Janice

Interesting take on the Civil War

Revisado: 01-29-25

Well read. Interesting stories of women struggling first in the war but also in the battles over the peace.

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Great Historian, Worth Listening

Revisado: 01-19-25

West is a great western historian. He gives an excellent overview of western history. The narration is competent.

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Great comedy flawed by period racism

Revisado: 07-08-24

In many ways, this is one of Wodehouse’s better novels. There are some great comic sequences. I love the narrator. However, it is a product of an earlier time. The n-word is frequently used and black face is a major plot point. There are no actual Black characters though a troop of Black minstrels is frequently referred to.

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Why Canada is not part of the United States

Revisado: 12-15-15

People may not remember but early Americans expected Canada to join the revolution. Thus the two times the U.S. Invaded Canada -- during the Revolution and the War of 1812 -- to liberate Canada from British rule. Canada declined to be liberated, expelling American forces both times. Taylor's topic is the confusing northern front in the 1812 war: A time when American loyalists filled much of North Canada, the British longed to prove their own ethical and military superiority over the greedy, hypocritical Americans,
Federalists feared the Jeffersonian hostility to commerce and the British, and Republicans longed to demonstrate the power of a citizen militia and purge the crypto-Tories of the Federalist party and Canada. By the end of the war, Canadians had built a new shared civic identity as not Americans and America had embraced the ideal of free, white manhood. Taylor is a fine writer who held my interest over the many chapters. The narrator speaks fluently and well. He also does aan amazibg job with names and words from the many different languages of the participants. I also strongly recomend The Enemy Within, the companion book which examines the war's southern front.

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Excellent reading of an important historical work

Revisado: 12-03-15

Breen offers an insightful re-examination of the Nat Turner rebellion. He is unflinching but not sensationalist in his presentation of the violence of the rebellion and the white retaliation. His focus is on the complex motives of the participants. He places the rebels within the antebellum African American anti-slavery movement which drew on both spirituality and American political philosophy (the revolt was originally scheduled for July 4.). Local blacks, however, had to consider the rebellion as members of families and communities, well aware of the history of failed slave rebellions and white retaliation. Whites were divided between those committed to protecting their investment in human property and non-slaveholders who often saw blacks as a threat to be eliminated. Breen offers a well-written and insightful portrayal of slave resistance and the complicated racial and class dynamics of the antebellum South.

Free is one of my favorite narrators. His general narration is great and he fluidly shifts accent and tone to bring to life the many quoted sources. I think a wide audience of listeners will enjoy this reading.

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Interesting Political and Economic History

Revisado: 07-05-13

I have to admit I was looking for a social history, focusing on how people responded to the depression, and this wasn't it. However, it is an interesting look at this turning point in American history. Robert's persuasively argues that this economic crisis pushed Americans to reconceive the role of state governments and their assumptions about economic growth. Most interestingly, Roberts demonstrates the complicated interrelationships between American popular belief in their destiny to expand across the continent, the military and diplomatic aspects of this expansion, and the reality that antebellum America economically depended on British investments, banks, and customers. Politicians might be guided by popular enthusiasm but they also had to contend with economic realities that might contradict the will of the people.

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Striking reinterpretation of the fall of Rome

Revisado: 03-04-13

Peter Brown is one of the best historians of Christianity today. In this book, he reexamines the role of Christianity in the collapse of the western Roman empire. Strikingly, he finds that christianity was part of the late Roman world not an attacking outsider. I really enjoyed it but I am a historian so I do like more academic approaches to history.

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