Unabridged Audiobook
What. is. wrong WITH the .......narration of such an inseresting subject....... ?
Stephen Kinzer has done an amazing job uncovering and synthesizing information about Sidney Gottlieb and the role of the CIA in a number of unethical experiments in pursuit of mind control drugs and techniques. I was turned on to this book after hearing Kinzer interviewed on Fresh Air and later Open Source. I would recommend tracking down those interviews if you want a nice 30-45 minute summation of the book's key findings. I’m now a third of the way through the audiobook and so a full review of the book is premature. My biggest gripe, which may kill my interest in listening to the full 12 hours, is the narrator’s interpretation of different voices quoted in the book. Most annoying of all is the voice of Gottlieb, a painful attempt to emulate someone who is struggling through a speech impediment. It is true that Gottlieb was a lifelong stutterer but Linkin’s attempt to weave a stutterer’s voice into the narrative is very distracting. Other key characters in the book he inconsistently gives them different voices, sometimes sounding like a bad parody of an announcer in a WWII propaganda movie. I think this audiobook would be much better without the attempted dramatization of character voices.
Great story. But the narrator inflicts a stutter into the protagonists dialogue. The story indicates he had a “slight speech impediment” but the written book gives no such distinctive stammer to his dialogue. The narration is contrived and annoying... and likely just wrong. Enjoy the book... skip the audio.
I found the book very thorough and interesting. It compounded to my distaste for what has gone on with unchecked authority.
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