Eric

About 30% incomprehensible

Revisado: 01-27-25

Might be better in paper where one could go back and figure out the referents, but it’s not a good listen. Kudos to the reader on his pronunciation.

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Such a sad book!

Revisado: 10-27-24

Beautifully written and honest chronicle of the last few years in one small corner of the world. Made me very glad to be old.

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Important take

Revisado: 11-06-20

Well written and argued, but by half way through I “got it” and decided I didn’t need any more convincing.

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Almost unlistenable

Revisado: 11-18-19

Prof. Lepore has written a good book and should have left it at that. In her gratuitous “acting out” of quotes, all of which sound the same, she shouts, mumbles inaudibly, and slurs words. You would also think an eminent historian might know how to pronounce names, such as Ruckelshaus and Haldeman.

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A bit jargon-heavy, but quite good

Revisado: 03-10-15

The arcane terms and technical detail would be fine with a little more introduction for the intelligent layman. Some of it is there, but only comes at the third or fourth mention, due to bad editing.

I do, however, finally know what investment banking is. ...that is, inasmuch as anyone does.

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Excellent Book, Terrible Reader

Revisado: 12-13-14

By far the best and mist in-depth biography of Napoleon in English, full of telling details and well paced. However, it is almost ruined by a pompous and monotonous reader who clearly has no idea what he is talking about. His mispronunciation of French (not to mention Russian) names is a dead giveaway of his complete ignorance. This is not a matter of nitpicking about minor details. It applies to the names of important cities and famous people and was bad enough to result in "oh THAT'S what he meant" moments minutes later.

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Good book, marginal reading

Revisado: 11-14-14

Excellent, densely researched, and eye-opening book. I, for one, will never see France in quite the same way again. They never underwent the violent catharsis of other Axis nations and, instead, seem to be reaching a resolution incrementally. I hope they get there; they've got a lot to resolve.

The narrator is dreadfully slow and non-fluent. His over-pronounced French names come after portentous pauses and sound like parody. It's a genuinely awful reading, which makes the fact-intensive writing that much more difficult to assimilate while cleaning up the kitchen or doing side lunges. Oh, and he pronounces "banal" to rhyme with "anal." Vraiment le coup de grâce.

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Superb

Revisado: 10-15-14

Judt's thinking is breathtakingly lucid and reveals relationships and causes deep under events where conventional accounts are superficial and unsatisfying. Snyder is also obviously brilliant and their voices are so similar that it would have been helpful to have some additional cues as to who is speaking in the audio version--the printed book uses italics. That said, Mr. Cosham, one of my favorite Blackstone readers, clearly appreciates the material and can pronounce the foreign names with remarkable accuracy. He does, however, tend to lose volume on the final consonants of sentences, here as elsewhere.

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Reader drags it down

Revisado: 07-26-13

You'll experience a strong sense of deja entendu if you've ever listened to "Iron Mike" read the forecast on NOAA VHF weather radio.

"Soul-der" for solder is bad, but wait till you hear him try "Hoechst” and Admiral Spee's name doesn't rhyme with "pee". I could go on.

Great story, though, and the writing is simple enough to absorb in challenging traffic or while making love (just kidding).

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Interesting, but not a great listen

Revisado: 02-22-13

The overall effect is Bob Dylan reading bad Hemingway, i.e. frankly annoying, and the writing, while workmanlike, is illiterate in spots: German U-boats did not create a "Maelstrom" for US merchant shipping, for God's sake!

The narrator has a strange, over-dramatic, cadence and the depressingly usual trouble with the unfamiliar: "Admiralty" comes out "admirality", "Dominic" is, inexplicably, "Dominique" (most Doms I knew wouldn't like that at all) and "Babineau" is "Babinow". He affects a bizzarre, ostensibly Bostonian, accent for the he crew members and their families, which sounds like a speech impediment.

Nevertheless, this book is the result of a fine and important piece of journalism and will be of substantial interest and worth the annoyance to anyone enamored of ships, mariners, and tales of survival at sea. I am in that category and it certainly made the dishes and the gym go faster for a week.

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