Professor Jacko

Best Narration

Revisado: 07-19-24

This is an absolutely phenomenal narrator for a really wonderful series of books. She’s narrating this entire series and I’m listening to all of them. Even when I decide to read parts of the book, her beautiful voice and narration stick in my head. Highly recommended.

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Well researched and immersive

Revisado: 07-05-24

I didn’t care for the characters as much as I should have. Possibly this is because, lacking psychological depth, the story’s plethora of details based on research kept me at a distance.
The relentless immersion into this world does accumulate effectively but I got too judgmental and didn’t find myself empathizing as much as I might have.
I must add, the audio narration is so dreadful that I was put off from the start. He delivers the woman’s voice as though she were a complete airhead rather than a complex person and victim of her times. Also they weren’t freakin’ Australian, for goodness sakes. I think I had to recover from the audio before going back to just reading it.

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Extremely thorough, beautifully written

Revisado: 08-21-22

Stephen Crossley is the perfect narrator for this very British biography of the playwright. It covers his life up to the production of Leopoldstahdt (which finally opens in NYC next month - 9/22 - for which I have tickets for the second night). Obviously a fan, I relish his work and have seen everything I was able to going back decades so this exhaustive approach to his life's work held my interest over the 700 plus pages. As 'intellectual' as his plays can be, they are also very much a part of his life and personality.

I alternated between long audio passages and reading the book. Crossley is one of those narrators who stays in your mind even as you return to the print. Stoppard requested Hermione Lee as a biographer, a form he generally distains. Her research is pretty amazing and she populates it with anecdotes on his working relationships with actors, directors, designers, musicians, royalty, as well as his marriages, family, children, other writers, and critics. It also breaks down his plays, which can be complex in plot and story. Stoppard comes off as one fine chap, at times conservative. always fascinating and gifted. "I'm not as nice as people think I am", he likes to say. There are many such statements, quips and witticisms at which Stoppard is so adept. Lee's afterward has a lovely explanation of how despite all the detail, Stoppard is still a living, breathing (thank goodness) artist of whom this biographical record is only a part.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Essential for anyone under 60.

Revisado: 09-08-21

These are crucial facts and an important part of 20th-century history, a good 'story' that probably needed to be written. Anyone paying attention to this era, especially anyone from the first wave of the post-war baby boom who was paying attention, will get a return to known facts but little fresh insight.
It is nicely-researched, though the chapters don't weave together as did David Talbot's brilliant Devil's Chessboard. Margeret Talbot is a wonderful writer in her New Yorker essays but I don't get that same pizzazz here. (I also love the book o their father that she wrote)

I do love the progressive approach to this history and sincerely hope it is read by anyone under 60, and certainly under 50. This stuff is essential knowledge. It does bring the facts forward occasionally to compare the impact of the 60's to work being done today.I just needed more meat and less retrod territory that I find elsewhere. For me, the female narrator was close to unbearable. That's when I bailed out.

Don't let that stop you. I think the book should be assigned in schools. They hold back just enough of their progressive politics to make it (hopefully) acceptable by school boards. If I were still teaching, I would try to use it. As a text, the chapters are clear and distinct. Generations that did not experience this world I fear are sadly uninformed about this historical time - a too convenient oversite that has had real-world consequences.

I tried to listen but had to give up. I have ordered the book in hardcover to read quickly but for me, as an audiobook, it didn't work.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

Arrogance, pretense and a hideous narration

Revisado: 08-26-21

There are good narrators and not-so-good narrators, narrations where the voice infuses eloquent subtleties and those that are overproduced with unnecessary music and effects. rarely do I hear one where I simply wanted to punch the reader right in the schnozzola. This author is filled with attitude and pretense, poorly formed opinions, and braggadocio. He makes judgments of musicians that are way out of line. This self-proclaimed “rock’n’roll renaissance man” who edited Screw Magazine and High Times styles himself hip beyond measure. Predictably, his observations on the art of rock are filled with drug and sex references that might charm a wannabe rocker or 12-year old.

