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The Battle of Britain Audiobook By James Holland cover art

Poor narration mars this lively but padded account

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
2 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 05-03-25

Holland is, as always, an enjoyable writer, but -- also as always -- he tends to pad out his histories with unnecessarily detailed digressions -- sidebars, really -- recounting the exploits of various individual soldiers, sailors, airmen, and civilians on both sides of the conflict.

More sober-minded historians (like Max Hastings) know how to add human interest to their books with brief well-chosen anecdotes and quotes. Holland, on the other hand, shoehorns in lengthy accounts -- often of fairly inconsequential people -- that run on for pages (or audiobook minutes) and are filled with vivid, sometimes lurid detail but also with ridiculous irrelevancies. (For instance, was it necessary to tell us that some obscure German pilot had four older sisters, what the family finances were like, or that he’d initially tried to enlist in a different branch of the military? Or that some minor, long-forgotten London actress was having several affairs, and whom they were with? Do we really need a detailed account of a young RAF pilot’s evening in a pub, how he got there, what he drank, whom he drank with, and the girls he flirted with, complete with their names?)

I assume Holland takes these individual stories from other books, diaries, and personal interviews. They are colorful and not without interest -- I finally learned, for example, why the Dunkirk evacuees all looked surprisingly clean-shaven (they'd been ordered to shave, if need be, in the ocean) -- but they're full of pulpy writing: “Coming out of it once more, a 109 sped across his windscreen and instinctively he opened fire, his plane juddering as his eight machine guns rattled” — that sort of thing.

Also, weirdly, these anecdotal accounts refer to the individuals in question, RAF and Nazis alike, by their first names or even nicknames, which makes them sound like extracts from young-adult fiction: "Sprinting to his Spitfire, Cocky grabbed his parachute from the wing and with fumbling fingers fastened the buckle, then jumped up on to the wing and hurriedly clambered into the tight confines of the cockpit.” “ ‘Tally ho! Right! Here they come, chaps!’ …Tony was conscious of Brian opening fire, and then a Dornier filled the sights…. Sweeping round, Tony drew his bead on a second, and as his guns blazed, he saw bits of engine cowling flying off the German bomber.” “Ulrich was sure the RAF must now be in its death throes so had been taken aback by the number of Tommy fighters that now met them.”

This sort of thing can be rousing and occasionally even thrilling, but — to be less generous — it sometimes seems just a lazy man's way of filling up pages.

Still, the worst thing about this audiobook is the dreadfully inept narration. Shaun Grindell tends to read every sentence pretty much the same, emphasizing the final word of every phrase, which in practice means every fourth or fifth word -- sometimes seemingly at random -- without much sense that he has any idea what he's reading. It gets quite monotonous. It also makes it unnecessarily difficult to follow the story.

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The Magnificent Ambersons Audiobook By Booth Tarkington cover art

Contrived, predictable — a far cry from “Penrod”

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
2 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 04-04-25

As a lifelong admirer of Tarkington’s three “Penrod” books — the truest and funniest books ever written about childhood — I was disappointed in this celebrated novel, which won Tarkington a Pulitzer and is probably best known because Orson Wells adapted it for the screen. That it seems, in fact, tailor-made for the movies is not a point in its favor; every aspect of the story seems obvious and contrived.

The narrative opens with a pleasantly nostalgic survey of life in a small Midwestern city at the end of the 19th century — sort of a slow, gracious “Meet Me in St. Louis” world — but then turns into a somewhat simplistic and didactic fable about the downfall of a wealthy, socially prominent Midwestern family. Every character and plot point seems almost cartoonishly unreal and exaggerated: The family in question, the Ambersons, seems not just wealthy and powerful, but excessively so; the spoiled young protagonist, Georgie Minafer Amberson, seems an unremittingly arrogant, snobbish, repulsive bully (who gets an occasional well-deserved comeuppance in an all-too-neat sitcom way); the beautiful girl he falls in love with seems implausibly wise and clever each time she opens her mouth; her father, a visionary inventor, seems likewise too unendingly wise. I soon grew impatient with these artificial creations.

