I’d always had a low impression of audiobooks. From my bastion of literary snobbishness, they seemed too much like a way out for lazy people to claim they’d read something, when at best they’d listened to a few minutes of an abridged version.
No more.
I started exercising a few months ago. Originally I listened to a couple songs, but as my condition improved I switched to podcasts like Talk of the Nation: Science Friday. Finally I decided to try something longer and there, sitting on a shelf at a friend’s house, was the audiobook version of John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
I’ll save you the time. Perkins claims he was under indirect contract by U.S. agencies, and he went to countries in order to economically destabilize them, get them deep in debt to the U.S. government and make them easy target for U.S. control.
I’m not only not a fan but highly suspicious of the U.S. nor its policies, and I don’t doubt that something very much like what Perkins’ describe exists, but for all of Perkins’ empty claims and innuendo the book ends up being nothing but empty fiction, with no data you can compare against reality.
It’s The Da Vinci Code for modern socialists.
On the plus side, I’ve gained an appreciation of audiobooks. Not only I got to exercise, but I didn’t waste precious hours of my life dedicating them singly to this junk.