Fascinating and timely but oddly narrated

From the perspective of England with it's relatively fixed and long standing borders it can come as a shock to be reminded of how fluid and modern mainland Europe's borders and political institutions are. Red Prince uses the central character of Wilhelm Habsburg to guide the listener through what could otherwise be a confusing or even tedious survey of aristocratic family trees and now-defunct middle European duchys as they collapse and are reformed during the 20th century. This approach succeeds in simultaneously creating a fascinating cast of characters and conveying with a real sense of clarity the workings of the Austro-Hungarian empire and its collapse on being squeezed between the forces of Nazism and Stalinism. This would easily warrant a 4 star review but for the odd narration. The narrator himself has a great voice - very clear and with a nice tone but he reads the book in what begins to sound like very uniform bites of about 4 seconds in duration all of which use exactly the same pattern of intonation. That might not sound too bad but the effect is to make the book sound like it's being intoned rather than narrated. Whole sentences can go by before the reader snaps back to attention, conscious that potentially interesting stuff may have slipped by. This could be down to the producer so apologies to Michael Damon if the "gregorian chant" affect has been imposed in the editing suite. For all of that though this is an interesting and timely book.

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2 people found this helpful

a good book , a good story

very interesting, very good story , performance wasn't great but tolerable , highly recommend

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1 person found this helpful

fine book by snyder

Would you be willing to try another one of Michael Damon’s performances?

For the most part he reads well. However, his pronunciation of French words and place names is really poor. It wouldn't take much to ask someone who speaks French to advise. I was also pulled up short by the pronunciation of Edinburgh as 'Edinburg' and quay as 'kway'.

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2 people found this helpful

wonderful panorama

Wilhelm's life plays out against the sweep of European history between the end of the XIX and mid-XX century that saw the continent completely remodeled at the expense of millions of lives and material damage.
The leading thread is the perennial question how to find peace when national ambitions clash with the reality of historically mixed regions. The Habsburg answer was a multinational state based on cooperation, the idea torn apart by the convulsions of WWI, Nazi racism, and Soviet totalitarianism. Snyder argues that to some extent, the EU has brought back the Habsburg idea. Both projects share a military weakness. Today, in the face of the return of a predatory imperialist Russia, this can be the undoing of the multinational democratic EU project, just as it brought down Austria-Hungary. Snyder shows that the past is not the past, solutions to the problems of nationalism and aggressive Russia have not gone away.
The image of kids playing on the Vasyl Vyshivany square in Kyiv in 2008 makes one think what is happening to them today, 16 years later, in the midst of another Russian attempt to wipe out Ukrainian identity and statehood.
It is a pity that for a book about Central and Eastern Europe, the lector made zero effort to figure out how to pronounce the names from that region (or any non-English names, for that matter). Snyder must be tearing his hair out hearing what has been done to his book, as was I when listening to this atrocious pronunciation.

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Much ado about not very much

What would have made The Red Prince better?

It describes the life of a person whose actual career amounts to very little.In fact he has wholly unrealistic aspirations and can do/does little to accomplish them. His goal is unachieveable. His character is unattractive. There is just not enough substance to him or to his life story to justify a biography.

What will your next listen be?

To Rule the Waves - history of the Royal Navy

How could the performance have been better?

The narration is far from smooth with some very odd pronounciation of foreign place names and words. It adds nothing to the experience.

You didn’t love this book--but did it have any redeeming qualities?

The acquisition of some little known information - but none of it very important.

Any additional comments?

I should have paid more attention to the fact that the title had been rated only 3 star by others. On balance that judgement was generous.

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