Billy

Opened my eyes to the culpability of the Allies

Revisado: 02-20-16

This is one of the best histories I've ever read.

I had learned in high school that the West had sold out their allies in the East in the 1930s, but until reading this thoroughly researched and engagingly written history of the 1930s -- for the book provides so much context for Churchill's political and personal life that the book is possibly more a general history than a biography -- I had not understood how badly Baldwin and Chamberlain had sold out the democracies.

The author never shies away from admitting Churchill's less savory characteristics -- condescension to lower classes, egoism, racism -- the book really focuses on the Nazi threat, and in this context, Churchill emerges as the unqualified hero. Manchester holds his main character in the highest regard, and his enemies, from Baldwin to Hitler, in the vilest contempt. If you don't like historians' passing judgement on their subjects, I would urge you to keep an open mind and read this book anyway.

The reader at first put me off because of the nasal voice, but I quickly got used to it and now feel that many other voices that could have read this book would not have had sufficient gravity for the subject matter. The reader uses voices for reading quotes, especially Churchill. The voices could have been lame, but they never are and add significantly to the clarity of the prose, since the author mixes his words and quotes frequently. I even liked the few bars the reader sang, which wound up being wholly appropriate and adding to the prose.

Conclusion: Absolute must read for anyone interested in history, leadership, or politics.

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Excellent content, terrible reader

Revisado: 08-05-14

The content is awesome. The reader sounds like he's narrating ghost stories: slow, breathy, and mostly just weird. Use Audible's playback speed feature and set it at 1.5x and the reader's jarring voice becomes a non-issue.

But the book is friggin' cool for anyone interested in how order arises from disorder.

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Who is the intended audience?

Revisado: 07-21-14

The book would totally baffle me if I didn't do statistics for a living because McGrayne doesn't even give an example of how Bayes' Rule works until about halfway through the book (using the cigarettes study as an example). She merely tells us that frequentists don't like it but don't explain the underly differences between their approaches. But even with all that assumed knowledge, she doesn't talk about any of the underlying math.

Thus the book assumes too much knowledge on the part of the reader for the book to be for the uninitiated but doesn't give enough information for the initiated. Who is the intended audience? I can't even tell.

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Long but worthwhile. Main theme:rhythms of history

Revisado: 05-22-14

Reader:

Roberts's sentences can get long, but you hardly even notice because Davidson guide's the listener to the important words merely with the way he speaks. This is a special skill and augments the clarity of the writing significantly.

For an American listener, Davidson's accent is hilarious British but somehow eminently appropriate for the gravity of the subject and the erudition of the scholarship.

Writing:

The main theme of the book is the "rhythms" of history. His main topic is civilization. His main lens for understanding civilization is the interplay between (political/economic/religious) power and culture, but occasionally throws in insightful tangents on topics such as scientific, artistic, or women's history. Roberts mentions important figures (and dwells on a few of his favorites) but many you would expect (e.g., Da Vinci, Madison) don't show up at all. He starts at the *beginning*, approximately 3 million years ago, and gives a very good impression of just how long man went before the first civilization, and how long civilization had been around before modern times. He holds out surprisingly long before passing judgement on anything at all (with some minor exceptions such as Aztec mass killings), making his tone reassuringly objective, which he breaks only for a moving passage on World War II.

An excellent overview, but had some drawbacks. In ancient and pre modern times, Mediterranean-centric, missing detail I would have liked on India, China, Africa, and Europe. In the modern era, often quite Eurocentric. This all balances out once the story gets to European imperialism, though I would have liked more on South America.

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Performer mispronounces basic science words

Revisado: 10-14-13

The performer cannot pronounce some pretty basic words. For example, he pronounces the first "s" in "Descartes" and "matrices" like "mattresses". Most European names were butchered. Many technical terms slaughtered. It's extremely distracting and makes the science and the story enormously hard to follow. I strongly recommend reading this book in text rather than listening to the audiobook.

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