Wayne Liebman

My comment is not about the writing in this book, which other readers have exhaustively discussed, but about the narration. I'm a writer, and I've been listening to audio books for twenty-five years, hundreds of them, and love the experience of being read to. Most narrators are at least pretty good; they have a relaxed, informal reading style that gets out of the way and lets the words of the author take you where the author intended. This is the first audiobook I've encountered which does violence to this principle. The reading style here is like a TV infomercial. That is, the narrator PUNCHES his words for EMPHASIS in every SENTENCE of EVERY PARAGRAPH, and BOY! is it IRRITATING! It's as if he DOESN'T TRUST the listener to REACH THE RIGHT CONCLUSIONS and must CAJOLE and MANIPULATE every step of the way! It's KIND OF like an ACTOR who CHEWS the SCENERY, MUGS, and ALTERS the pitch, tone and VOLUME of his voice into something UNNATURAL and ROBOTIC to indicate what the audience should be experiencing.

The result of this pummeling left me weary and jittery. The book was a chore to get through, as it left no room for the author or the listener: it was all about the narrator, who told me what to think and when to think it, robbing me of the chief joy of reading. Granted, the book is a piece of muckraking journalism, but can't I discover that for myself? The narrator and producer of this travesty have ill served the author, and should be severly flogged, as they have flogged others.