ancientreader

wow, did this ever not hold up when revisited

Revisado: 10-12-23

I read this as an e-book a while back and found it mildly entertaining, plus I usually enjoy Joel Leslie's narration, but all I can say is boy does the book not wear well. In particular I started wanting to throw things at David's repeated manglings of the word "achubydd" -- come on, it's only three syllables, there's no need to act as if it were some impossible tonguetwister. Seems like a small point, but it's typical of how forced everything about this book is, from the attraction between David and Alun (sorry, not feeling it), to the trumped-up misunderstandings and arguments.

In short: don't bother; listening to this audiobook has placed Russell firmly on my DNR list.

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Brilliant performance

Revisado: 02-23-23

This isn't the audio version to get if you want a straight reading. But if you enjoy narrators who *perform* the book, Adjoa Andoh is beyond fabulous. She's a brilliant actor with a beautiful voice and extraordinary mastery of accents and characterizations. Her work revealed so many aspects of P&P that I hadn't seen before, though I was already familiar with the book, having read it for the first time years and years ago.

I hope Andoh is contracted to do the rest of Austen -- honestly, I'd listen to this woman narrate a grocery list.

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It would be five stars all around, if only ...

Revisado: 03-24-22

I love this book, I love North and Shaw, and HOLY CATS is Charlie David a terrific performer. So why only 4/5 stars for the performance? Because as good as it is, it suffers from repeated pronunciation mistakes, even of some words that IMO are fairly commonplace. Honestly, Mr. David owes it to himself to look up the pronunciation of any word he's less than 10000000% sure of, because the quality of his performance in every other respect is superb. It's almost worse when work of such high quality is marred by such easily avoided faults.

Well, I'm off to listen to the next in the series, with fingers crossed that someone else has held Mr. David's feet to the fire on this point.

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Enthralling

Revisado: 02-25-22

Ayers is simply brilliant -- he covers everything from the geography and soil of what we now call the South in pre-colonial times, to the growth and development of the slaveocracy and the cotton economy, to migration and immigration patterns, to the origins of the myth of the Lost Cause, to music and literature. He's a marvelous speaker and while much of his material makes for painful listening, it's never less than fascinating. I think of myself as fairly well read in US history, but I learned a great deal from this course and I think my understanding is far deeper than it was before Professor Ayers got hold of me.

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Fascinating & insightful from start to finish

Revisado: 01-25-22

The headline says it all, really. Professor Vandiver illuminates the historical/social/literary/religious context of Greek tragedy & her discussions of the individual plays and playwrights are insightful, ditto her analyses of various scholarly theories. I was less interested in the information & hypotheses about ancient Greek stagecraft, but actually the more I think about that material, as someone who loves attending the theater, the more relevant and engaging it is.

How much did I enjoy this course? So much that I mean to listen to every other one offered by Prof. Vandiver. Really, I can't recommend her teaching highly enough.

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smart and fair-minded

Revisado: 11-22-21

A really stellar course -- lots of information that was new to me even though this is a subject I've done some reading in, and a thorough and fair-minded analysis. Bivins is a most engaging prof whom I'd love to invite to dinner with some of my brainier friends, and then sit back while they all talk.

I pretty much binge-listened.

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Reading is better than listening

Revisado: 11-22-21

I'm pretty much a Gregory Ashe addict so, having read all the Hazard & Somerset books, I expect I'll wind up listening to all of them as well. That having been said (a) this series started a few years ago and gets stronger as it goes along -- I can see being put off by an early installment if you're not retrospectively happy with the whole series, and (b) I find Tristram James an enormously frustrating narrator -- the placement of his stresses is often just plain strange, and some of his errors make it obvious that he doesn't understand the sentence he's reading, or just isn't paying close attention. Case in point, there's a moment when Hazard thinks of Nico as "unwounded," plainly meaning that Nico hasn't yet experienced many wounds in life, but TJ pronounces the word as "unWOWnded," as if Nico hasn't been -- wound up? The insight about Nico being unwounded is terrific in context and I about screamed at hearing it ruined. Also, honestly, TJ doesn't do a great job of distinguishing Hazard and Somerset's voices, and often his renditions of women's voices sound like caricatures to my ear.

I wish Gregory would have these books re-recorded with a better narrator.

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Disappointing in many ways

Revisado: 10-20-21

I expect more from a history course than straight narrative, even if the anecdotes that make up the narrative are valuable in and of themselves: what I want from a *teacher* is informed analysis, something this course sadly lacks. (To be fair, it probably suffered because I started listening to it right after the terrific course "Thinking About Religion and Violence.") Also, Professor Paxton's delivery is riddled with verbal tics, which over the hours started grating on me something fierce.

But that's not what got me to stop listening.

While I don't expect a historian to take a presentist view of past centuries' ethics / morals, I do expect a *21st-century* historian not to espouse retrograde language and attitudes, and to have some knowledge of the history of gender and sexuality, to say nothing of ordinary human feeling. (1) Nobody calls LGBTQ people "homosexuals" anymore except bigots, and this course is not so old that I can give Paxton a pass here. (2) Speaking of LGBTQ people, one needs only a passing acquaintance with the history of sexuality and sexual categories to know that queer social identities -- as distinguished from sexualities per se -- are a product of the 19th century. Right, Richard III was not "a homosexual," because, among other things, that wasn't a socially available category of identity at the time. And how naive do you have to be to argue that a man's marriage to a woman precludes his having erotic relationships with men? Maybe Paxton is correct to pooh-pooh the possibility, but "he was married to a woman" is not evidence one way or the other. (3) News flash, an adult man's sexual contact with a 12-year-old is rape by definition; King John's rape of his 12-year-old wife doesn't magically become anything else just because he was smitten with her. (And no, I'm not being presentist: Paxton herself says that people of the time disapproved of John's "cohabiting" with his child bride.) Amazingly, it doesn't seem to occur to Paxton that the reason Isabelle of Angouleme never mentioned John after she was widowed *might* have been that she loathed him. (And Paxton does speculate about human motive in other contexts, so this silence doesn't reflect general restraint on her part.)

Possibly the above seem relatively minor problems in a course that runs 19 hours, but they're just what made me reach my breaking point; well before then, I was getting annoyed at the lack of any offered perspective. You can bring a critical lens to bear on past history without being presentist. Also, nothing I've objected to reflects specialized or arcane knowledge. If Paxton is that ignorant of commonplace historical information and that oblivious to ordinary human feeling, how can one trust her presentation? I couldn't. I'm glad I got this on sale and thus didn't waste very much money.

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