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Douglas Osborne

  • 5
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  • 31
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  • 30
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Solid book with lousy narrator

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

Reviewed: 12-20-24

The narrator has a pleasant voice but is weak in terms of matching his reading to the meaning and atrocious in terms of pronunciation. It's distracting enough that he hasn't a clue how to pronounce anything in French (e.g., "pain" as "pane", and even famous people's names get butchered, e.g., Rimbaud as rimbode and Baudelaire buda- lair), but what is really irritating is his mispronunciation of everyday English words. True, they are high-school- or university-level words, but surely a book with this subject matter demands a narrator for whom such words are familiar and quotidian. My focus was routinely interrupted by the nagging question "Why has this narrator been chosen for this book?" and the related question "Who among the readers of this book would make such errors?"

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A Perfect Introduction

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

Reviewed: 01-16-24

The best introductions constitute a set of adequacy constraints for a complete theory. Scruton's introduction to beauty does that, and in so doing shows why beauty demands our attention and deserves a central place in any conception of live well lived.

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excellent analysis for the initiated

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

Reviewed: 10-28-23

This is a book for people who already know a great deal not only about the Constitution but also about its historiography. It's an excellent book, but a poor choice for people who are still early in their reading on the topic.

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Highly recommended.

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

Reviewed: 04-17-21

This book gets difficult but important things right. It's admirably succinct and lucid as a summation of a powerful synthesizing vision of biology that embraces mind and language, mechanism and function, behavior and meaning in all their dynamic complexity. Highly recommended. Four stars instead of five only because it's not the sort of book one loves; rather, it's a book to be admired, referred to, and passed on to anyone looking for a solid yet expansive and humane foundation for understanding the topics in the book's subtitle.

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2 people found this helpful

bad narration of a good book

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

Reviewed: 12-30-20

I highly recommend this book-- for reading. I don't recommend the audible version. The narrator has a pleasant enough voice and enunciates clearly (hence two stars instead of one), but his pronunciation is often distracting (e.g., "-ure" words such as "endure" sound like "-oor" words, and "prevalence" is read with the stress on the second syllable and a long "a" sound ...). The real problem, though, is that the narrator doesn't read as if he understands what he's saying. He seems to be reading word by word, rather than seeing where a sentence is going and adjusting his delivery to reflect the larger structure and the various components --phrases, clauses, conjunctions-- within it. I've been listening to audiobooks for at least 25 years, and I don't recall having come across another narrator who does so little to help me keep track of where I am in a sentence. Nevertheless, I did manage to listen to the whole book despite nearly giving up after 30 minutes. Switching to 1.25 speed (a first, for me) made a big difference.

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29 people found this helpful