Paul

A Magical Journey

Revisado: 08-20-20

Long ago, like Hans Castorp, I too had my own Magic Mountain. Mine was high in the mountains of Afghanistan. I lived in a mud room without running water or electricity. There was nothing to do at nights but sit in tea houses speaking Farsi. During a short vacation I rode the Afghan Post bus through the Khyber Pass to the border city of Peshawar in Pakistan. They had an English book store one can only dream about. On its shelves I found Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. It had been required reading in one of my classes at school, but I never read it because of its length. Grabbing a copy, I brought it back to Afghanistan, and there, each night, by the gleam of a gas lantern, I burned my way through the novel. I talked with my cousin Joachim; I disputed with Settembrini and Naphta, and fell desperately in love with Madame Chauchat. That reading experience was magical for me, and I hope that that you too will take the same journey yourself; the novel is beautifully narrated by David Rintoul.

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Read by narrator at a blistering pace.

Revisado: 03-15-18

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Shame on the editor's of New Classic Books (if indeed there were any) for not moderating the breathtaking speed at which this great and timeless classic was read. I tried decreasing the speed on my phone to 0.75, but then the narrator sounds as if he were on Prozac. I have waited for years for this wonderful book to appear, which made it all the more painful to see it
read so as to make it almost unintelligible. Any competent editor, or narrator, would have realized the problem and made appropriate adjustments.

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Unique Selection

Revisado: 01-03-15

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Aristotle is one of the most influential thinkers in history, yet most audible selections center almost entirely on three of his works: Ethics, Politics and Poetics. That is why this selection is unique in that it offers, besides the Poetics, two works that are rarely included in audible works by Aristotle: Rhetoric and Logic. The production values of this recording are excellent, and Frederick Davidson's rendition is clear, concise and energetic. Still, I must add a caveat emptor. Although both the Rhetoric and the Poetics are unabridged, the Logic (Organon) includes only the Posterior Analytics in its entirety, and his other five works of the Logic: Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Topics and On Sophistical Refutations are treated with only very brief summaries. I was tempted to subtract one star for this stretching of the truth of the term unabridged, but I was so happy that this trio of works was even available I resisted that temptation. I hope that the selection of Aristotle's works in audible increases over time, and that in the future we can look forward to listening to other important works such as Metaphysics, On the Soul and Physics, as well as the remaining five unrecorded works of the Logic.

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A magic rendering

Revisado: 11-30-13

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This rendition by C Day Lewis is magical. Yes, it is abridged; Yes, it is on a topic, farming in the Roman Empire, that resonates little with modern readers. Yes, it is competing with an unabridged version by Charlton Griffin that is very good. But, this is the version to buy. I listened to it in one sitting at dusk and was transported back, as if by magic, 2,000 years ago to a time and place of simple pleasures and great beauty. Lewis is reading from his own translation of Virgil, and the sweetness and lyricism of his narration is unforgetable. This is Virgil brought to life, and poetry of the very first order.

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