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Too many right-wing personal rants

Revisado: 08-12-21

I actually agree with many of the ideas Greenberg expresses about the Soviet Union, but I didn't buy this series to listen to him on his soapbox. I've heard other talks he's given, and he's smugly intolerant of any views other than his own. The cutesy style of delivery, such as frequently repeating "My friends!" also gets old pretty quickly.

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Okay for what it is

Revisado: 05-29-21

This book does a decent job of hitting the highlights of Italian history in half an hour. Essentially, it's an outline or even a table of contents for a more comprehensive study. The reader mispronounced some proper names so badly that it required effort to figure out what he was trying to say. That's just careless on the part of the director, when audio of the correct pronunciation is so easily available on Google.

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Okay info but almost amusingly sexist

Revisado: 08-21-20

The casual sexism of this speaker's world view is so outdated that it's almost quaint. Speaking of Queen Elizabeth I, one of the greatest monarchs in English history, all he can think to say about her is that she was "ostensibly a virgin" when she died. Similarly, he calls "Nessun Dorma" a love song, which indeed is how Verdi envisioned it. Verdi's excuse was that he lived in a deeply sexist culture, but a contemporary speaker might be expected to recognize that far from having anything to do with love, "Nessun Dorma" is the cry of an entitled male who's determined to force an unwilling woman to do what HE wants, regardless of the cost to anyone else. Worse, the premise of the opera is that no matter what she says, what she actually needs is a sexual relationship with a big strong dominant male, as if it were true that when a woman says no, she really means yes. I deeply love this music and gladly get past the mind-boggling male chauvinist piggery for the sake of the beauty, but it does need to be acknowledged.

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Meh

Revisado: 10-21-19

There's only enough of a plot in this book to hold together the set pieces about eating, violence, and sexism. Basically, the story, such as it is, consists of the two main characters falling into one glaringly obvious trap after another, in between eating huge Italian meals and having sex - no real sex scenes, just the statement that they went to bed together. The only woman in the book giggles, looks adorable, pouts, wheedles, and in one scene actually claps her hands in delight. I'm not making any of that up - those are the actual words used. The sexism is so outdated it's almost quaint.

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Content good, speaker has a terrible speech tic

Revisado: 06-17-19

I was really enjoying the content of these lectures, but I finally had to stop listening because the speaker constantly makes empty noises, like um, um um, er um um um er, um, uh, um, sometimes several times in the same sentence. Since this speech tic is one of the first things that would be addressed in the most basic undergraduate speech class, and this speaker is supposed to be a professional, I'm surprised that the lecture company didn't ask him to break this maddening habit before hiring him for this course.

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Excellent book, slow reader

Revisado: 05-25-19

This book is really interesting, and although it's read at a super-slow pace, it sounds closer to normal if you change the speed to 1.5.

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Good entertainment

Revisado: 01-07-19

This book tells entertaining stories about the Victorian era, with a great performance by Stephen Fry, interviews with scholars, and scenes. The reason I didn't give it a 5 is that it has non-stop piano music behind the narration. That would have worked well once in a while for contrast, but they overdid it, and after a while it gets annoying.

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Noticeably lower volume than most audiobooks

Revisado: 10-25-18

The story itself is excellent, as is the reader, but it's much harder to hear than most audiobooks. The volume is unusually low to begin with, and since it's a spy story, there's a lot of muttering and whispering. Especially when there's background noise, like traffic, you really have to use earbuds.

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Generally very good

Revisado: 10-15-18

This book covers a good variety of interesting topics, and the delivery is lively and engaging. The only problem is that the author is hung up on an analogy between the human mind and a machine. What he's saying is a lot clearer when he just says it, rather than going on and on and on with long, confusing tangents about levers and gears and dashboards.

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Very well documented history

Revisado: 08-16-18

This book does a good job of presenting a powerful story based on specific details from letters, registers, public records, and other historical documents. The introduction includes the author's opinions, but once you get into the book, there's very little preaching. There doesn't have to be, because the facts speak for themselves. While viewing themselves as godly people, the Puritans did things like buying cargoes of rotting fish very cheap to feed to the enslaved people, and ordering enslaved men to impregnate unwilling women in order to produce more property. No need for comment: it was what it was.

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