Orson Scott Card

so many good stories

Revisado: 10-28-24

well narrated, the book takes us through the meaning of land as it shapes history and human behavior.

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a new but scientifically well-founded view of our dependence on the natural world.

Revisado: 05-13-24

the book's vision of urban biomes is quite hopeful. cliff-dwelling plants, gut-dwelling worms, the vital function of the far-from-useless appendix -- all of this is vastly illuminating. though I'm not willing to get infested with hookworms quite yet..

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good dialogue, well performed.

Revisado: 04-23-24

an excellent YA novel which totally worked for somebody left the target age group long ago. the many viewpoints allow us to see adult viewpoints so it isn't a generational war. it's really a love story, with bunny tails.

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wise new views about why we're nice and why we're

Revisado: 07-26-22

wrangham takes us through key issues in human evolution, dealing with motivations for violence and how our cultural resistance to it can lead to paradoxical results. it's even possible that we have evolved to have leaders who have been genetically influenced by previous outcomes.

this is going to require considerable thinking, but thanks to this book, we have a lot more data to support our thinking about who we are and where we're going.

Michael Page's reading is superb, with utter clarity plus an ear for how to interpret what is said.

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careless preparation marred the performance

Revisado: 07-20-22

a short history of Canada that helped ease my ignorance about our good neighbor to the north. it packed a good narrative into a very short book.

the drawback was Jay Herbert's reading, but he's not a bad narrator. he just had no idea how to pronounce French names and words, and that is a fatal flaw in a history of Canada. either a producer, or director, or the narrator himself should have prepped the pronunciation of every name and every foreign word. the absolute neglect of this made this audio presentation far less valuable and enjoyable than it should have been.

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a useful way of understanding storytelling

Revisado: 05-20-21

this wide ranging book applies scientific findings to help explain how and why every society needs storytelling -- and just how the methodology of storytelling has evolved over time.

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best narration of this great novel

Revisado: 04-13-21

I've heard every performance of Pride and Prejudice that I'm aware of, and this one is far and away the best. Every character's voice is distinct and recognizable, the diction and pronunciation are flawless, and the emotional aspects of characters are moving and humorous by turn.

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So You Think You Know Movie Musicals

Revisado: 02-19-20

I grew up before the internet, before streaming downloads, before cable TV, before movies-on-demand. We only saw old movies when they came on late-night or afternoon movie programs on broadcast television stations, or when somebody rereleased a classic into the theaters or a revival house picked them up.

So we would drive many miles when my mom took us to see a program of operettas in a revival house -- Spring Time, Rose Marie, and above all her favorite, Naughty Marietta (my mom's glorious singing voice was quite similar to Jeanette Macdonald's, and she could sing-and-play her way through the whole score). And we would build our family's schedule around the upcoming broadcast of a classic, like Singin' in the Rain. When MGM released the montage movie That's Entertainment, containing great clips and scenes from the MGM musicals, I saw almost everything for the first time in that movie.

Yet when a good friend, my musical collaborator, started talking about the glories of Busby Berkeley's choreography, I had no idea what he was talking about. My parents had little patience with Ethel Merman's strident singing, so I had no chance to acquire a taste for her style, and as for Esther Williams, how in the world can you be credible singing and swimming in the same show?

With The Movie Musical!, Jeanine Basinger does a fabulous job of introducing us to movie musical genres and classic films that no longer get any love. She also tells us, respectfully, about movies that had many flaws and failings, and approaches to the genre that missed the point. By the time I finished listening to Erin Bennett's excellent, clear, perfectly-paced narration, I found myself going online to find and download, or order as DVDs, many musicals that I heard of for the first time in this book. Whether you know little about movie musicals or a lot, whether you think La La Land was a great musical or a pale shadow of the films that came before, even if you can't remember the difference between the movies Holiday Inn and White Christmas (both with Bing), this book will bring you nothing but pleasure. Read it if you must, but it's more fun to listen.

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The Greatest Songwriter?

Revisado: 02-19-20

Even during his lifetime, Irving Berlin's peers -- and competitors -- often marveled at the cleverness of his lyrics and the excellence and emotional power of his music. For a guy with no training, who could only write music using mostly the black keys, and whose singing voice was high and weak, Irving Berlin's career was incredible in his level of success and in the extraordinary length of his songwriting career.

His celebration of ragtime in Alexander's Ragtime Band (which is NOT a ragtime number; it's a march) was such a huge hit that people in many places, especially Britain, thought that Irving Berlin had invented ragtime music. Within a few years, he found a way to write in every new genre that came along -- swing, country, and the pop standards of the Great American Songbook. Not until disco, punk, and rap did he decide that a sixty-plus-year career was long enough. Even then, his songs remain astonishingly popular: God Bless America. There's No Business Like Show Business. White Christmas. Songs that everybody knows, even if they don't know who wrote them.

James Kaplan captures Berlin's life and his music, and even though L.J. Ganser can only recite the song lyrics in this audiobook, that's enough; indeed, it's better, because we really hear the words when they're read to us rather than sung. And even though Berlin got a reputation for grumpiness later in life, we get to meet him during the years of his courageous and likeable spunk, attributes that brought him to success in a business that chewed up and spat out most talented newcomers. So by the end, we listeners love him and his music, and I, for one, was glad that he didn't die young like Lorenz Hart, Moss Hart, George Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein II; Irving Berlin got to live long enough to see the lasting impact of his work on American culture.

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A Town Destroyed by Criminals

Revisado: 02-19-20

We start out with the town on the verge of being destroyed by escaped convicts, from the federal prison that is the main employer of the townspeople, and see how brilliantly the escapees have prepared their ruthless takeover of the prison. But just when a different writer might have made us experience all their crimes in the town, all the murders and terror and suffering, the story skips forward in time. It has been a couple of years, and the original team of conspirators who terrorized the town have still not been brought to justice. The town's top cop is taking a long leave of absence now to hunt them down and bring them to justice. Not necessarily the criminal justice system. Merely justice. And by then, we are eager for her to be just as resourceful, and just as ruthless, as the escapees were in their original breakout. The narration takes a superb story by one of our most powerful writers, and makes it come to life. I couldn't wait to get to the end. Then I was sad that it was over. All of Perry's novels are good. This might be the best.

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