Pete Millwood
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River Town
- Two Years on the Yangtze
- By: Peter Hessler
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 14 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 50
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 36
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 37
In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Absorbing book ruined by narrator
- By Pete Millwood on 13-06-12
- River Town
- Two Years on the Yangtze
- By: Peter Hessler
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
Absorbing book ruined by narrator
Reviewed: 13-06-12
This is an engrossing, accessible but nonetheless perspicacious book, one of several on China written by Hessler. However, this recording is ruined by the narrator's lack of knowledge of the Chinese language. Although in English, the book includes references to many Chinese terms and sayings which are hopelessly mispronounced by Peter Berkrot. To anyone with even a superficial knowledge of how Chinese should sound, this is distracting and detracting. This may not be a problem for those with absolutely no knowledge of Chinese (Berkrot cannot even pronounce the most fundamental and basic of words), although it would nonetheless give such listeners a false impression of how Chinese is supposed to sound. While it is understandable that it would have been difficult to get a narrator who also spoke fluent Mandarin, it surely could not have been that difficult to find someone who had at least some familiarity with the language. A shame.
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