Agnieszka Robakiewicz

excellent, essential reading

Revisado: 07-29-24

Brutally honest without being salacious or ghoulish, this book should be required for anyone interested in U.S. politics. It's time to put the "Camelot" myth firmly in It's grave

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Fascinating

Revisado: 08-14-23

An incredible bit of history, virtually unknown in the west. It's extremely unfortunate that so few western historians speak Polish and can understand primary source material on Polish history, choosing instead to take enemy propaganda as fact.

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Cherrypicked for your convenience

Revisado: 07-31-23

It's disappointing, but not surprising, when historians choose to leave out important aspects of world history when they're trying to make an assertion. Nonetheless, I expect better from "Great Courses." The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was not an insignificant entity in the history of Europe and the world. But, acknowledging that would make it difficult to claim that Europe was moving towards greater recognition of national sovereignty in the 18th century, that Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire were anything other than hypocrites and opportunists, that Catherine the Great was "enlightened" in any way at all, that American Revolutionaries were honorable idealists, or that there's any truth to the U.S.'s beliefs about the "Greatest Generation" of WWII. Polite reminder: while the French Enlightenment was waxing philosophical about the Rights of Man, the largest republic in Europe, one with the longest history of religious and ethnic tolerance, was being cannibalized by its neighbors, it's libraries and treasuries looted by the hundred cartload. St. Petersburg's national library was created this way. Russia's "civilization" was made by stealing Poland's. Not that I haven't heard historians ascribe Polish accomplishments to Prussia, Austria, Germany, even Russia before, bit it's tiresome. Who stopped the Ottoman advance on Vienna? Who halted Stalin's westward march? A nonexistent nation? Oh. And Germany didn't exist until the end of the 19th century. There were German-speaking people in Poland and Prussia, though.

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a wealth of new information for history nerds

Revisado: 07-15-23

This podcast never fails to fascinate or enlighten, provides a crucial perspective missing from the vast majority of western documentaries of European history. It's in Polish, though, so English speakers will have to rely on Google translate

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Myopic, predictable, disappointing.

Revisado: 06-11-23

The only positive thing I can say about this one, which I actually purchased after running out of free credits, is that the narrator did his best with some formulaic, tedious material. I get that the current trend is to dismiss early feminists and suffragettes as a bunch of proto-"karens", but considering that he opened with a discussion of Charlotte Perkins' Gilmans' masterpiece, "the Yellow Wallpaper", without so much as a word about its intention- to call out the practice of pathologizing women's very human responses to being forced into the role of domestic, sexual, and reproductive servitude as "hysteria" and "nervous disorder", to imprison them indefinitely either in institutions or in the home and call it a "cure". He couldn't have been ignorant of the story's theme, a simple Google search makes it clear, he just chose to ignore it. So, considering that he has no problem recognizing the racism in everything from 1920s pulp fiction to King Kong, it's hilarious that he's willfully blind to the misogyny inherent in imprisoning a woman who wishes to work in a tiny attic room. Or in bringing back the witch hunts that had largely died out in Europe to the American colonies. Or in the explosion of films about torturing and murdering sexy, barely clothed young women during the height of the 1970s feminist movement. Racist tendencies in pop culture should absolutely be acknowledged. Just don't be a hypocrite, stupid.

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Great if you're trying to cut down on 'roids

Revisado: 11-08-22

I made three attempts to listen to this one. I like mysteries/supernatural stuff, am turned off by true crime ghoulishness, so I often end up turning to silly vampire books. But the silliness here was too much for me. The writer has such a hard-on for all things manly-man masculine, it just sounds like a love letter to He Man (and, to a lesser extent, the mythically selfless, endlessly giving, breathtakingly beautiful mother-wife). If I want to be reminded of the endless supply of dudes who love dudeness, I'll hop on 8Chan.

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