Mark

It's a great idea for a book, contrasting the lives of the two brothers. But the same idea was used by Giblin in "Good Brother, Bad Brother," and I preferred his method. Titone has some odd writing habits that should have been corrected by an editor. She repeats the same information over and over again, as if assuming a senile reader who must be constantly reminded who the characters are. It gets tedious. This happens, as a book is written in stages, but it's the editor's job to notice these redundancies and edit them out. Titone also makes some glaring mistakes in her statements of theatre history. It makes anyone with knowledge in this area distrust her other statements. In all, it's a good and important story, but the book is just rather gracelessly written and the research seems suspect.

I was hoping for a more engagingly told story behind the science. It was fairly tedious and I gave up on it.

For some reason, I had avoided this book for years. Maybe it was the length, maybe just the odd title. I am so glad I broke down and chose it. It is a long, entertaining, wild ride. It is rather campy, cartoony, compared to other King books, and I was delighted to see that facet of his amazing talent.

It is a compilation of well-crafted and entertaining columns about quirky places and people in California. As has been said elsewhere, Hillinger works in a styles similar to Charles Kuralt or his successors at CBS Sunday Morning. I really enjoyed this book on a long drive.

I have read and listened to the entire saga twice. This long conclusion is exciting and spiritually satisfying. Some of the events are heart-rending, but this profound story helps me to accept the hardships and losses that are inevitable in real life.

One of the best Reacher novels, with an extreme but plausible plot and some superb writing involving a near-drowning. The first-person narration works much better than the previous third-person storytelling. The action keeps unfolding and building to a very satisfying end.

This satisfying story brings together many threads from Reacher's past and creates a complicated, violent tale centering on loyalty to friends and dealing vengeance. The book paints the picture of Reacher as the roaming loner who comes in from the cold--for a while. First-rate Reacher.

This novel is set back in the past, when Reacher is still in the military police. The story is loaded with suspense and action, all of it well-crafted and skillfully written. It is a complex and satisfying book.

I would rather listen to a Reacher novel than do most other things, and that is true of this book as well; but the novel is oddly lacking in action. The bad guys are not encountered in person until the very end, and Jack spends a lot of time discussing his feelings, which is not what I look to a Reacher novel for. I am glad I listened, and Reacher fans will not want to skip it, but it is not up there with the best ones.

The book is delightful and the reader is perfect. Inglis also performs the Lord of the Rings trilogy, so I had heard him before. Fantastic. Someone has even composed melodies for the many songs of Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, and even Goblins--and Inglis sings them charmingly. The only problem--I didn't want it to end. Completely entertaining and memorable.

I am baffled by the positive reviews of this book.

I have listened to about four hours of it, and will go no farther. It has wasted enough of my time. So far, it has been four hours of some completely implausible academics wandering around Europe and Mexico vaguely looking for a mysterious German writer who may or may not exist, and participating in a limp love triangle that might be believable were they 12-year-olds. We get every tedious detail of their observations, including--I have just been hearing this part--all about whether a guy should take ice cream or a ham sandwich as a present to a pretty girl's brother, and then the exact ingredients of the chosen ham sandwich. Deep.

In sum, it was either calculated for maximum tedium as a caustic joke by the writer, or it is the work of someone with nothing to say and no story ideas who is just typing any dull thing that next comes into his mind. Ghastly.