Ryan

Great book with the single worst narration ever

Revisado: 08-09-17

What did you like best about Victorian Freaks? What did you like least?

The book is absolutely fascinating, and it's nice to have an erudite book on this subject. It consists of a series of scholarly essays on freakery and its relationship to Victorian sensibilities. This is made for an academic audience, so anyone looking for a casual read may be put off; it has the air of a dissertation, but those of us who study the topic will find a wealth of great observations and material.

However, this is the single worst narration I've ever heard in any audio medium. I have no idea what the intent of the narrator was here, but it's my personal theory that although the narrator can accurately read single words, he has no idea what they actually mean or what the sentences say. Seriously, the inflection, tone, pacing, and pronunciation make no sense at all, as if a computer voice were reading a text. It sounds a little more human at 2x speed, but it's still very, very difficult to listen to, and many words are mispronounced. In the span of like three sentences, he pronounces "minotaur" as "meen-OH-tor," "fin de séacle" as "fine day seecle," and, bafflingly, "milieu" as "MEEL-yerr."

I would probably recommend going with a physical book on this one.

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Marrs is unimpeachable, but the book...

Revisado: 08-11-11

@Daniel - whoops! Looks like someone's confusing "Jews" with "Israel" again! One's a loosely-connected ethnic heritage/religious affiliation, one is a nation-state. "International financiers" and "international bankers" are crazy-anti-semitic-speak for Jews, but not usually in Marrs' terminology - in fact, he's often referring to the Rockefellers, Bushes, Farbin company descendants, etc.

The book is well done and well researched (though I might dispute the veracity of some of his sources) as all Marrs' books are. Though one must navigate the material with something of a critical eye (the Prescott Bush/Bush Family stuff is pretty well documented fact, whereas the Nazi superscience must necessarily be a product of rumors and slight documentation), the book tells an important story of the follies of corporate control of government (fascism being, in a sense, hypercapitalism) that's relevant to all free people today (look at today's conservative right/tea party/Wall St. contingent).

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