Posts tagged history

AUDIOBOOK read by Simon Prebble

This was a pleasant surprise.  I can’t remember how I stumbled across this book, but I’m glad I picked it up as I very much enjoyed it.  The story takes place in Paris right after the final capture and exile of Napoleon.  There is an interesting historical feel to the book as it follows a young medical student who gets caught up with a gang of thieves.  The story moves well as he balances who he is supposed to be with who he is becoming.  For the audiobook, Simon Prebble does a great job with the narration.  A fairly quick read and worth the time. 

AUDIOBOOK Read by Stefan Rudniki

Wow, this book is scary.  A history of the CIA from it’s inception through the post-9/11 agency, Legacy of Ashes is a narrative pulled from thousands of declassified documents.  Tim Weiner does a remarkable job of telling a cohesive story from the formation, to the clandestine operations in Central America, Asia, and beyond, to the complete inability of the CIA to gather much useful intelligence on the Soviets.  The major theme of the book is that the real CIA is not the CIA of the movies.  It describes an agency that spends much of it’s time trying to get out of it’s own way and shifting on the whims of presidents and directors.  It appears that the CIA has spent most of it’s history guessing and little of it actually gathering intelligence.  The book drags in places, which is sometimes troublesome for an audiobook as you can’t skim ahead, but that happens with most non-fiction audiobooks.  Rudniki does a decent job narrating and the book has enough action to keep the listener’s attention despite the length. 

AUDIOBOOK read by Bill Bryson

I have always enjoyed reading Bill Bryson’s books.  I think the first one I read was In a Sunburned Country about his travels around Australia.  I took a special interest in that book as I read the majority of it on a flight to Sydney in 2001 (you can get a lot of reading done on a 14 hour flight).  If you haven’t read that or any of his other travel related books (A Walk in the Woods, I’m a Stranger Here Myself, Notes from a Small Island, …), I highly recommend them.  Filled with often hilarious observations and stories, they are quick reads.  I caution reading them in public places as I found myself laughing out loud on more than a few occasions.  

In the last few years, Bryson has moved away from the travel type writing and on to more historical/scientific topics.  I listened to his A Short History of Nearly Everything last year and thought it to be a bit dry, but interesting.  I would classify At Home as much the same.  There are a lot of interesting tidbits in this history of housing and the things within, but the narrative is a bit dry.  There are still some moments of the Bryson wit, but he treats these topics more seriously than his previous writing and I think it suffers for it.  The audiobook is read by the author, which may have been a mistake.  It never really felt like Bryson was into the text and I think it affected my opinion of the book.  If you’re a history buff, then this book may be a good pickup for you but everyone else could probably skip it.  But do yourself a favor and pick up Bryson’s travel books.