Blake

Painfully Repetitive and Lacking an Ah-ha

Revisado: 01-17-25

When you get to the end, you realize this book could have been a 10-page pamphlet. All it needed was the concluding chapter, in which the author summarized the book, stating essentially that over the ages, scribes changed the words on the oldest known Christian texts, both deliberately and accidentally, and the New Testament is an amalgamation of all these changes. During the preceding 10 hours of listening, he repeats himself repeatedly, with endless “as I wrote in chapter x…” lines. The documentation is very thin. There are no smoking guns, meaning no identified villains, and he cites only a handful of passages in which the narratives in the gospels are substantially altered. Bottom line is he spends many hours stating what’s rather obvious (spoiler: the Christian gospels have been altered since the earliest known papyrus scrolls); and very little time is spent making a case against for the deliberate changes and contradictions in the various gospels and letters of the New Testament.

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Too Much Unnecessary Detail Makes This Tedious

Revisado: 12-12-24

This work is like listening to a Wikipedia article, with the author deciding he has to mention every possible detail, as if writing the official record, not a readable document. The author demonstrates no ability to create an interesting narrative, preferring instead to regurgitate every single possible detail from countless action reports, American and Japanese. This is the kind of history book that appeals to an academic review of the period covered, period. .

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Dreadfully Unnecessarily Detailed

Revisado: 05-02-24

If you want to know how many depth charges were dropped, the number of oil barrels loaded, the specific type of seaplane, the middle initial of every officer, the name of every ship in a convoy, the specific military units to the company level, etc. then you’ll love this dreadfully slow plodding detailed recitation of (mostly) Japanese battle and troop movement reports. There’s little human element in the book, just massively over-specific technical details, thus it’s +30 hour length. This book desperately needed an editor. The audio interpretation is questionable, with the reader using a snarky, jesting tone throughout. For me, an avid history reader, this book was a total waste of many hours time.

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A Good Overview But Not Very Deep

Revisado: 03-14-24

To use a submarine pun, this book stays at periscope depth but claims to dive deep. It gives a general overview of submarine special missions, but with the exception of going into detail about underwater wire tapping operations, there’s no depth in this book’s revelations. As an example, the first two missions in the book do nothing more than mention having special operators aboard but never at any time describes what they did aboard. There’s a long description of the Glomar Explorer operation, but other than a description of how it was found by a special operations sub, the entire operation and the many pages devoted to it had nothing to do with the supposed focus of the book. There’s nothing in this book that can’t be found reading Wikipedia articles about the few submarines mentioned. The narration is excellent and the book sails along, but don’t expect it to be very revealing.

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Two Separate Stories That Almost Relate

Revisado: 07-25-23

Erik Larson is a master storyteller of real events, and Thunderstruck doesn’t disappoint, though for the majority of the book the reader is alternating between two seemingly unrelated storylines. One story is about the inventor Marconi and the other is a love triangle involving a doctor. The two storylines, each intriguing, come together only loosely in the end, leaving the reader to wonder why these stories weren’t worth two separate books. Despite this feeble connection, Larson pulls the reader into both stories completely and the book alternates between seemingly unconnected people and events. The narrative of the audiobook is a bit off, as the reader’s choice of inflections are often puzzling, frequently highlighting some words or parts of works or mysterious reasons and making unnecessary pauses. The writing is Larson’s customary brilliance though taking a slightly bumpy path through the narration.

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No “Secrets” in the Secret War Book

Revisado: 05-16-23

The author Friedman is widely praised as a forecaster of geopolitical events, and in this book he writes not about the future but about what was then the ‘now,’ events that were widely reported my major media. As a prognosticator in 1991 he wrote a book “The Coming War with Japan” which we presumably can write off as a total fail of his crystal ball. It’s not that there isn’t useful information in his “America’s Secret War” book, there is, such as the revelation that Iran had already prepared to govern the post-Saddam Hussein Iraq and lured the USA in to get rid of Hussein for them. My biggest issue is that there are a lot of individual errors in this book, based on my own personal first-hand experience with some of the topics covered, and when I see so many small errors in a book I always wonder about the accuracy of the things stated that I don’t have first-hand knowledge about. It’s also disturbing to read a book that is based 100% on the author’s opinion without one single (not one in the entire book) reference to data or external sources. Perhaps the printed version has such references but I have not explored that. The audio portion is jarring. The reader injects crazy inflections into sentences for no apparent reason, hangs certain parts of words out for inexplicable purposes, and the whole thing sounds like each paragraph is a separate roller coaster ride. Not the worst audio reading but very distracting.

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A Stream of Trite Cliches

Revisado: 05-12-23

Here is the book: Stop thinking negative thoughts, think positive thoughts. The end. The subtitle of this book is “An Athlete’s Guide to Inner Excellence.” Mr. Mack - there’s no guide here. This book is 5 hours and 27 minutes of non-stop one liners taken from athlete media reports and from the author’s own work with athletes. If “It’s not the size of the man but the size of his heart” can be considered a roadmap, i.e. a guide, then stringing together hundreds of similar trite expressions must make this the best guide ever. It is not. There is nothing here, but it does read like sitting through a 5 1/2 hour standup comedy show listening to seemingly endless cliches. Maybe the author thought if he threw out hundreds of one liners, there would be one that stuck to each reader.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Marine by Marine Minutia

Revisado: 05-10-23

The author did a lot of research, and produced a book of the exploits of individual Marines, right down to listing each Marine’s home town, a detailed description of each Marine’s wounds and fatalities. If you want to know about the battle of Khe Sanh from behind each blade of grass, that’s what this book is. I found it unreadable.

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Compelling Story with Awful Narration

Revisado: 04-16-23

Excellent job by the author in collecting the history of Enterprise and many of it’s sailors and pilots, coupled with an just-awful narration. Tom Weiner does an embarrassing transformation of dialog by turning the navy sailors and officers into cartoon characters from the Bowery Boys.

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Wonderfully Personalized History of Destroyer Action in WWII

Revisado: 03-27-23

Engaging from start to finish, Tin Can Titans expertly weaves the campaigns of this group of Fletcher class destroyers with the lives of many of its officers and crew. The author’s work at researching journals and letters brings the WWII action home to readers in vivid accounts. Wukovits has created the perfect blend of historical events and personal storytelling. Robertson Dean adds the perfect voice to the story throughout. This is a completely enjoyable and captivating book told from the sailor level from the start of the great sea battles of WWII in the Solomon Islands until the intimately detailed end in Tokyo Bay.

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