Dusty Trails

The narrator makes this almost unlistenable.

Revisado: 02-22-22

TL;DR - Narrator’s pronunciations will drive you nuts and the content is as much opinions as it is history.
I’ve been hard into WW1 for about two years now. I have over 40 audio books on the subject here on Audible. I listen to them while at work. This is the first one I probably won’t even get through. The narrator’s pronunciation of many words is incredibly irritating. Some of the words are pretty WW1 specific, like “boche” which he pronounces “bush”, or German junkers (pronounced “yung ker”) which he pronounces just straight-up “junkers”. While you’d think he should have done SOME research on the subject of the book he was to narrate and should know better, I can forgive mispronunciations of those somewhat obscure words. It’s the more common words that really drive me nuts. “Gallipoli” he pronounces “Guh-lop-oh-lee”. Seriously? Even worse are some everyday words or terms. Several times the author uses the term “wreaked havoc on” to which the narrator reads as “wrecked havoc on”. He awkwardly pluralizes the word “fire” every time he reads is, which has to be over a hundred times. Examples of this are “they came under heavy artillery fires” or “they were pinned down by enfilading German machine gun fires”. The most annoying pronunciation, to me, is the one that he uses the most: the word “Allies” pronounced as “Uh-lies”, as in “the Uh-lied armies advanced” or “this proved beneficial to the Uh-lies”, or “Germany didn’t have the most faith in its main Uh-lie.” I’ve never heard the word pronounced this way in my 38 years, and it’s nearly used at least once in every paragraph. He’s relentless.
Aside from these narration peeves, the book itself seems a bit pretentious. In the introduction alone it touts something along the lines of having the German perspective and actually adds the term “,a first” after making the claim. Much of the writing seems to be more of an opinion of the author than a “new history”. For example, he spends a good amount of time defecating on Wilson’s pacifistic positions and literally says a lot of the doughboy’s blood was on his hands because of it. This was pretty brazen for a guy to write 100 years later and not experiencing the actual political climate or social zeitgeist at the time. There’s also an unnecessary amount of time spent on a bunch of different soldiers’ religious convictions and how their Christian beliefs lead them to do this or that heroic feat. I find this off-putting in a “history of” type of book. I wish I could get my credit back that I spent on this title.

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