Icons of the Iron Age: The Celts in History

There is so much speculation and hyperbole about the Celts and Celtic culture that it's difficult to separate fact from fantasy. Susan Johnston does away with the nonsense and delivers lectures that are at once scholarly and approachable.

The professor does not present anything as fact that isn't well-researched and documented, and she regularly cautions her listeners not to make assumptions based on limited information. In that regard, she serves her students well.

I admit that I was thrown by the good doctor's frequent "uhs" and "ums" for a while, but by the third lecture I found myself looking forward to them. Her sense of humor, deep knowledge and unpretentious style brings to mind some of my favorite professors.

Thank you, Dr. Johnston, for an enlightening and enjoyable lecture series. I look forward to many more.

This was a good listen - very interesting. The narration is presented in lecture style - in fact parts of it may well be recorded while the professor is in class.

Prof Johnston is obviously well educated on the subject and presents a lot of information well. The only negative I have is that her speaking could be a little smoother. There are a lot of 'ums' which probably go mostly unnoticed in a class lecture but somehow stand out a lot in an audiobook. And toward the end of the book it seemed like she realized she had a lot more material to cover and was running out of time.

But over all if you're interested in Celtic history this was a very good listen, not dry or boring, with many insights from someone who's spent a lot of time analyzing the facts.

Highly recommend.

Ignoring the umm's and uh's that occur in every sentence there is some pretty good knowledge in here, like most of the modern scholar books it's very insightful, and interesting. I recommend this.

Unless that is you cant stand people saying umm... Uhh... every other word

This gave me a lot of solid info to combat some of the bad Wiccan history floating around out there. My only problem with this recording is that Johnston says, "um" to the point where it is distracting, thus the one star removed.

While the subject itself was interesting, the presentation was painfully bad. Every sentence had at least one "um" or "uh" cluttering it up, and most had several- some to the point that you couldn't follow the train of thought from beginning to end. There was also the problem that whenever she calculated timespans from B.C.E. into C.E. her math was wrong which is not only annoying but makes one wonder if there were other less obvious errors in her material as well. Over all, I would not recommend this particular lecture. To anyone.

This was a series of lectures and not a novel. Overall, I enjoyed it, but it did get very slow and repetitive in parts. I'd get it again.