Anne

Crichton was superb at taking science and stretching its possibilities to create new environments with surprising challenges--and that is done really well in this book, but he never would have killed off nearly every character. Halfway through you are wondering if any are going to survive, and the evil characters are just stupid. Are we meant to think that an enterprise desperate for graduate students in science would take a blow-hard who only writes critiques about theory and would pay for him to come see a top-secret project? How in the world did it make sense to set up one character as the protagonist and kill him off, plus appear to kill off all but two of the "good guys"? We didn't even care about the ones who survived, and couldn't we at least have saved the surprise helper at Tantalus? This needed different plot points and better editing, plus a resolution that didn't make you feel that you had wasted almost the entire time you spent listening.

No, but I will be extremely careful ordering other books where another author (and this one is a good author, but he either didn't save Crichton or just didn't deliver on this book) has finished Crichton's posthumous material.

No, but I thought he did well.

Save your money and your time. If it goes on sale for $4.95, it will be worth that, but you will still be annoyed at what is a great start devolving into a frustrating experience.

I can't honestly tell if the story ever got any better. The first 30 minutes introduced a bit of the mystery but also characters that I had no sympathy or interest in. I am sorry I bought this and will avoid anything by this author again. So if you like cliches and stereotypes, go for this but otherwise don't waste your time

M. C. Beaton normally writes contemporary mysteries. This isn't, of course, a mystery, and the plot is fine, the characters are all right, but it is neither bodice-ripper (thank goodness) nor comedy of manners based on the constraints of the period in which it is set. While it would have short-circuited the plot to have the protagonists display the background expected, it seems just silly to propose the idea that a gentlewoman would have learned how to cook so well that she would have been able to turn out multi-course meals appropriate in fine dining establishments during the Napoleonic era. And that a gentleman would be so intemporate in his language to one of his own class. So this is definitely fluff and if you aren't looking for Jane Austen or Finess it is just fine but be prepared to roll your eyes if you keep listening.

I liked the plot well enough to give the writer another chance. Actually, the thing that I continually find awkward is the gratuitous use of bad language--not to heighten the drama or express a character's frustration, but just to sound contemporary. A surgeon who isn't even mildly irritated uses bad language, and so do several other characters who are supposedly educated and affluent. So as you are listening, the effect is jarring. Anyone who has ever used a computer will at times be at their wit's end, and probably teenagers would drive you to think one or two of those words, but just for shock value this interrupts the narrative. Where you can skim in reading it yourself, this language pretty much jumps at you while you are listening. But good story; plausible and intriguing, so will try one more by Sandford and see if he was just on a tear or whether he likes this style of writing.

I did like this, but was perplexed in that O'Reilly reviews the events from 14 days out to July after the assassination; he didn't link events on the battlefield to the assassination and you had the feeling that Wilkes-Booth would still have planned on assassination regardless of the last desperate battles between Union and Rebel armies. He also tantalized us with evidence that Sec of War Stanton might have had a bit to do with the assassination, but there was no link to the conspirators that was explained. I dislike writing in present tense, and it worked all right here, but I thought this was a good book rather than a great book. Interesting content.

Steady, however it was odd that he mispronounced words like gelatinous and endometriosis--would have thought he would have looked those up!

Definintely.

It has been on the New York Times best seller list, and while better than many things you could listen to, couldn't quite see why it was so far up. Buy this on sale and you will really enjoy it!

Yes, but not in a hurry.

I only listened to the first 30 minutes and then determined to return it. In that time, 6 characters were introduced and every last one of them was so ignorant or selfish that you couldn't find any one of them you had the least bit of curiousity about. I had listened to a couple of McCall-Smith's books before, and he can be a slow started, but this must have been done just to meet a contract deadline. (Probably why it was on sale . . . )

Have you ever wondered where our peculiar phrases and words come from? Pass the buck, cowboy, okay, etc? Melvyn Bragg tells the story of the language as it developed and incorporated influences and went on to influence other languages. He is a bit slow at the start, but you should be intrigued because he makes the case that at the time of World War II a man from mid-Britain could make himself understood in Iceland within a couple of weeks--the pronunciation and grammar of two languages having so much still in common. Bragg goes on to follow the tale of English when it survived due to intervention by Alfred the Great, when it flourished so much that it outlasted incursion by French conquerers, tinkering and explosion in the New World, etc. The second half moves along much more quickly, but the first half, which concludes with the impact of Shakespeare on the langugage is well worth listening to.

