Tracey's Reviews > The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times

I'm a little disappointed. I was hoping that what this book would do was to draw direct lines between fossils and a bestiary of fantastic beasts (and where to find them). And it did, a bit, for griffins, and this gave me hope. And giants and cyclopes and dragons got some attention. But I'll admit it - I saw centaurs mentioned in the table of contents, and I was really hoping for the story of a discovery of the remains of some unfortunate rider who with his horse met a terrible fate, but with part of the horse missing ancients went "hey! Look at that" and came up with a new species... or something ... Yeah, that didn't happen. The closest is a hoax-slash-art installation at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. (Google “Centaur Excavations at Volos.”) Google Image that - it's pretty nifty.

And that brings me to a huge problem with this audiobook: if I hadn't had access through Scribd to a digital copy of the text, I would have been doing a lot of Google Image searching. There are references to photos and illustrations all through the book ... and I can't tell if a pdf is included with, say, the Audible release. So my rating would probably be higher if I had read rather than listened to this - which is absolutely no reflection on Donna Postel, who did a lovely job narrating. But, basically, this was not a good candidate to *be* narrated.

So my middling rating for this book is partly my feeling that the expectations set up by the book description were not met, and partly that my own personal expectations were not met. The explanation for centaurs - and satyrs and suchlike - is, to me, somewhat outside the stated scope of this book; it wanders rather far afield from what I at least expected it to be. I do want to explore some of the author's other books - her writing is engaging, and it is hard to make archaeology uninteresting. But I'll be avoiding the audiobooks.