Paul Adams

Unforgettable

Revisado: 02-12-25

What a powerful, moving, depressing, inspiring story, beautifully written and beautifully read by the author! An indictment of Islam, its radical violent adherents, and its Western apologists, it is deeply rooted in the author's own personal and painful experience.

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A brilliant, pathbreaking book

Revisado: 04-02-24

A fresh approach to the catastrophic decline in fertility. It focuses not on why women do not have babies but on why some - educated with shining paths to career and material success choose to buck the trend and have large families. it explores their reasons of head and heart by allowing them to tell their own stories. Pakaluk as an economist and social scientist illuminates how these stories cast light on the futility of current public policy efforts to reverse the birth dearth. She proposes a better approach.

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excellent, balanced, informative

Revisado: 03-10-23

...marred only by some weird mispronunciations. But still a fascinating guide to the man, the times, and the Church in this period.

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Outstanding!

Revisado: 07-18-22

Well reasoned and comprehensive, coherent argument supported by detailed evidence, this is an invaluable resource. It addresses economic, political, moral, and cultural aspects of this lethal violence against human life.

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The wisdom of submitting to limits

Revisado: 05-27-21

The book is outstanding. A grateful immigrant's fears for the culture of his new country and how it will chisel the character or soul of his little son. He draws brilliantly on the lives and worldviews of his representative characters, drawn from across the political and ideological spectrum, to define his worries about the spiritual poverty of the kind of materialistic, affluent but empty world he sees as a likely future for his son. In face of the difficulties of the task today, Ahmari will do his best to equip the boy with the spiritual resources he will need to flourish. He helps us think about what our life and our freedom are for by telling stories and asking questions. Thereby he will help his son - and his readers - discover the wisdom of tradition.

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A coherent, compelling, and challenging account

Revisado: 06-08-20

Stark's work continues to build a strong case, based on quantitative data, for re-examining established myths about the rise and early history of Christianity. He shows how Christianity spread in cities and among the more affluent rather than among the rural poor; Paul's work was primarily among diaspora Hellenic Jews rather than gentiles; polytheism was not tolerant in this period nor monotheism intolerant; Constantine favored a peaceful pluralism and did not try to suppress paganism (whereas Julian was an anti-Christian repressive fanatic), etc. Church Fathers engaged the question of the similarities between Christianity and pagan myths (e.g., Isis) that anti-Christian writers like James Frazer (Golden Bough), centuries later, seized on as gotcha evidence of the former's unoriginality.

On the contrary, the commonalities showed how God gave us all the capacity to discover him. Stark explores this theme in another book, "Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief." But the difference between pagan religions or cults and Christianity are crucial. As in the case of Gnostic heresies, the non-Christian cults were ahistorical myths, unanchored in time or place, but the Judeo-Christian story was one of an historically and geographically particular people developing its relation with God over centuries, a God who progressively revealed himself "at sundry times and in divers places" as the people were ready to receive and understand (something like Star Trek's "prime directive"!).

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essential reading

Revisado: 06-14-19

This book is careful, well informed and documented, and offers a coherent analysis of "our transgender moment." The success of trans activists in taking over professional organizations, the Democratic Party, the media, and schools in just a few years is extraordinary. Anderson is compassionate toward those suffering from gender dysphoria and parents of confused children. At the same time, he warns against the ideological push to exclude treatments other than social transitioning (which activists insist must be supported by parents and schools), followed by chemical and surgical interventions. Those measures prevent or distort normal human development and mutilate healthy bodies. They are essentially irreversible (though many seek to transition in their mature years as they come to regret the decisions they made or were pushed into as children and adolescents. They may cause permanent loss of fertility or sexual capacity, require a lifetime of treatment to manage the damage done to the body, and have not been shown to work even in terms relieving the dysphoria or reducing high suicide rates among those who transition. He shows how trans ideology reverses Title IX and other measures designed to protect women, subordinates parental authority to government bureaucrats, and imposes gender confusion on vulnerable children. Anderson shows how trans ideology is philosophically incoherent and contradictory, unscientific (while claiming its own unsupported opinions as the latest science), and intolerant of anyone who dissents from its orthodoxy, refuses to celebrate it, or who seeks alternative approaches to research, policy, and practice.

This is essential reading for those concerned about these issues, personally or as a destructive social and political force. It offers empirical information, reasoned argument, and a sound, fair-minded approach at individual, family, and political and legal levels.

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great poetry, well read

Revisado: 09-22-17

One of the greatest English poets, and of my favorites. This is a representative selection of Donne's poems, sacred and profane, love and divine poems. The poems are clearly articulated so that the reader can follow the poet's wit and argument, even on a first listen. I found the intermingling of holy sonnets and witty, even bawdy love poems disconcerting. I would have omitted some of these poems and included others. But all that notwithstanding, a fine slection admirably performed. Worth committing the whole to memory.

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A truly great novel, wonderfully performed

Revisado: 08-10-17

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes, it is one of the great English novels, a work of profound and perceptive moral seriousness about a round of visits and social engagements of upper-class families. Austen's genius, wit, and irony make the two aspects - the moral seriousness and the social round - work together to produce one of the great works of English literature.

What did you like best about this story?

The way it portrays Emma's getting everything wrong so powerfully that the listener wants to yell at her to show more sense. One can't help but feel Austen's own self-criticism - observant and critical of those around her, yet misperceiving or deluding herself almost to the very end.

Which character – as performed by Anna Bentinck – was your favorite?

Emma is wonderfully performed. But the other characters, including the male ones, are convincingly done too.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The classic moment when Mr. Knightley reproves Emma for her thoughtless, supercilious unkindness to Miss Bates - and Emma's mortification as she takes the full measure of the criticism and its justness - was movingly conveyed in the reading.

Any additional comments?

One reviewer thought the reader condescending. I thought the reading perfectly conveyed Emma's own unjustified sense of the superiority or her own insights into the affairs of others, her misplaced sense of the need to direct the affairs of others she deemed incapable of managing their own affairs. She came to see how wrong she had been about everything, the harm she did to those she thought she was helping, and how she continued to be deluded almost to the very end. An extraordinary creative exercise in self-criticism.

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