B. Bartosh

Surprisingly Emotional

Revisado: 11-29-22

This book made me both laugh and cry, when I didn’t expect to do either. Stimpson has a really great authorial voice and intermixes her own story with her thoughts on food. Anyone who has experienced struggles with food, either through overeating or extreme dieting or both will find her story resonating with them. In fact, anyone who wonders how to navigate a supermarket selling both Cinnamon Toast Crunch and gluten-free vegan products will find her perspective useful, refreshing, and full of common sense.

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Excellent Course!

Revisado: 12-05-19

I love the evolution courses, especially anything with John Hawks in it. If there were two recommendations I could make to the Great Courses, they would be 1) make more of these available through Amazon’s Signature Collection, so that more people can afford to stream the visuals, which is rather important when the professors are describing fossils. The other would be to add more period-specific courses, such as a course just on the Mesozoic or Cenozoic. I would love to get some Deep History Courses that are more in-depth!

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

Excellent course!

Revisado: 06-18-19

This was very well presented for such a complex and controversial subject. I would love to have more courses with this professor, perhaps something that goes into more depth on Neanderthals.

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Get the video version

Revisado: 06-17-19

Like evolution itself, this course takes some time to build up steam but becomes pretty impressive when it does. My only caveat is that while I ordinarily prefer the audio versions of Great Courses so that I can listen to them anywhere, this really is a course where you need the visual accompaniment. The professor frequently shows examples of the creatures he is talking about and I felt like I was missing out with just his vague descriptions of them. He is, however, a good storyteller.

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Absolutely wonderful

Revisado: 01-16-18

This course rivals the Ancient Egypt course as my absolute favorite. I loved all the lectures comparing, for instance, Rome with Han China. Brilliant all the way through!

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Good overall but weak on Aristotle

Revisado: 11-30-17

The professor presented a very well organized and balanced course. I especially appreciated his treatment of the Presocratics, about whom I knew very little beforehand. His scholarly focus on Plato was also clear and those lectures were equally good. I did, however, think his Aristotle lectures were somewhat weaker and overly apologetic for my tastes. Aristotle was the one philosopher I knew a little bit about beforehand, and I found the explanation of his theories about causation rather lacking and some of the statements about the differences between Aristotle’s conception of the soul and the Christian conception a bit misleading. However, I did enjoy the course overall.

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Excellent introduction

Revisado: 11-20-17

Aquinas has always seemed hopelessly dense to me, but Professor Fraser’s introduction placed him within the Aristotelian framework in which he operated. I’ll probably have to revisit the book several times to get everything, but it did more for my understanding of Aquinas than anything I’ve ever read before.

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Very nice

Revisado: 10-27-17

I wish this course had been slightly longer and more focused on later periods. I listened to it in conjunction with the Late Antiquity series and there was a lot of overlap. However it did fill in a substantial gap in my knowledge of medieval history and I enjoyed it very much. It also made me wish there was a more general course on Eastern Europe during the medieval period, covering the Bulgars and Serbs that were mostly peripheral to the series. Overall very nice.

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Very good!

Revisado: 10-15-17

Fascinating lecture that demonstrates just how complex the changes from antiquity to the medieval world could be.

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Truly excellent

Revisado: 10-12-17

This was the first Great Courses lecture I purchased and it took me longer than expected to finish, but every minute was worth it. Dr. Brier is one of the most engaging instructors I've encountered and I've now purchased two of his books, just because the course was so interesting. What I loved was the mix of thematic topics with detailed history. So often if you go to a conventional bookstore, you'll find plenty of books on Egyptology that focus on religion and artifacts as if they are all static and timeless. I'm sure there are more chronology-oriented books out there, but without an overview, it can be difficult for a novice to know where to begin. Dr. Brier covered all of the amazing cultural developments and his expertise in mummies makes for a fascinating series of lectures midway through, but he also puts all of this in context of the real pharaohs, royal women, priests, and other human lives for whom they were important. The most exciting thing was that this course left me confident enough to include two lectures on ancient Egypt in my own undergraduate Western Civ course, and it was thrilling to see how my students lit up when we talked about Sneferu's pyramids, Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, and King Tut. This is one of the best history courses TGC offers, and I highly recommend it!

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