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Gripping narrative overcomes amateurish narration

Revisado: 01-24-22

… barely. Jim Garrison’s seminal account of his investigation into the Kennedy assassination is still a must-read/listen for anyone new to the controversy surrounding it, or who simply wants more details behind Oliver Stone’s film JFK based on it. Garrison is a more interesting storyteller than I expected – especially helpful when he’s laying out the often complex web of facts surrounding things the movie hints at but doesn’t fully explain – and the book is neither dry nor sensational. (He was, after all, a lawyer as well as a public official.) No doubt he understood that the story was already dramatic enough without him needing to embellish.

Would that the audiobook narrator had gotten that same memo. Rather than mirroring Garrison’s straightforward style, he often tries to heighten the drama by affecting an exaggeratedly serious tone that is all the more distracting for being unnecessary (think old-fashioned “Dragnet”-style voiceover). Other times he flat-out mispronounces common words and names in ways that are almost laughable: Clay Ber-TRAND (which nobody pronounces that way – including the narrator himself when he correctly says “BER-trand Russell” later on), “Lift” magazine for “Life” magazine (as another reviewer mentioned), “kooh-day-tot” for coup d’etat, to name a few.

Trivial perhaps, and certainly no reason to skip such an otherwise important book regardless of where you fall on the ideas put forth. It’s just too bad Garrison’s thoroughly competent prose couldn’t be matched by equally competent narration. (Unless that’s part of a conspiracy too – in which case, *definitely* worth a listen to judge for yourself.)

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Irritating sing-songy narration that

Revisado: 02-07-21

actually made it harder to follow the already dense and somewhat scholarly style of writing. Not a good thing, especially for something that (even though the author claims to have written “in the vernacular”) was fairly dry at times and so reference-heavy it made me realize some books probably are better suited for reading than listening. I found the constant Bible verse referencing particularly distracting, though again, probably necessary for serious students and I was eventually able to tune it out well enough... less so the affected mannerisms of the narrator. That said, the ideas presented were so compelling (makes Da Vinci Code look like a comic book by comparison), and so persuasively argued and meticulously researched that in the end I’m glad I stuck it out. In fact, grateful as I am for the Audible version as a primer, now I really want the print book in order to go back and digest some of the details that frankly flew by too fast from listening alone. All in all, recommend even with all the irritations. Great food for thought and more timely than ever for the open-minded.

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