sleiii

An excellent breakdown an ethnic puzzle.

Revisado: 07-20-22

A lively survey of the European history of the Slavic, Magyar, and Teutonic peoples from cultural and political viewpoints. It is both sweeping in the Big Picture and filled with anecdotal accounts of individuals, ordinary and authoritive, across the social and cultural spectrum.

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A Masterful Assemblage

Revisado: 02-23-22

This lecture series is foremost a tremendous concept brilliantly executed by the resources brought together to present a gallery of vivid and compelling topics covering diverse aspects of the Second World War that range from the most private experiences of individuals to the massive campaigns of warfare. Throughout the separate chapters, one accumulates a body of shared perspectives from individual sufferings and heroics embedded in the vast sweep of the global conflict. Such stories enlarge the account of mere military combatants into a greater portrayal of the underlying humanity that felt the causes and consequences of the acts and events that befell them in ways both particular and universal. The means to gather so diverse and plentiful material into a graspable format is only possible from the remove of time through the lens of historical research. The lecturer has combed his selections from a broad array of extant resources and deftly arranged them into a masterful work of its own.

(A Note on Narration: The delivery of the 24 lectures is at times "uneven". Ordinary statements are occasionally fraught with exaggerated emphasis on syllables, words, and phrases that obliterate the natural rhythms of the prose diction, as though shouting out terms printed in ALL CAPS. Additionally, proper and place names are frequently pronounced in non-standard variations (those in French are generally mangled beyond recognition), though as irritating or unintelligible as they may be, it is not enough to sink the content of the lectures, individually or in their hugely potent whole.)

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Man and Meaning

Revisado: 01-20-22

This is the place to begin if you seek a guide to Jung’s broad achievements and the processes he took in developing them. It serves as both a well drawn portrait of the thinker and his career, while functioning as a detailed map of his ideas and concepts. If you go no further in your efforts, you will still possess a working knowledge of things Jungian, along the lines of reading a first-rate travel book whether you visit the country itself or not.

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The Parade of Footnotes to Plato

Revisado: 12-15-18

A quick but pithy refresher course in the weird, contentious, overreaching history of Western philosophy. (They can’t all be right.)

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Numbing Reading of a Great Poet

Revisado: 03-16-18

Stephen Mitchell, wherever his translations of Rilke may rank (undetermined except from local publicity and reviews), displays no scintilla of talent in the oral rendering of either the Duino Elegies or the Sonnets to Orpheus. HIs nasal monotone fails to distinguish cadence and inflection or tone and timbre in nearly two hours of droning through the rich variation of expression in the poems, ranging from anguish to exuberance in modes that veer from the discursive and conversational to the lyrical and ecstatic. Mitchell flattens it all in a voice that, if you walk a bit away from the output, increasingly begins to resemble a table fan or mosquito in its unbroken whine.

While it is regrettable that so bland an effort has the corner on this one work, it is perhaps refreshing to be sent back to a silent reading of Rilke’s written text to discover the vivid dimensions that the poetry's inherent power invariably creates on its own.

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Pure Joyce

Revisado: 05-27-11

The reading is magnificent. Through the crowded pages and episodes of literally hundreds of characters, the narrator, John Lee, manages to catch in all their tones, quirks, and color the distinct voices of each. His inflection, pitch, and cadence is clear and deadly accurate. Not only are the rolling rhythms of Joyce's prose maintained with uncanny naturalness--thoughts are recognizable as such (not merely rendered as captioned overlays) and the tones, timbres, moods, and motives of the enormous flood of speech are rendered in as richly and varied accents as they would if one were walking the streets of Dublin.

From heavy Latinate meditations to the onomatopoeic replication of linotype machines in the newspaper office and the raucous imitation of a gramophone recording of a deceased grandfather, Lee's renderings are palpably believable as both the realities they represent and, more importantly, as empathetic interpretations of the individual hearts and minds they issue from.

I was first a bit wary of the lower cost and ratings of this version compared with the nearly tripled price of the most reviewed recording (who knows what they were thinking), but after listening to the provided sample of its long stretches of rushed and flattened monotone and hokey interpolated music recordings, I moved on to find this gem. It does what Joyce's greatest gift does--bring the full panorama of humanity to life purely through language.

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esto le resultó útil a 34 personas