Reviews and Comments

I loved Jurassic Park so I wanted to read Crichton's OG novel. I liked it but not nearly as much as Jurassic Park. I have a queasy stomach when it comes to descriptions about blood, and there was a lot of that in this book. If you want to read it I would recommend dead tree rather than audiobook. Other editions might be better, but the one I listened to there were minutes and minutes of the narrator painstakingly reading tables that I would have jus skimmed over if I was actually reading it.

It's a 1960s near-future sci-fi thriller. The story comes down to a satellite falling form space onto a small Arizona town, and everyone in the town dying because of some space germs that were on it. The rest of the book goes into trying to figure it out, how to contain it, whether or not to just send a small nuke to Arizona to stop it from spreading further, etc.

My wife had been homeschooling, or perhaps unschooling, our kids for years now. I go back and forth on how I feel about it. These kinds of books help me keep things in perspective. Nancy Wallaces first book was about how she got her kid out of public school in the 80s when that was a thing in the states. We don't have that problem now. It was beneficial to see her going through the same troubles I have and wondering if they are doing enough. I kept wondering how these kids would survive in 2020s. We'll I emailed one of them and asked. To my surprise I got a reply same day. I still have a hard time thinking of art as a meaningful career, even more so now that I feel my oldest is going down that path, but if I support and let her make hey own friends with people of all ages, she'll do just fine. 4 stars.

This work was well written. I would say I liked it three stars. Definitely left me feeling uneasy, and honestly quite hopeless. In part I think that is what the author was going for. A speculative fiction work based in a North American society that has taken Calvinist fundamentalism to the extreme. Including, but not limited to, forbidding "baren" wives from fornicating with their husbands, instead forcing a "hand maid' to move in in which they have a breeding ceremony once a month to try to impregnate her with everyone watching. Its been said that when Atwood only put things in here that already existed somewhere in the world in 1980s. Maybe in Iran? I'm not sure. Seems far-fetched even for such repressive regimes. I was disappointed that the story kind of just ended. Nothing resolved, and it certainly wasn't happy (or maybe it was, we really don't know). The author did TRY to add a little with a summary of a future historian looking back on this as if it were a collection of historical events.