A World on Fire

Amanda Foreman's account of the uneasy relationship between the United States and Great Britain before and during the Civil War is exhaustive but far from exhausting, detailed without being tedious. It takes a solid reader to carry off a work that runs this long, and Robertson Dean is up to the task. He eschews histrionics, which would become tiresome quickly, but his tone has the right note of gravity. He gives just a hint of a British accent to directly quoted material by Englishmen. He also changes his pitch slightly--but without a cartoonish quality--when quoting women. His easy tone carries listeners along, even through the potentially tedious discussions of British Foreign Office politics. R.C.G. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine