A History of the Philippines

By: David P. Barrows

Narrated by: Mark Young

A History of the Philippines is a short, dense and temporally expansive book. It starts with the Evolution of the Land 100 million years ago. The writing is predominantly dry, dispassionate and academic. It's full of details, and often presumes an existing familiarity with Philippine history and culture, introducing terms with no definition provided.

Public Domain (P)2022 Bookstream GmbH

Good Information; Scattered info; Narration could be better.

Pros: Lots of great in-depth information from the early days of PI.
LOTS of detail sometimes
Interesting perspectives.

Cons: Its like listening to non-stop cliff notes.
Sometimes you get really great context of issues, sometimes you get a 10 second story.
All over the place.

Narrator is often speaking at such a low-breathy tone, it makes it hard to hear and interpret without turning the volume up.
Definitely some inconsistencies with the voice and voice inflection throughout the chapters that is that is pretty stark.
Pronunciations of the cities and islands in the PI could have been better if the narrator had done a little homework, but forgivable.

What’s hilarious is the author at the beginning says the book is for kids of the PI, when it’s WAY too difficult to read and understand for even educated adults averse in history.

FYI: This book only covers PI history up to about the early 1900’s, before WWII and the atrocities that Japan inflicted on the Philippines.

Surprisingly Good Considering

FYI, this is a high school textbook written by an American colonial administrator circa 1900 (in the last chapter, the author refers to Oklahoma as an example of a US territory). The writing is prosaic more than dramatic. But even so, the author lays out a clear story of the Spanish colonial period, from just before the Spanish arrived to the start of US administration in a way that will give you the facts but also understand the context and big picture story. Probably, in 1900, such a small fraction of people in the Philippines actually had the opportunity to go to high school, that the book was able to target a pretty high level. There's not a lot else available on Philippines history for the broad audience (especially in audiobook format). So, it can still fill a gap if you are interested in the region. The production values , particularly the quality of the reader, are surprising for a book like this.