Good, with one small flaw

Naturally, a (private?) journal kept by Campbell in the 1950s is going to feel very dated and problematic in the 21st century in places. His political views are VERY MUCH of their time, and his attitude toward postcolonial India and Southeast Asia is ... iffy in places. His brief reference to "who cares if Indochina goes communist" is both prophetic (the US never should have been involved in that war, and Campbell seems to have known that before it even started in earnest) and also somewhat amusing when heard in retrospect, given that ten or twenty years after he wrote that it would be all the US government cared about. His views on many other matters are similarly dated or reveal a lack of the kind of careful research that he put into the other works that he clearly meant for publication. But overall, the content is very good, especially if read as a historical record of one prominent American academic's personal views on south, southeast, and east Asia in the mid-1950s.

As for this audiobook... well, the narrator makes a decent effort most of the time, but his gaffes on the many, many foreign words Campbell used throughout his text are somewhat immersion-breaking. Full disclosure, I'm fluent in Japanese, studied French for eight years, and have a passive knowledge of Sanskrit, Chinese, and other languages that are peripherally related to my fields of interest. One would think that a narrator for an audio version of a book by Joseph Campbell would be required to have at least my level of expertise in the languages in question, but he doesn't sound like he has any knowledge of French, Sanskrit (or any Indian language), or Japanese phonetics, and was not prepped for any of the words and phrases Campbell uses in these works. He pronounces all of the "final vowels" in "le symbolisme qui cherche" as though it were Spanish ("lé symbolismé qui cherché"), which is probably the worst offense, since this aspect of the French language is something any educated American or west European should have acquired through cultural osmosis even having never studied the language itself; but he also reads "shogunate" (an English word for Japanese "bakufu") as "shogunaté", "Zeami" as "zee-me" (rather than "zay-ah-me"), and consistently pronounces romanized Sanskrit "c" as /k/ rather than something like the "ch" in "chat".

These are the kinds of errors I would expect from a LibriVox recording or the text-to-speech function on Kindle or Alexa, but when I pay money for a professionally recorded audiobook (of a book whose text is not in the public domain and therefore needs to be purchased separately), I expect a slightly better level of expertise (or at least research/preparation) than this.

All that being said, I only noticed the errors because I myself am familiar enough with the subject to identify what is actually being said, so it did not hinder the conveyance of Campbell's message to me, and anyone who doesn't have my background will likely not notice the errors (which are at least fairly consistent) to the point that it would hurt their experience, so I would say 4/5 overall. (If I were JUST judging the audio aspect rather than Campbell's book[s], this would be 2/5.)

ありがとうございました。

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