I’ve continued to wander away from the blog’s usual genre of thrillers, espionage novels, and murder mysteries. Obviously, my taste in literature has deteriorated, but I’ll give you a short synopsis of what has been catching my interest. A friend who retired from teaching high school English and chose to follow his dream of moving to China where he stayed for 10 years, recommended I listen to From Yao to Mao: 5000 Years of Chinese History by Kennth J. Hammond. This was actually from The Great Courses of which I’ve listened to numerous topics and lectures, but I didn’t realize it wasn’t a book until after I downloaded it. While not nearly as long as American Prometheus, which I recently reviewed, it was still and 18 hour listen.
There’s some good news, but also some bad news about this work. The lectures were intended to present a survey course of Chinese history up until the current time. The good news was that this work accomplished what it was supposed to do. The bad news was that Professor Hammond’s voice was awful. There is a passive quality to his speaking that lacked the authoritative voice that I expected. Additionally, there were many pauses in his speech pattern and he seemed to have intermittent word-finding difficulty. Just because of the vocal presentation, I nearly abandoned this effort on many occasions. However, I wanted the data, so I soldiered on through the entire course, but there is probably a better way to get the information. So, it’s a +/- recommendation, at best.
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