Brad

Promising book but you should read it instead

Revisado: 10-23-24

I used to be annoyed by completely monotonous narration, but it turns out that it's MUCH worse when a narrator shovels in emphasis and emotion with no regard to either volume or placement.

It didn't seem as bad at first, but an hour or so into the book I found that most of my mental energy was spent on fighting the natural urge to infer meaning from intonation, because the intonation had become absurd.

It's as if the narrator switched off his brain and just read each word or phrase according to its most generic affective connotation, magnified to a comical degree.
This is probably what you'd get if you took an LLM trained on teen poetry and political ads, and asked it to "read with emotion".

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Everyone needs to read this

Revisado: 09-29-20

This and The New Jim Crow ought to be mandatory reading for all Americans. It is outrageous how little we know, and how unaware we have been of our own ignorance.

The book is impeccably researched and strikes a good balance in tone. You will wish the content was different, LOL, but that is hardly the author's fault.

In audio format, I found it hard occasionally to keep track of jumps across time and space, so I'm using the paper book for reference as well. (Could just be my inattentiveness, though.)

The narrator is perfect.

Please read/listen to this, and buy one for someone else you know.

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useful guide to American history and culture

Revisado: 05-04-19

I hope Democrats will read this book before we all die in a fiery inferno.
The practical advice is at the very end of the book - if you only have 20 minutes to spend on this book, listen to that. But hearing the whole context is fun and quite illuminating.

The only reason I gave the narrator 3 stars is the "accents" that pop up when quoting historical/public figures. They're... not great... By this I mean that I cringed a lot, and almost gave up on the book at some point because of it (but I'm glad I didn't). It's a shame, since accents are not necessary in this context, and don't have much to add - there is no dialog that they need to help us keep track of, and the source of the quote is always mentioned anyway. Besides, no one can reasonably be expected to replicate such a wide range of accents anyway - so it's a losing proposition from the outset. (Unless you're Meryl Streep, in which case go for it!)
The narration is quite good otherwise.

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is this a human narrator?

Revisado: 07-24-18

Very interesting book, but it sounds like an AI is narrating, with no common sense breaks between sentences, paragraphs, or even chapters. The pace is brisk and perfectly uniform, through dense and banal passages alike.

I thought at first that it must just be an inexperienced narrator, but he is excellent from a purely technical standpoint: diction is flawless, with no detectable switches from one recording session to another and never a mistimed pause for breath. Maybe he's just profoundly uninterested in the topic and isn't bothering to understand what he reads?
In any case, I found the uniformity of narration and lack of appropriate pauses to get incredibly frustrating after a while.

I do recommend the book, just not the format.

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loved it

Revisado: 10-12-15

the content was interesting, and the narrator was warm, funny, and engaging.
I have a deep aversion to preachy academic narration, and faced no such problem here. It's clear that the author loves his work in both research and teaching - his enthusiasm comes through and makes the book a joy to listen to. thank you!

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hard to listen

Revisado: 05-03-14

Is there anything you would change about this book?

Have someone else read it

Would you be willing to try another one of Rose Itzcovitz’s performances?

Not in the near future, though long term I don't see why she couldn't improve.

Any additional comments?

I'm having a hard time getting through the book, because I keep getting distracted by the narration.
The diction is largely good, though it falls through the cracks on a regular basis - this tells me the narrator is certainly capable of speaking clearly, but she collapses some words into an unintelligible mess when she'd rather just move on to the next sentence.

What drives me crazy is the cadence. Picture a 4th grader reading a poem - there's a strong rhythm (so not a painfully even tone which can also be maddening), but the rhythm is fixed and not very responsive to the nuances of the text. So there is often unneeded emphasis on non-essential words, or plowing straight over what should be a break in the sentence or a crucial point. There's no reason this should happen. All it takes is a careful reading of the text *before* narrating it. Try to think about the main points the author is making in each paragraph, and then render it accordingly. Maybe that will mean shorter takes, but it will make it soooo much easier to listen to the final recording. Argghh!!!

Anyway, maybe 2 stars is too harsh, but 3 would be too much. With a little more care, I think the narrator is easily capable of 4 or 5.

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