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Interesting and entertaining

Revisado: 06-17-23

The story centers on the colourful figure of Reginald Jones. Well read by the author himself.

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fine history, silly performance

Revisado: 05-17-23

Though perhaps less well crafted than the first volume this a fine book and I liked how it extends seamlessly into the early post-war. However I nearly stopped listening because I found the reader's grotesque and stereotyped "accents" annoying and distracting. Tories (and officers) almost invariably sound like high-pitched cretins and Churchill comes straight out of a pantomime, Labour voters have droll "working class" accents, De Gaulle sounds like Inspector Clouseau and so on. Only Indians are spared the funny accent treatment. It's a pity because Jerrom is otherwise a competent, if deliberate, reader.

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An interesting overview poorly read

Revisado: 03-20-23

An interesting overview of the practice of history from classical times to the present, with an emphasis on the latter. Critical of many recent trends, remarks on how the discipline might evolve. I found the reader difficult to follow, torpid American accent, poor clarity of speech.

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Mendacious fools

Revisado: 07-25-22

I gave up after six chapters pouring scorn on a posse of mendacious fools. Tiresome.

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Outstanding biography, awful pronunciation

Revisado: 05-13-21

Excellent dissection of De Gaulle's personality and deep understanding of the wider context although in my opinion the book would have benefited from being a bit shorter.
Julian Jackson shows De Gaulle's theatrical and almost grotesque pride and prickliness was real but he made a srewd use of brinkmanship and was ready to back down when necessary. Still, his ingratitude to the Allies and later his meanness to the US and Britain is shocking. His extreme awkwardness in his early career gave way to a more self-assured stance and there is an element of mischievous fun in his brutality which somehow makes it less odious. His oratory and litterary style, while often vague and opaque, was clearly outstanding.
Unfortunately the reader mispronounces half the French names he comes across, sometimes beyond recognition. This became so annoying that I switched to the excellent French version of the book, also available on Audible.

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A celebration of ordinariness

Revisado: 03-15-21

This is an old-fashioned biography.
The first third of the book is a folksy celebration of Mid-Western ordinariness. Truman comes across as a decent man with a sense of humour and a supporting cast of endearing Missourians (never mind some of them are gangsters or Klan members). It was interesting to learn that farm hands were served meat and potatoes at Grandview Farm (in my own country they got a bowl of gazpacho), and Stalin was served strawberry ice-cream at Potsdam. I don't know what Truman had for breakfast the day the H-bomb was tested because I stalled after 27 hours.

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Conventional and oddly repetitive

Revisado: 03-07-21

One approaches warily any book whose title includes the words "that Changed the World". It is an old ploy that smacks of pub debate, but one can't avoid being intrigued when it comes from a renowed historian. What is wrong with pub debates anyway? They can be rather entertaining. Unfortunately, this in not the case with this book. It turns out to be a rather tedious and conventional history of the first years of the Second World War, the "ten decisions" merely an excuse to dump general information as "context" into ten boxes. It is also extraordinarily repetitive: the same arguments, the same facts are repeated ad nauseam, often using the exact same words, leading to a weird feeling of déjà vu. Maybe the editor fell asleep after the first pages.
The performance is rather dull. The actor makes silly voices for some of the characters. Hitler and several of his henchmen in particular sound like a pantomime villains which has the curious effect of making their chilling monstrosity merely farcical.

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Soviet meltdown

Revisado: 09-04-20

The power and social structures in the last years of the Soviet Union revealed by the Chernobyl disaster at local and state level. Dysfunctional, brutal, mendacious, shoddy and often inept but capable of mobilizing heroes such as the hapless firefighters who kick fragments of graphite rods from the roof of the exploded reactor with their boots, the engineers themselves, more aware of the often fatal consequences of their improvised and generally ill-conceived efforts to control the situation, and the hundreds of thousands of "liquidators" who followed them.
A gripping story and an excellent performance by the reader, although half the reviewers seem obsessed by his pronunciation of the word "nuclear" (I didn't notice anything strange about it).

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