A great book but some question marks

An excellent book. I didn’t find the narration difficult to follow - it must be quite hard to make a long academic work sound any more exciting than the words allow. The narrator occasionally pronounces words strangely: e.g. the American lootenant instead of the English leftenant for lieutenant. There is an odd paragraph in the second chapter where the narrator smoothly moves in to saying Gibbon glosses over the horrors of slavery and neglects to mention that Christianity was the major force for its destruction in the Roman Empire. I doubt Gibbon wrote that about himself, so what was that, if this is meant to be Gibbon’s work?

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Outstanding work of History

A superb performance of an outstanding work of historical literature and significance. I have listened to it in its entirety.

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Really long but amazing.

Really long but amazing. The understanding that you gain not just of this era but of the wider history of the world and they way it all holds together is second to none.

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3 people found this helpful

Sweeping Story - narration takes some getting used

Where does The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Definitely the longest, by some significant margin.

What other book might you compare The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to, and why?

Nothing to compare this to. Magnificent in scope and ambition - much like the empire itself.

What do you think the narrator could have done better?

American pronunciations from a very British speaker was a bit odd. Narration was a bit slow for me and was actually much more listenable when played at twice normal speed.

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19 people found this helpful

This is fantastic value and brilliantly delivered!

I was taking my time to purchase this due to the reviews about the narration. Such a long book and such a listening commitment would obviously be totally spoiled by poor delivery. I can say that I do not agree with the reviews that say this is poorly narrated. First of all, this is extremely difficult to narrate: the sentences are long, full of the detailed sub-clauses, understated opinion and twists and turns that you'd expect from a book written in the late 1700s. The narrator pulls this off admirably, and has done something that I couldn't do by reading myself: get me beyond the first 5 pages without falling asleep. Since then, I've enjoyed the book enormously, and thank you to Audible for getting me into audio books! A word of warning: Gibbon's work is often called 'magisterial' which is sometimes code wording for 'long and dull'. This is a book of its time, and has none of the quips of Stephen Fry, or the efforts to make things 'alive' of Mary Beard, or any other modern television history. But the scope is amazing: the detail and the groundwork that has gone in are breathtaking. Many of his conclusions are tempered by modern historians, he often takes too much of the writings at face value, without any modernist understanding of context, failing to see propaganda where it is obvious to us today. And the final 'fall' is itself subject to debate about whether or not it happened, or how you can describe the end of the Roman empire as a cataclysm or a gradualistic process of change. Hence many of his conclusions are now challenged as being too unilinear, putting too much emphasis on this or that factor, when the processes involved operated on many inter-connected fronts. But Gibbon is one of the very baselines that modern history starts from, and its worth every penny of the 1 credit charged. I started off trying to concentrate on every word, but now I just let it all wash over me and the experience is calming, relaxing and educational all at once. Enjoy!

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30 people found this helpful

Ruined by faux English accent

Excellent content, but the narrator inexplicably adopted a pompous English accent with some odd pronunciations that spoil the experience for a native English listener. I could not relax into it. Imagine listening to 100 hours of an Englishman trying to sound like an 18th century American.

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Perfect book

Listened to this in the span of around 10 months. Very impressed with the book, definitely one of the greatest and one of my new favourites, now I’ve finally finished it. The narration was good as well, I can see in a lot of the reviews people don’t like it, but for me as long as I can understand I don’t really care. Very good deal, as most places sell this book by the volume or in multiple parts, so considering that I would 100% recommend this book:)

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Worth Listening.

A polished delivery by one of my favourite narrator's. It's Gripping from start to finish

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appalling narrator

I gave it an hour but honestly I could have narrated better than this. I was terribly disappointed. I know I have heard the guy before and somewhere in my vast collection of audiobooks I am sure I will meet him again
amazon must have used him because he was cheap after all it is a vast work. I know it is not always easy to bring academic factual works to life but gibbon is considered an exceptional writer and to destroy him like this is not right.

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Flawed performance of a towering masterpiece.

this sounds suitably grand, and is a marathon performance. But there are serious flaws.
in the early chapters a passage (possibly a footnote from the modern edition?) gets ready as though it was Gibbon's - which is odd, as it refers to Gibbon in the third person.
The accent has idiosyncratic tics which become intrusive and ( to this listener) annoying. the sound 'or' is commonly pronounced 'our'. 'rapine' is pronounced 'rapeen'
more seriously the reader's intonation reveals a misunderstanding of the C18th meaning of certain words. This 'wanted' commonly denotes 'lacked' and not 'desired.'
'sensible' means ' aware of', not 'commendibly reasonable'.

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