Roy Scarbrough

Great book. Awful reading.

Revisado: 05-17-16

I would advise listening to the sample a couple time so you can decide where or not you can listen to this recording. I listened to the sample once, and I thought, 'Well, maybe it will grow on me. Give the guy a chance." Well, it didn't grow on me. The narrator of this recording seems to be clueless to the patterns, cadences of Thoreau's gorgeous prose.To my ear this reading is so bad that I'm not sure if I will ever finish this book. He pauses within sentences where he shouldn't, and rushes though phrases where he needs to slow down. He emphasizes unimportant words, and over emphasizes others, all very arbitrarily. The voice subordinates where it should coordinate, and vice versa. It seems, at times, that he is reading one...word...at...a...time. Many of Thoreau's sentences are long and flowing, but the reader seems to not be able to go with the natural flow of human speech. He can't make it though these kinds of sentences in a manner in which the listener can have any sense that he is at the beginning, middle or end of the sentence. You're listening along, and you might be ten words into the next sentence before you realize the last sentence has already ended. Or there's a weird pause and you're trying to figure out if it's the end, and then it just picks up and chugs along like rail cars rolling down a grade, unhitched from the locomotive. It's maddening.

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A good straightforward reading

Revisado: 11-13-10

What I like about Cronauer's reading is that he is subtle in depicting the voices and emotions of the characters. For me, listening to this recording is close to the experience of reading the Henry James text.

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Narrator's voice

Revisado: 11-25-05

Ms May is an excellent reader here, but I'm puzzled why the publisher would select her for the voice of Dante. For most works gender shouldn't matter, but I can't help but be distracted by the cognitive dissonance of hearing a female voice reading a narrative told from the point of view of a male poet. I don't think I'd want to listen to Tom Waits reading Pride and Prejudice either.

This selection does combine all three books of the Divine Comedy, so it's a good value if the voice is not an issue.

If it's of any help, Audiblebooks offers the Heathcote Williams readings of Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. These too are excellent readings of a good translation, but it requires three separate purchases to compile the complete Devine Comedy. Personally, I think it's worth it.

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Wrong!

Revisado: 05-16-05

It's absurd and simplistic for Berman to assert that Islamist terrorism represents a return to the kind of totalitarian thinking that ravaged the European continent during most of the twentieth century. One could just as easily point out the parallels between the emergence of European fascism and the rise of the extremist right in America and it's eventual take over of all three branches of the federal government. One could say that Mussolini's 1922 "March on Rome" was the blueprint for George Bush's Brooks Brothers Riot that shut down the 2000 Florida vote count, or even allude to Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia on some pretense hardly anyone now remembers. It's a fun exercise to make these kinds of comparisons and Berman is having his fun too.

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