Douglas Osborne
- 5
- reviews
- 31
- helpful votes
- 30
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Time of the Magicians
- Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy
- By: Wolfram Eilenberger, Shaun Whiteside
- Narrated by: Rhett Samuel Price
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
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The year is 1919. The horror of the First World War is fresh for the protagonists of Time of the Magicians, each of whom finds himself at a crucial juncture. Benjamin is trying to flee his overbearing father and floundering in his academic career, living hand to mouth as a critic. Wittgenstein, by contrast, has dramatically decided to divest himself of the monumental fortune he stands to inherit, in search of spiritual clarity.
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Narrator butchers foreign many language quotations
- By William G. Brown on 08-31-20
- Time of the Magicians
- Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy
- By: Wolfram Eilenberger, Shaun Whiteside
- Narrated by: Rhett Samuel Price
Solid book with lousy narrator
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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Beauty
- A Very Short Introduction
- By: Roger Scruton
- Narrated by: Chris MacDonnell
- Length: 6 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In this Very Short Introduction audiobook, the renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores the concept of beauty, asking what makes an object - either in art, in nature, or the human form - beautiful and examining how we can compare differing judgments of beauty when it is evident all around us that our tastes vary so widely.
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Introduction to Beauty
- By Adam Shields on 05-03-19
- Beauty
- A Very Short Introduction
- By: Roger Scruton
- Narrated by: Chris MacDonnell
A Perfect Introduction
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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Perfecting the Union
- National and State Authority in the US Constitution
- By: Max M. Edling
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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For most of the 20th century, the American founding has been presented as a struggle between social classes over issues arising primarily within, rather than outside, the United States. But in recent years, new scholarship has instead turned to the international history of the American union to interpret both the causes and the consequences of the US Constitution. Max M. Edling argues that the Constitution was created to defend US territorial integrity and the national interest from competitors in the western borderlands and on the Atlantic Ocean.
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excellent analysis for the initiated
- By Douglas Osborne on 10-28-23
- Perfecting the Union
- National and State Authority in the US Constitution
- By: Max M. Edling
- Narrated by: David Marantz
excellent analysis for the initiated
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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From Darwin to Derrida
- Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life
- By: David Haig, Daniel C. Dennett - foreword
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 14 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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In From Darwin to Derrida, evolutionary biologist David Haig explains how a physical world of matter in motion gave rise to a living world of purpose and meaning. Natural selection, a process without purpose, gives rise to purposeful beings who find meaning in the world. The key to this, Haig proposes, is the origin of mutable “texts”―genes―that preserve a record of what has worked in the world. These texts become the specifications for the intricate mechanisms of living beings.
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Highly recommended.
- By Douglas Osborne on 04-17-21
- From Darwin to Derrida
- Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life
- By: David Haig, Daniel C. Dennett - foreword
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
Highly recommended.
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
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The WEIRDest People in the World
- How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
- By: Joseph Henrich
- Narrated by: Korey Jackson
- Length: 19 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich draws on cutting-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology to explore these questions and more. He illuminates the origins and evolution of family structures, marriage, and religion, and the profound impact these cultural transformations had on human psychology. Mapping these shifts through ancient history and late antiquity, Henrich reveals that the most fundamental institutions of kinship and marriage changed dramatically under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church.
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Lots of mispronounced words
- By Phil F on 10-24-20
- The WEIRDest People in the World
- How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
- By: Joseph Henrich
- Narrated by: Korey Jackson
bad narration of a good book
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