Three star review, originally posted here on November 20th, 2024.
I’m usually a pretty big Larson fan. When I heard he had a new book, and that it was about Fort Sumter and the start of Civil War, I was absolutely stoked. I love a good Civil War book, I’ve visited Fort Sumter, and I was confident that Larson would do the tale justice. I jumped on the book the second it was available from Audible, queued it up ready to click the purchase button, and then… oh crap.
The audiobook is narrated by Will Patton. Shit.
I can’t explain why this is, but for whatever reason, Patton’s narration just doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t make sense- there’s nothing wrong with his narration! But by some crazy coincidence, Patton ends up being the narrator on like every other book I want to listen to. I am, apparently, the target audience for whatever kinds of books the publishing industry thinks appeal to lovers of Patton’s voice. But somehow he never pulls me in (I don’t know why!?!?!), and it’s ruining books for me. So when I saw Patton’s name on the book, I hesitated. I decided to wait until I could read the hard copy of the book instead, even though I knew it would be a long wait (my hard-copy to-read list is super long and I move through it very slowly.) But then, a couple months later, I completely forgot about the Patton narration and bought the audiobook anyway. DOH!
Look, I’m not blaming Will Patton. He is a talented guy. He did nothing wrong. But, yet again, I just couldn’t listen to his narration. It just didn’t match the text in my head. Yes, Larson is known for narrative non-fiction that reads like a novel, but still, I felt like Patton was reading it too much like a novel. I needed a more scholarly voice here, even if that voice is a little rigid and non-expressive.
So, basically, I just never got into this one. Like, at all. I was constantly losing focus and just waiting for it to be over. But was it all Patton’s narration? I don’t think so. I think the storytelling itself wasn’t Larson’s best. One big problem I had was that I couldn’t keep track of the various characters. I couldn’t even remember who was on which side, let alone who the specific people were. That’s especially true for the people at the actual fort.
But hey, look, this is a neutral 3 star review, not a bad review! Though overall I wasn’t that into it, there were still certain storylines and moments that I found fascinating. That’s especially true towards the beginning of the book, when Larson paints a picture of the southern “chivalry” and all the super evil douchebags who championed it. These were some evil fucking bastards! Larson doesn’t hold any punches pointing out how shitty they were, and it was great. I also enjoyed some of the stories about Lincoln’s travels from home to DC, including a weird little story about getting mad at his son for going out to party when he was supposed to be guarding a briefcase with Lincoln’s speech in it. These human anecdotes are the exact elements I tend to love in Larson books. I just wish there had been more of them in this book, and that I had taken the effort to read it myself instead of having Will Patton read it to me.
Helga without the H 