Aurumai

This book isn't what I was led to believe it was.

Revisado: 06-08-22

TL;DR at the bottom.

So the very first thing you need to know about this book is that it's not some heart-warming story about how dogs came to be. It's an extremely technical educational textbook on genomes, evolution, cultural anthropology, and a LITTLE bit (and I really mean very little) of layperson-friendly explanation of dogs sprinkled on top. After reading the title and description and even seeing the cover art, I was quite disappointed to realize about half an hour in that this was basically just an anthropology textbook and even more disappointed by the end of it to realize how little of it actually directly focused on dogs themselves. Now, I can fully appreciate that it would be impossible to tell an in-depth story about how modern dogs came to be without delving deeply into early Humanity, but the book's external presentation just seems a bit disingenuous to me. A more appropriate title for this book might've been something like "Early Humans and Their First Companions". It's been a minute since I listened to this, but if my memory serves me, there was an entire hour-long stretch in this audiobook where dogs literally weren't mentioned a single time, even indirectly! At its best, this book only ever allows dogs to share the spotlight with other topics like cultural anthropology or the study of gradual ecosystem/geography changes over time. At its worst, this book completely forgets about dogs and takes to overexplaining individual cultures and their histories without ever really justifying why it's necessary to know all of this information to understand dogs.

There were times in this book where Pat Shipman seems to expect that the reader is well-read and studied on all of these topics because there is an overwhelming amount of technical/scientific jargon, as well as references to studies without any further explanation used throughout. At the very same time, there are some brief moments where he seems like he thinks his audience is made up of middle-school children. I was particularly confused about what tone was intended when he poses the question, "So what is a dog?" and the answer essentially begins with "Well, look at your dog. That's a dog." I genuinely can't tell if certain parts of this book were meant to be humorous and whether it's the delivery that causes any semblance of humor to be lost in translation..

As for Kate Mulligan's performance, I'm quite torn. I've never listened to an educational textbook for entertainment, so this was new territory for me as far as audiobooks go. She speaks very clearly and with an almost suspicious level of enthusiasm. I suppose her performance is perfectly apt if you're looking at this from the perspective of using this book for college studies or something of the like. But from a perspective of a layperson who just wants to listen to a story or even just a conversational explanation about dogs, Kate's performance is somewhat obnoxious and becomes grating after a short while of listening. Her performance makes a lot more sense to me if this book was intended to be consumed only in short excerpts over a much longer period of time than it's sub-7 hour running time (as you might expect if a college course used this audiobook as reading material).

The last reason I have a bone to pick with this book is that it seems a bit messy in the way it presents the information to you. Many of the topics and even the specific details of those topics are repeated numerous times throughout the book. Again, I'm not used to reading scholarly texts for entertainment, so I'm not sure if this structure is a necessity for some reason, but it seems to me that even with light-handed editing, it would be possible to shave off at least an hour of the running time of this audiobook and it could still get the same amount of information across. There are so many obvious redundancies in this book, even to my relatively uneducated ears, that listening to it for hours at a time can become a bit disorienting, making me wonder whether I was actually hearing the same information again, or if I had just mentally checked out and imagined that I've heard it before.


TL;DR - There's a wealth of knowledge to be found in this book, but it's not a "story" in a traditional sense; it's an educational cultural anthropology textbook. If you're not caught up on some basic education on genomes/evolution/cultural anthropology/geography AND/OR you don't find textbooks on these things entertaining, you'll probably find this to be quite an excruciating listen. I did learn a bit from this book and certain parts were very interesting, but it has almost no entertainment value whatsoever, and since they didn't do a good job of explaining that in the title or description, people who don't read these reviews will have to find that out the hard way.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

An excellent audiobook experience!

Revisado: 11-15-21

I'm writing this review for the entire trilogy rather than for individual books -- The whole story is quite consistent in writing and performance. Any fan of the WarCraft universe will be able to appreciate all of the context and perspective that the War of the Ancients trilogy brings to it. It fills in some gaps in a handful of characters' origin stories and personalities as well as the general feel of the relationships between the races of Azeroth's earlier eras. These books are no masterclass in amazing writing, but they simply don't need to be; they mostly only serve to flesh out lore that you may already know with some specifics. One small nitpick I have to offer is that Richard Knaak has a very repetitive writing style. You'll no doubt notice that certain words and terms are repeated constantly throughout this trilogy, to the point where I have to wonder if the editing process of this book was rushed. Get ready to constantly hear terms such as: materialize, "It was all he/she could do", former, latter, visage, countenance, orbs (referring to one's eyes), scores, myriad, sinew, etc. Maybe it's a dumb thing to nitpick about, but the frequency of these words definitely did sometimes distract me from the story. It could possibly be that Richard's tendency to overuse some terms is at least in part because it was meant for this trilogy to be written in a certain 'fancy' writing style. I couldn't know whether or not this was an intentional thing, but the writing style definitely does seem appropriate for the story's ancient and epic setting. It almost feels somewhat reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft's more convoluted classical style of writing, while being quite a bit easier to digest. I'm sure there's a much better comparison out there, but I'm not well-read enough to know one. By the end of the trilogy, I've started feeling that the writing style is very repetitive in a much broader sense as well. Maybe it's something that couldn't be avoided, as the book explores the entire War of the Ancients and needed to give us a sense of what all the characters had been through. There are MANY scenes in this trilogy which are all essentially the same (mostly combat scenes), just with different antagonists and protagonists. after all was said and done, I had more than my fill of scenes that describe each character's fighting style. Easily one of the greatest highlights of this trilogy is Ramon de Ocampo's performance. With every new character introduced in the story, I've grown more impressed with the scope of his voice acting, especially as the races with accents emerged. The first thing that caught my attention was that his depiction of female characters is actually very feminine. It was so jarring and even slightly uncomfortable to hear a male voice actor suddenly start channeling a borderline convincing feminine voice, I almost disliked it at first. But as time went on and I realized how many different voices he had to match the personalities of characters encountered in the books, I found myself forgetting that this book was being read by a single person and started listening to it almost as an audio drama. I'm very new to the audio book experience, but I have a hard time believing that many people can top Ramon's performance. I am extremely impressed with his reading and almost worry that he's set the bar so high that other readers will seem inadequate by comparison. The only shortcoming in Ramon's performance that I could think of is that sometimes his characters will sound like they got mixed up for just a single scene or even just a single line. These instances are few and far in between though. Overall, this trilogy was an excellent audiobook experience for me and I'd absolutely recommend it to anyone who is a fan of WarCraft or anyone who wants to get into it.

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An excellent audiobook experience!

Revisado: 11-15-21

I'm writing this review for the entire trilogy rather than for individual books -- The whole story is quite consistent in writing and performance. Any fan of the WarCraft universe will be able to appreciate all of the context and perspective that the War of the Ancients trilogy brings to it. It fills in some gaps in a handful of characters' origin stories and personalities as well as the general feel of the relationships between the races of Azeroth's earlier eras. These books are no masterclass in amazing writing, but they simply don't need to be; they mostly only serve to flesh out lore that you may already know with some specifics. One small nitpick I have to offer is that Richard Knaak has a very repetitive writing style. You'll no doubt notice that certain words and terms are repeated constantly throughout this trilogy, to the point where I have to wonder if the editing process of this book was rushed. Get ready to constantly hear terms such as: materialize, "It was all he/she could do", former, latter, visage, countenance, orbs (referring to one's eyes), scores, myriad, sinew, etc. Maybe it's a dumb thing to nitpick about, but the frequency of these words definitely did sometimes distract me from the story. It could possibly be that Richard's tendency to overuse some terms is at least in part because it was meant for this trilogy to be written in a certain 'fancy' writing style. I couldn't know whether or not this was an intentional thing, but the writing style definitely does seem appropriate for the story's ancient and epic setting. It almost feels somewhat reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft's more convoluted classical style of writing, while being quite a bit easier to digest. I'm sure there's a much better comparison out there, but I'm not well-read enough to know one. By the end of the trilogy, I've started feeling that the writing style is very repetitive in a much broader sense as well. Maybe it's something that couldn't be avoided, as the book explores the entire War of the Ancients and needed to give us a sense of what all the characters had been through. There are MANY scenes in this trilogy which are all essentially the same (mostly combat scenes), just with different antagonists and protagonists. after all was said and done, I had more than my fill of scenes that describe each character's fighting style. Easily one of the greatest highlights of this trilogy is Ramon de Ocampo's performance. With every new character introduced in the story, I've grown more impressed with the scope of his voice acting, especially as the races with accents emerged. The first thing that caught my attention was that his depiction of female characters is actually very feminine. It was so jarring and even slightly uncomfortable to hear a male voice actor suddenly start channeling a borderline convincing feminine voice, I almost disliked it at first. But as time went on and I realized how many different voices he had to match the personalities of characters encountered in the books, I found myself forgetting that this book was being read by a single person and started listening to it almost as an audio drama. I'm very new to the audio book experience, but I have a hard time believing that many people can top Ramon's performance. I am extremely impressed with his reading and almost worry that he's set the bar so high that other readers will seem inadequate by comparison. The only shortcoming in Ramon's performance that I could think of is that sometimes his characters will sound like they got mixed up for just a single scene or even just a single line. These instances are few and far in between though. Overall, this trilogy was an excellent audiobook experience for me and I'd absolutely recommend it to anyone who is a fan of WarCraft or anyone who wants to get into it.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

