THE WEST’S LAST CHANCE Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?

Mark Warner reads this warning of the mounting clash between Islam and the West in an unexceptionable news anchor kind of voice, with suitable expressiveness but more reasonableness than seems to fit this far-right call to meet fascism with worse fascism. However, he has pronunciation problems. He mangles the simplest foreign names and words, Italian, Latin, and French; he even mispronounces “Proust” and “vizier.” His accents are harrowing. Even his English is sometimes flawed so that “licentiousness,” for example, becomes “licentuousness.” Some sections sound as if recorded with a voice-activated mike, with dead space between phrases, which is quite distracting. While it gets the fundamental job done, this program is below par. W.M. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG/ SEP 06]