Andrew

Good dual biography compromised by bad narration

Reviewed: 08-15-22

Note to publishers audiobooks: when choosing a narrator, try to find someone who's somewhat familiar with the subject.

In this case, the narrator has a pleasant enough voice, but reveals an appalling ignorance of the subject when it comes to pronouncing names. He pronounces Petrarch, "PEET-rark", and he's utterly hopeless with Roman names (Catullus, for example, is "Ca-TOO-loos"). Other errors abound, as when he pronounced the Sorbonne the "Sor-BON" (French nasal), when it should be rendered "Sor-BUNN". I being picky? Maybe. But this book is a history of two key figures in the Renaissance/Reformation, it's FULL of foreign names and words, and the narrator consistently gets them wrong. The effect, for me, is akin to nails on a chalkboard. I realize that people can get a fair amount of education these days without ever really crossing paths with a good history of Western civilization, but come on...

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1 person found this helpful

Great story in an awful production

Reviewed: 07-11-21

I'm not going to spend much time rating one of the greatest adventure stories ever written. I'll focus instead on BJ Harrison's production. Harrison is a fine narrator but he needs to find himself a decent audio engineer. I don't enjoy hearing a narrator's lip pops and clicks, and this recording is rife with them. As someone who produces audio and video content, I can say that these issues are relatively easy to fix using a gate audio filter. I love this story but cannot recommend this audio program.

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2 people found this helpful

A New Perspective on an old problem

Reviewed: 07-22-18

This is an outstanding book. I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in the war on drugs, or in public policy more broadly. The author has a compelling style and a mastery of the crucial facts. As analysis, it's creative and interesting.

The reader is okay, and generally up to the task. However, you would think that in selecting a reader of a book about drug cartels and the economics of the drug trade, you would pick someone who knew how to pronounce Spanish words and names. After all, Latin America is a big part of the story.

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A moving book diminished by a poor reading

Reviewed: 09-27-17

This is an excellent book that describes how prominent American philosophers have approached some of the basic questions of philosophy: can life have meaning, and if so, how? The author, a scholar of philosophy himself, chronicles their answers through the lens of a major crisis in his life, one that caused him to question the value of his own existence. Kaag gets lost in some of his digressions, and not all of the philosophers he presents are compelling, but the book hangs together quite well. In the end, I felt that I had learned a good deal about American philosophy, and I had connected with the writer's experiences.

Unfortunately, the narrator is not up to the task of this book. His diction and inflection are fine, but he frequently mispronounces words. "Banal", "ebullient", "Coleridge", and numerous others come out wrong. A book on philosophy, one might imagine, will have a vocabulary that's more extensive than, say, a mystery novel. This book's vocabulary occasionally overwhelms the reader.

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