His points are often reduced to “fuckin’ this or fuckin’ that’ or ’goddam this or that to emphasize that “'I’m as cool as my subject” bona fides. Attitude in rock and roll criticism is a thin line that he falls off and stumbles on to an embarrassing degree. I’d say he is a dime-store Lester Bangs but that would be a compliment. He’s more like a penny arcade version. It is attitude without art.

Some of his worst judgments concern pitting the Beatles against the Stones, an old and tired game. “The Beatles weren’t part of any counterculture - they came adult approved . . wholesale embrace of product … shaking their mop tops . . . cracking a few jokes for the Queen of England.” He claims that the Beatles lacked “a mojo” in other words “no pretty boy handling the mic like a hot cock”. “ In his hyperbolic opinion, the Stones were authentic sexy bad boys and that makes them superior rockers. Does that make Charlie more ‘authentic’ than Ringo? It a tired and woefully unnecessary. The Beatles changes music and Charlie knows that, too.

There is a perilous white insensitivity to discussions of black music as in the repeated and dated use of the word “negro” (“primal negro eroticism that Mick and Keith mainlined at least until the drugs took over). I imagine regressing to the traditional use of that word, skirting a more politically savvy term, is part of being hip and ‘in the know’. That is the kind of attitude that makes this so exasperating. He passes judgments from some lauded place of startling ignorance.

But to give him credit where it is due there are songs worth revisiting based on his descriptions. The history, particular the roots of lesser-known drummers, is interesting. A clever turn of phrase like the description that of Kiss - “a band so ugly they had to cover their faces with Spackle and great paint [with] more sexual conquests than Wilt Chamberlain and Satan combined” is accurate - but it begs the question “who cares”.

I got some information from the book but after a life spent as a professional musician (and drummer), I find this kind of fan perspective infuriating. Anyone who has put hours into the craft and the work, who has absorbed and experienced the world of popular music and its roots the nuggets will drown in arrogance and pretense.

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Fascinating and perfectly read.

Revisado: 06-21-21

The text will widen your perspective, literally, on everything. A fascinating study of the world, and time, and space. Richard Matthews is the best reader for this. His attitude catches an almost rye humor behind a study that is indescribably vast and just beautifully written.

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Thorough, fascinating, and expansive.

Revisado: 02-16-21

The Searchers has long been one of my favorite films. It may seem a throwback to old-school movie-making but its iconic and mythic value should be appreciated by anyone enamored of filmmaking or cinema history. The wonderfully researched book covers all the angles: a history of the Indian Wars, Western mythmaking, capture narratives, author Alan Le May, screenwriter Frank S. Nugent, the film's casting, production, and, of course, colorful information on John Ford, John Wayne, and the rest of the great cast.
Most importantly the story and legends of Cynthia Ann Parker, Peta Nocona, and Quanah Parker (on whose the story is loosely based) are given a full airing. Author Frankel begins with their tale in a full historical context bookended by a wonderful epilogue of the Parker family today.
If you want to dive deep into the full context of how the truth became a legend and became a book adapted into a film classic this book is a feast. The complicated history and the creation of western mythology and of the film in the context of Ford's late-career and Hollywood in the mid-50's are fascinating. The book is long and detailed but never feels gratuitous.
The Searchers audiobook was also a great follow-up to The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, another covering a single film. I also just finished the audiobook for News of the World, another "capture narrative", albeit fiction, which was also followed by a movie.
The narrator, however, almost had me returning it. But I got used to him because I like the book so much. His voice is clear and resonant but he inflects every sentence the same way. The punctilious sameness becomes maddeningly robotic. When he has to speak as a character, the "acting" is just awful. I checked him out and saw that this reader gives classes in voice-over technique. Being an actor myself, I recognize his strengths but the man really ought to put more variety into the reading. We don't need to train a generation of robot readers!

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Franzan is not best when abridged

Revisado: 01-21-20

Abridged titles are best moving through plot points and this is much more than plot. I was confused reading and listening in shifts. The coherence of Franzen's satire, though understandable, leaps around cut sections and loses the music of his language - a sad compromise. Dylan Baker is wonderful but I wish I'd realized how this would affect the experiennce.
I had to stop listening. Back to the printed word. I'll check more carefully next time.

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