Bill. Thirdson

Kate Atkinson’s delightful stream of consciousness

Revisado: 12-03-24

Author’s delicious writing voice well interpreted by the supremely agile emotions of a fine narrator.

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Delicious and important

Revisado: 11-15-23

Delightful for those of us who love words and have been enaamored of all that has been written about the greatest autodidact ever, James A. H. Murray, who, as second editor of the OED brought it nearly to completion over thirty years. This is the mostly incomplete but necessary story of the many people in the English speaking world who zealously found words and quotations as crowd sourcers to send to Murray's Oxford Scriptorium. Many were women, some were famous but most were everyday readers. Sone were suffragists. One was Shaw's model for Henry Higgins. Ogilvie brilliantly goes through the alphabet telling stories that she has gleaned from tracing them. Loved it and I honor the work it took her and her students to bring it forth.

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What He Said It Was

Revisado: 10-18-23

Delightful, but not sure I enjoyed the anecdotal choice rather than autobiographical format. Feel like too much left out.

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Genius enjoyed

Revisado: 10-04-23

Loved it, indeed, especially in audio as the voice of this national treasure is the right way to learn all this. I can't improve on the accolades this man with extreme chutzpah (rightly so) read out from his reviews, but if you read this, Mel, knowing you are still actively seeking another huge genre to take apart with comic delight I have an idea for you. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson engage their 1895 contemporary, H. G. Wells to use his Time Machine to go back to 1595 to discover who Shakespeare was fronting for. I have a comic, literary script for you to work from. (WGA regiistered.) Only your genius could make it work and all scholarship would speak of you forever.

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Montaigne's life, thought, and effects

Revisado: 08-25-23

Delightful, perceptive, highly recommended. Bakewell covers the gist of the essays in the understanding of a humanist and makes me long to read (or hear) the essays by the person who created the word 'essay.' (Except, as I have discovered that audio is either 49 or 53 hours long!)

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Fascinating even digressions

Revisado: 07-26-23

As a retired knowledge philanthropist, (a public reference librarian who had amassed a wealth of knowledge and then gave any of it away for the mere asking,) I found this delightful as as Winchester went over ground I had studied and then added his own experienced insights. I will now spend some effort to look into Confucius and Aristotle a bit more thanks to the author's suggestion, but I must admit to doubts about his final suggestion that maybe the AI world would free the mind to seek a wiser, more creative and more virtuous life. Perhaps among those predisposed, but unlikely as genius among any populace. i recently wrote a speculative story about AI taking humans out of all forms of expression as the planet dies out from our hugely bad fossil fuel mistake. This book makes me wonder if I should balance that outlook with the fantasy that there will be an alternate group of humanist brains who do, in fact, find purpose and virtue for enough people to turn things around in time. Thank you, Simon.

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Superb for anyone considering studying movies

Revisado: 06-26-23

Finally finished this fifteen plus hour production by listening a half hour each day on my treadmill walk. I highly recommend that you LISTEN to this read by Tom Hanks and his cast because it is an audio production every bit as passionate as a movie. It tells nearly everything one would need to know about the making of a movie, which in print might become tedious at times, but delivered orally becomes fascinating. (My old Shakespeare professor's quarterly "Friends of Oral English" would approve heartily.) Hanks knows and shares a lot from his own experiences, and as I knew him in the early days it was fun to see him describe young actor experienced ff that I saw him go through back then. The director's partner in this is Rita Wilson, his real wife, and you may recognize at least one other voice from his TV days. The only complaint I have for this is that twice he used the term "wheelchair bound." Please, Tom, and others who fall into that trope, we who use wheelchairs for mobility are not bound to them; we simply use them.

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Worthy, great study

Revisado: 05-14-23

Should be taught in every senior high school and college humanities curriculum. outstanding survey of humanism and superb narration.

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