Donald T. Wardlow

Second Novel Maybe Better Than the First

Revisado: 05-25-21

Dave Barry moved to Miami from the Philadelphia area in 1986 and has made the area his home ever since. In both his newspaper articles and his first two novels, he captures the wonderful weirdness of the locals. After his first novel, "Big Trouble," his fans like me wondered how he would follow that up.
He managed it.
Once again, Dick Hill uses his many voices to bring the characters to life.
He's especially good with the two senior citizens who break loose from their nursing home to catch a gambling ship on the night of a tropical storm off the east coast of Florida.
We meet Bobby Kemp, who thought he had bought the ship months earlier.
We meet its de facto owners, some truly rotten individuals.
Bobby hires some guys who are just as rotten to engineer a hostile takeover, if you will.
We meet two of the ship's cocktail waitresses, the ship's band-Johnny and the Contusions-a band as dreadful as their name-and many others.
Only Dave Barry can mix cruel violence, disdain for TV weather reporters ... and even a love story in one novel.

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The Bumbling Male's Bible is Here! Read Or Weep!

Revisado: 04-24-17

I am not an actor being paid to write this. (Don't I wish.)
I was the typical bumbling male of 24 when I got hold of this book which was a current bestseller at the time. I was wondering if my technique with my girlfriend needed an upgrade-or maybe an overhaul.
I was so ineffectual that, at the man's ultimate moment i would take to giggling.
Furtively, I got a copy and read it cover to cover while waiting for my GF to return from work.
Did she get a shock when her Mr. Klutz suddenly had discovered the way to satisfy her jaded body. My giggling days were over and so were the pinches I got to stop the giggling.
After we had split up I got with a lady in a wheelchair.
You haven't faced difficult odds until you try to satisfy a woman who can't walk. She had not known a man since the accident that injured her. Without Ms. Hayden's book there's no way I could have gotten the delighted response I got from her.
A quarter of a century later I've gotten the book again, to see if the older version of me can satisfy the woman who has a claim on my heart.
This book was an eye-opener 30 years ago when it was new. I hope more men since then have read it and the ideas aren't as startling as they were when they were first put on the printed page.
I hope you listen to it. I heard Ms. Hayden's voice on the Imus In the Morning show back when Imus was funny. She was a delight to listen to then, and still is.

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Funniest Baseball Book Ever

Revisado: 12-19-15

I read this book at some point in the '70s when it was relatively new. I had to smother my laughter, lest my Mom ask me what I was laughing about. A lot of the stories here weren't the kind you told to Mother-not then, not now. How could this book get any funnier? Have the author read his own work. Awesome move. Bouton has been a motivational speaker for some time, and kindly sent me a recording of one of his speeches when I was a baseball broadcaster. I knew from hearing it how good his delivery was for jokes. I didn't know that a 70-year-old Bouton could still laugh at jokes he wrote 40 years earlier. He did. What a romp through baseball's past this is.

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Bullying Does Not Pay; The Carrie Knows

Revisado: 11-20-15

I first heard this book on tape in 1982. I was so eager to read it I played sick for the one time in my life to miss a boring church function.
The format is unusual-the story woven around pretend news items and entries from books that could have been written, had this nightmare been reality.
The story is about bullying-a universal truth since the first cave man realized he was bigger than some other cave man, then threw a rock at the smaller guy and laughed his heiny off. Carrie White is bullied-maybe the word tormented fits here-by the low lives in her school. Even Susan Snell, normally the typical New England blueblood with no personality acts like a jerk in the opening scene.
There is an early warning that Carrie is the wrong gal to push too far, but as always the warning is ignored.
Susan tries to apologize for the wrong she has done, but Christine Harginson, Billy Nolan and their respective todies won't allow any mercy for Carrie.
What happens next is classic Stephen King-writing with bare knuckles, no holds barred and no interest in a happy ending. Tremendous. Fabulous. Two weeks’ worth of nightmares unless you’re a Vulcan.
This is King as he was in the many short stories before “Carrie,” and in the Bachman Books series available on BARD, all written between Carrie in 1974 and 1982.
So don your earphones, pull your covers up tight
and get a grip on your nerves ... if you can.

