David

Johnson's work is excellent. It is wide ranging, fair and understanding. (Despite an earlier reviewer's statement that this is history according to Ayn Rand and that all Republicans are praised, etc.--well, those claims are outright false. He presents fairly, without bias. It's history, not campaigning.)
The recording performance by Nadia May, however, is not so excellent. She has a particular manner of speaking, with her thick British accent, which causes her to swallow syllables repeatedly--the volume drops to inaudibility after a stressed word, or a word gets shortened to a length that makes it near impossible to hear. If the syllable is a whole word, you will lose the whole word. Sometimes it's as many as three words rushed through with a drop in volume and a clipping of the word or words, and the sense is gone. These things happen again and again in the recording, and I'm actually surprised her producer didn't notice it (unless, perhaps, he or she speaks English in the same way). Also, the bad accents for quotations---Russian, French, German, Slav (but oddly, no attempt to quote Americans with an American accent--I wonder why?)---are kind of funny. However, they do serve the purpose of letting the listener know when a quotation has begun and ended.