tthomson53

Weird Ending

Revisado: 01-20-25

I don’t get the premise of this short story. It left me hanging, thinking it was just the first chapter of a longer book.

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Beware: The Narrator Is Hard to Take

Revisado: 10-03-24

A decent story written by someone with an insider’s knowledge of clandestine ops, but it was hard to keep track of the characters, and the plot was confusing at times. The narrator is terrible, especially when voicing characters other than the protagonist.

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Transfixed

Revisado: 09-29-23

Right up there, in my opinion, with David Mitchell’s best. Equally good is Sea of Tranquility, especially with its excellent narrators.

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Transfixed

Revisado: 09-29-23

Right up there, in my opinion, with David Mitchell’s best. Equally good is The Glass Hotel, and Dylan Moore is the perfect narrator.

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Not My Cup of Tea

Revisado: 11-04-21

Boring and infantile, about what one would expect in a debut, I suppose. I got 45% into the Audible version and gave up, finding myself skipping ahead through endless, mindless internal monologues. Uninteresting characters with whom it was impossible for me to develop any connection, much less empathy or sympathy.

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If you like Geithner and Paulson, steer clear...

Revisado: 05-21-15

I was able to listen to only 60% of this, because I got tired of Bair's sanctimonious diatribes against Tim Geithner and, to a lesser extent, the others who plowed bold ground to save us from financial Armageddon in 2008-09. She viewed her role as head of the FDIC narrowly and was a stickler for the rules, which wasn't the approach required when the walls and bridges were burning down - so thank goodness she was left out of the loop in most of the critical decision-making done by Geithner, Bernanke and Paulson. Her conservative approach to bank regulation and supervision is entirely appropriate, but she does herself no favors by playing the ostensible victim of an old boy network, rarely admitting she was wrong, failing to see the perspective of her antagonists, and railing against dramatic actions taken in the name of financial stability with her naive, Midwestern "gee whiz", "oh I'm shocked" mentality. Geithner and Paulson left the personal animus out of their books, and Bair would have done well to do the same. See "Joseph's" review of June 9, 2014, on Goodreads for a more detailed and evocative telling of my feelings about this book. Bair wasn't done any favors by the narrator, who sounds just like Fraser's ex-wife "Lilith" and piles on the righteous indignation through her reading.

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What a disappointment!

Revisado: 02-03-15

I tried this on the basis of someone's recommendation of Rebecca Cantrell. I'm having to quit at about four hours because of the juvenile and hackneyed plot, infantile dialogue and horrible narration. I'm going to put Baskous on my list of narrators to avoid.

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I Think I Missed a lot...

Revisado: 10-07-13

I liked this book a lot, as it's extremely well written and tells interesting stories about a likable character who has a wealth of interesting experiences over a lifetime beginning in 1910. But the book's structure frustrated me. Not because I got lost as one after another of Ursula Todd's many lives (and deaths) morphed into the next and time shifted accordingly, but because I expected to see more obvious connections and threads in and between her many stories, as one does in Colum McCann's "Transatlantic", the best book I've read in a while. As in "Transatlantic", where real-life characters such as Frederick Douglass and Senator George Mitchell make more-than-cameo appearances, Eva Braun and Adolph Hitler figure in an interesting story line in "Life After Life", adding to its appeal to me. Don't be put off by my three stars, which would have been 3.5 if I'd had the flexibility; try this one for yourself. Having read a number of reviews after finishing the book (the "Most Helpful" reviews currently on Amazon.com are very helpful), I realize that I probably missed many of the literary, religious and other allusions which others say lie under the surface of "Life After Life". You might not.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

What's all the fuss about??

Revisado: 01-12-13

This barely deserves two stars, in my opinion. A sentimental fiction that revolves around Hollywood characters in 1962, the present, and in-between, with Italy thrown in for good measure. None of the characters is rememberable, the use of Richard Burton (with a fiction created around him that's almost too stupid to bear) is beyond the pale, and the constant time-shifting is schizophrenic. Even the male protagonist, Pasquale, is unremarkable, and I spent the whole book waiting for him to make a correct decision - or any decision, for that matter. The way the author wraps up the tale, updating us on what happened to all the characters, suggests that he had a publishing deadline to make and had to deal with them all in one chapter instead of many. Why this book got so many great reviews is beyond me.

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esto le resultó útil a 7 personas

Another great story marred by poor narration

Revisado: 09-13-11

This is another great story about a very depressive detective. Unfortunately, Dick Hill seems to be the narrator for all of the Wallander novels. He's fine when speaking like a real man, but he slips so easily into an infantile, nasal voice when speaking for just about everyone except Kurt Wallander, which ruins them as real characters. His female impersonations are a joke for the same reason. I'm afraid I'm going to have to default to the written word for the most recent four books in the series. I can't stand Hill any more!

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esto le resultó útil a 5 personas