Great Adventurers

I’ll admit, I approached *Great Adventurers* skeptical of yet another ‘heroic explorers’ collection—until Benjamin Soames’ opening lines about Drake’s ‘piracy with a papal blessing’ had me laughing. This audiobook thrives on its refusal to sanitize. Burton’s hypocrisies, Stanley’s brutality, and Sacagawea’s quiet, indomitable resilience are all rendered with a journalist’s eye for contradiction. The brevity is both a strength and a weakness: each 15-20 minute segment packs a punch, but you’ll wish Angus lingered longer on figures like Ibn Battuta, whose globe-trotting feels criminally rushed. Soames’ performance is masterclass *restraint*. He doesn’t do voices or over-embroider the drama; instead, his measured cadence lets the absurdity of, say, Mungo Park’s near-death-by-hippopotamus speak for itself. The production is clean but not sterile—background noise is nonexistent, yet the audio never feels antiseptic. My only gripe? The transitions between stories can feel abrupt, like channel-surfing between epochs. And while the teen target audience will devour this, older listeners might crave deeper context on, say, colonialism’s dark undercurrents. Still, as a gateway drug to history, it’s addictive. I immediately replayed the Burton chapter just to savor Soames’ delivery of ‘disguised as a Muslim merchant… badly.’