The White Plague

The White Plague is a decent story, well told, with good narration. It's especially interesting for its portrayal of the terrorist mentality from the perspective of the 1970s and 80s, when the most commonly reported terrorist attacks were those of the IRA and the Palestinians.

Given the advances in genetic engineering since those days, I suspect that Herbert barely scratched the surface of what could be accomplished now by a brilliant, or even mediocre, genetic engineer, but I give him high grades for his vision of the future. Another aspect of the "let's knock off a huge percentage of the human race and see what happens" genre is how the aftermath is handled. What is the author's vision of the remolded world? Again, Herbert does a credible job imagining what things would be like and throws in some interesting twists. We are allowed to see the new world as it is walked by the protagonist. This could become tedious, but is instead well paced and interesting.

In the final analysis, however, I only give the book three stars. While the story is well told, I really didn't care a lot about any of the characters. For that reason, I was ready for the book to be over about two hours before it ended. I doubt that I will ever bother to listen to this book again, and that is something I really look for in audio books.

While this book was written some years ago and thus sometimes is dated the subject matter is very topical for current times.

There is interesting investigations into the social consequences and reactions within the book.

Not up to the standard of Frank Herbert's other books but still worth listening to if the subject matter is of interest or wish to enjoy another Herbert book.

Scott Brick the narrator could perk his narration up however.

Great voice and passable acting. He can't quite pull off female characters but his narration is top notch.

Only the very beginning and the very end were compelling. Everything in between was as if the author decided to follow irrelevant portions of the storylines of the relevant characters. It would be as if I told you the story of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf but focused mainly on the construction of their houses and glossed over that whole

It's just too darn plausable! We have all been there in our dreams; now we are there when we are awake... you don't know who to defeat and there is no where to hide. So what do you do now??? Read.

to enjoy this story from 1983. It's a bit dated but that should not detract from the story.
I found it thoughtful and interesting and appreciated it's accuracy for it's time.
What people do when threatened with a worldwide plague is the subject and the characters responded much as I think they would have at the time.
Worth the time and credit.

The storyline is OK but suffers from the confusion and stop/start noted by other reviewers. The real whammy however is Mr Brick's Irish accent. It is terrible and can only be equated with Owen Meanie's voice. Terrible - please Scott, restrict yourself to narrating in 'American'!!!

"WOW" This is really Scary
It's well thought out and makes you think because This could really happen in the near Future in fact I don't understand why it hasn't
I Liked it A lot...

I have read many of Herbert's books. I found some of them good and others not so good. This book falls well within the "good" category.

Even though it was written over 20 years ago, its subject matter (systemic hatred, tribalism, terrorism, WMD, vengence, survival, redemption) addresses situations which could have been taken from today's headlines. I found it very thought provoking as well as entertaining.

This was one of the most boring books I have listened to. The beginning was pretty fast paced and interesting but the remainder was very tedious with an ending I honestly slept through and had no desire to "rewind" and endure.

Don't waste your book credit on this,

I thought I would enjoy this book but by the time I had reached second half, I stopped listening.
The only way I can describe it is zoom out and zoom in. The zoom in is the time with characters and the zoom out is discussion. This was disjointed and I found I had hard time keeping up with characters