However, Peter Berkrot’s performance was superb, and — as skillfully as possible — it brought these cardboard characters to life.

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The Sea and the Jungle Audiobook By H.M. Tomlinson cover art

Eloquent, charming, yet aimless and kind of boring

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 03-30-25

This classic travel book is proof that if one is sufficiently clever with words, one can write endlessly about absolutely anything… or even about nothing.

Ron Keith’s performance is brilliant, spellbinding, and — this is going to sound like a criticism, but believe me, it isn’t — his earnest, rather hushed voice and (I think) northern English accent become so hypnotic that they almost put one, gently and pleasantly, to sleep.

As I say, that’s a feature, not a bug.

Or if you consider it a bug, it’s not Keith’s fault. Tomlinson was apparently one of those endlessly productive journalists who can fill up, as the occasion demands, half a page or 200 pages, talking amiably about whatever comes to hand: in this case, the vastness of the ocean, the routine of life on shipboard (and the dullness of that life), the meals, the weather, the sunset, descriptions of his fellow crew members, conversations with those crew members, his old job in London, the Amazon landscape, its exotic flora and fauna, various pets of all sorts, the challenges of dealing with ornery mules (“punishment has no more effect on them than kindness”), tropical diseases and the benefits of quinine (which Keith charmingly pronounces QUINN-neen), the assorted drifters and workers and natives and storekeepers and eccentrics Tomlinson runs into in his travels, his philosophical musings about life and the universe, a rather pointless tall tale about Davy Jones’ Locker, etc. etc. etc.

He is always eloquent. He’s good at embellishing his descriptions, throwing in all sorts of colorful details and snatches of dialogue he couldn’t possibly remember (the way Patrick Leigh Fermor does in his books). He does refer to keeping a journal, but says he remembers lots of things “more vividly” from pages left blank than from pages filled with “happenings minutely recorded.” Here and there he comes up with a memorable image, a poetic phrase, a provocative observation, or even a passage worth quoting.

He reminds me of a friend who once boasted that if necessary, placed at a table of deaf mutes, he could carry on a perfectly acceptable one-man conversation for at least two hours.

The problem is, there’s no real story here, no particular point to anything, nothing in the narrative that’s gripping or engaging, in fact nothing to keep you avidly listening (or turning the page). It is not entirely uninteresting; it simply doesn’t amount to anything. It all ends up sounding like pleasant time-filler. You forget exactly where the narrator is or what he’s supposed to be doing; he just drones on amiably, like a sensitive, intelligent, but fairly boring character you might wind up sitting next to in a bar. You know that if you give him an hour, he’ll do his best to fill it up. If you give him a second hour, he’ll do the same.

Honestly, that’s nothing to sneeze at; it requires real talent. I have fallen asleep a number of times thanks to this audiobook, and I look forward to listening to it often.

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Sand and Steel Audiobook By Peter Caddick-Adams cover art

Mammoth but endlessly fascinating (and horrifying)

Overall
5 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 03-29-25

This has got to be the definitive book on D-Day — truly the last word. While it is lengthy, it is never less than fascinating, and I'm astonished at Caddick-Adams' thoroughness, the clarity of his writing, and the book’s wealth of colorful, inspiring, often horrifying and appalling anecdotes and personal accounts. (I should add that Derek Perkins’ reading is splendid — truly flawless.)

As to thoroughness: Yes, there are more facts here — more details, more numbers, more names of people. places, battalions, and ordnance — than one can possibly absorb (whether on the printed page or audiobook). But as Caddick-Adams says, “Brevity has been the enemy of accuracy,” and his prodigious research has cleared up more than its share of D-Day myths and misconceptions.

My primary takeaway is, of course, how grateful I am to those who took part in the Allied invasion, and how glad I am to have been spared any experience remotely like it.


