The Duel: A Captivating Guide to the Lives of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr

By: Captivating History

Narrated by: Duke Holm

Length: 4 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's summary

Explore the individual lives of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr and their duel

Two captivating titles in one audiobook:

• Alexander Hamilton: A Captivating Guide to One of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America
• Aaron Burr: A Captivating Guide to the Life of Aaron Burr and the Most Famous Duel in American History

Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr lived very similar lives. They were both orphaned at an early age. Both were excellent students who attended college and studied law. Both were young staff officers under General George Washington, and both became war heroes. They were both drawn to politics, and each served in the newly formed government of the United States. How was it then that these two men ended up in the most famous duel in American history?

©2018 Captivating History (P)2018 Captivating History

Informative but repetitive

The book overall was very informative about the lives of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. The book first talked about Hamilton from birth until death and then discussed Burr the same way. The only complaint that I have is when the book discussed the dual process. This area was talked about in the Hamilton portion and then regurgitated verbatim in the Burr portion. At first I thought I had accidentally "rewound" the audio book. This is my only complaint. Otherwise, I learned a lot about both men.

Recommend this book

I found this a great history book for children. It talks about the parallel lives and why what happened, happened.

Easy to understand

How much do you know about our founding fathers? The was a very interesting listening! The two men, their lives touched by similar events.

Franken-book, but ok...

Rather than an actual deeper look at the 1804 duel itself, it is simply the Hamilton and Burr bio books (that can be bought separately), smooshed together. Still, good overall content with only a minor piece on the duel itself that was overlapped. The Audible performance was uncharacteristically poor. Many, many mis-pronunciations of words where the reader should have known better: “rhetoric”, the island of “St. Croix”, the name “Eliza”, and “Paramus” (NJ) among them. Not a huge blot but noticeable, even at rapid speed.

held my attention

The book was concise and did not get lost in detail. I recommend it to beginners of the subject.

Poor Pronunciation & Bias

First, while I found Holm's voice pleasant, his pronunciation of many common words are incorrect for a standard, educated American accent. As this is in the vein of a scholarly work, this is not a good example to have out there in the world. He should have done his homework beforehand about how to pronounce some words, such as "promontory" and "rhetoric," if he found them difficult. This was off-putting. Also, while most of the facts are sound on the topics of Hamilton and Burr's lives, it relies on out-dated interpretations of facts, blatantly castigating Burr as a womanizer when the truth was that he was a feminist, which was extremely unusual for his day and so his behavior towards women has been sorely misinterpreted. There are many "judgey" statements about Burr that are not made about Hamilton in this book, which leads to a lack of objectivity overall.