Saturday, April 10, 2010

Page Turning


The Andromeda Strain
By: Michael Crichton
Ballantine 1969

A satellite lands in the desert near the small southern Utah town of Piedmont.  Within hours, everyone in the town is dead.  Piedmont is a virtual ghost town.
As the US government assembles a team of doctors and scientists to investigate, the race is on to find out what killed everyone in the town.
Although The Andromeda Strain was written in 1969, I think it was far ahead of its time.  So much so, that while reading it, it is not hard to imagine the events taking place today.
Like most of his books, Crichton writes about things that could possibly happen, and in recent years we have seen how mysterious viruses can spread.
Like all of his books that I have read, I couldn’t put this book down.  In fact I read it in 33 hours.  I think that helped to keep the tension of what the characters were going though in the book.  However I did find the characters to be mostly forgettable.
And Even though Crichton uses a lot of technical jargon, as he usually does, it doesn’t hamper the understanding or slow the narrative down, until, however; the end which I thought was anticlimactic.
This is an exciting fast paced novel that will have you turning the pages to find out what will happen next.

Story                 ****
Characters         ***
Readability         ****
Overall rating      ****

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