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Kingdom of Shadows Audiobook By Alan Furst cover art

Typical Furst — no plot, but oodles of atmosphere

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 02-13-25

This is the sixth Furst novel I’ve read. Obviously I’m something of a fan, and I’ve grown used to the fact that Furst’s books, while long on atmosphere, excellent writing, and colorfully cynical dialogue, tend to have little in the way of plot. And this one has even less; it’s really just a loose collection of scenes — on the surface, at least, unrelated — chronicling the protagonist's travels to assorted pre-war European locations on various murky clandestine missions, not all of them successful. The fact that we’re talking about 1938 and ’39, the years of the Anschluss, Munich, the fall of Czechoslovakia, and the start of war gives all the proceedings an intrinsic suspense and sense of approaching doom.

All of Furst’s books seem to have, along with the same strengths, the same faults (at least to my mind): too many descriptions of meals — mainly of interest to food snobs, no doubt — and too many intrusive, embarrassingly pulpy sex scenes. This time, typically, his protagonist is a brave, handsome, wealthy Paris-based Hungarian aristocrat, still fit in his forties, with a military background, a still-beautiful mother, and all sorts of handy international connections. Like other Furst fantasy figures, he’s a magnet for women and has a beautiful, glamorous, wealthy young mistress. (I find Furst’s sex scenes a bit creepy, especially having seen what he actually looks like.) Furst’s female characters are basically just compliant Bond women who hop readily into bed with the hero.

These early Furst books are narrated by the redoubtable George Guidall, and for better or worse, they all have the Guidall trademark style. He’s a terrific reader, always enjoyable, but all his foreign characters, from bartenders and taxi drivers to generals, tend to have the same accented voice: they all sound coarse, colorful, loud, and a bit low-class, like minor characters in a Hollywood film.

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The Demon of Unrest Audiobook By Erik Larson cover art

Timidly censored, politically correct prose

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 12-19-24

Larson is, as always, a highly skilled tale spinner. As he admits in his generous and modest acknowledgements, he’s more an arranger of material into a dramatic narrative than an original researcher, relying — in this and in previous books — on published diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts rather than on dusty archives. Still, he’s adept at excerpting from them the most colorful passages and details, interweaving a number of personal stories, and generating suspense by cutting between various individuals and locations.

What I could have done without is Larson’s — or his publisher’s — decision to bleep out racial epithets with an electronic tone, as if to spare our tender modern ears, even when the book is directly quoting from letters or publications of the time. That sort of prissy censorship does a disservice to historical truth.

More important, although his narrative uses “slave” as an adjective — “slave market,” “slave quarters,” etc. — he leans over backward to avoid using the word as a noun. Most of the time, he resorts to the awkward, politically correct circumlocutions increasingly fashionable today: “enslaved people,” “enslaved workers,” “enslaved servants,” and “enslaved Blacks.” (Yes, Larson capitalizes the word in the printed text of the book, so that — in what I regard as sheer unwitting woke stupidity — we are actually presented with a phrase like “making Blacks and whites equal.” How pathetic, and how far from the spirit of Lincoln!)

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The Universe in Your Hand Audiobook By Christophe Galfard cover art

Yes, mind-stretching—but also cutesy and annoying

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 10-28-24

Galfard is beyond doubt brilliant (Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cambridge, worked with Stephen Hawking), but this book could have been shorter and far less annoying if he’d trimmed the cutesy, rather condescending filler material that demands we imagine ourselves on a tropical beach looking up at the stars, or floating in spirit around the galaxy, or dozing on a time-traveling jet plane complete with airport and stewardesses, or conversing with a little yellow particle-throwing robot, or corresponding by postcard with a great aunt in Australia who likes crystalware, etc. etc. — all embellished with far too much detail that tries too hard to be amusing. This sort of thing makes me impatient. I don’t pretend that the concepts themselves are easy to understand — far from it; they are, as you’d expect, mind-stretching, certainly beyond the limits of my understanding — but Galfard has apparently written children’s books, and something of the hand-holding tone, the sense that he’s talking down to us, remains from those books.

Constantly, as I listened, I kept thinking that the concepts described would be considerably easier to follow in an animated movie.

