Zelig

Coming alive to consciousness

Revisado: 10-19-24

Is able to create a present tense for events that took place long ago, in the different person that was herself (all of ourselves) as a child. Truly lovely.

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Brilliant adventure story, unworthy narration

Revisado: 06-11-23

Dumas understood human motivations and the society of his age wonderfully. There are hardly better adventure stories. The narrator has only three or four voices for four times as many important characters. His women’s and “foreigners’” voices were particularly bad. I personally think he made the Count sound too sinister.

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Classic Americana, getting a bit harder to digest

Revisado: 06-11-23

When the woke-crazy English department at my school banned the book because of use of the n word and other unflattering depictions of slaves and maybe Southerners, I was irritated. Reading/listening to this again after several decades, I found my own tolerance for those elements had frayed some. I still think it’s a wonderful novel, that it promotes basically sound values at the same time that it depicts historical attitudes accurately, and should therefore continue to hold its place in the canon. Twain is a true American original. Nevertheless, not every inch of it is comfortable even to a skeptic of today’s values and sensitivities, and a well-turned preface might help preserve the integrity of this American classic.

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An abridgment. Excellent narration.

Revisado: 06-11-23

I discovered only accidentally that this is a much abridged version. Should be more explicitly advertised.

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Underplayed. Unparalleled writing.

Revisado: 06-11-23

Branagh offers a quiet reading, presumably in a well-reasoned effort to not get in the way of a perfectly wrought text. I think the reading could have conveyed meanings in the text better. A good preface or afterword might also have been useful to help bridge the century since this mysterious text was written.

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Fanatical, cruel, angry, pathetic characters

Revisado: 05-17-23

Is this what Tennessee was like in the late 1940s? If so, history really is a strange country.

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Intense observation

Revisado: 03-03-23

Edward Hermann’s narration is masterful. Steiner’s powers of observation and expression fantastic. Not a joyful book.

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Nice Le Güin Story

Revisado: 01-25-23

Two years before Left Hand, same universe. Draws on her father’s anthropology for inspiration. Imaginative science for 1967.

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Childish narration

Revisado: 02-26-22

Bakewell’s book is not lacking in insight. However, it is written as for a high school student. The narrator, in the meantime, reads as though the audience is eight years old. Her Frenchier than the French pronunciation of names and words in that language is independently irritating. Because I am interested in the subject, I endured the whole thing, most of it at 2.0x speed. Don’t subject yourself to the same unpleasantness.

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Sorry, the sun has already long set on the British Empire

Revisado: 02-09-21

As cute as this story is, the era for being able to suspend disgust for the depiction of an English gentleman dripping so richly with superiority
and noblesse oblige that every colonial subject and servant he meets swoons before him has passed.

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