I'm sure Harold Keith was a nice man to everyone he knew. I'm just as sure everyone he knew was white. Yes, Hugh Lofting won the Newbery with a book peppered with racist stereotyping, in 1922; hadn't sensibilities changed at all by 1949? "Half-blood" Cherokees--who survived or were the first generation after the Trail of Tears--to look down on full-bloods because they want to live according to their own lights instead of their tormentors'? I have no problem with his uneducated characters speaking in dialect, but I do with his adult characters speaking like children. Lack of formal education doesn't make you think like a child.
Furthermore, almost every character got slapped by the exposition fairy when Keith thought the reader needed a history lesson. Which I did: I didn't know about various native American tribes siding with the Confederacy in hopes it would respect treaties more than the Union had. But an author should make a history lesson a tad more seamless than this one did.
My Bill Bryson so far: English and How It Got That Way, which was interesting (to me) and in print and, as I recall, fairly free of Bryson. In the summer of 2000 I read A Walk in the Woods, and while I loved his cultural and ecological background on the Appalachian Trail, I got really pissed at him for blowing his ride: an opportunity to hike a seven-month trail, squandered by being unfit and unprepared. But then A Short History of Nearly Everything made me happy: it was funny and informative and an excellent narrative of, yup, nearly everything.
In a Sunburned Country combines his interesting, humorous delving into language, Appalachia, and everything with his unappealing wimpiness, insincere self-deprecation, and complaints. It doesn't make a good audio book because in print I could have skipped all the bits about him and read the geographical and zoological and other worthwhile bits.
The other reason it doesn't make a good audio is that he's the narrator. He doesn't speak clearly. He swallows the insides of many words, dulls some consonants and unexpectedly sharpens others. Hepronounces "unsettling" as "un-seh-dling." Living in Europe didn't sharpen his t's at all, and whatever, we Usans, and he's one, say "twenny" and "mih-ten" and apparently all British women named Katie are quite sick of Usans calling them "K.D." But a narrator of audio books is obliged to enunciate a sight more than Bryson does. "Peer-yud" instead of "period," "quayre-lous" instead of "querulous," "sig-nif-gant" instead of "significant." Plus he sounds like he has a stuffy nose or, harkening even farther back in my college career, a deviated septum.
Davids McCullough and Sedaris read their own work just fine, but Bill Bryson should leave his to others.
I am glad George Guidall narrated this. It's not that he employed what I consider his habitual sardonic tone for Elie Wiesel's story: of course he and the production company wouldn't be that disrespectful. It's that I associate his voice and that tone with more pleasant topics, and that association made the story easier to hear. On the way home I fell asleep so often during Dawn that RDC put on Hemingway short stories instead (assuming correctly I wouldn't mind missing what I wasn't already familiar with).