Bill

I cannot say enough about this book. Pressfield is excellent. If you like historical fiction, if you like detailed battle descriptions that do not depend on gore, if you like the feel like you are actually in the culture and time of the characters, this is a book to get.

Simply a beautiful novel. I have never encountered such an brutally honest story before that takes you so completely into the lives of these women. If you are faint hearted or prefer not to look the truth in the face, skip this book, but if you want a listening experience that you will never ever forget, this is the one.

This book starts out pretty good, gets a little silly but maintains enough of an edge to keep you listening.

This is a pretty good Koontz tale. It gets a little flakey and the ending doesn't really satitisfy but Frick is really cool.

Saylor is always good and this is a good book. He paints excellent pictures of ancient Rome and his take on the important events in Roman history is refreshingly candid. If the book has a draw back it is that it should probably be two books at least. The time span he covers causes him to have to travel lightly over over a lot of the topic.

The pacing on this will make you anxious if you are used to fast paced run and shoot stories. The recording is not bad, and the reader does a good job on his characterizations. However, things were slower back then, a lot slower, a lot slower. Nattie's ruminations on his na'ter and his preachification on just about everything gets you to the point where you may skip a few tracks. But all in all, it is a pretty rousing story, very good scenic imagery and background. I hit a deer while listening to this book in my car so......

Russell Banks is an excellent writer and this book is an excellent listen. It is very well read and the sound/engineering is very good. Banks' characters are drawn with unromatic honesty, sometimes a bit harshly, but that is true to the perceptions of the narrator. This would probably be a good book club selection, lot of fodder for chatter. No one in this book makes a truly human connection with anyone else and in some way that undercuts the horror of the completely benighted mayhem that overtakes them. But the context is good and the pacing in subtle but very effective, you will be moved when he wants you to feel something. Whereas it is a totally engrossing book, I am still stuck on the fact that Hannah never did really want to find her sons.

This one costs me a perfectly good credit on my monthly balance. It is horrible and really annoying. I set myself up. I jumped on the author's name, I didn't read the review or synopsis and I got burned like Wiley Coyote. The characters and plotting are so LAME and the premise is mind bogglingly stupid. The fun in these kinds of novels is that the scenario is implausible but it has a kind of eerie, creepy kind of 'why-not' 'what-if' aspect about it to make your skin crawl. This does not! Circhton has always played with technology and made it interesting because it had a real impact in the drama of the story. This is like an engineering inservice lecture with NO FUN.

I say 'haunting' because it is several weeks since I listened to this book, and the characters still reverberate in my head. The reading is wonderful, it captures the inflection and state of mind of the speaker. The reader is also very versitle and when he switches characters you don't get lost and you begin to actually seen the world through the character's eyes even while you marvel at the shape and strangeness of their world. The world he creates is every bit as articulate as Faulkner's. The big flaw in the book is the whole Kamel Ataturk sequence. After the finely textured lives and lines of the active characters, these passages just go flat. The author is seeking to situate his characters within the larger social context, but sometimes it gets lost. His Koratavok, Polixinee, Memenchik, Philotae, Rustan Bey, Tamarah-hanum and all the others will stay in my mind for a long, long time.