I’m not sure that posting something about this here is altogether appropriate given that it’s not an audiobook, despite being listed on Audible. This is the audio recordings of Fawlty Towers, the award-winning British comedy from the 1970s, made available with introductions from John Cleese and additional narration from Andrew Sachs, who played Manuel on the show. Listening to this made me more appreciative of the level of physical comedy that Fawlty Towers employs: Sachs does in-character narration to “fill in the blanks”, so to speak, but mere audio doesn’t translate all of the humor. Take, for instance, “The Germans”, which is one of the funniest episodes on the show, which has in its first half enough comedy for an entire hour, let alone fifteen minutes. Sachs/Manuel does a fine job providing narration to set up the hysterical scene where The Major confuses Manual practicing his English with a talking moose, but when the concussed and confused Basil is unwittingly antagonizing Germans in the dining room, there’s nothing at all. (“Here! I’ll do the funny walk!!!”) I can appreciate Sachs’ narration being limited to scene intermissions, but it didn’t serve all of the humor. Still, as someone who has watched this show an unhealthy amount of times, these recordings gave me laugh after laugh. I just don’t know that they’d work for someone who doesn’t have the shows in his head.

At the end of last week, I read Declaration: The Nine Tumultuous Weeks When America Became Independent an interesting little book that chronicles May – June 1776 when the American colonies shifted from “having disputes with the King” to desiring outright independence. The author, William Hogeland, provides the additional interest of focusing on how local Philadelphia politics impacted the shape of the Second Continental Congress’s discourse. Philadelphia had a strong artisan class, one that was active and wanted a larger role in the government: there was a reason Pennsylvania’s state government was the most ‘democratic’ of the states, with a unicameral legislature and barely an executive at all. (John Adams, on reviewing its new constitution, snarkily commented that within a decade Pennsylvanians would be writing to King George and asking for relief from their constitution: sure enough, in 1790 Pennsylvania adopted a new constitution that was bicameral and had a stronger governor.) This book features John Dickinson and Samuel Adams in more elevated roles than they usually get, and was fun reading. I picked it up because it covers the period where the colonies effectively asserted independence long before they formally proclaimed it, by creating state constitutions that made no reference to George III’s authority. The book focuses narrowly on Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, though, instead of looking at the variety of constitutions the new States were creating.