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The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill
- Narrated by: Noah Waterman
- Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins
- Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Historical
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Summary
Superb in its dispassionate objectivity, the Autobiography stands as a work of enduring relevance and a final testament to a rare and luminous intelligence.
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What listeners say about The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill
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- Dan Hall
- 03-07-17
Unbelievable fault
It is amazing to me that this wasn't proofed properly. There are a few little elisions that skip over small amounts of the text, which for the most part are forgivable little annoyances. But one of them skips over Mill's description of what got him out of his depression, which is probably the most important biographical moment in the entire book. It skips so much of this passage that the listener has no idea whatsoever what triggered his recovery and no specific reference is made to what it was again in the text.
It's a shame, because the only other fault with this book is the pronunciation of Edinburgh as 'Ed-in-burg' rather than 'Ed-in-bruh', which again is just a little bit annoying at first but really gets your goat when the 'Edinburgh Review' is mentioned frequently in later chapters. The narrator is clearly North American so you can't fault him for not knowing how to pronounce the UK's weird place names, but when it's in the name of the main organ that Mill published his work in you do wonder why no one took the time to even check how it should be pronounced.
I'd urge you to get another edition of this.
4 people found this helpful
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- Jacquelyn
- 29-04-11
Fascinating childhood education
I found the audiobook very interesting, but I was already a fan of John Stuart Mill. Anyone who is curious about the intellectual aspects of John Stuart Mill's life will find this book very satisfying. I found it particularly fascinating to hear about his extraordinary unorthodox home education, as well as his views on education overall. Since John Stuart Mill would have had a British accent, I would have preferred a British narrator. Nevertheless, the American narrator did a great job speaking so quickly as to keep the pace at a rate which made listening very easy. JSM did not have a dramatic, adventurous, swashbuckling life, but that is part of his charm; he was a fantastic thinker, a brilliant mind. I loved the book. I gained valuable insights into the man.
4 people found this helpful
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- Benjamin Moodie
- 27-03-20
Argh! Missing a fragment at the climax!
I have been listening to this autobiography with intense pleasure. (Let it be said that I am a huge admirer of John Stuart Mill and unusually historically knowledgeable, and so likely to be more inclined toward the book than most.) Like all of his mature work, this book is, without being in the least pretentious or vain, a virtuoso exhibition of intelligence and sympathy of the highest degree. Here's the kicker, though. Right at the climax of the autobiography, where Mill is in a suicidal depression, and a chance encounter with a particular book breaks through his despair, the recording skips a chunk of text, and we hear nothing about the actual turnaround! WTAF!! I resorted to the free text at the wonderful (though, to me, ideologically quite uncongenial) online Library of Liberty to figure out what had happened. (It was worth it, because the accounts of this episode I had encountered elsewhere turn out to be wrong in their detail!) Anyway, I hope this inexcusable lacuna in the recording is amended in a revised edition published as soon as possible.
2 people found this helpful
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- Chloe
- 15-06-18
Couldn’t get past the first two hours
Unlistenable. So so boring. the whole first couple hours are just endless lists of books he’s read.
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- RB
- 21-04-16
Dry with spotty audio
A dry recounting of events. Audio skipped ahead at several points, causing sections to be missed. The narrator did an excellent job of making long convoluted sentences easy to follow.
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- Jon
- 19-11-09
Vaguely interesting
... incredibly dry at points purely due to the preponderance of utterly dull minutiae about matters I find it impossible to care about. It is little wonder Stuart entered into a severe state of despondency for a time. Were it not for the details of this rather interesting mental breakdown I would have rated this clumsy attempt to share a life a single star.