A review by rjleamon11
The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language by Melvyn Bragg

4.0

The first two thirds or so of this book was fantastic--spell-binding--"bore your family around the dinner table" interesting--and made me wish I had a hard copy for reference and, well, keeping. In the last third, Bragg seemed to lose his narrative thrust through history and doubled back (it seemed) to look at Australia and India--both fascinating areas of development, but somehow the power of the book had waned a bit. It could easily have been due to the odd lack of measurement in an audio: I never know how many more pages or chapters are left, so my sense of pacing gets lost. The narrator was spectacularly good, so it wasn't his fault. Still, I'd recommend this for anyone who's interested in how English got "that way": it has helped me realized that "that way" never has, and never will, remain/ed static.

Highly recommended!