Loses its sense of narrative under far too much detail

Incredibly comprehensive - too comprehensive. The author clearly knows a huge amount, but his efforts to include everything, even really minor events decades before the war that had very little or no effect on the actual conflict, makes this a dreary, dull, confused read.

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Superb!

Wonderfully detailed account of this great tragedy. A war with few winners and many losers. A lesson to all yet to be learned.

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Awful narration

As others have pointed out, the narration is so bad it hurts to listen to it. so many names are mangled.

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1 person found this helpful

Good narration, but I want ***MAPS***

But for a few inevitable slips with pronunciation, the narrator's reading is very good, but i realised after a couple of hours that i really want to be looking at maps sometimes while I'm listening. Some books come with an accompanying PDF, and this is an obvious case where that would be very helpful. I don't need pictures of the main characters involved (which i would expect to find in the book), as i can just google for those, but MAPS i do need.

Anyway, the writing is good and the narration is good. Obviously i wouldn't have bought this book if i thought that the subject was completely dry and boring, but then again some would say so! The way it's narrated - trust me - it doesn't feel like that.

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2 people found this helpful

Exhaustive history, slightly eccentric narrator

First of all, this is about as comprehensive a history of the 30 years war as you’re going to get. It starts in the 1500s, and you have to accept the war doesn’t actually start until 1/3 of the way in, or 11 hours. That’s quite a long preamble. The author clearly knows his stuff, my only reservations being (a) the sheer amount of detail, and (b) the constant criticism of other historians for interpreting things wrong.

The choice of narrator was interesting, with a whimsical delivery perhaps more suited to pg Wodehouse than a bloody war, and his pronunciations verged on the eccentric - “papal” to rhyme with “apple”, and many more.

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So badly read it is painful to listen to

The book seems good from what I have heard so far, but the reader is so inept that I will find it very difficult to carry on. In a book full of references to popes he pronounces ‘papal’ as ‘papple’; in a book with hundreds of German place names and personal names he mispronounces every one except Berlin, notably giving a final stress to Lübeck and Passau; and in the early parts of the book he pronounces ‘the’ as ‘thee’ even when before a consonant.

A few solecisms can be forgiven, but when every sentence is full of grating errors the discordant delivery becomes too distracting to allow me to follow the meaning.

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Great historical explanation of a complex subject

Finally made sense of the thirty years war after reading this book. Interesting how it links to modern day European politics

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Excellent book spoiled by erratic pronunciation

This is an excellent book but, for a listener, the reader can be very distracting:
They had a British accent that seemed to come from every corner of U.K., but with American pronunciation. It sounded odd: ‘Markey’ instead of Marquis, Lootenant, rout instead of route, but many other examples.
An American voice is fine, especially for a U.S. audience, but what is the intention here?
The reader seemed to have little idea of German/French pronunciation. That doesn’t matter much so long as it is consistent. It wasn’t, sometimes 3 variations in about 3 minutes. Unfortunately the listener has to try to work out what place or person is being referred to. Thus there is Mainz, Maynz, Mance; Nantes, Nantezz; Wallenstein, Wallensteen; Celle, Sell, Chelly; Kries, Crease; Augsburg, Orgsburg; and endless variations on Lorraine.
Just a few of the distractions.

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3 people found this helpful

Authoritative but too detailed for an audiobook.

If you know your European history and geography well then you should have no trouble listening to this book. It contains a great deal of detail and you need to have a firm understanding of the kingdoms and principalities of the time to fully understand the story. Nevertheless, despite my poor sense of European geography, I did learn a lot from this book and rather like a poor teacher, it made be go and read up more (mainly from Wikipedia) to understand what was going on. The author's understanding of the subject matter is excellent and the narrator was very good, never letting up on how tedious it must have been reading it. The book would have benefited by having less detail and more synthesis and summary.

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A fine work ruined by the narrator

This is a fine piece of historical research, offering lots of insight into the events leading to the 30 Years War, the major events during the war itself and the results and consequences of the war. However the audio book was ruined for me by the narrator. His pronunciation of both people's names and place names was inconsistent and frequently incorrect, which left me left me frustrated and prevented me from concentrating on the subject matter. Knowing that much of the activity in the 30 Years War took place in the Germanic parts of Europe, why did the producers of this audiobook not choose a narrator who could pronounce German names correctly? His pronunciation of non-Germanic names was not much better! Such a shame.

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3 people found this helpful