Acres of Diamonds

By: Russell H. Conwell

Narrated by: Jason McCoy

Length: 4 hrs and 1 min

Publisher's summary

In Acres of Diamonds, Russell H. Conwell shows us how to identify the riches and opportunity that lie all around us. Many people search their entire life for opportunity never realizing that everything they need to succeed is already within their reach if only they recognized it.

Public Domain (P)2009 BN Publishing

Good Biography, Subpar Narration

Acres of Diamonds is a good, inspiring story about the gentleman who started Temple University. I was, however, largely underwhelmed overall.

The good: it's a good and interesting biography of someone who achieved greatness. It contains a number of classic success principles with accompanying good illustrations of the principles.

The bad: the narration is unbelievably subpar. If I were to recommend the book, I'd recommend paper or hardcover, not the audiobook. The narrator mispronounces numerous words throughout the text. This was very distracting, surprising and disappointing. Some examples: [gratutious] instead of gratuitous (chapter 6), [vaHEEmently] for vehemently, clergymen pronounced with a hard G sound, [passtrate] for pastorate, welded instead of wielded, [uRIZZtocrassy] for aristocracy, [morodd] for myriad and [corderly] for cordially. These are only a few examples. Better narration would help. The book proved useful, though not very memorable or impressive.

Good story, but very hard to listen to

I really enjoyed the "down-to-earth" storytelling of RH Conwell, but this version is hard to listen to.

The narrator, Jason McCoy, has such awkward phrasing and inflection in his voice, it's difficult to determine when a paragraph, story, or sentence begins & ends. In each sentence, he's like an announcer gearing up his voice (tone, volume) for a big announcement, then never getting to the announcement, then gearing up his voice again. Basically, he puts emphasis on the wrong parts of a sentence, which screws up the intention of the sentence, and the listener's experience. It makes the content very hard to follow.

I would strongly recommned "Acres of Diamonds," but NOTHING narrated by Jason McCoy.

Good speech, this 4 hour verison was split

The first chapter is 1.5 hours long, his speech, great speech.

After that each chapter is 10-20 minutes long, the first 1/3 to 1/2 on each chapter is a story of Conwells....after that the rest of the chapter is glorifying his memory/the type of person he was.

I will relisten to the speech, I will not relisten to the other chapters.

Acres of Diamonds: Classic!

The story Acres of Diamonds is a classic one. The biography of Russell Conwell was hard to get through but informative.