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Good story. Terrible narration.

Reviewed: 09-03-23

Read this one rather than listen - trust me. The author reads in such a flat monotone that I found my mind wandering.. Too bad. His story deserves better treatment. Publishers need to start coaching narrators. Especially if they are reading their own work.

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Not your garden variety self-help book.

Reviewed: 08-09-23

This book merits a long and thoughtful review. Which I may do at some point. But for now here's my TL/DR: If you are looking for a pure self-help book Dale Carnegies "How to Win Friends" coupled with Stephen Covey's "7 Habits" are better choices.

This is not your typical "self-help" book full of quick fixes. Peterson wants you to take a very hard look at yourself and your choices and to ultimately decide what would give your life meaning. And unlike a lot of self-help books it is not chipper and overly optimistic and full of "can-do" positive thinking.

Peterson is more reminiscent of a tent revival "fire and brimstone" preacher in some respects. He leaves you with a very stark choice: improve yourself and contribute to the betterment of the world or don't and contribute to the slide into chaos, darkness and evil.

In that regard you may find some of the chapters to be more gut-wrenching than inspiring but perhaps that is necessary for some of us.

Peterson has rocketed to fame as of late (just google Jordan Peterson Channel 4 Interview) and as such has a near equal set of supporters (some of whom border dangerously close to cultish acolytes) and detractors (who seem to wilfully misinterpret and bend his words).

It is hard to cut through all of that and read his book objectively, but you should.

Here's a clinical psychologist and university professor distilling years of what he has seen in both his practice and in the research about what makes us truly tick. In many ways I would consider this book a primer for those who want to enter therapy because some of the issues he raises aren't easily handled on one's own.

I would liken it to a psychedelic trip - you really need a good guide. So my recommendation is to listen to it. Think about it and then find a good therapist's couch to lie on and talk about it.

Oh and one more thing - if you don't like long dissertations on biblical stories and Jungian myth interpretation you may find some of this a hard slog. Oh and Dr. Petersen narrates this one and depending on your taste his voice might not be your cup of tea.

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Doesn't live up to the hype.

Reviewed: 07-27-23

In certain circles there is quite a bit of hype about this book - or more specifically the theory it espouses. I am just over halfway and it seems to me that a lot of the enthusiasts who push this book haven't read it.

I'm not a linguist nor do I play one on TV so I cannot challenge the author's theory. And I stress this is merely a theory (a rather titillating one but a theory nonetheless) that makes far too many assumptions based on how words are adopted into different languages.

The narration is excruciating. It sounds like a bored British Civil Servant reading a dry economics report. I find myself unable pay attention for long stretches only to find that I didn't really miss anything. Just another long list of sumerian words that really mean penis.

And wow those Sumerians were sure obsessed with the penis.

Look, I don't want to demean the work of a noted (and now dead) scholar who seemed to be really excellent at deciphering dead languages. It's just that there seems to be too much of a leap of logic here.

We used to be told that we shouldn't take the Bible literally.. now we are supposed to believe it's full of hidden dick jokes??

I am going to return this one. I might read the actual book format because I don't feel I have given it a fair chance but for now I am going to shelve this one under the category "life's too short to listen to bad audio books.

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2 people found this helpful

A tough listen these guys were worse than I knew.

Reviewed: 04-11-23

I thought I knew a lot about the lake-ng murders. Specifically, two "survivalist type" nutjobs kidnapped a bunch of women to make into slaves and then murdered them. Lake takes cyanide, ng flees to Calgary yada yada yada... death row.

Turns out there is a lot more to this story. Particularly just how strange these two were and just how many people they killed particularly how many men (which is unusual for serial killers who tend to be very focused on one sex).
I can't say I'm more enriched by knowing all the gory details of Lake's murder spree but then again I suppose one doesn't delve into true crime for uplifting messages.

The one critique I have of the book is far too much time spent on the minutiae of Ng's court case. Do we really need to know what outfit the DA wore on each day? That whole section of the book could do with some serious pruning. It made it a struggle to finish.
The narrator (Charles Constant) does an excellent job but he really, really needs to learn how to pronounce Saskatchewan.... it's not that hard. Has he never met a single Canadian?

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1 person found this helpful

A tragic history largely ignored...

Reviewed: 12-13-22

I'd read this book some years ago and was happy to have chance to listen to it via audio format. It is at once a highly informative and well researched book bringing to light a horrendous series of wars that swept the Congo and most of its neighbours in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide.

It's an incredibly dense book in some ways and it can be overwhelming at times. Particularly when the examples of the waves sadistic and senseless violence are continually piled up to the extent that you begin to wonder just how do human beings become so savage towards their fellow man....

For those who are new to the history of the Congo this is a decent place to start. Although a better first read/listen would be King Leopold's' Ghost which outlines the history of the Congo under the rule of the Belgian king and helps set the stage (somewhat) for the Congo of today.

The narration is ok but not great. Mike Chamberlain has a terse and somewhat monotone style that gives the feel of a military officer delivering an after-action report to headquarters. Fine for a 20 minute presentation. Not so good for a 15 hour book. That made the book a bit of a slog for me - and as mentioned I've already read the book before as well as some others about the Congo...

In either audiobook or print format I would listen to or read the last chapter first. It gives a very nice summary and will help frame the entire book for you.

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Misleading title - still informative but....

