Arken

Smart and enlightening

Revisado: 08-13-21

This is an erudite and pithy account of the medieval worldview (through the eyes of C.S. Lewis.) This is his real academic area, and he has (as he says) read all the hard books, which means we don't have to! All very engaging and smart. But, crikey, the narration is a bit on the over-caffeinated side. Calm down, pal - these are lectures on the medieval intellectual outlook, not political screeds. What are you so outraged about? This would have been the right thing for the regular readers of Lewisian non-fiction (Geoffrey Howard/Ralph Cosham or Simon Vance.)

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Truly terrible narration

Revisado: 07-16-21

The idea for this trialogue is clever, and the work itself is fine. It reflects Peter Kreeft’s preference for C.S. Lewis’s point of view over Kennedy’s or Huxley’s, as one might expect. Unfortunately, the sample audio only covered the introduction. You cannot guess how terrible the narrator’s attempts at providing accents are. The one he puts on for Lewis is the worst attempt to create some sort of English accent I have ever heard. And, what is he doing to JFK? Surely he knows Kennedy is from Boston? Then why does he sound like a cross between Mitch McConnell and a drunk teenager? You should almost get it just to hear how bad it is.

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More than a good yarn

Revisado: 10-24-18

I'm not sure there are many books like "Youngblood Hawke" being written anymore. While clearly a sort of melodramatic, best-seller-ish potboiler, it is also very literate, artfully constructed, deeply researched, and smart. I wish there were more books like it I usually don't like novels about novelists - it seems like a cheap trick usually, a way to avoid thinking up plots and characters by substituting autobiographical musings for fiction. But that isn't all what is happening here. Like all of Wouk's novels, the successes and failures of the characters turn on which deliberate choices they have made. The good, ultimately happy characters are the plodders who go along behaving well; the tragic or inept characters are the ones who make bad choices which expose their weaknesses. That sounds trite and moralistic, and sometimes it is. But usually it is, in a Wouk book, part of a detailed and consistent universe. He may espouse conservative values, but they are not the phony and hypocritical values of the brain-dead right of modern times. Youngblood Hawke is (apparently) a greater writer than Herman Wouk. He is on his way to becoming a genius if he could only stop undermining himself. The travails of a Kentucky mountain boy trying to make it in post-WWII New York is a plenty good setting for an interesting book, but this work is an education into all kinds of details about that world - investing, the movie business, how the rich and powerful behave, what they eat, what they value. I have loved being in that world. I've been waiting a long time for this to show up as an audio book, and I haven't been disappointed. The reader was very good - the characterizations and accents were all handled with aplomb. I highly recommend this entertaining and well-written work.

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Good idea, not well-written

Revisado: 10-17-16

This is a book that needs a good editor: he starts off with a pretty good concept for an alien invasion (although the aliens seem to have a history that more-or-less parallels earth's history - that just doesn't seem very likely.) But the pacing is really bad - he spends what feels like hours describing the screwing on of a piece of equipment and then zips through a potentially interesting encounter between man and invader without any satisfying detail. He also shouldn't present his characters as so super-smart if they have such a tendency to use the wrong word - his vocabulary is just enough off that it makes his characters unbelievable - check out the President's use of "efficacy" as an example. This happens a lot. It's the old "that word doesn't mean what you think it means" problem. I keep looking for well-written science fiction - I will keep looking. The narrator is good, though - it would be worse to read it on the page.

