The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta

Rahe's scholarly history of Sparta in the Greek and Persian wars makes for a difficult audiobook, and Bronson Pinchot's narration hinders more than helps the listener. His pace is often a beat too quick for a book so densely detailed, especially where the listener, lacking maps, must visualize the geography. He pauses before most names and technical terms on first mention, reading them with a question in his voice, a distracting practice in a text laden with a bewildering number of such words. His narration has many serviceable passages, but at times he varies intonation in ways that obscure the sense, or he inserts pauses that break the flow, then rushes on, making comprehension more difficult. It's a bumpy reading, often hard to follow. W.M. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine