China Audiobook By John Keay cover art

China

A History

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China

By: John Keay
Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
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Many nations define themselves in terms of territory or people; China defines itself in terms of history. Taking into account the country's unrivaled, voluminous tradition of history writing, John Keay has composed a vital and illuminating overview of the nation's complex and vivid past. Keay's authoritative history examines 5,000 years in China, from the time of the Three Dynasties through Chairman Mao and the current economic transformation of the country.

Crisp, judicious, and engaging, China is the classic single-volume history for anyone seeking to understand the present and future of this immensely powerful nation.

©2009 John Keay (P)2016 Tantor Asia China World Ancient History Imperial Japan Ancient China
Comprehensive History • Fascinating Engineering Stories • Beautiful Voice • Entertaining Individual Narratives
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Narration was fine, there were a few places were the recording blurred, overall I learned a lot and will continue to broaden my understanding of eastern countries

Enjoyable and Exhausting

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I love this book - I’ve read it a few times in the past and I would have enjoyed listening to it as a refresher. However I can’t stand the narration - I have lived in China for several years now and I’m fairly knowledgeable about Chinese history… but whenever this narrator mentions a person or place I barely know what they’re talking about, it is so horribly mispronounced. Never mind getting a Chinese speaker, the producers could have at least found someone who can correctly read pinyin. Such a pity for a book that otherwise gets so much right.

A great history book, HORRIBLE narration

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Couldn’t listen for more than a few hours: the narration is HORRENDOUSLY monotone and dull.

Probably a great book, but worst performance ever

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Were the producers trying to be ironic by casting an ESL narrator who misses all the tonal subtleties of English to read a history of a place with highly tonal languages? Might as well have been computer generated narration. The John Keay history of India had a pitch perfect narrator. Hopefully the production company fixes its mistake and rerecords with him.

great book, terrible narrator

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The narrative kept moving forward and back in time. The information was good, but it was tough to know when events described were occurring.

Good, but a little out of order

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I enjoyed this title, but the books for which Keay is most famous are "The Honourable Company" about the East India Company (which used to be available on cassette) and "India," the culmination of his life-long study of the Indian subcontinent. One always wonders whether the good people who make decisions as to what to make available on audio really have any idea what they're doing. . .

This is great, but why not Keay's "India"?

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detailed and particularly stated ...deals with ancient times as well as modern times ...comprehensive ...

great history of china

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She made it as interesting as possible with the limited information and very long expanse of time. Even now it’s hard to know what was exactly the truth on current events happening every day.

A lot of names and dates

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While the book itself seems great, a well researched and compact history with lively prose, the narrator clearly knows no Chinese and her frequent mispronunciation of names and places makes for difficult listening. E.g. 中国 as jong gwa, 夏 as "shee-yah", 秋 as "chew" These and many more become rather grating and make it hard to take the content itself seriously. Would gladly buy the book again with a new narration

Needs new narrator

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Keay is a good author and tells an interesting story that is worth knowing. However, I don’t think an audible book is the best venue for demonstrating his genius. The major problem is that it is almost impossible to keep track of the foreign names and words without seeing them. This made it extremely frustrating for me to learn more about the topics I’d been hearing about, because, in order to learn more, I spent inordinate amounts of time googling various spellings of Chinese words I had no idea how to spell.

well written—mediocre performance

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