Phillip J. Gaskill

It's an extremely fascinating story. We all know the Darwin narrative, but I didn't know anything about 90% of what's in this wonderful book.

Extremely affected British accent PLUS she turns final "d" into final "t" (I mean, she fairly *spits* those d's), leading to my misunderstanding of several names and terms that had been unfamiliar to me. In fact, believe it or not, this is the sole reason I broke down and bought the Kindle version, so I could figure out what she was saying.

Well, I'm not much of one for glitzy, sexy, cutesy, say-something-so-people-will-buy-the-book titles and/or subtitles. My subtitle for this book would probably just be something like "Darwin's Forerunners" or "Predecessors Who Had Worked Out Most of How Evolution Worked" or some other thing to the point and non-misleading. (Actually, I'd probably choose my first example as the *title,* and my second as the subtitle.) But that's just me, I guess.

The book is WELL worth reading, despite the less-than-ideal narrator.

Absolutely not. He's the worst narrator I've ever heard, in his own unique category. His voice is pleasant and intelligent enough. His German pronunciations are mediocre (for every word that he pronounces perfectly, there's another that he totally mangles). But he's defined his turf by inventing a new way to make spoken sentence structure unclear, ambiguous, and utterly confusing: any time he seemingly (this is the only explanation I can think of) comes to a word at the end of a line that *conceivably* *could* be the end of a sentence, he assumes that it *is* the end of *the current* sentence, even if it makes absolutely no sense in the context of that sentence--and regardless of whether it has *any* punctuation after it. No punctuation = end of sentence. Comma = end of sentence. After an end-of-sentence pause with appropriate inflection, etc., he then continues on with the rest of the sentence (the part that's obviously on the next line) as if it were a sentence on its own, even though it makes absolutely no sense.

This alone makes the book almost totally unlistenable.

Unfortunately, before I started listening to anything, I bought all three books in the series. I assume the same thing is going to happen throughout. And I shall persevere, whether the narration drives me crazy or not (see my comments below about the book itself).

The author, in the preface or introduction to the book, states (I'm paraphrasing) that the book contains pretty basic information, and that if you're at all knowledgable on the topic, you might not learn anything new. I wish to disagree: I know something about the topic, and yet I find the book to be *very* educational, interesting, instructive, and the like. I think he's selling himself short. Audible just needs to find a better narrator for him.