Tough read, but very informative

This is the kind of book I would not have been able to *read*, and only a genuine commitment to learn this topic allowed me to *listen* to it all.
This essay is long, full of details and statistics, and is not in a narrative history format for most chapters. If you're looking for an easy read with historical anecdotes and a chronological narrative, this is not your book.
But if you ever wondered why the Holy Roman Empire, despite being potraited as ephimeral in some history books, was so influential throughout a full millenium of Western Europe history, this is your book. At the end of it, you might not be convinced that it wasn't "neither holy, nor roman, nor an empire", but you will not have anymore doubts about the pivotal role it played in shaping the history of Western Europe.

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very informative

This audio book was worth listening (some chapters even two times), because it delivered lots of further useful information (even for a such far advanced hobby historian like me ;-)) and very useful and new points of view. As far as I can see, I would consider its content as created independently and objectively and not tendentiously. Vielen Dank, merci beaucoup! Charlemagne, Iéna, décembre 2019.

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3 Leute fanden das hilfreich

Difficult to follow

The author lays a huge amount of well researched (as far as I can tell) and interessing information before the listener. But with chapter captions only running from 1 to 44 without any hints about the content I found it nearly impossible to follow the audio. The material is ordered according to topics so the narration jumps forth and back in time, making it very difficult to find something like Aridne´s thread.
And Mr. Ryan reads like a school teacher taking a dictation exercise: Very clearly pronounced and ever so boring. My recommendation: Buy a paper edition, because the book is worth reading.

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2 Leute fanden das hilfreich

interesting book, weird German pronunciation

the book is great and the narrator has a good voice and delivery, but his pronunciation of German words is somewhere between disturbing and hilarious.

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16 Leute fanden das hilfreich

Not good

(Audiobook) The speaker is terrible imho. The pronunciation is very artificial. The speaker has no knowledge of German pronunciation at all, either. Which is a pity given the subject. Probably this is not a favourite because this is not a book that was written to be ported to an audiobook format. I have managed to make it to Chapter 3. The book is so far structured in a way that jumps wildly between different time periods and subjects. Definitely more of a scholarly book and not one dedicated to informing a lay reader. There is interesting material here. But it is presented more as a series of conclusions than as the result of an elaborate argument. Few anedocts and the history does not come alive so far. I am thinking of abandoning it and that is a rare ocurrence.

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1 Person fand das hilfreich