Allstar

Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness

Reviewed: 08-19-20

The author uses a lot of long words to try to sound smart. It's as impenetrable as it is pretentious. It even starts out with a condescending disclaimer about being for the kind of peiple who can't be bothered to *actually* study anything.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

Free was the right price for this

Reviewed: 08-15-20

Full disclosure, I didn't read the description before I "bought" this. I saw the title, then the price (free with membership) and went for it. I expected a non-fiction book about the technology, history and culture of phone phreaking, or maybe a "based on a true story" fictionalized account. I wasn't expecting an original work of fiction, especially one as thirsty as this.

I was also expecting an audio book, but that's not what I got. If I didn't know this was an Audible Original, I would assume it was an audio-only recording of a TV miniseries. Each of the ten ~30 minute chapters begins and ends with about 30 seconds of pointless music, perfect for credits sequences. Scenes are written as if we're supposed to be able to see where we are and who's present. Sometimes there's even gaps of diagetic background noise clearly intended as an establishing shot. There are lots of scenes written as if the audience can see what's happening, but we can't. It's often halfway through a scene before I figure out where we are, who is present, and what is going on.

Plot is: It's 1970, there's only one phone company, the radio plays nothing but plot-relevant news broadcasts and commercials for sex toys, and a teenager being able to place free telephone calls makes the evening news. Enter Emma Gable, blind person and part-time teenage girl,. Her blindness symbolizes the author's need to pad the runtime with dialog such as "Emma, have a seat. Oh wait, I forgot and just remembered that you are, in fact, a blind person, and therefore you are unable to see where the chair is. How awkward of me." She's a typical obnoxious teenager, she's snarky, uninterested in school, and fascinated by the telephone, which she spends most of her free time playing with. Every conversation she has with another woman quickly turns to the subject of boys. It's the only thing other women seem to be able to talk to her about.

Emma lives with her parents: her selfish, surly, rude, dim and all around shrew of a mother who has never missed a day of work at the local nuclear power plant before, during and after her pregnancy with Emma. It's heavily implied that Emma's blindness and her own major sickness was caused by radiation exposure at the plant. The only plan she has for her daughter is "no boys." When it becomes clear she's dying, she tries to force the creation of pleasant memories to reflect on, which Emma doesn't let her get away with. Her father is a deadbeat who can't find steady employment in a small middle of nowhere town with no industry or business except the aforementioned government plant. By the time of the story he's found "work" at a nearby scout camp turned hippy commune repairing the cabins. He ends up spending most of his time there avoiding his family, cheating on his wife, and starring in the awkward, irrelevant B plot about homophobia, racism, self-loathing, sexual angst and hurt feelings with a nice sprinkling of abusive cops that leads to no character growth or plot progression. It seems to be there entirely for the sake of "wokeness." Or, to shoehorn in an actual gay sex scene into what is being marketed as an audio book to justify the warning about "sexual language and situations" at the beginning.

One night, while her parents were downstairs arguing, Emma is in her room dialing random phone numbers, and she stumbles upon a phone phreaker who gives her a preposterously vague hint about how to hack the phone network. (in amongst more time wasting, useless exchanges like "You hang up." "No you hang up." "No seriously, you hang up.") She manages to figure it out because the very next day her music teacher gives a lesson about audio frequencies, and the local telephone exchange just so happens to work with the hint she was given. She figures out how to whistle into the phone to make free long distance calls. She again encounters the phone phreaks, "her people."

Enter our main antagonist, Agent Connolly, Bell Telephone toll fraud investigator and sociopath. Filled with little dick energy from being assigned a desk job in 'Nam and being called a pussy by his NYPD father, Connolly equates our teenagers' unpaid phone calls with literal high treason and pursues them as such, committing illegal wiretaps, fraud, theft, vandalism and multiple counts of kidnapping in the process. Agent Connolly cannot comprehend that these kids are simply fascinated by telephone technology and are driven to play with it to figure out how it works and what it can do even when this is directly explained to him by his partner. All he sees is bad guys to punish.

Mind you, the story isn't told quite in chronological order. The scene where Connolly and his partner figure out that a lot of these phone calls are coming from Emma's school takes place before the scene where Emma actually makes those calls. this happens a few times, when we're shown the effect before the cause.

I'd also like to know where Emma's blue box came from at the end. For most of the plot, she only knows how to do her whistling technique. She refuses to take the undercover kid's blue box in the attempted sting, none of the other phreaks visit her in person, so...where'd she get her "magic" blue box at the end? Did she find it in a plot hole?

Eventually, all the plotlines peter out without any real resolution, none of our main characters undergo any growth (in the case of the father it's shown that he hasn't undergone any character growth since childhood), and the world continues to be a terrible place to live in.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

Not the Battletech novel to start with

Reviewed: 10-09-19

First let me mention, these weren't made for Audible, they were apparently made to be two-cassette books on tape. Each is divided into four ~hour long chapters and pretty heavily abridged to fit within that space. In some cases whole plot points are dropped. The performance by Christopher Graybill is rather good, though I wish he had kept character voices consistent throughout. It's not too bad within one book, but taking these six books as a series, some characters end up with the voices of others. Here, Theodore has a neutral American accent, but by the events of Blood Legacy he has adopted the breathy accent Hanse Davion spoke in at the beginning of Lethal Heritage. It's slightly confusing.

This book is included in Battletech Series 2 here on Audible, despite taking place before the books in Series 1, and that was a good decision. Series 1 is the better place to start reading. That's the Blood of Kerensky trilogy, which tell one cohesive story of the Clan invasion of the Inner Sphere from about a dozen points of view, in which Theodore Kurita is a minor character. This book, Heir to the Dragon, is about Theodore Kurita's life prior to the Clan invasion, or the 8 or 9 most pertinent hour-long anecdotes thereof, and along the way we get to see a bit about life in the royal court of the Draconis Combine.

There are a few strange things to note. Theodore is apparently a very attractive man and he keeps getting more attractive as he matures...according to the inner monologue of his aunt and cousin, but not his wife. He has a really rocky relationship with his dad you guys; he's overly critical, he never listens, he doesn't understand. It's not fair! Oh, that thing where Theodore promotes Shin Yodama to Chu-Sa in Lethal Heritage by meeting with him personally and finding an excuse to address him by full name and (new) rank? Yeah, they do that about four times in this book, partially as an excuse to bombard the listener with Japanese terms and partially to show you that that's just how it's done in the Combine. Also, the Kurita royal court has like, intrigue and such, there are apparently several different and competing spy networks and orders of turbo ninjas. There are several attempted assassinations and coups and such.

There are several battles depicted, but the book seems to kind of get tired of them and jump ahead a few months or years to the next thing that happens. It's like "So he saw his grandfather get shot when he was six, then there was that time when he was 20 when he got into that sword fight which was all a test, then I guess there was that time he was stationed on that backwater moon because his dad was sick of him, that led to this big battle with the Lyrans where he played this game of cat and mouse with their commanding officer...what else? Oh, then there was that time on the dropship..." It doesn't tell a cohesive story, there isn't an introduction, middle, climax and conclusion. Just here are some things that happened to this character. It's basically 3 hours of exposition.

Long review short, this book is for the people who read the Blood of Kerensky trilogy and then asked "Hey, could you tell me more about the background of that Theodore Kurita guy?"

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

More like a radio adaptation than an audiobook

Reviewed: 06-13-19

I enjoy most things Battletech, and this is a particularly important story to the lore. Overall I enjoyed it.
It's a very abridged version of the story, nearly every paragraph is shortened or missing. It's more like a radio show version than an audiobook. It features such things as sound effects, particularly during 'mech fights. These range from pleasantly immersive to obnoxiously loud sometimes drowning out the narrator.
A lot of content from the book is missing, including entire scenes. I think you could get lost if you weren't already familiar with the setting.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

Andy Weir's must read

Reviewed: 11-05-16

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

I would absolutely recommend this audiobook to a friend. The story is masterfully crafted. The book is full of tremendous humor, heavy tension, and marvelous adventure.

What other book might you compare The Martian to and why?

I would compare it to Lost Moon, by jim Lovell. More to the point, I would compare it to the movie Apollo 13. There are similar themes of triumph in the face of adversity, survival in the face of great peril, and never, ever leaving a man behind.

Which scene was your favorite?

I won't answer this as I don't wish to spoil the book ;)

However, I really enjoy the first line of the book. I hold it up as the best example of setting the tone in a work of fiction. As a Linux user, I'm also quite fond of the section in the book in which Watney has to do some shell scripting to hack one of his rovers.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I laughed throughout this book, even at the very first line. Part of the character of Mark Watney is that he uses humor as a coping mechanism for his rather severe predicament, so there's quite a bit of comedy throughout the book. I never cried, but there were several genuinely tense moments in the story that really gripped me. And at the end, I really didn't want the story to be over.

Any additional comments?

My cousin loaned me the print book, and I read it in a single sitting. I couldn't put it down. When I returned the book to her, I went out and got the audio book so I could listen to it again.
The performance by R.C. Bray is fantastic. He chooses distinctive voices and accents for various characters, making dialog easy to parse.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

Ben Rich's life story...but not in that order

Reviewed: 11-05-16

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

This book would be less than half its current length if told in chronological order. It jumps around a lot in time, starting with the F-117, then jumping back to the start of the U-2 development, following the history of the U-2 from the mid '50's into the Clinton administration, then jumping back to the early '60's to the SR-71. He ends up describing a drone they made at length as a basis of comparison for the F-117, then later in the book they go back to describe that drone's development. The book is thus very repetitive.

Has Skunk Works turned you off from other books in this genre?

No. There's quite a lot of interesting information and anecdotes in this book, and others may not have the style problems this book has.

What three words best describe Pete Larkin’s performance?

Only one voice. The book contains quite a bit of dialog and quite a few narrator switches, but the book is read by one man in one voice, so it's hard to keep up with who is speaking.

Was Skunk Works worth the listening time?

Honestly, no. It's probably a better idea to read this book in print rather than listen to the audio book version.

Any additional comments?

The actual meat of the book is very fascinating. These are personal anecdotes mostly from an engineer and later manager of the Skunk Works, along with other engineers, men from the CIA and Air Force, and pilots of the various aircraft. Unfortunately, these amazing stories are done a disservice by the non-chronological style.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

59 people found this helpful