Steven

Easy to absorb...

Revisado: 07-29-21

One of the easiest listens in a long time. Written like a fireside chat, but the real key was Vance's comfort with all the foreign terms and names.

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Exciting but dated...

Revisado: 02-02-21

A bit dated, especially in terms of easy presumptions about historical characterizations or "ethnic" behavior. But a fine bit of story-telling if that's all one wants.

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Truth in the Subtitle

Revisado: 12-31-20

This turned out not to be the kind of study I anticipated from the title, where I thought I'd be getting a holistic portrait of what it meant to be in the navies of the time, and what it was like for the nations who fielded such navies. Instead, as the subtitle pointed out, it was a narrative of how the British and French fought each other across these centuries. In that sense it was disappointing, as it was far too often a litany of this many ships sailed here, then this many ships sailed over there, and so on. Battles happened, but got rather short shrift (Trafalgar was over just like that...).

But... the real crime of this book is not the author's fault. Did no one think to coach McSorley on how to pronounce French????? It was painful. French ducs were constantly being pronounced as "ducks"! Counts (comte in French) were being given a second syllable, as if the e were accented. And the names of places or admirals just grew unbearable, esp. the repetition of major bases like Rochefort.

The book has value as a narrative of the wars, and not least for some of the financial data that shows how expensive the choice to have a navy can be.

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A Mixed Bag

Revisado: 02-06-20

I found this book alternately enlightening and infuriating as it became an endurance contest to finish. I probably know about half of the topics that Freedman covers rather well. And where that was the case, I was dismayed by how light the treatment of the person/event/theory/etc. was. When he was in a period or aspect (business strategy, nuclear theory...) that I knew far less well, then it was great to soak in a lot of new ideas (maybe not so much for the business stretch, but I freely admit to personal bias there). Still, it was fascinating to see Thucydides, the suffragette movement, and the Rand Corp all on a continuum.
That said, the narrator drove me crazy. Words were butchered on far too regular a basis (and this was not a case of British vs US English). Who pronounces "anomalous" as though it rhymes with enamel-us?? Several times, I had to pause the book and review the words in my head as if on a page to detect the mistake. And when the great sociologist Max Weber dominates nearly 1/3 of a text, it behooves the narrator to say his name right. Ugh.
This was the closest I've ever come to returning a book to Audible. I didn't, though, and in the end, it gave me good food for thought. But I'm stubborn that way.

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