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My First Book

Revisado: 01-05-16

Although "The Caine Mutiny" wasn't literally my first book, I remember it as being the first "grown up" book I read on my own with no prodding from teachers or other adults. So for me it has the added attraction of nostalgia. The audio version has been a real treat for me. I've listened to it a couple of times and I think it stands up very well. Its plot is riveting, the characters are well-drawn and develop in believable and satisfying ways. Willie Keith, the hero of the tale, is a classic coming-of-age character: the callow youth who gains wisdom through adversity. Queeg is a wonderful villain (or maybe someone else is the villain?) Greenwald is the unexpected savior (or is he?) who metaphorically slays the dragon. A sea story as exciting as a Patrick O'Brian book combined with a terrific courtroom drama, and all with a serious purpose. Wouk is a "conservative" author in the classic sense of that word - he favors the ancient platitudes as guides to human behavior. Perhaps that makes the book read more like something from the Victorian era, and indeed I think there is a bit of Trollope's influence discernible in this fine novel. "The Winds of War" and its sequel are the main tale Wouk had to tell, and this is comparatively a miniature, but it is a superbly realized work.

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Good book - hire a real reader

Revisado: 11-25-14

Even good books can be diminished by bad readers, and that is the case here. Lots of very good insights, an interesting personal story, a very good book for the 21st Century Catholic looking for something other than the usual triumphalist bunkum. But, really, leave the reading to the professionals. The author seems to think that getting emotional and dramatic in places is the best way to convey his point, when really it just makes you want to turn it off.

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My mistake, but still not too good

Revisado: 07-27-14

I was not careful when I ordered this book, so I had a mistaken idea about it. I assumed it would be a work by Robert Graves discussing David Copperfield in some way. I love Dickens, and especially David Copperfield, which I have read a couple of times, and I have listened to the audio version narrated by Simon Vance twice. So,when I realized that this was Robert Graves's "improved" version of the novel itself, I was pretty skeptical. I listened to the first couple of chapters, and it "fixed" all of the errors Graves believes Dickens is guilty of - repetitious, prolix prose, obscurities, lack of clear direction, etc. But it also sucked the life out of the story. It is like reading a straightforward version of Hamlet without all of those bothersome soliloquies. Perhaps it is a "better" telling of the facts of the story, but that is not why we read Shakespeare. Same with Dickens - the language and style are an organic thing which cannot be dissected, unless you don't like Dickens to begin with.

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A little science, a lot of fluff

Revisado: 11-04-13

I am interested in the way the brain is wired and how that affects things like happiness or self-control or behavior modification. This book sounded like it was right up my alley. And there was a bit about how the brain has evolved to react to threats and rewards, etc. But then it is all couched in godawful new age claptrap. Lots of "be in the moment" kind of talk that just gets on my nerves. And, perhaps unfairly, this was exacerbated by the author/reader's wimpy therapist voice. I didn't make it even halfway. Maybe it gets a lot better in the second half, but I'll never know.

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An excellent storyteller

Revisado: 05-11-12

I am sort of a sucker for anything by Herman Wouk. As an aficionado of his WWII books, I expected this one (when I first read it a million years ago) to be too girlish for me; and it is certainly more soap-opera-like than the war books; but I think it is better than that implies. Wouk is attempting to get inside the mind of a mid-20th-century American as a way of exploring some big ideas. He is particularly concerned with the place of traditional moral values in a modern setting. His conclusions are seen by many as being bourgeois or reactionary, but I think that is going too far. He certainly favors traditional morality as a way to get through life, but he doesn't do it in the snide, condemnatory way that so many right-wingers use today. Bestselling novels just don't engage the kind of ideas that are in this book anymore.

And as a child of the rural midwest, this book was one I used to live vicariously in New York in its golden years. It is so evocative of a different era! And the characters are pretty well-drawn. Noel is exactly right as the seemingly super-accomplished yet really inadequate "genius" type; and Marjorie herself is an unusual heroine. I usually half fall in love with the heroines in Dickens or Trollope of whoever. Marjorie remained interesting and attractive without ever being the embodiment of perfection we usually get with such females.

The narration could have been better -- someone with a bit more sophistication and sureness -- and who could pronounce things a bit better -- would have been good. But well worth a listen, overall.

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Good information, grating style

Revisado: 12-12-11

I am pretty committed to the principles embraced in this work, and Mr. Pollan has done some good homework and marshaled his facts. I don't like his writing style. He comes across as pretentious and effete. The facts are the facts, but people are also influenced by presentation.

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