Marcus

I have listened to many of Deaver Brown's other audio books about startups and entrepreneurship, so I was a little surprised to see him branching out to topics like religion. I generally like the conversational style that he uses for most of his audio books, instead of reading word-for-word from an actual book. Since this one was only $1.95, I figured I would give it a shot... at least it might be entertaining. I was pleasantly surprised that he didn't have an obvious bias when presenting the material. It is definitely a very brief summary of a wide variety of religions, but I found it to be a useful high-level refresher. It has been 20 years since I took a formal comparative religion class, so I can't really vouch for the accuracy of the material. Nothing was obviously wrong to me, but that might not be saying much since I'm not a religious expert. Anyway, if you like Deaver Brown's style, you may enjoy this book like I did. If you're primarily looking for a good book about comparative religions, I would probably recommend finding another more in-depth book or possibly some other reputable online resources.

Definitely geared towards people considering entering an MBA program (since there is a decent amount of info about the application and admission process), and not quite as great for people who want a sampling or refresher of MBA material. I believe that there are other books better suited for that.

One really annoying thing while listening was the number of audio editing issues. There were many occasions where the narrator made a mistake and then repeated his whole sentence assuming it would be corrected during audio editing, but they never were. Apparently no one proof-listened to this production before releasing it. That kind of carelessness is hard to believe (especially for an audio book that retails for $40!). If you can ignore it, then it doesn't really affect the material. I definitely found it annoying and embarrassing though.

After listening to Twain's more well-known books recently, this one was a little different. It's fairly short, but packed with his style of humor, and likely some of his political views of the time come through as well. It was very enjoyable and laugh-out-loud funny at times too. The performance is decent too.

Very useful tactical information for forming and operating a startup business. I normally listen to most books at 2-3x speed, but since there is so much info in this one I couldn't quite absorb it all at the highest speed. Granted, it doesn't cover everything that you need to know, but it went deeper than I expected in several areas, and it contained a lot of useful info (mostly in the finance/tax sections) that I didn't run across yet in other startup books. The only annoying thing about this audio book is the audio production. They added different sound effects, and a second "narrator" to introduce sections or pose setup questions. The primary narrator (who is one of the authors) did a very good job, and these added embellishments felt out of place and amateurish. Hence the 3-star rating for the "performance".

Good advice on several different areas for starting and running a business from someone who has quite a bit of first-hand experience.

Sedate, moist, and ??? The narration can put you to sleep or annoy you (make sure you listen to the sample before deciding to buy the book), since he has a pretty sedate speaking style, and it sounds like he has too much saliva in his mouth while narrating. The only way I could tolerate it without being distracted was to listen at a pretty high speed (2-3x setting on Android), which solved both concerns for me.

The chapter on sales techniques was particularly useful and interesting to me. That seems to be one of his clear areas of strength from many years of direct experience. He presents a number of techniques for handling a pretty wide variety of sales situations.

Overall, I recommend the book for anyone considering starting a company, and even for those who are already working in an established company, since some of the advice is not only for start-ups. I felt that some of the advice seems a little "old-school" and also contradicts some guidance from other more modern start-up audio book authors that I recently experienced.