Migrations and Cultures

Thomas Sowell warns that history is what happened, not what we WISH had happened. He illustrates this with a painstaking documentary of the migrations of peoples from six cultures, their survival strategies and their contributions to their new homes. The bulk of the book consists of catalogs of facts, dates and statistics--the narrator's problem is to keep things lively without adding an editorial tone to the reading. Barrett Whitener gives a performance that is accurate, but so expressionless that it sounds strangely inhuman and barren. It's the reading a computer voice might give, enunciated to the point of exaggeration ("million" gets three equally accented syllables) and almost perfectly unvarying in rhythm and pitch. S.P. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine