Atrocious narration

The book seems great, but it’s impossible to follow a reader who pays no attention to punctuation and seems to never breath. He just powers through the whole thing, from the first syllable in the book, to the last. I would recommend you buy the book and forget the audio edition.

9 people found this helpful

Good ideas, terrible narration

It's like the narrator ignored all punctuation! there are some complex ideas described, and lots of important players, but the narrator just bulldozes over everything in a hurry. Pro tip: set your app to 0.95 or 0.9 reading speed so at least you can follow it - yes, make it go slower than usual! The book itself is Lachman's usual sweeping story of ideas on the need for an intuitive and creative thinking to match our rational and linear one. The author flows easily from Plato to Heidegger and spending time with poets, most notably Kathleen Raine.

5 people found this helpful

A deep book with that got screwed by the narration

The problem with this audiobook is not the book itself. It's not even really the narrator's fault. The true culprit here is whoever edited the recordings. I've done some audiobook narration, and what it sounds like to me is that all of the natural breaths between words, sentences, and paragraphs have been edited out, post-recording. No human reads the way the narrator does here -- nonstop, no breathing -- so I don't believe Leslie James did that. If I had to guess, I'd say whoever got the finished tapes to edit was instructed to bring this audiobook in at under 5 hours, no excuses. To accomplish that, the sound editor not only clipped out the spaces between words, but also sped the recording up. I made it through Lost Knowledge of the Imagination by playing it at 85% speed in the Audible app. It still wasn't completely natural because the breaths stayed gone. But it was at least intelligible. LKotI is a fascinating, if short, book. Lachlan is a talented and experienced writer in these topics. Neither he nor Leslie James deserved this treatment from the publisher.

3 people found this helpful

I Highly Recommend This Book (but not the audio version)

Yet another brilliant work of scholarship from the extremely prolific writer of philosophy and esoterica, Gary Lachman. I own quite a large collection of his many many works (as of this writing only two are available in audio format) and this is one of his best studies yet. This review however is less about the book, which is quite brilliant as I said, and more about it's narration. It is greatly underserved with a quite poor job of narration. I am sure Gary Lachman is aware of this; I hope it won't discourage him from making more of his works available on Audible. It is safe to say he very likely had no input regarding the choice of narration. His other audiobook on Audible entitled "Dark Star Rising" is also very good AND it has a perfectly fine narration. Yet, "The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination" is in many ways the better book; you'd never know it though because the narration is so poor. In short, I know that in the world of book publishing writers often have little (sometimes zero) control over such things as cover design and often even the book title itself. Still, publishers generally do a pretty good job at those details. Now, in the age of the audiobook, publishers must work more closely than ever -- with the author -- to find the right person to read books aloud.

1 person found this helpful

Enlightening content. We'll researched! Just what I was looking for on the topic. Didn't enjoy the narrator unfortunately.

1 person found this helpful

Ridiculous reading

First, I will say that I've loved every book I've obtained by Gary Lachman, beginning with "A Secret History of Consciousness." He shares his broad knowledge of esoteric and occult history, placing each step and individual in the context of general history and and the various streams of philosophical and spiritual inquiry. I'm familiar with much of what he has to say in his books, but I love how he connects the dots and fits it all together. I had been looking forward to beginning this book, and perhaps I should have read these reviews before hand, though I probably would have bought the book anyway.

The narrator is one of the worst I've ever heard. Each chapter seems to be one long sentence, and I even began to wonder if the book was being read by a computer. The material is all there, but it is nearly impossible to absorb the full meaning behind the words being read. On the plus side, in contrast to the reader of Lachman's "Politics and the Occult," Leslie James did generally pronounce names and terms correctly and consistently. It's a shame that this reading spoiled such a fine text.

Wow

mind expanding and mind blowing. Really deep and philosophical. A good deal of it went over my head and will require further study. Definitely want to get a hard copy of this to be able to devote more attention to it and reread at least once in the future. Narrator wasn’t the best but didn’t ruin it either.

Excellent Overview

I've been studying most of the people mentioned in this book and if provideds an excellent overview of them all and this mostly forgotten line of thinking. These intellectuals deserve more attention and should be emphasized above the materialists thinkers that the educational system currently promotes.

amazing journey through history. buckle up!

I needed to take a break a few times because it is so packed. I especially like chapter 4 and 5 discussing liminality,.

one long sentence.

loved the information, really struggled with the narrator. The book felt like one long sentence. It would be much more enjoyable if the narrator paused and took a breath between sentences.