Roman

Merry Christmas and Thanks!

Reviewed: 12-16-10

Merry Christmas to the good people at Audible! I wish you luck, hope you grow and stay strong and continue to bring the joy of listening to a lot of great books to people all across the world! Let 2011 will be a good year for yourselves, your loved ones and your country. And I would like to extend the greetings to all of the Audible members in many countries! Thanks for an unexpected surprise of receiving O'Henry stories as a gift, it is really brings back childhood memories of pleasure reading those same great stories, albeit in translation.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

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Wonderful book

Reviewed: 10-03-10

Great stuff!!! Story is quick paced and picaresque, characters are believable and alive. Stephen Fry as usual does a marvellous job reading, no, rather performing the book. I would love to get further installments of the Montmorency series. My credit was well spent. I would recommend this book to anyone who loved classic adventure literature as a kid.

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3 people found this helpful

Collection of articles, rather than a book.

Reviewed: 10-03-10

This book is certainly very well researched and written, however it is actually a collection of different articles in all of which both authors participated. That creates feeling of discontinuity, as articles differ in their subject matter, and are written in different style. Also, as quite often is the problem with reading of scientific articles, reader gets often mired in details, while dry prose does not help, and really interesting, elucidating ideas are few and far apart. I would only recommend this book to a specialist reader. However, as it is very specific scientific matter and is accompanied by graphs and tables, this book makes very little sense in adiobook format. Get an e-book.

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4 people found this helpful

Small Town Murders

Reviewed: 10-01-10

Before listening to The Various Haunts of Men I have read only one book by Susan Hill - The Man in the Picture - and was captivated by its gothic atmosphere and stylish writing. Perhaps that raised my bar too high. I was a bit dissapointed by this book. The plot is familiar to anyone who follows Midsomer Murders - cosy villages and toy towns harbouring deep secrets and a host of macabre characters. However, it is still masterfully written, if unoriginal and forgettable. The characters rather flat and anyone with interest in crime/ mystery genre will be having deja vu's many times. I could fare better with my credit...

Narrator is very good, though...

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3 people found this helpful

Rural mystery

Reviewed: 10-01-10

A very enjoyable and definitely quirky English country house mystery. Not exactly a crime novel, as there is no crime, just a chain of very weird events going at and around a crumbling country house. First part of the novel, where we are introduced to the characters and Appleby travels from the station to his host's home is wonderfully written. The happenings at a house itself and around are of rather bizarre kind, however still captivating. Highly recommended to all who like British Golden Age crime novels. The writing itself is very clever with lots of allusions to classical literature and art. It is also very well narrated. This was a first book by this author I have read and I was not dissapointed - a credit well spent.

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7 people found this helpful

Great Book, Poorly Presented - Get an E-book!

Reviewed: 01-29-10

What a great book - really puts a lot of tendencies in the economics of the day into a historical perspective. In this respect, it really clears a lot of fog and makes many things clear. However, this book has a very large amount of diagrams and charts which not only illustrate the text, but develop its ideas in a graphical form. Without these graphs the book sounds weird with constant referrals to the stuff you can not see. More so, parts of text - historical anecdotal chunks of data - are simply omitted... So, before spending your credits, find an e-book somewhere on the net - without this aid you are only getting 50% of this book, which is a pity, as this book, being a quite serious research, is, at the same time, is instantly accessible even to a humble armchair economist like myself.

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20 people found this helpful

Amazing book!

Reviewed: 04-06-09

This book just appropriates you, just sucks you into its airless, menacing world. Would give it 5, if not for a bit dissapointing second storyline. Out of two plotlines, run in parallel - one around WW2 era, second in 1976 - I was completely captivated by the spy story, and felt like fast forwarding through some of the events of 1976. However, the spy story is completely captivating, on the par with Le Carre at his best - characters live life of deception, betrayal and cold calculation of one's every step - and that completely redeems relatively weak second story line. The narrator, Rosamund Pike, is superb - she wonderfully does many characters of many nationalities and accents without a trace of vocal histrionics, gives them flesh, so to speak, making them 3-dimensional. William Boyd's twist on the history of the US entering WW2 is also an added value to this amazing book. Great many thanks to Audible for this treat! Give us more Boyd! :-)

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5 people found this helpful