Scott

excellent, I hope, in some way wholly lost on me

Revisado: 03-17-25

a lazy slap dash collection of facts entirely unremarkable to a reasonably read college freshman, things presented as somehow uniquely interesting that so fail that test that I was unable even while listening to must up the mite of interest needed to even try to recall if I'd even been aware is this tidbit of medium.

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A festival of clichés and lazy writing

Revisado: 03-05-25

Let no cliche
Escape un-reused
By & by Lord
By and by.

Let no broke horse
survive its flogging ...

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3 cheers

Revisado: 02-27-25

Small complaints would be unsporting in regard to this book. Best of this specialty genre, by far.

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hilariously, unbelievably bad ...

Revisado: 10-20-24

.... if, that is, it had been human produced. As the work of ai, happily reassuring.

Should you wish to hire me to do the work, I've gotten fascinated by what you've been up to and have a wide range of suggestions. But, I think with this and the others I've done quite enough free work for Amazon.

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this can't possibly be real

Revisado: 10-20-24

the tech can't be taken past the short-story yet, and even there, it creaks. this is, so far as I could get, just the same chapter again and again.

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Odd title, definitely a short story

Revisado: 10-19-24

fine for what it was, reading is impressively competent, even if the stresses are still frequently wrong. even if the author here isn't ai, the title algorithm is, and it's completely off. Again.

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great short story

Revisado: 10-19-24

Not much development, but it's a short story, so that's fine. Title and cover art are misleading.

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excellent

Revisado: 01-21-24

Churchill as Churchill, and so as genuis. We miss this sort of clarity. Read this book. Yes, it's dated -- but its datedness is easy to recognize and move past, and not the all-pervading bias of pretty much all modern schlock, especially about this era.

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Text fine but not as advertized; reader horrid

Revisado: 01-12-24

The text is fine for what it genuinely is, if you like that sort of thing. It's sold as a recount of struggles for power by the players of the "shifted" 19th Century (through the Great War), which could have been really interesting if told as objective history, taking all of the actors in good faith on their own terms or with the same level of scrutiny and critique. This is not that.

This book ought to have been called something like "The Uncertain Struggle toward the Triumphal Socialist Future." It's not real history, but ideological exegesis; not a social history but a socialist history. The author ascribes (classical) liberal failure to the "inherent contradictions" and even "dialectical contradictions" in its tenets -- a style of analysis and a target arising directly from socialist (and allied) theory -- not as the analysis of those liberals by socialists at the time but as statements of truth. Socialism's contradictions went unexplored. When, say, factory owners seek to maintain power over the use of their property, they are invariably described as murderers, bandits and (wage)slave drivers, but when workers smash other people's property or demand the power to control it, they are noble fighters in the (yes, this very term often arises) "class struggle."

And I think it's fair to characterize the last quarter of the book as an attempt to place the whole blame for the First World War (and then the Second as well) at the feet of capitalists, nationalism and the upper classes and bougies, with the noble, wise workers looking on dismayed in a way that becomes increasingly polemical and frankly dishonest (as by selective quoting and relying on the author's assertions about what he has seen in the photographs of the time that he has happened to look at). The purpose of the class distinction for ennobling socialism is obvious; the charge against nationalism is necessary (and standard throughout the western left) because, after all, Nazi is short for "National Socialist," and so post-war socialism must put all of the evil of Naziism on the first part (nationalism), to absolve the second (socialism), even though any 10-year-old can note the matching word -- and reflected worldview and behavior -- in NSDAP and USSR.

All of this is made vastly, almost impossibly worse by the book's reader. Tastes vary, of course, but by my lights this guy offered 41 hours of masterclass in how not to read an audiobook. A couple highlights: when reading quotes he does that "emphasis on the last word before the quote, pause, then begin the quote with a vocal rise then fall" thing that bad readers are heir to. It's not quite as annoying as saying quote and unquote at each end, but it interrupts the flow of narration nearly as much, and when it happens frequently becomes infuriating.

The narrator then compounds this problem by adopting it as well when pronouncing foreign words -- but then adds the all-but-insupportable flaw of so wildly, preposterously over-pronouncing most foreign words, which often come together in clumps, that it became difficult to believe he wasn't a saboteur. His pronunciation of Bismarck (who comes up a lot, as you might imagine) made the name sound like an incantation by the sort of vampire who would describe himself as fabulous and fierce, and who thought the spell more effective if it were hissed for as long as possible. A sentence including both Bismarck and Reich really ought to have come with some sort of medical warning for the listeners. (And meanwhile, the reader manifestly made no attempt to discover the correct pronunciation of English words with which he was unfamiliar.)

At all events, if you're a socialist or looking for a socialist interpretation of the long 19th C. ... I'd still read this one on paper.

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Note: Not an objective history

Revisado: 11-15-23

There are useful things to be learned from this book, even for someone well studied in the field. But be aware that this is not a neutral history, but rather a leftwing interpretation of the history of the period. The bias gets more obvious as the years roll on, especially after the 1970s, when the author's interests and preferences become fully clear. A couple of examples: the author clearly has more sympathy for people's republics than for "neo-liberalism," and can't imagine any legitimate, non-racist, justification for objections to mass immigration. After 2000, it could all be a particularly virulent screed by Ian Hislop on a bad day.

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