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Old Thunder
- A Life of Hilaire Belloc
- Narrated by: Kevin F. Spalding
- Length: 13 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Art & Literature
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Summary
Hilaire Belloc is one of the most important writers of the 20th century. At turns reviled or revered, depending on the audience, he was a razor sharp social commenter and a master of both poetry and prose who continues to captivate readers. In Old Thunder, Joseph Pearce examines Belloc's enduring impact on British intellectual life.
Along the way, Pearce uncovers Belloc's relationships with Chesterton, Waugh, and Sassoon, among others. Pearce also illuminates another side of Belloc's personality by relaying his long courtship with Elodie Hogan, her brief stint in a convent, and his ultimate grief at her death.
In this updated biography, with a new introduction by Dale Alhquist, Joseph Pearce uses previously unpublished letters and photographs to reveal in Belloc a romantic, complex, and solitary man, who is one of the true giants of the Catholic revival in the last century.
What listeners say about Old Thunder
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- margherita morgante
- 28-03-20
What a disappointment!
I cannot finish the book in spite of my love for Belloc. The book itself is very good but the reader is painfully inadequate.
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- MJTE
- 13-03-19
If you like Belloc, it is worth reading
I started reading Belloc a while back. I appreciate his writing but also his orthodoxy. So this book was on my "Wish List". I really like the book, but the narration isn't good. He sounds like a narrator for kids, not someone for an English writer. However, I really enjoyed getting to know Belloc's story. So worth it.
1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-08-20
Grating narration, only slightly better biography
The narration is easily one of the worst I have encountered on Audible. The pacing is aweful, the voices introduced childish, and it sounds to my ear like he is treating the subject matter with relative contempt. Meanwhile, the book itself is not much better. The author is constantly telling us what long dead people must have thought and felt, instead of showing us through quotes. At no time did I feel he understood lives that clearly well documented through letters and memoirs. I stopped when the author decided to criticize an/condescend to aged Belloc for "misremembering" his own first communion. If you can imagine, a 60+ year old man thought he was 14 and got First Communion on Thursday (unusual), when he clearly he was 13 and there's documentation he was going to receive it on Corpus Christi, moveable feast, but generally celebrated on a Thursday. Everyone should be this "soft" in their old age. I really wanted to like this, because it appears it's the only biography of Belloc on Audible. Unfortunately, it's a didn't finish and a return.