Reviewed: 06-24-20

A lot of people have made similar comments but I will echo some of them here as well. If you want to learn about the different tribes of North America - what were there cultures, how did they organize, was it true they were matriarchal socieiteis? How did the European contact help some tribes at the expense of others?
What's the difference between an Apache and a Comanche? Did all Indians live in Tipis? Why were some tribes "fiercer" than others and feared by other natives?
What about mating rituals?

Sadly you won't learn much of that here or if you do it will be in passing. This course should rightly be titled "the experiences of Indian tribes with the US government and how they were f***ed" over continuously"

Most people unless you are living under a rock already know that first nations people suffered tremendously from contact with Europeans and the subsequent westward movement of these "settlers" who often moved quicker than government bureaucracy could keep up with and we are left with a legacy of broken treaties, disease, and warfare which the Native Peoples ultimately lost.

But if you are like me and have been fascinated with Indians since you were little you won't learn anything about their rich cultural history here. and as others have pointed out, North America for this course is exclusively the continental US with scant mention of Canada and Mexico and appallingly ZERO attention paid to the Innu and Inuit of the far North..

It's rather like wanting to learn about the Jewish people but instead getting a lesson in only the pogroms and the holocaust...

Add to that the professor is clearly reading from a text and doing it very poorly and he sounds like the annoying social worker from King of the Hill (Anthony Page).

I will admit that the latter part of the course which dealt with the experiences of natives in the 20th century to be interesting because it was an area I was completely unfamiliar with so I did learn somethings from the course.
Also it is worth noting that even though I knew that Indians had fared badly over the course of the past 300 years in some cases I didn't know how badly (case in point the Indian tribes of California).
I'm not saying you should avoid this course - just go into it with your eyes open.

And if you are interested in specific tribes there are plenty of good books out there like
"Empire of the Summer Moon" (Comanche)
"9 Years Among the Indians" (Apache and Comanche)
"The Heart of Everything there is" (Sioux)
to name a few....

And even another Great Course (American West history myths and legends) has much better information about Indian tribes in just two lectures (Trail of Tears, Struggles of the Plains Indians) on those specific tribes than this entire course.

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3 people found this helpful

A good slogan stretched into a book....

Reviewed: 11-26-18

The title of the book is quite inspiring. "The Last Arrow - save nothing for the next life" great advice. You and I should give our all to this life.

However I couldn't get through this one because the author's voice/tone sounds like he is on the verge of a nervous breakdown or about to burst into tears at every sentence. Oh and he is pretty vague about how one should go about using all our "arrows" other than the fact that we should definitely use them (somehow).

I might be selling the book and the author short because it has loads of ecstatic reviews but for an audio book my first criterion is that it be at least listenable.

This one wasn't. AT ALL.

Will be returning.

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6 people found this helpful

Pseudo science posing as science.

Reviewed: 11-26-18

Could not finish this book. My guard went up immediately when early on the author claims that Quantum Theory invalidated Newtonian physics. That is 100% BS. Quantum mechanics describes the behavior of particles at the sub atomic level. But for anything larger than that Newtonian Physics still applies.

He claims that because of "collapse of wave function due to observation" phenomenon we can control matter beyond the sub-atomic level. And that you only have to focus your mind (and think happy thoughts while doing it).

That this means you can manifest a new car by thinking about it is a little preposterous if you ask me.

Oh and if you think that this is a new "method" for attracting positive change in your life, it's pretty much a rip off of Wallace Wattles "The Science of Getting Rich" which pretty much made the same claims - that you could attract what you wanted out of life by tapping into the "energy' of the universe. Somehow when Wattles described it, it seemed less crazy and more practical.

Sorry audible I'll be returning this one.

I suppose if you want a basic introduction to Quantum Theory his summary of it is actually pretty good for a lay person. But it's hardly worth buying the whole book for.

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3 people found this helpful

High level but somewhat dry introduction

Reviewed: 07-20-17

High level but somewhat dry introduction to the various thinkers/philosophers that are collected under the banner of Existentialism.

There is a lot to cover in this course so in a way you can't blame the author for having to cover a lot of ground in a relatively short period of time.

I came away with less of an understanding of "existentialism" and more of a smattering of knowledge of what ideas people like Sartre., Camus, Kant and (of course) Nietzsche had.

It was hard for me to draw a common thread between all of these disparate individuals but then again I am completely new to modern philosophical thought.

This is a course that (for me) bears repeated listening and perhaps a read through the provided material that accompanies it.

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4 people found this helpful

We all have a little viking blood in us

Reviewed: 04-30-17

Would you listen to The Vikings again? Why?

Have listened to it three times already, so yes.

What other book might you compare The Vikings to and why?

Pairs nicely with the Great Courses Trilogy on the Middle ages (High Middle and Early)

What does Professor Kenneth W. Harl bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

He sounds like he is giving a lecture without notes so you really feel like you are sitting in a class room. Not listening to someone read from a script.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Sure but it is too long for that!`

Any additional comments?

This is not just focused on the viking raids but on more on a broader history of Scandinavia with a focus on what would be called the "viking era" so it is not just a recounting of the bloodiest and goriest bits of the Viking world (which we all think of when we think of Vikings).

From Ireland to France to Sicily and Russia even as far as Newfoundland (which the Professor mispronounces continually) the vikings left their mark so we might all have just a little viking blood in us.

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