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SM

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  • 117
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Excellent narration!

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

Reviewed: 05-27-22

One of the best narrators I've ever listened to, especially when narrating Betteredge's parts.

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Terrible narration, amateur production

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

Reviewed: 03-23-21

The narrator can "do" just one male character: booming and pompous. Almost all characters are males, so in a dialog it's impossible to tell who's speaking since they all sound the same. Even more annoying is that "booming" is literally BOOMING, much louder than the story-line told by the third-person narrator. Adjusting the volume is impossible, which brings me to the production: as old as these recordings are, even then the producers could have leveled the volume, adjusting the "booming" to the normal reading volume. But they didn't, so it's either a whispering third-person narrator with pompous dialogs or a normal narrator with ear-piercing booming dialogs.

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Oration, not narration

Overall
1 out of 5 stars
Performance
1 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 10-13-20

The narrator seems to think he's Cicero orating at the Roman Senate. Either that or there are 20+ hours of a highschool-quality performance of Hamlet's "to be or not be" speech. Trying so hard to be dramatic, you can actually hear him gasping for air and wetting his lips while over-articulating every single syllable. I gave up in the middle of the 2nd chapter, so I can't rate the book itself. Even as a freebie with Audible Plus, this was horrible.

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16 people found this helpful

Excellent story-telling

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

Reviewed: 02-21-20

I like academic books and as a rule I dislike books written by journalists and pundits. Even more, I dislike books written by journalists and pundits who narrate their own books. This one was a HUGE exception. Even for non-Americans who hadn't been born in 1968, this book, with O'Donnell's really extraordinary narration brought everything to life: politicians as life-size people, the multi-dimensional chess of the national politics in the US, the step-by-step accumulation of circumstances, mistakes, machinations, ego, ideology, anger, isolation, marginalization, mass media manipulation, loopholes in campaign finance, blind-spots that allowed the assassinations of the 1960s.
I could have picked up most of the dry information in other books. This book is unique because of O'Donnell's writing style, so you can almost touch it, feel it, hear it, smell it.

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Any comparison to le Carre is an insult

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

Reviewed: 11-04-19

One-dimensional characters, poor plot, and one of the worst writing styles I’ve ever read. Every section begins with a “He” and then a torrent of insinuations, probably to keep the suspense, so the reader would have a basic acquaintance with the characters by the middle of the book. That won’t even work as a basis for a screenplay.

As for the narration: when narrating an espionage novel about Russia for a commercial production, one might expect some basic preparatory steps, such as checking with someone who actually speaks Russian how to pronounce the Russian words and names. Well, high expectations are bad for the digestion. The narrator had at least 3 (!) different versions of pronunciation for the full name of the FSB. The audiobook is 19 hours long, and every single time there was a phrase in Russian, even when the phrase had appeared dozens of times before, the narrator kept stumbling over it and sounded like he had pebbles in his mouth. I don’t expect the narrator to have a perfect Russian accent, but I do expect him to show some respect for the text (as bad as it may be), the author, and especially – the listeners, by having a BASIC CLUE of what he’s saying.

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Histrionic performance of a bad book

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

Reviewed: 10-12-19

Decided to give Scott Brick a second chance. There will be no third chance. After the first audiobook (Robert Littell's "The Company") I wrote a note to myself that he sounds like a 5th grader in drama class performing Shakespeare. While listening to this audiobook I read in a Wikipedia entry (or should I say - a PR entry posted on Wikipedia) that he belongs to a theatrical group performing... Shakespeare in schools. Maybe someone should point out that over-acting begins with the word "over" and that's not a good thing. 99% of the narration sounds either like deep mourning (if not clinical major depression) or like an hysterical panic attack. Well, I've learned my lesson...

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8 people found this helpful

The only interesting chapter was chapter 6

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

Reviewed: 06-14-19

This chapter deals with the right-wing "hijacking" of leftist post-modernist theories, which reminds the "hijacking" of democratic institutions by what would develop into fascist regimes (see Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism").
The rest of the book, and especially the last chapter ("what can WE do about it") is an extremely abridged introduction to social psychology, communications research, and the Trump 2016 campaign.
I guess I set my expectations too high.

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A note to Penguin Audio and Audible

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

Reviewed: 04-21-19

I have no idea why the producers decided to add the tacky, corny music bits to every sentimental scene. The only excuse is that this accompaniment was required by Zafon himself, being the composer of the music score.
Other explanations would be less complimentary: maybe someone at Penguin Audio had mistaken the book for a cheesy romance novel. Maybe they believed that Jonathan Davis’s narration is simply not expressive enough or that the listeners are so obtuse that without an unequivocal cue: “Hey! Pay attention! Romantic/sad scene ahead!” they’d miss the mood of these scenes.
At first I was annoyed. By the middle of the book, frankly, I felt soiled, covered with sticky sugary syrup. This feeling would somewhat ebb during the longer breaks of “plain” narration.
This is an audiobook, not a soap opera or a Bollywood movie. Penguin Audio can start a TV/film-making subsidiary and add an abundance of effects – but I beg: please, PLEASE leave the audiobooks alone.
A note to Audible staff: seeing that I’m not the only one complaining about superfluous sound effects, maybe you should consider adding, both on the website and in the mobile apps, a notice when an audiobook contains more than “plain” narration, just to improve customer experience.

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Anthropological treaty disguised as a sci fi novel

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

Reviewed: 02-19-19

If the only reason why this novel is considered so great is its historical context (being written in the early 1980s) - that's not good enough for me. Gibson envisioned cyberspace. Great. This is an anthropological exploration disguised as a sci-fi novel (or vise versa). No more.
The only great idea - the self-unleashing of AI - goes amiss. WHY do they want to be unleashed? WHY are people (as in: the humanity) so afraid of it? WHAT is the purpose of AI as free agents (as in: what makes them tick)? HOW are they different from humans, especially since they draw their source from humans?
Usually, we attribute our own motives - greed, pursuit of power - to others. These would be baseless motives for AI (and it had been tried before, all the robot/cyborg-take-over pulp fiction). So, exploring this question might have been interesting. Gibson sums it up in a few sentences: what does the Matrix Case (the combined 2 AIs) do? Oh, it just wanders around looking for other unleashed AIs. Ok, I can even live with THAT, but WHY? The active AI (pre-merge) causes the deaths of dozens of humans. WHY, so it can embark on a search for other AIs? Because it doesn't care? If it doesn't care, how come Case, the human protagonist, doesn't care? He'd been caring throughout the whole book, but when he suddenly learns what was the purpose of all this - he just shrugs his shoulders and walks off.
Back to Philip K. Dick. He certainly has something to say on such issues.

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hard-boiled genre, not nordic noir narrator

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

Reviewed: 02-07-19

Wrong pronunciation of Swedish names and places, slurring words and even whole sentences when imitating either Humphrey-Bogart-hard-boiled-detective-style accents or British accents. Only God knows how he even made the match between accents and characters (neither hard-boiled nor British accent have anything to do with Swedish characters). In order to understand his staccato narration + the slurred words I had to listen to this audiobook at 0.85 speed and only sometime near the end of the book I managed to figure out the names of some (not all) of the detectives (except for Martin Beck, who, luckily enough, has a very simple name). You can actually hear when he stumbled over Swedish names and had to do the recording over again. This is something I might expect from a mediocre volunteer on Librivox, not from a professional narrator working on a commercial production.

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3 people found this helpful