Ukrainian History: 2 Books In 1
Kievan Rus, Cossacks, The Ukraine Revolution & Chernobyl

I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, this is a fountain of useful, detailed information. That's a good thing, right? I would even like to have a print copy of the text for closer study. But I'm decidedly less impressed, or maybe perplexed, by the narration. The tone and timbre reminds me of Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey. Not unpleasant, mind you, but sort of monotone, a quality that can cause one to sort of drift off and lose track. I could probably deal with this if the narrator didn't also have an unusual cadence and habit of mispronunciation. The author often has odd pauses or, conversely, no pause where one should be. Aurally, pauses equate to punctuation, so here I often found myself struggling to figure out when one sentence or phrase ended and another began. When I say mispronunciation, let me note that I know people might pronounce some words differently than I, but I expect them to be consistently pronounced the same way. Here, the narrator had different ways to pronounce the same word, which made it difficult to follow, especially when referencing people or place names. For example, sometimes I noticed the narrator pronounced Berlin as one usually hears it, with the stress on the second syllable. Elsewhere, however, the word was pronounced unexpectedly with the emphasis on the first syllable. I'm accustomed to listening to non-native speakers of English who might pronounce words differently than I, but, again, they are consistent. Another disconcerting habit was when the narrator would drop a word. I would hear a sentence where, for example, an article like 'a', 'an', or 'the' was omitted, which distracted from the content flow. Still, this is a topic about which I am very interested, and as noted, there is a lot of good information. I hope my criticism will be taken constructively.