If you love 'holistic' history, get this!

The first in the staggering and admirable effort of Will Durant.

It is by it's very nature a skimming across the surface of history. But, with the length of the book and it being the first in an eleven-part series, it is a 'detailed skim' if that makes any sense ... it doesn't does it ... oh well, we're sticking with it!

The book is very well written and I found it a joy to listen to from start to finish.

The narrator is great. I ranked him 4 / 5 more because I found him to talk very s l o w l y and found that I had to listen to it at 1.25 x or 1.5 x for it not to be frustrating but that is the only issue.

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A unique perspective

The prose is excellent, I enjoyed the narration - not perfect, but always clear. Eventually the narrator became a somewhat pleasing companion.

Durant has a unique perspective and a subtle sense of irony, he is positive and conveys his genuine enthusiasm for other cultures through the prism of this gentle philosopher's mind.

Towards the end of this volume, he predicts Japan would enter into military conflict with America in 1934. That is, 8 years before Pearl Harbour, this may not surprise everyone but it surprised me. He broadens our knowledge of the events that unfolded up until 1934.

Over and over you see the mistakes and folly of men and (few) women in power. And through it all, the idealists, artists and ordinary folk who strive to survive to make their civilisation succeed.

One thing for the purists, Durant is very generous with his opinions, this is his romanticised story (which is why the word history is not in the title). I loved it.

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Comprehensive Volume on Asian Civilisation

What made the experience of listening to Our Oriental Heritage the most enjoyable?

Robin Field narrated this book brilliantly. Chapters are all out of sync though so I was forced to bookmark every chapter for future reference.

What did you like best about this story?

This book is a masterpiece of succinct comprehensive brevity and chronicles almost 7 millennia of the history of Asian civilisation as Western scholars understood it in the 1930's. This book will leave the reader/listener with knowledge of the oldest known roots of ancient civilisation and a firm understanding of the timeline of all the notable events in civil human development in the Orient from pre-biblical Mesopotamia and Egypt, through to Mughal and British India, as well as Imperial Japan and industrialising China.

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Narration is annoyingly mechanical

An absorbing account of the early stages of history as viewed through western eyes, and a fine prelude to the remaining ten volumes in Will Durant's classic series. We can excuse the sexism built into his idiom ("men" rather than "people", almost every time), and other leanings that strike third-millennium ears as off-key. All authors – Plato, Shakespeare, Woolf – are “of their time” and must be received with that in mind. Durant is in fact revealed as a fair-minded and shrewd critic of all the times that he so meticulously surveys: and of his own, with a scattering of drily humorous asides.

One problem in hearing these texts is an unfortunate reliance on pronouns. We move so swiftly from one person to another that the meaning of “he” sometimes cannot be retrieved, if our attention has been distracted at one critical moment when the subject was first introduced. This does not arise in reading the printed version; we can glance up at the head of a section. More than once I’ve had to wind back and listen again, or pull down the relevant volume from my shelves. A pity, and neither the author’s nor the narrator’s fault. Would it be possible in narration to use the noun itself a little more often, with an explanation at the start that this will happen? Something to think about. Literal fidelity to the printed text may not be the only imperative.

For me the only major problem with this volume is the narration. Clear and well paced, but tediously automatic. Several Audible offerings are like this. I’m thinking especially of Richard Ellmann’s excellent biography of James Joyce: essential but agonising listening. There, as in the present case, there are long stretches of mechanical patterning that has no relation to the content. Wrong words are stressed, and successive sentences are forced into an arc that would be helpful only when it is judiciously applied. The rest of the time it’s wearying. I often have to stop listening and turn elsewhere. Some people are sensitive to that deficiency (as we see from a few earlier reviews of this title), but many listeners seem completely oblivious to it. Do I wish I was untroubled by it? On balance, no! I would be losing too much that I value in myself.

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No chapter names!!!

Not a single chapter or part is named also meaning that there’s no table of contents.

There is no Kindle-Audio deal either which would solve that to a degree.

Disappointing.

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