In one of the later chapters, the narrator assures us: “So far you have been traveling through the best theories mankind has ever built to describe the world that surrounds us. In practice, it means you now know as much about our universe as a good graduate student from any of the best universities on earth. Not in technical terms, obviously, but certainly in terms of ideas. It should already be enough for you to shine at any dinner party.” What an absurdly self-serving claim! Utter horse manure!

For better or worse, Ray Chase’s narration, while clearly enthusiastic, only tends to magnify the condescending tone. (But I don’t think it’s his fault.)

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The Road to Little Dribbling Audiobook By Bill Bryson cover art

Thank heaven it’s NOT read by Bryson himself

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 10-12-24

Unlike most of the commenters here, I’m glad this book is narrated by someone other than Bryson. Normally I’d prefer to hear an author read his own work, but — I know this is a minority view — Bryson is one of the worst readers I’ve ever heard. His rendition of his book “At Home” was so bad that I had to stop listening. As a Midwesterner transplanted to England, his accent is a shifting mixture of the two; he starts off sounding like a corn-fed American, then throws in a tortured, phony-sounding British pronunciation of one or two words (especially ones with a long O — “home,” “show,” etc.), like a kid in a high school play pretending to be a rather snooty Brit. The effect is creepy and, to my mind, quite chilling.

That aside, he is a wonderfully entertaining writer, and I’ve enjoyed a number of his books. However, for the first time, I've begun to suspect that he’s not a particularly nice guy.

In fact, “Little Dribbling” is surprisingly sour. Make that VERY sour. This region-by-region travelogue veers between heartfelt praise for the beauties of the British landscape, pats on the head for various quaint shops, pubs, and restaurants that have pleased Bryson, and rather mean-spirited accounts of his interactions with assorted cashiers, ticket sellers, bartenders, shop assistants, waiters, and service people in general who’ve annoyed him. True, they do tend to come across as stupid, rude, and obtuse, and maybe they deserve his snarky, rather grumpy comments; but after the dozenth time, this routine of his — “I may be an old curmudgeon, but I’m surrounded by idiots, and the service in this country has gone downhill” — grows wearisome, and he sounds like a Yelp member who enjoys handing out bad reviews. (As an expatriate, he also never misses a chance to ridicule ignorant Americans.)

Curiously, Nathan Osgood’s performance makes Bryson sound all the snarkier. Osgood speaks as an American, but when giving voice to the humble service personnel the author has encountered in his travels, he gives them exaggeratedly dumb, low-class British accents. Maybe that’s exactly how Bryson would want it, I don’t know. Osgood certainly emphasizes, in his delivery, Bryson's aggrieved, scornful, short-tempered side.

Beyond this, it’s also a rather depressing book, leaving the impression that the Britain I’ve loved and revered has pretty much vanished forever. Aside from good hiking trails, scenic rural vistas, and some quaint old business establishments, it sounds as if the best things in Britain have closed up, gone under, been replaced, or become shabby, litter-strewn, overcrowded, or ridiculously overpriced. (P.S. A friend recently informed me that virtually all the second-hand book shops on Charing Cross Road are gone.)

I did listen to the whole audiobook and, as with other Bryson books, found a few chuckles and some interesting historical facts. But overall “Little Dribbling" was — perhaps as intended — something of a downer.

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The Sleepwalkers Audiobook By Christopher Clark cover art

Brilliant, in fact mind-changing, but very dense

Overall
5 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 09-13-24

I’d already read excellent books on World War I and its causes by Max Hastings, Margaret MacMillan, Barbara Tuchman, and (still my favorites) Robert K. Massie and G. J. Meyer, but in some ways this one seems the last word on the subject. It’s erudite, written with clarity and grace, and reads as if it’s the product of years of research in, among other things, government files and diplomatic correspondence. And it’s a mind-changer, in that — as some of the commenters here have noted — it overturns the popular view that the war was largely the fault of Austria (long looking for a pretext to crush upstart Serbia) and of Wilhelm’s Germany (caught up in a dreadnought race with Britain and looking for a chance to provoke a war with Russia before the latter grew too powerful).

