Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The late twentieth century has witnessed a scientific gold rush of astonishing proportions: the headlong and furious haste to commercialize genetic engineering.

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

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The book that inspired the movie that inspired my favorite Youtube video of all time. The first time I read Jurassic Park I was like 11 and it was the summer it came out in the theaters. We were driving to the beach and my brother had already read it and I had to fight him to keep from telling me what happens in the novel before I was able to read it. I also had a cursory (still do!) understanding of chaos theory from reading […]

We don’t use any more personnel than we have to.

The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton

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This is both a very solid science fiction novel and an utterly ridiculous example of bad science fiction (and bad fiction) habits of the 1960s and 1970s. So the bad habits here is this bizarre attention paid to sexuality and gender in a book in which the sheer finite numbers of hours could prove to be the difference between humanity’s survival and its destruction is so silly and distracting it’s almost embarrassing for the book. So the book is about a satellite whose mission has […]

A horrible, convoluted mess that couldn’t be more horribly timed.

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Towards the end of my review of Rising Sun, I said, “Michael Crichton was kind of an asshole, right? I’m not off-base in saying that?”. With his follow-up novel, Disclosure, I can, without reservation, firmly assert that I think Michael Crichton was unquestionably an asshole. Disclosure, which Crichton alleges is based on a true story, tells the story of Tom Sanders, a department head for Digicom, a tech company on the cusp of a big merger. Sanders’ hopes for a big promotion are foiled by […]

Seldom has so much stupidity been written by such a smart man.

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I’ll start this review by briefly describing the story. I’m only doing this to get it out of the way, because I’m not going to talk much about it in the rest of the review. Celebrating the opening of its new headquarters in downtown Los Angeles, the Nakamoto Corporation throws a lavish party filled with businessmen, celebrities, and politicians. During the party, a young woman, Cheryl Austin, is murdered. Police Lt Peter Smith, Japanese liaison with the LAPD, and Cpt. John Connor are given the […]

Michael Crichton-lite; or, Michael Crichton without being so messagey

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I have a weird fascination with locked in characters facing unimaginable horrors. This is probably why I love zombie movies so much. The battle of Helms Deep in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is my favorite part of the whole trilogy. You put a bunch of people in a structure planted firmly in the sediment at the bottom of the ocean? Yeah, I’m on board. Sphere was always my favorite Michael Crichton book for this reason, probably. Deep Storm is just such a […]

Crichton falls a little flat

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I think I read most of Crichton’s works one summer (I was hugely pregnant with twins and mostly bedridden.)  There’s a lot of great stories in the man.  However, I must have missed this one (perhaps it is newer than 2006? Yep, 2008) and honestly, I’m not so thrilled with the fact that I “went back” for this.  It’s no Timeline or Andromeda Strain.  It’s kind of close in sphere to Jurassic Park, but it lacks the humanizing qualities.  This is a story of man […]



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