An excellent audiobook experience

Revisado: 11-15-21

I'm writing this review for the entire trilogy rather than for individual books -- The whole story is quite consistent in writing and performance. Any fan of the WarCraft universe will be able to appreciate all of the context and perspective that the War of the Ancients trilogy brings to it. It fills in some gaps in a handful of characters' origin stories and personalities as well as the general feel of the relationships between the races of Azeroth's earlier eras. These books are no masterclass in amazing writing, but they simply don't need to be; they mostly only serve to flesh out lore that you may already know with some specifics. One small nitpick I have to offer is that Richard Knaak has a very repetitive writing style. You'll no doubt notice that certain words and terms are repeated constantly throughout this trilogy, to the point where I have to wonder if the editing process of this book was rushed. Get ready to constantly hear terms such as: materialize, "It was all he/she could do", former, latter, visage, countenance, orbs (referring to one's eyes), scores, myriad, sinew, etc. Maybe it's a dumb thing to nitpick about, but the frequency of these words definitely did sometimes distract me from the story. It could possibly be that Richard's tendency to overuse some terms is at least in part because it was meant for this trilogy to be written in a certain 'fancy' writing style. I couldn't know whether or not this was an intentional thing, but the writing style definitely does seem appropriate for the story's ancient and epic setting. It almost feels somewhat reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft's more convoluted classical style of writing, while being quite a bit easier to digest. I'm sure there's a much better comparison out there, but I'm not well-read enough to know one. By the end of the trilogy, I've started feeling that the writing style is very repetitive in a much broader sense as well. Maybe it's something that couldn't be avoided, as the book explores the entire War of the Ancients and needed to give us a sense of what all the characters had been through. There are MANY scenes in this trilogy which are all essentially the same (mostly combat scenes), just with different antagonists and protagonists. after all was said and done, I had more than my fill of scenes that describe each character's fighting style. Easily one of the greatest highlights of this trilogy is Ramon de Ocampo's performance. With every new character introduced in the story, I've grown more impressed with the scope of his voice acting, especially as the races with accents emerged. The first thing that caught my attention was that his depiction of female characters is actually very feminine. It was so jarring and even slightly uncomfortable to hear a male voice actor suddenly start channeling a borderline convincing feminine voice, I almost disliked it at first. But as time went on and I realized how many different voices he had to match the personalities of characters encountered in the books, I found myself forgetting that this book was being read by a single person and started listening to it almost as an audio drama. I'm very new to the audio book experience, but I have a hard time believing that many people can top Ramon's performance. I am extremely impressed with his reading and almost worry that he's set the bar so high that other readers will seem inadequate by comparison. The only shortcoming in Ramon's performance that I could think of is that sometimes his characters will sound like they got mixed up for just a single scene or even just a single line. These instances are few and far in between though. Overall, this trilogy was an excellent audiobook experience for me and I'd absolutely recommend it to anyone who is a fan of WarCraft or anyone who wants to get into it.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Best era of Warcraft lore so far

Revisado: 07-08-21

Thank God I started this podcast over 2 years late. if I didn't have such an enormous backlog of episodes to binge, I'd be forced to wait a whole week to find out what happens after each one.

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On the edge of my seat

Revisado: 07-08-21

It feels like this is where the story is really starting to pick up! Gin always seems to know exactly where to end each episode to perfectly cap off each week's story but also leave you in suspense for more.

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