SheWhoReads

Interesting story, terrible narration

Revisado: 05-12-25

The story itself is fine? Maybe a little too much in love with Cortes, but it’s whatever. What really got me was the narration. The narrator has no knowledge of the Spanish language and manages to mispronounce almost every name, both Spanish and Aztec. And when he’s reading a quote written by one of the Spanish people, he gives them the worst cartoony “Spanish” accent, instead of just reading the quote. It’s terrible. Maybe if you don’t know any of the words, it will be okay; otherwise prepare for the worst.

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A decidedly western view

Revisado: 12-02-24

I enjoyed hearing about how the volcanic eruption changed and shaped so many things, but it really only focuses on Western Europe and the US, with a little Quebec thrown in for good measure. I’m not sure if that’s intentional or just these authors’ focus, but I feel like there’s a lot left out. What about Native American impressions of what was happening? Or Asian and Pacific Islander POVs? It was a long book, but I would have listened to a longer book if there was more of a global perspective.

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Podcast style, not audiobook

Revisado: 11-15-24

I was expecting a well-researched and journalistic foray into the stated subject, but instead I got a podcast where the heavy lifting of the research is done by a family member of one of the former patients, whose whole point is that they don’t have enough information. It felt like one of those, hey I need to make a podcast about something but let me see what looks like the most likely thing that can get me on tv today. The podcast doesn’t even live up to the subtitle, because anyone who knows the least bit of history can take a guess what the deep dark secret is, and while it’s horrible, it wasn’t abnormal for the time period, so technically not a dark secret at all. I was just hoping for something with more depth and not something that reads like a series of local articles in a small town newspaper. It makes a couple of stabs at being meaningful as a way to talk about mental illness but then that doesn’t really pan out or go anywhere.

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Good overview of the disaster

Revisado: 04-29-24

The narrator has a voice for radio, and I kept expecting him to say “this is Casey Kasem” or “and now, the rest of the story.” He puts odd inflections that you don’t really need. He pulled me out of the story. The book is a basic overview of the eruption- I wouldn’t say there’s any new ground covered here. It falls into that NF trap of going all the way back to the beginning to tell you about a company when it’s just extraneous details. Like, I don’t need to understand the history of a company starting in the 1850s to understand what happened at Mt Saint Helen’s. Geez. This book was included in Audible Plus.

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Pop psychology, questionable history

Revisado: 03-19-24

For a book about survivors of the titanic, we get very few survivors stories. 706 survivors and we get around 30 mentions (maybe more, I didn’t count) and maybe 20 stories, of which some are deeply fleshed out, and others mostly glossed over. This tends to follow class lines. It feels like this book was not researched further than what was easily available, and since the wealthy left more of a historical footprint, we get more about them, but certainly not more than you can find out from googling it yourself. Really, I don’t feel as if this adds anything to the historical record that you can’t find out yourself on Wikipedia. You can probably learn more from Wikipedia than from this book.

The biggest issue I had was with the author’s “knowledge” of what people were thinking about at the point of their deaths (impossible) and the pop psychology he uses to interpret every issue of their lives post-Titanic to somehow being caused by their PTSD or something, but offers absolutely no evidence, just a lot of amateur supposition.

The narration is mostly okay, but he does use accents to interpret some quotations, and some of those are particularly questionable. Like, why does he use a “stereotypical Jewish Yiddish/English accent” for one of the women, when there’s no suggestion that she spoke anything other than English? Oh, maybe because her last name is Rosenbaum? But there’s nothing in the woman’s biography that would suggest this; in fact, she went to finishing school and lived in Paris for a long time. She wouldn’t have sounded like that. So that was an interesting choice, based on her name, I suppose. The narration lends itself to sounding almost gossipy/dishy in places, which does not help when the book already has issues in content.

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Interesting focus but dry

Revisado: 01-29-24

I found the book on the whole to be quite good, even though it is more an academic book than general audience non-fiction. So, in the way of academic books he tends to have lists of other dates/times/events that are used as support to his argument, and those can be tedious. The interesting thing to me about this book, and the reason it’s only 4 stars, is that it actually ends with about 3 hours left, and those 3 hours are are and afterward, that is basically an academic clap back at another writer, and an update for 25 years after the book was written, that makes some corrections and updates the body of knowledge that pertains to his particular subject.

If you are a student of WWII or of the Holocaust, then this book is a definite, if dry and academic, must. If you are a casual listener, you might want to pass.

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Excellent detailed analysis

Revisado: 11-30-23

Detailed analysis of the facts as they are known. She recounts the various theories and then discusses why there are flaws in those theories. In the end, she ends up with the most plausible theory, although it may not be what people want to hear since people love a conspiracy theory. However, it passes the Occam’s razor test, so to speak, so I find it to be plausible. Sometimes the narrator sounds robotic, but I secretly enjoyed the accented portions.

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Needs a narrator

Revisado: 10-19-23

I appreciate that the author wants to do the audiobook, but there is a definite difference between reading a book and narrating a book. The author reads the book, and it has taken me months to get through half of it. It is both the sound of the voice and style of the delivery that makes it feel like an endless drone of being read to. The book itself, the writing, etc, is excellent, but if you are at all sensitive to the narrator’s tone of voice or style of narration, try the sample first.

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