Kenneth C. Davis Audiobooks

Don't Know Much About Mythology: popular history for the curious and the rusty

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.4/5 average

209 listener ratings

Who is Kenneth C. Davis?

Occasionally a writer lands on a title so exact that it turns into a career. For Kenneth C. Davis, that title was Don’t Know Much About History, published in 1990 on a simple diagnosis: most of us were taught the past as a list of dates, and forgot it as quickly as we decently could. Davis set out to hand it back as a story.

The American author has since built a shelf on that method, carrying the same question and answer approach through geography, the Bible, the universe, the American presidents and, here, the myths of the ancient world. He writes for the intelligent adult who is willing to admit a gap in their knowledge, which is a more generous register than it sounds. There is no scolding in his books, and no showing off either.

Away from the series he has written narrower histories for adults and for younger readers, and he remains a familiar commentator whenever an American anniversary comes round.

Kenneth C. Davis in audiobooks

Don’t Know Much About Mythology is the title of his that listeners here return to most, and it is a genuinely substantial piece of work: better than twenty hours tracing the gods, floods and creation stories of Greece and Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, the Norse world and the Americas, and asking what each culture was trying to explain.

John Lee narrates, which is a shrewd piece of casting. His measured, faintly amused delivery suits a book that keeps stepping back to say why any of this still matters, and it holds the long span together without ever sounding like a lecture.

It rewards listening in chapters rather than in one go, and it makes an unusually good companion on a commute. Have a look at what we hold of his below.