Darren @ LA

Decent stories but very mixed performances.

Revisado: 04-27-25

If you’re looking for stores with familiar characters and doctors from the current era you may be happy with some of the early stories and performances but then things go very badly downhill, particularly with one reader deciding to make the 12th doctor (Capaldi’s) voice inexplicably sound like someone whispering on their deathbed. There were also three stories that had no doctor at all. At other times I couldn’t tell if the doctor was talking or Rose Tyler. Is it really that much more expensive to have a male and a female reader in one story rather than each struggling half the time? On the upside, the stories were mostly solidly written.

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Great but with one big caveat

Revisado: 03-06-24

I love this author’s books but almost gave up on this one. Whose idea was it to have the narrator read all of the references in an audiobook? Imagine listening to someone repeat over and over “H, T, T, P, colon, slash, slash, double u, double u, double u . . .”. Please, nobody listening to an audiobook is jotting down URLs. Put it in an accompanying pdf and refer people to that. If you want to listen to this, you’ll have to get used to fast forwarding over these spots which is annoying. Aside from this big mistake, the book itself is very good. If you are a fan of Susan Wise Bauer, the fast forwarding may be worthwhile.

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Great except “Sick Building” (chapters 11 & 12)

Revisado: 09-25-23

I’ve gone through a lot of Dr who books and loved all of them but I rate this collection lower solely due to “Sick Building” (Chapters 11 & 12), which was a real aberration for me. The ending was so poorly written I recommend skipping it. I wish I had. The doctor decides to do something that makes the whole story tragically pointless. That said, it is nice to hear Freema Agyeman who does a great job reprising her role as Martha Jones, and the other readers do a fine job as well.

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Fantastic and surprisingly hopeful

Revisado: 06-03-23

Dr. Eberhardt wonderfully weaves science with anecdotes to tell a compelling story that everyone should hear. This is not only a story of the depressing bias that resides in all of us but also a surprisingly hopeful summary of small initial steps individuals, businesses, and police departments have been taken that actually have made a difference. Though we have a long way to go, this book left me hopeful for the future.

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Logical leaps, needs editing

Revisado: 11-23-21

The author is prone to making huge logical leaps. One example is attributing current high real estate prices for houses on higher ground to mosquitos. Never mind that they might have better views or that waterfront property is also expensive. Perhaps the most egregious is the story of the discovery of coffee, which the author admits may not be true but that doesn’t stop him from speculatively inserting that the maybe fictional character in the story might maybe have tried a coffee bean to treat malaria that he has no evidence of. Sure why not. That might have been ok if the author had been transparent about it and stopped there, but no, he then goes on to attribute all sorts of political revolutions and revolutionary ideologies cooked up at coffee shops to this malaria he had inserted. Anything to advance a narrative, I guess.

Did the mosquito have a large effect on human history? Probably, but the author fumbles so much credibility in these simple stories that one has to wonder what other parts of this telling of “history” might be fictional or what omissions the author has made in his quest for a narrative.

The book also needs a good edit. The book could do without the Illogical leaps, nonsensical tangents, unnecessary repeated references to the NFL, and about 100 occurrences of “General Anopheles”.

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Awesome treat for Whovians

Revisado: 11-03-19

Only thing that would be better would be to have Tenant and Tate recording together rather than taking turns reading stories, but I see there’s a separate download for that. On to download that one next, but for many hours of entertainment, this one can’t be beat!

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ambitious, sometimes tough listen

Revisado: 09-18-19

This book that ambitiously attempts to cover thousands of years. On the plus side, even with my long commute it took me a month to finish it while driving, and I loved learning about the patterns that repeated themselves over multiple civilizations and periods. On the downside, it tends to be Roman-centric, particularly at the end. To be fair, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, and Chinese are also discussed in some detail, along with mentions of several others in less detail. No doubt this perspective is driven by the information available, and I guess more is available about Roman civilization, but potential readers should just know what they will hear. Another issue is it is very hard to keep track of all of the names in this audio format, and this problem is compounded because the author at times seemed to feel obligated to list names of minor players in passing that were never mentioned again, which makes it hard to sort out which ones we need to remember and which ones we need not memorize as we listen.

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interesting stories, mediocre humor

Revisado: 07-11-19

loved the history but the sound clips inserted as attempts at humor often fell flat.

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much better than the 3rd Aliens film

Revisado: 06-11-19

Fans of Alien and Aliens who hated the debacle that was the actual 3rd film will like this story much better. That said, it is NOT the "In space nobody can hear you scream, on Earth everybody can hear you scream" story that was once briefly teased as the 3rd movie. I was hoping it would be. Still, had this story been adopted as the 3rd film, it would have taken the franchise in a different and more interesting direction. Thank you Audible for bringing this (and Newt, and Hicks) back to life.

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