Pretty steady, but you could tell that the speaker was unfamiliar with several North American frontier introductions--his pronunciation of lasso is a hoot, but you still enjoy his reading.

I have already recommended this to several. It starts off just a bit glib, but you will be engaged very quickly and amazed at the story it is telling of the "orphan" children in Nepal. Due to fears of the parents in mountainous regions that their children will be taken by guerrilla forces and forced into their own army, unscrupulous child traffickers convinced hundreds (or more) families to give up all their resources and their children to the traffickers who promised that these children would be taken to the cities and given a good education. Then they are abandoned or sold as child labor or starved but trotted out to display to tourists to encourage donations. The author--reading his work--had planned to work in one of the well-run orphanages for 3 months before he spent the year going around the world. He did go around the world, but felt compelled to go back and eventually began to tackle the plight of several of these children. He always intended this to be temporary but the longer he worked around the children, the more his heart changed. Terrific book, and gets increasingly compelling with both tragedy and deep happiness. This is one of the two best books I listened to in the entire year.

When Connor (author) finds that one of the "orphans" has been told his family all died at least 10 years ago, and his family have been told this boy died. Although it isn't simple to reunite the children--somehing so complicated that you have to listen to the circumstances to understand this--it is amazing that anyone would be committed to hiking in areas to find the "orphans" families where there are no roads, where altitude is not an ally, and where help is seasonal because flights stop in fall during the change in weather.

I bought this on sale because I have a good friend whose parents emigrated from Soouth Korea and I knew very little of either country. Since then I have recommended this to at least 8 people; it is dramatic, appalling, and amazing--Nothing to Envy is what the North Korean government tells its people even as it ensures they are starving, without electricity most of the time, and brutally stripped of any personal, academic, or industrial opportunities. This work is from a reporter stationed in South Korea who met and interviewed several of the very, very few North Koreans who had escaped from the North. From their stories you understand how it is that the North Korean government is able to control its people, why such a tiny number of citizens ever escaped, and why both South Korea and the United States are portrayed as the arch enemies of the North Korean people. You will hear from a schoolteacher, a doctor, and a true believer whose daughter tricked her into escaping; these and several other personal stories are interwoven with Korean history so that you can put their stories in context. Very well written, very timely.

I can't think of any that has a similar flavor; if there is something comparable I haven't read that yet.

She is not overly dramatic, speaks clearly, and moves the story forward with a nice pace.

Shock. After the first few minutes, you pause because you can't believe any government would be so short-sighted and would not only engineer its own failure but continue to do things to perpetuate the problems.

You will be missing a remarkable book if you pass this one by.

I really like L'Amour for his plots, and frequently his descriptive phrases and dialogues are peerless. This book needed editing, and definitely follows his formula, but it wanders much more than what he usually wrote, and only one of the women is well written. I would still buy and listen to this again, but I can't see going back to it for a second review down the road. David Straitharn is also well, well matched to reading L'Amour and delivers again. However, if I had a limited budget, I would choose other L'Amour works like Skyliners, Treasure Mountain, or anything else in that series (the Sackett family chronicles). L'Amour got on his soapbox way too much in this novel rather than telling the story and having philosophical thoughts thrown in casually as he has done in other works.

When the Russian agent suddenly realizes that not only is the escaped Russian he's targeting for return to Russia free to stay in California but also that the US Government isn't going to force her to return and, by the way, the agent himself could stay and make a new life for himself in California.

When Miss Nesselrode confronts the grandfather who has been trying to have his grandson killed because the grandson is the product of a marriage his daughter made with a seaman--tainting the pure Spanish blood the overly proud grandfather prizes. Also enjoyed the tactics our hero and his crew use to overcome superior numbers each time his horses and his life are threatened.

No, and since I didn't care for the wet blanket our hero fell in love with, I didn't want to see any more of her.

Still like L'Amour, and still liked the book, just thought this one was not one of his better ones.