Unabridged Audiobook
Brilliant, informative book nearly ruined by the male narrator’s mind-boggling inability to pronounce names correctly. One doesn’t have to be a master of film history to know that Oscar-winning actor Charles Laughton ((Law-tun) shouldn’t be pronounced (Low-as-in-cow tun) and then pronounced (Loff-tun) a few minutes later. People reading this book probably already know David Niven’s and Joel McCrea’s and Carole Lombard’s very famous names, and hearing them called Nye-vin and Mac-Cree and Lum-BARD yanks the listener right out of the narrative. Yet this reader does this possibly half the time! I’ve narrated several books myself and was always given a pronunciation guide and always investigated any name I wasn’t certain of. Additionally, the male narrator gives slight ethnic accents to people whose names have ethnic origins, even if the real person had no such accent. Listening to this narrator for most of the book’s 28+ hours was both a painful distraction and a guessing game as to whose name would be screwed up next. The female narrator made no pronunciation errors that I caught, but her voice was rather strident and eventually unpleasant after so many hours. The book is so good, so richly revealing that HarperCollins might do very well to have it reread by people who grasp the very specific tools needed for a book like this. Also, these are transcripts from conversations, not revised and rewritten narratives. The male narrator does not seem to have the knack for recreating conversational speech. Even the most casual of remarks are read as if they’re from the King James Bible, and his pauses are inappropriate to the meaning and verisimilitude of the quotes he’s reading. Very disappointing reading of a fantastic text.
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