Sean

Apparently, there was a violinist with a really strong thumb. It may or may not have had to do with his genes. That's the level of insight you can expect about "Lost Tales of Love, War and Genius."

The book is an excellent history of the science and discovery of DNA. He also talks about the controversies surrounding the human genome project. However, I was expecting more information about how our genes shape our behavior in interesting ways. Something like "so-and-so discovered an argument gene prevalent in lawyers..."

The performance is engaging and the history is complete but the book was not what I was expecting.

If you keep your expectations low this book can entertain you with short 1-2 min anecdotes from old Hollywood stars. Most of the material is from the 20-50s and even as a fan of that period I did not recognize several names.

The production is incredibly annoying--the reader has sycophantic tone and every story is punctuated by a burst of "ditty" music ("da-deet-deet-da-da"). You will hear that ditty about 200 times by the end of the book.

The stories are the sort you would hear from the PR department of a movie studio--not TMZ. There's no real dirty laundry, just funny stories and the occasional "Oh you scamp!" moment, but the author is clearly infatuated with his subjects--probably a little too much.

The title should be "Patrick Henry Was a Major Douchebag." The book spends more time talking about Henry, the principle antagonist, than it does about Madison, the protagonist. Even when he does talk about Madison he spends more time talking about his diarrhea and hemorrhoids than his political genius.

The chapter in American history when the Constitution was ratified was obviously pivotal, but all of the historical "what if?" discussion is ultimately fruitless. The author should have spent more time on the actual importance of the bill of rights. Amazingly, for such a long book he never finds time for even a cursory review of the actual bill of rights. Some amendments are discussed as they come up but the coverage is surprisingly sparse.

Overall, the book is accurate and provides insight into the ratification of the Constitution and later the bill of rights. However, the writing is very dry and repetitive and he spends too much time talking about Patrick Henry and the other anti-federalists.

The performance goes a long way to improve the subject, but the narrator can only do so much.

The author wants to construct a case that 1775 was a more crucial year for the Revolution than 1776. But, as another reviewer points out, he uses examples from the 1760s onward to bolster his case. He never makes a compelling argument for the importance of this distinction.

His examination of the various motives for independence go too far into detail to hold the reader's attention. For example, when discussing the effect of religious denomination he gives an overlong, state-by-state, county-by-county, denomination-by-denomination analysis of dozens of different congregations.

I kept waiting for the groundwork to end and the interesting discussion to begin, but I had to give up 2/3 of the way through.

The book is well suited to intermittent listening because each word gets it's own 4-5 minute chapter without any overlap. Conversely, just as each etymology becomes interesting it's time to move on, which gets frustrating.

He uses obscure words as well as current coinage (such as "blogoshpere") to demonstrate all the various ways words enter our language. There is really no grand conclusion about the history of the language so a better title might be "The story of 100 English words."

It's entertaining and light and the performance is very good.

I was expecting an objective tour of current controversial experiments. Something about Intelligent Design, Cold Fusion and/or dark matter. Instead we get a lengthy discussion of Alfred Russel Wallace's (co-discoverer of Natural Selection with Darwin) life and personality. The author did his PhD thesis on Wallace and apparently wanted to get some extra mileage out of it.

Rather than an exploration of the actual borderlands of science, we get an attempt to describe an archetypal inhabitant of the borderlands. What sort of education, relationships, birth order etc create the "heretic personality" that will wind up in research projects that run contrary to mainstream thinking?

I don't think he is wrong in his conclusions, but I was very disappointed to find a dry psychology book disguised as a popular science text.

The story of the people who monitored enemy radio traffic for the Brits and passed it on to Bletchley Park for crypt-analysis consists of long periods of boredom punctuated with occasional episodes of excitement. The book credits the essential but un-glamorous work of the people who collected the raw material for the boffins to work on.

Unfortunately, the book is much longer than it needs to be. Most people's entire careers can be summed up as "we sat at a radio every night for 5 years and one time something interesting happened."

The author correctly wants to acknowledge the risks and sacrifices these people made for the war effort, but the plain truth is that the work was not terribly exciting and dwelling on the details does not make it more interesting. The book mostly chronicles bureaucratic pettiness and occasional brushes with danger.

Many of these people never told their families about the hours they spent at this important work and they do deserve to be honored for their labor. But there is not enough material to sustain 12 hours of reading.

I liked the book because it delves into the facts and stories of the 1906 natural disaster but the author presents more information than is necessary to make his point. This causes the book to falter at several points.

He does a good job of going back to original source material and eyewitness accounts to paint a vivid picture of the earthquake and firestorm. However, when talking about how inept use of dynamite made the fires worse he goes on for page after page describing how this building at this intersection was demolished on Thursday at 9:30 AM and then another building at another address was blown up at 12:45...There are other areas where the details become similarly tedious. For example, he goes into great detail about a corruption trial that involved several key city leader but had little effect on "how SF nearly destroyed itself."

The information is well researched and I suspect even a native SF reader will find surprises. The performance is solid and well paced.

The book is a collection of historical sketches about various cooking implements. Although neither exhaustive nor comprehensive it manages to entertain and inform.

There are many books on food history, but this is the first I've found on the history of pots, appliances and flatware. However, the author bites off a little more than she can chew and the writing becomes uneven and erratic. There are simply too many ingredients to do justice to all aspects of cookery.

You will not learn any recipes from the book, but you will never look at your kitchen the same way again. I learned many fascinating facts (like the fact that Europeans have only had an overbite for about 200 years) and new appreciation for medieval recipes like "beat the eggs enough to tire one or two people." She draws interesting conclusions about how our cultural beliefs shaped the instruments we use to prepare and eat our food. She even makes a convincing argument about how the fundamental differences in Eastern and Western culture play out at the dining table.

The reader delivers a solid performance in her British accent but she affects American, Southern and French accents for quotes. They are probably artistically authentic but they do not sit well in the ear.

Overall, I enjoyed the book but it has problems with organization and pacing.

Do not buy this until Audible fixes the recording. In the last 2 hours the reader randomly starts and stops and there are snippets of her exchanges with the engineer--"Did I get that right?", "I'll do that again" and various throat clearing and testing out pronunciation of words.

Clearly, no one listened to this after it was mastered.

This new production brings the book to life in a fresh and relate-able way. Diane Keaton's performance is dead on (although she does get some place names wrong, which is odd for someone who has spent so much time in California.)

A collection of published and personal pieces about life in America during the 60's (it has nothing to do with the Middle East) the book still offers valid insights for a modern reader. She simultaneously provides a time capsule view into the past while reminding us that certain complaints are perennial as the seasons. I found the piece responding to complaints about how Hollywood doesn't make movies like they used to particularly funny.

Diane Keaton's reading captures the thoughtful prose and inflects a very slight condescension which I think represents the material very accurately.