Marc

The introduction suggests this will be a great book, something that really gets into the dynamics of Lincoln's team-of-rivals cabinet. But the abridgement left little more than a bland recitsation of the facts of Lincoln's election, the civil war, and the assasination. The facts were fine, but I was hoping to get behind the facts, into the heads of the main actors. That did not happen.

This is an amazing debut in the legal thriller genre. Actually, and fortunately, it's more legal than thriller, which means it moves forward based on compelling and believable plot rather than chases, shootouts, etc. The trial process is quite realistic as are all the characters. The prosecutors aren't one-dimensional enemies looking to convict the innocent; they are realistic prosecutors doing a realistic job. Ditto the judge; he's not a hanging judge. He's a judge who wants to get it right as best he can, like so many in real life. The thrill element does exist, but it's not overwhelming. I'm also glad that we;'re not burdened with a lot of boredom about unresolved father issues, as is the case with so many fictional lawyer protagonists.

I don't want to give things way; suffice it to say this is an audio book you will enjoy if you appreciate this genre.

I can see many reasons why people will dislike this book: the author's ethical shadiness, the trite descriptions of so-and-so's loamy loins, etc. But if you give it a chance and really think about what's happening here, you'll find more substance than is apparent. The best parts actually weren;t so much the Wall Street events, but the author's involvement with corporate life, Steve Madden, Inc. I was familiar with the company some years ago form the vantage point of a stcok analyst, and I got some good trades in it. The inside view was fascinating. If you invest in emerging growth companies, these chapters can be quite intriguing.

This book is great!

Some may see it as outdated since the projects where it takes place have been demolished. But the insights it provides into the lives of the urban underclass are substantial and timeless, and told in a very engaging manner.

I enjoyed every moment of this audio. The insight into the restaurant industry was interesting in and of itself and I think the author definitely has a future as a writer. Naturally, in a work like this, he'd talk about himself, in addition to his job. Going in, I expected the self-revelatios to be boring, something I'd have to put up with. I can't say the author's life is anything special. But the way he wrote it is what gives a clue that he has talent. He presented his own mundane issues in such a way as to allow the reader to relate, to empathize. In other words, he made something special ut of the ordinary.

This is a potentially wonderful work that doesn't succeed because of problems inherent in the audio format which hit this work particularly hard. If I were to go into the audio-book publishing business, I would be much more attentive to chapter/section breaks, even if it means departing from the precise way it's done in the written work.

I can tell that the translation and narration here are fine based on the way I'm captivated by the first episode in each of Ovid's "Books." Really. . . this material is absolutely riveting, a wonderful listen. I also notice that by the end of the Book, I'm barely awake and pretty sure I did doze off at points in the interim.

One-hour-plus of un-broken narration does not work, not for Metamorphosis, and probably not for any audio book.

We need meaningful breaks (silence, audio-book music, place markers that would show in an iPod, etc.) after every episode, not after every book. I don't care whether Ovid demarcated it that way. I don't care if ancient audiences heard all-the-way-through oral recitations. These audio-books are geared for modern audiences and if the format is to flourish, publishers need to get out of auto-pilot mode (where they passively mimic written text) and really think about user experience.

It's probably harsh to pin all this on a review of Metamorphosis. I've seen it throughout audio. If I’d have figured out how to articulate it earlier, I'd have wrote this for Iliad, Odyssey or Aneid. But this is the piece where I realized why I wasn't enjoying the work as much as I could have.