur

Published in 2021 by Next Chapter Audio LTD. Read by Crawford B. Bunkley III. Duration: 4 hours, 34 minutes. Unabridged. I have no idea where I found this book. I think it was a freebie on Audible through Amazon's Prime Reading program. I know that I got it because I am a big reader of Civil War histories and fiction and this sounded like it was right up my alley. Synopsis: The description of this book is accurate, to a point. It is about a freed slave who joins the Union Army and then goes from job to job and place to place with a goal of settling in Africa. My Review: This book is basically a Forrest Gump type of story - one man goes on an epic journey and ends up going through a lot of the historical movements of the era. Warning: Lots of *********SPOILERS********all the way to the end of this review. This audiobook comes in at almost exactly 50% of the run time for FORREST GUMP   and covers maybe even more territory. Our hero (his name changes multiple times) begins as a slave

  Published by Tantor Audio in 2021. Read by Allyson Johnson. Duration: 3 hours, 44 minutes. Unabridged. This book takes a short look at how the people that refer to themselves as Evangelicals and their forebears have dealt with race over time. An interracial marriage protest. The signs claim that interracial marriage is Communist and a sign of the anti-Christ. The book starts with the justifications that religious leaders used to defend slavery. After the Civil War, they modified those justifications slightly to defend the Jim Crow system. Butler contends that the Evangelical movements in the 1900's were worried about things like Communism, but it usually had a racial overtone to it - like when Martin Luther King was accused of spreading Communism to Black communities all over the country when he was just asking for the rights that White Americans already had. The heart of her book is about Billy Graham and what she calls out as a wishy-washy approach to racism. I am a bit more fo

  Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2019. Read by Arthur Morey. Duration: 12 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged. Barry Strauss is a professor of the history of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. As the title clearly says, Strauss tells his reader/listeners about what he judges to be the ten most important Roman emperors and ends up telling a decent political history of the Roman Empire along the way. Bronze statue erected c.175 AD of  Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD), one of the Roman Emperors featured in  this book. When I say he chose the ten most important emperors, that doesn't mean he chose the ten best emperors. He has more than one emperor that demonstrates how a bad leader can abuse the political consensus, damage the political system, and leave a lot of confusion in his/her wake. But, change is not necessarily a bad thing - especially when handled by talented leaders like Augustus and Constantine.  This was an interesting listen and well-read by Arthur Morey. I did enjoy how