Douglas

I picked this up because it was featured on the Audible home page and I had a couple of extra credits. I was looking for something different to listen to when walking the dog and waiting in airports. I had taken advanced math in high school, but, to be honest, I only excelled in the courses due to an excellent teacher (Thank you, Mrs. Claybrook), and then I stopped doing any kind of real algebra, trig, or calculus. At this point in my life, my brain stops working as soon as I hear numbers being tossed around.

However, this book dealt with theory and history rather than functions and numbers. In the end, it was a very entertaining listen; chronicling the development of random theory from probability theory. Living in the Vegas area, I found the passages on gambling very engaging and interesting. I'll grant that the subject matter is not one that everyone will embrace, but this "math" book has changed a few notions of this "non-math" person.

If you have the guts and the drive to be debt free, this book will show you the way.

If you have fears about being uncomfortable, if you have a short attention span, if you can't commit to long term goals, and if you feel obligated to martyrdom because of financial mistakes, you should download something from the fiction category instead.

But if you've had enough of not even being able to live paycheck to paycheck...I double dare you to listen to this book.

There is something old-fashioned and nostalgic about the way this story is told. The pace is not frenetic. The humor is mature, dry at times, and clever. And by the story's end I was left with the feeling that I had just enjoyed a warm afternoon in the company of an dignified older female relative.

This is truly a life-altering book for any artist seriously interested in the craft of storytelling and mythology. It's required reading for my undergraduate and graduate students. But to have Joseph Campbell's masterpiece erratically edited and then read with such an apparent lack of skill is embarrassing.

My first wish is that the well-intentioned producers would have left the text in its original form. The book has been the definitive work regarding how an audience hears a story since 1949; how can cutting entire pages out of the chapters improve on that? My second wish is that the same producers would have hired a STORYTELLER -- one who understood the merits of vocal variation in pitch, pacing, and phrasing -- to read the work.

Please don't let this review stop you from purchasing the book in print.