Oculus

Outstanding narration

Revisado: 01-25-23

The accent of the Scotsman - a major character in the book - was particularly convincing to these American ears. As with all the C. S. Lewis books I have heard or read, this one deserves reflection.

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Lots of insights

Revisado: 05-06-22

This audiobook comprises six live lectures, given with with spontaneity, clarity and humor, synthesizing three major aspects of Brene Brown’s research. The lectures are entertaining, accessible and loaded with insights. I don’t doubt I’ll listen to this book again - maybe a couple of times - to make sure I internalize this important material.

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A narration informed by understanding

Revisado: 12-05-21

The author has a solid grip on how to parse the sentences he’s reading and his voice is pleasant. While I noticed a few places where his intonation did not fully match Milton’s intent, they were minor and not distracting. On the whole, this narration aided my ability to understand the poem’s text.

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Illuminates Dante’s Divine Comedy

Revisado: 04-05-21

I am taking a three-quarter course in Dante’s Divine Comedy and wanted some background on the spiritual and philosophical concepts he addresses. This course provided them. Lecture 19 on Aquinas’ ethics was pure gold in this respect, and would have justified my purchase for that lecture alone. Dante would have been familiar with much of the material presented in this course, which is devoted to thinkers who predated or were contemporary with him, excepting the last two lectures.

This is often chewy stuff and I listened to it while walking. It was not always easy going, but I found a used course book online that has helped my review. Some of the lectures dwelt with semantic distinctions that don’t seem all that relevant to me. I could have skipped those lectures without losing much. But on the whole I can enthusiastically recommend this course for those interested in medieval thought or the study of Dante.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Deep insights

Revisado: 12-28-20

My impression after listening to these lectures is that modern education has devalued thousands of years of important thought in certain areas. I’m over 60, consider myself well-read and although I’ve been more interested than most in the kind of material presented here, there was so much that was new to me in these lectures. A gem to find. It has inspired me to read more of Lewis’ non-fiction.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Superb narration, but keep a character index at hand

Revisado: 12-27-20

The narration is superb, with major characters cleanly drawn by tone of voice and accent. But there are a LOT of characters - too many to keep track of for me, until I found a web page that briefly described them all. I kept it handy so that I could remind myself of who was being referred to when they reappeared.

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esto le resultó útil a 22 personas

Important insights

Revisado: 11-27-20

I listened to this lecture series after taking a 20h Stanford course on Dante's Inferno which involved reading both the Musa and Durling translations, including all the footnotes. I also listened to the lectures on the Inferno from the Teaching Company Course on the Divine Comedy before turning to this lecture series. I'm happy to say that after all that I still learned a lot from this professor. Every lecture contained insights and perspectives that I hadn't found in the other sources, many of which added to my appreciation of the poem. The lectures are lively and drew me through the course. I recommend these lectures. I plan to buy the next two courses in this series even though the set of three courses is comparatively a bit pricey.

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Entertaining enough, but...

Revisado: 07-28-20

This book was entertaining enough, but the writing is just OK. The narrator’s descriptions often struck me as forced, well past the point of what was required to be evocative. The plot was enjoyable, if predictable.

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