David Adams

Unlistenable

Revisado: 09-27-17

The narrator has the strangest accent I've ever heard and does a very poor job of speaking comprehensibly. The weird mispronunciations and rapid reading make me half wonder if this isn't read by a software program.

In any case, avoid this because oh won't be able to follow the story.

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Terrible sound quality ruins the experience

Revisado: 03-23-16

Ngaio Marsh and Inspector Alleyn are as reliable as ever in this mystery, and I don't feel much need to review the story itself. If you enjoy Ngaio Marsh novels, include this in your reading, it's a no brainer. Unfortunately this narrator is not so great, and the sound quality of the recording is atrocious, which makes this overall a mixed review.

First of all, the narrator James Saxon does a good enough job of speaking clearly and getting pauses, inflections, and pronunciations correct. And he does possess the capacity for a wide range of character voices. But he's not disciplined enough in their use to make it a great rading. As noted by others, he is hit and miss about giving the characters distinctive voices consistently, and the accent of one character often bleeds into surrounding prose or even other characters' lines. So, when you have a choice among narrators for a Ngaio Marsh title, I would definitely recommend Nadia May over James Saxon, and Philip Franks did a frankly masterful job on the title he narrated.

Finally, the recording quality here is downright atrocious. It's not just a matter of some general noisiness common to 90s-era and earlier audiobooks that were recorded or archived on tape. That's annoying, but one gets past it relatively quickly.

In the case of this book however, chapter by chapter there are variations in volume levels, background hiss, and recording quality. Some chapters sound like a 70s-era cassette recording of a 30s era radio broadcast. Even then, if the quality were consistently bad, it would be one thing, but it jumps around and every time it gets worse, you get more annoyed. This is just plain bad product, and that makes it all the more enraging that Audible is charging a premium price.

I expect an $18 audiobook to be a new recording, or a really excellent older recording. But this is just terrible, and Audible shouldn't be charging more than five bucks for it.

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esto le resultó útil a 16 personas

Great narrator, good history, poor conclusions

Revisado: 08-14-12

First of all, this book offers a good history of the thinking about certain aspects of sexual selection from an evolutionary perspective. The narration is excellent, as one should expect from Simon Prebble. The book is generally well-written if less than perfectly edited.

However, I find that the author often falls into a reactionary trap of dismissing too much of the substance of arguments that differ in assumptions or details from his own point of view. Further, the author is often inconsistent about his own apparent principles regarding the appropriate weight that ought to be given to certain scientific studies. In one paragraph he can dismiss the entire premise of the fields of anthropology, sociology, and psychology while embracing without criticism results of studies in those fields which do happen to match up to his thesis.

And on numerous occasions the author is more than willing to make sweeping assumptions about potential sociological results because "everyone knows" what the answer would be--even while admitting there is no evidence on the subject either way. And in so doing he falls into the exact same traps he criticizes practitioners of those other disciplines for doing so. On one page, he rejects assumptions of anthropologists that lack evidence, and on the next he lambasts them for demanding strong evidence before changing how they do their research.

Finally, besides these numerous logical errors, cherry-picking, and conclusion-jumping, the author demonstrates an unfortunately sloppiness in style when he is willing to constantly assert "boys are X" and "women are Y" and "is it any surprise that boys do X better than girls" and vice versa. Yes, he's right that there are gender differences in psychology and average skill, but he's so interested in proving wrong the social scientists--who, prior to strong evidence becoming available otherwise, preferred to assume both genders thought in the same way--that he raises slight differences in averages into sweeping generalizations that are foundational to his arguments... at least when it suits him. Other times he takes great pains to point out that individuals vary when that helps his argument more.

Overall, not worth the listen. The reactionary tone leads to poor conclusions, and at this point the data is so outdated it's not worth cluttering your mind.

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esto le resultó útil a 17 personas