Nathaniel Sterling

Too Bad About the Performance

Revisado: 09-18-24

This is quite an interesting story of Vietnam during WWII, with the interplay among the Japanese occupiers, the Vichy French administration, and the Viet Minh resistance. It is well-written, but unfortunately the reading is just terrible, making the whole experience somewhat unpleasant. The reader over-emotes, and emphasizes every sentence. His characters — male and female — tend to sound fakey instead of natural. Do yourself a favor and read, don't listen to, the book.

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Interesting book marred by poor reading

Revisado: 03-04-24

This book is an interesting overview of the history of native and non-native interaction in the U.S. from 1492 to the present. For example it explains how early enslavement of indigenous peoples by European settlers established a pattern that paved the way for the slave trade in the U.S., and how native alliances with the British became one of the provoking causes of the American revolution. The book documents the shifting attitudes of the government towards Indian tribes, and the uncertainties surrounding their legal status under the Constitution and how it has evolved over time.

Unfortunately, the narrator of this book has a manner of delivery that is disconcerting and that undermines the narrative flow of the story. The narrator routinely emphasizes the wrong word in a phrase, and pauses within a sentence or between sentences, in ways that are distracting and make the book hard to follow.

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Disappointing

Revisado: 04-02-23

This book is a series of vignettes about characters in mid-19th century America, very loosely tied together by the theme of trees. The vignettes are interesting, and well-written, but the book doesn't cohere as a narrative or develop its theme. The audiobook is not helped by the editorial decision to treat the material poetically, so it is read in a declamatory style, with drawn-out diction and falling intonations, that doesn't really work.

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Good book destroyed by lousy reader

Revisado: 09-23-18

This was quite an interesting scholarly book, but it's remarkable that the author allowed this recording to see the light of day. The reader constantly mispronounced words. He used the same fakey type voice for every quotation. His pronunciation of foreign words was embarrassingly affected. But his worst sin is that he didn't really seem to have a sense of the meaning of the material — he invariably emphasized the wrong word in a sentence (usually the verb), so there was no flow to the narrative. Instead of being able to listen to the argument, you had to mentally re-interpret to get the author's intended meaning, and couldn't really focus on the arc of the history being told.

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