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Best Book by Sheldon you can Buy from Audible

Revisado: 03-29-13

The only better Sheldon book than this is "A Stranger in the Mirror," and Audible hasn't got it.
So this is his best work that Audible has.
Sheldon does what John D. MacDonald also excelled at-drawing highly unlikable characters and filling you with desire to see how low they can sink into the quagmire of human depravity.
Noe!l Page is a spoilt French girl. She runs away from an arrangement her father made for her-straight into the arms of the worst sort of man a girl can find.
Larry Douglas is a beast no one girl can tame.
Meantime, Katherine Alexander is a Chicago beauty and intellectual. But she is an emotional cripple.
She finds the right man in Washington, DC-then leaves him in a minute when she meets Larry Douglas.
But Noe!l Page has been keeping notes on Larry, no matter that he's across the Atlantic, and she has a plan for him.
The narration is terrific. The reader is an Englishman with a rare gift for voices.
I am particularly impressed that he can do American accents-usually a reach for even great British actors.
This is a very adult book. As in every Sheldon book, the sex is rendered in gasping (unrealistic) detail.
It travels effortlessly from Chicago to France, back to the States, then to a frenetic finish in Greece.
The time is before, during and just after World War II, a time frame Sheldon made his own in "Stranger in the Mirror," as well as this book.

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Two Short Great King tales

Revisado: 12-22-12

Stephen King can still write a short story that packs a wallop. He does it twice here. "Blockade Billy" particularly appeals to me, since it's a baseball story, and I'm a huge fan, as King is.
He creates a baseball team in dire need of a catcher-and a catcher who will be one-no matter the cost.
Cost is a factor in the second story, "Morality," to be exact, the cost of a woman's soul. She and her husband are in desperate need of money, but the act they commit to get it is more than the lady can handle.
Blockade Billy is read by Craig Wasson, who is as good as it gets and clearly loves his baseball.
Whoever reads "Morality," it's a good yarn too.

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top 5 King books

Revisado: 12-22-12

This is an incredible book, and Craig Wasson's narration makes it so much better it isn't funny. Wasson doesn't just bring the many characters to life, he brings the book itself to life in a way few narrators can manage.
The novel itself is awesome-only Stephen King could posit a world where the Kennedy assassination is better than the possibilities if Oswald's bullet had gone elsewhere.
Jake, the main character, has one chance to go backwards, a million to one chance any man reading this would probably take.
King reconstructs both the good and the bad of the late '50s and early '60s which few manage. Most gloss over the '50s as a perfect decade, which it must have been-if you weren't black, Jewish, homosexual or disabled in any way at all.
King has written one you can't put down, for the first time since "The Green Mile."

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I'm a big fan, and even I yawned

Revisado: 12-22-12

I'm used to loving everything Joan Rivers does. Sorry, not this time.
She just wasn't funny.
particularly the material about her dog Spike I found appalling, and that's a word I never hoped to use to describe anything done by a woman I admire so much.
I know she has aged, but this just never should have been recorded.
Her book, written 7 years later, is 7 times as funny on one page as this entire thing is.

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It was so perfect until ...

Revisado: 12-22-12

I was ready to write a melting love letter to this book and its author-until I find how much had been left out!
Can we talk here?
Where was the part with the funny nicknames for all our 50 states? Where were some of the other hilarious jokes?
What was there was excellent. I loved it to death. I've loved Joan Rivers since the early '80s when she subbef for Johnny Carson, and appeared on Hollywood Squares. What a hoot.
solid 4 out of 5, should have been 5 but for the missing material.

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Maybe best book ever

Revisado: 07-31-09

This book, and "the Stand," by Stephen King, go back and forth in my mind as far as being the best book ever. Mr. Horsley brings this book to life as only a Texan can do, even better than the skilled narrator who did the audio for the Library of Congress. He was good--Horsley is exceptional. He captures the brashness of Gus, the savagery of Blue Duck, the timid nature of July Johnson, and so much more. With such an epic to work with, many potential narrators would be overwhelmed. This reading lends an added dimension to an amazing book--more realistic than anything John Ford ever put on the screen. In this real Wild West, the good guys certainly don't always win, and even the good guys show the character flaws that make them seem more real than any hero John Wayne ever portrayed. McMurtry only wrote two other books worth bothering with--Streets of Laredo, the sequel to this book, and "Last Picture Show." Other than that, don't even bother. Forget the two prequels, they're worthless. This is easily my favorite western, and as i stated at the outset, one of my two favorite books of all.

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