Owen Davis

Strong political history, ok economic history

Revisado: 12-14-24

Relative newcomer to modern Chinese history. The political history was richly detailed and engaging, if a bit overly detailed at times, to my novice ears. I would have liked a bit more color and texture in the economic and business stories associated with the liberalization. There are short capsule histories of businesses, but never lasting more than a few paragraphs. Would have benefited from deeper engagement with some of these stories.

Very good performance.

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Great story well told

Revisado: 11-10-24

David Grann is a master of the form and this did not disappoint. Entertaining and clear throughout.

Narrator can be a bit melodramatic but he’s solid. I thought he mispronounced “Juan” in Byron’s “Don Juan” but turns out that’s how Lord Byron actually pronounced it.

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If you can stand the schtick, you’ll get a lot out of it

Revisado: 07-11-24

Right from the bat you can tell the lecturer loves the sound of his own voice. He hams it up constantly. It seems like me might have dreamed of being a stand up comedian or radio personality at some point. If you can handle that—and it’s a lot—there’s a wealth of knowledge and insight to be gained for the casual music fan.

He does a great job of contextualizing the music within broader world history. It seems like he chooses the representative musical examples well. I’m no expert but he seems to know his stuff. I feel more enlightened about music now than when I began.

Beyond the broad-brush musical history and biographical detail (of which there is plenty), the musical analysis tends more towards the structural features of the music. This is especially true for the baroque and classical periods.

Listen to the sample to see if you get a kick out of the guy or can at least stand him (to his credit, he had me chuckling a few times). If you can, I think it’s a good investment.

Oh yeah, and you better like Beethoven’s Fifth. You’ll hear that plenty.

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Clear and compelling argument and richly detailed analysis

Revisado: 01-04-24

Fascinating and convincing book. Not my field but still of great interest. Henrich does a great job of moving the book along through complex theoretical discussions and breaking down difficult concepts. Highly recommended for anyone interested in human evolution, psychology, and culture.

Some have complained about the narrator but I think he’s very good. A bit of an old timey radio voice vibe, yes, but his delivery is clear and expressive. His vocal patterns make the technical material more digestible and it’s clear he understands the gist of what he’s saying.

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Great book, narration is shaky but not that bad

Revisado: 10-26-23

The book was much better than I expected. I'm allergic to pop-psych and airport reads, and I worried this is one of them. I don't think it is. Really convincing thesis supported by an impressive breadth of empirical work and analysis. I'm a social scientist so I have a large appetite for this stuff, but I thought it did a great job of explicating scholarly work without getting bogged down in tedious details. Very thought-provoking and illuminating. I enjoyed it throughout.

A number of reviewers have complained about the narrator. He does have some weird mispronunciations and occasional lapses in sentence delivery (e.g., putting the wrong emphasis on phrases like "such that" or "that which"). But it's not nearly as distracting as others seem to think. He has a good rhythm and pleasing tone, so that makes up a bit for the stumbles.

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Strong in the first 2/3, fumbles through modernity

Revisado: 04-13-23

The book is phenomenal in the early parts dealing with human evolution, early human groups and tool use, hunter gatherer societies, dawn of agriculture, and growth of cities. Then the author sprints through 2000 years of modern history and narrows his focus mostly to advanced western capitalist societies and sometimes touching only tangentially on work in these sections. He has interesting throughlines for the modern era, but overall it is rushed and patchy after 1000 AD or so. Very little attention to modern labor institutions and modes of work organization.

My advice is to listen to the first three quarters or so of the book, which is fascinating, erudite, and engrossing. The last part has good moments but falls flat overall.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Amazing historical scope and detail, occasionally aimless

Revisado: 03-03-23

The book is an impressive achievement. It certainly fulfills its promise of providing a full historical overview of human work. The author is adept at finding evocative stories that highlight the themes and historical moments under examination. This comes at the cost of occasionally losing bigger-picture narrative momentum. Perhaps this is a result of audio rather than paper consumption. I think I’ll buy the real thing now that I’ve listened so I can return to some areas where I lost focus.

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Take a tour of Brad DeLong’s mind palace

Revisado: 10-08-22

If you already follow Brad DeLong’s work, you have some idea of what you’re getting into. If you don’t, know that he is a quirky and original thinker and a bit of an eccentric. Not easy to pin down intellectually, though solidly a liberal (in both senses of the term). The book is good as history, though not great. Where it excels is in conveying the author’s singular way of organizing vast quantities of information. DeLong has a handful of heuristics he uses to interpret the world, and this book is largely an exercise in self consciously deploying those heuristics at world historical scale. It certainly has an effect on the way I think about pre-modern societies and subsistence level poverty, and what it meant for humanity to escape “the Malthusian trap.”

The weakest points — and some of the strongest points — occur during DeLong’s occasional tangents. Sometimes you get wonderful little biographical anecdotes of historical figures that delight and enlighten. Other times you get excessively detailed extensive descriptions of battlefield strategy that have seemingly no connection to the big (economic) ideas that undergird the book. These flaws are excusable though. This will probably be regarded as a classic in decades to come.

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esto le resultó útil a 5 personas

Well-researched, clearly delivered, entertaining

Revisado: 06-29-22

Fantastic listen. For such a dense and technical topic, Ahamed does a great job keeping things accessible and peppering the story with entertaining tidbits and details. He draws out the main characters quite well and makes sure to remind the reader of who's who throughout the story. As an economist (though no expert in monetary or historical matters) I enjoyed this greatly.

The performance is good, but I have a big quibble: his mispronunciations of major figures' names. Hoye is able to affect a perfectly convincing Edwardian British accent, yet he can't correctly pronounce Keynes, one of the main characters in the book and the most famous economist of the 20th century (in this book he's probably #5 in importance after all the top central bankers). It's pronounced Canes, not Keens. Every time I heard this mispronunciation it felt like a small sharp object was jabbed into the back of my head. Another repeated mistake: Bagehot is pronounced "Badgett" not "Bag-hot." Not an easy one, but surely you'd want to do your research on this, right?

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Hard to imagine a better one-volume economic history of the US

Revisado: 02-27-22

I really enjoyed listening to this book. I come to it as an economist though not a history buff by any means. The book maintained a good pace without leaving me in the dark at any point. Levy sets up a particular economic analytic framework early on — a classically Keynesian one — and uses it to great effect in his analysis of the macro trends throughout US history. Some may quibble with his analysis here and there but Levy is clear and consistent throughout.

A particular strength is Levy’s attention to cultural phenomena. Interspersed with the history and economics are short and delightful forays into the art and the entertainment of the eras under consideration. These are fun and surprising and provide a nice break from facts dates and figures.

I also appreciated Levy’s detailed accounts of business operations. Two standouts are Carnegie’s steelworks and Silicon Valley. These sections are interesting in their own right, but also provide essential context to the macroeconomic developments they illuminate.

The narrator is very good too.

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