On the contrary, Clark — despite his claim in the final chapter that no single nation can really be blamed for the war — opens the book with a shocking Serbian atrocity (the gory assassination, by military officers, of the royal couple in 1903), details the machinations of the Serbian terrorist group the Black Hand, analyzes the Serbs’ fanatical desire to annex any surrounding nations where Serbs were even a minor portion of the populace, alludes to the Serbs' cruelty to conquered foes, and basically depicts them as a fiercely tribal, grievance-obsessed, belligerent, aggressive people who, quite simply, started the war by murdering the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.

Clark is clearly sympathetic to the Austrians’ response — the set of demands, followed by the declaration of war. He makes the demands sound quite reasonable, in view of Serbia’s provocations. He’s also remarkably — and persuasively — sympathetic to the Kaiser, who emerges as mercurial and unstable but basically harmless; in fact, despite his bluster, largely a voice for peace.

French president Poincaré, on the other hand, is depicted as a warmongering Germanophobe, and British foreign secretary Edward Grey is shown to be overly secretive, manipulative, and at times confused to the point of self-contradiction.

In short, the book spends much more time on Serbia, Russia, France, and Britain than on Germany and Austria, and it convinces one that the former group of allies are considerably more guilty than the latter of causing the war. Surprising though this may be, Clark's conclusions seem wise and well-reasoned. (But you may want to read a couple of the comments here on Audible by angry readers who vehemently — and lengthily — dispute this point of view.)

Aside from the fact that Clark, in the course of the book, more or less undermines his claim at the end that one can't really hold one nation or one side responsible for the war, another curious thing is the book's title. To call these nations, or these nations’ rulers and military chiefs, “sleepwalkers” gives the erroneous impression that they didn’t know what they were getting into. In truth, the book is filled with examples that tend to show that those in power were well aware that they might be risking a huge European conflict, and they knew the alliances likely to be involved. Granted, each nation hoped that it might be able to outbluff its enemies, that perhaps its enemies would back down, and that its allies, if it came to war, would live up to their promises on paper and stand with it; in that limited sense, they didn’t know precisely what lay ahead. But even years before 1914, observers knew what might happen. Clark explains, at the end of the book, why he describes the participants as sleepwalkers, but it still makes no sense to me; it’s a weird choice of title.

Yes, incidentally, as people here have noted, the book is for long stretches VERY granular (to use a currently popular word), and goes into far more detail about diplomatic negotiations, international disputes, schisms and political intrigues within governments, and various treaties and crises and economic matters, than many readers will want to go. One can’t deny that Clark has done his homework! There are times when I just grew tired of it all and wanted him to get back to the Serbians’ plot.

Finally, I was going to say that despite a few inexplicable low grades by other listeners, I thought Derek Perkins’s narration was splendid, in fact delivered so impeccably that I might actually seek out other books that he’s narrated. But judging from one commenter here who’s detailed, at considerable length, some of Perkins’s lapses and omissions, maybe I’m wrong in having been so impressed. Still, I’m giving him 5 stars. He reads beautifully.

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Zoo Station Audiobook By David Downing cover art

Absorbing, but not enough to continue w.the series

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 06-21-24

This somewhat satisfied my addiction to spy stories set before or during World War II, and I stayed with it till the end, but I was a bit disappointed. While Downing is clearly an excellent writer, the plot was not especially gripping or cleverly worked out. I found the book’s journalist hero fairly unappealing (especially his boring relationship with his mistress — a gorgeous too-good-to-be-true actress — and with his teenage son, as well as his unlikely prescience about exactly what’s going to happen in the coming war), and the book’s ending was at once too neat, yet also left too much hanging, in anticipation of the next book in the series. Also, as some here have commented, Downing tends to create atmosphere — something one craves in wartime fiction — mainly by trotting out dozens of place names, streets, parks, etc., as if he’s writing with a map close at hand.

Alan Furst’s wartime spy fiction is also somewhat unsatisfying, particularly as to plot, but it feels more realistic and its atmosphere seems richer, hence I’m more likely to go back to Furst than to continue with Downing’s series.

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