prazy

Enjoyed this but not great

Revisado: 07-31-23

Good story, very listenable, but not a book I’ll listen to again or recommend to my friends on a must hear list. Klavan has an interesting character here but the “I’m just an English teacher” schtick gets old. The femme fatale here is not believable to me, though still fun to think about. The bad guy is a little too cartoonishly topical to be believed but again, it’s still a fun story. It ain’t John Le Carre, but maybe closer to John MacDonald, which is a pretty good time.

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Lots of good facts, writing is so so

Revisado: 06-18-22

This book had a lot of good facts and reporting of situations not covered in the media. As an audiobook, some parts dragged though. The author is a police officer, not Truman Capote.

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Point made and well, but I am tired

Revisado: 12-18-20

Debunking Howard Zinn accomplishes it’s purpose, getting into the details of distortions, errors, plagiarisms, and other marks on the famous Zinn book. It is interesting, though perhaps not as readable as Zinn. And it gives a welcome opposition to the one sided history popularized by Zinn. But it also gets old, focusing on one man’s lies and mistakes is necessarily tiresome even if true. This book puts paid to Twain’s old quip about lies running around the world before truth gets its shoes on.

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Long, long better as a reference

Revisado: 01-16-20

This is a great work, but it’s so long and covers so much ground that I’d prefer it in book form where you can skip around and use as a reference rather than as a listen experience

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Found this kinda man hating

Revisado: 01-16-20

Orlav is an expert, so what do I know, but I found her analysis repeatedly put men in a position of being the “bad guy.” I also found the discussion to be a series of ways for the “normal” partner to rationalize, tolerate, apologize for, support, or enable things in their relationship. I use apologize in the rhetorical sense, not the “I’m sorry” sense here. I came away from this angry and discouraged.

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Great lit? Bad audiobook

Revisado: 05-23-18

Immortality may be a great book. I say “may” because I have physically read other books by Kundera and they brought me to tears. I cannot vouch for Immortality as a book, but as a listening experience it’s boring, wandering, and tiresome. On the physical page where you can reread and reconsider this may not be true because Kundera is smart and subtle, allusive and self referential. His theme keeps coming up again soon n unexpected ways and places that may be delightful to a reader but doesn’t maintain the continuity for a listener to follow. I don’t recommend this as an audiobook.

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Sometimes moving, often didactic history with so-so narration

Revisado: 12-05-17

Disclaimer: I have not seen the film. I listened to 12 Years with interest. This is clearly an important history and I wish it had more of the historian’s commentary and research into its veracity that is advertised in the e-book companion. As it is though, we get no third party verification and no storytelling beyond the original author’s. This is a pity because the source material, though heartbreaking, is dry. It was often a struggle due to the excursions into minute details of planting, construction, plantation administration, and geography. Also LGJ’s narration is flat and at times lacks clear diction. This is a great historical document, not great literature. Worth listening to but don’t expect a “page turner.”

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Wow, listen again and again to great SciFi

Revisado: 08-26-17

If you could sum up Stories of Your Life and Others in three words, what would they be?

Read it again!

What other book might you compare Stories of Your Life and Others to and why?

I love short stories and science fiction. I would compare this to collections by James Morrow . If you like reading Asimov's (the magazine) this is the same experience of one incredible and different imagined world after another.

Which character – as performed by Abby Craden and Todd McLaren – was your favorite?

Gosh, so many great stories. I really enjoyed the Tower of Babel for its logistical descriptions of an ancient tower that takes so long to climb that workers live their entire lives in the sky.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

no

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Dystopia goes beyond the end of the world

Revisado: 08-26-17

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes, this is a wonderful, if very dark, story of deeply developed characters in a destroyed world. It hits close to home and doesn't seem that outlandish, except a certain unlikely geopolitical unity in the mid-east and northern Africa.

Who was your favorite character and why?

The main character Serat is amazingly developed as we follow her through childhood at home, in a refugee camp, as a teen and angry young adult, and older tired woman who still has a fire in her eye and yearns for satisfaction. The second supporting character in the book is America itself as we see Akkad's imagination of what would happen in a real shooting war with the capabilities available to fighters in the near future.

What about Dion Graham’s performance did you like?

Graham was a great narrator of this, inhabiting male and female characters young and old with realism and sincerity.

Any additional comments?

The audiobook is quite long, takes a bit to get into and drags out in certain areas. This is a book to be studied and I feel it's a bit complex for an audio only format. It needs a second reading or maybe a paper reading to really soak it in. That's the only reason I didn't give 5 stars.

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Interesting but light on conclusions

Revisado: 08-26-17

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

I was recommended this book by a friend and I probably will not pass it on. It was fairly interesting in its commentary about chips and bonobo sexual behavior and its reflections and shadows in human sexuality. I think the authors made and supported fair points about monogamy and its faults and cultural rather than biological roots. They make very good points that explain faults in human monogamous lifetime pairings. However, from a practical point of view as an American adult, I need to live with and maximize benefits from the culture I have. That culture is build around these concepts and is not kind to outsiders. The authors ignore real problems that do not have biological basis with a polyamorous existence and hesitate to support practical impacts of their theory. It's nice to know there are other ways of looking at things, but I didn't come away from this book with a new point of view on life.

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