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Outstanding
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Wall Street Journal Ronald Bailey
Every bit as informative as it is entertaining. And it is very entertaining.
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Favorable
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Chicago Tribune Alan Cheuse
Crichton gives us a jumpy, 600-page page-burner in the sometimes-hour-by-hour, day-by-day tradition of "The Day of the Jackal" that dramatizes the plight of post-Cold War globalized society.
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Favorable
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Entertainment Weekly Gregory Kirschling
And it's a kick to watch a brainiac like Crichton chomp down on the conventional wisdom about global warming with the thrashing jaws of a velociraptor.
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Favorable
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Publishers Weekly
This take-no-prisoners consideration of environmentalism wrapped in extravagantly enjoyable pages is one of the most memorable novels of the year.
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Favorable
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Booklist Kristine Huntley
Perhaps his most serious and important book yet. [1 Jan 2005, p.783]
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Mixed
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Chicago Sun-Times Henry Kisor
Conservative Republicans will love it. It's all about how a greedy ecoterrorist group, with the help of a gullible press, whips up runaway fears about global warming (a threat Crichton maintains is oversold).
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Mixed
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USA Today Carol Memmott
This is heavy subject matter, sometimes bogged down by moralizing and too many scene changes.
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Mixed
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The New Republic Sacha Zimmerman
But despite these problems, Crichton does deliver a globe-trotting thriller that pits man against nature in brutal spectacles while serving up just the right amount of international conspiracy and taking digs at fair-weather environmentalists.
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Unfavorable
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Boston Globe Richard Dyer
It is all utterly preposterous and extremely tiresome, especially when padded to spread over nearly 600 pages of breathless but sludgy narrative.
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Unfavorable
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The Guardian
The trouble is that while the science may be interesting, the story is pretty peculiar.
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Unfavorable
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The New York Times Book Review Bruce Barcott
This might all be good if not screamingly clever fun -- but for the footnotes. The annoying citations make it apparent that the author desperately wants to be taken seriously on the global warming stuff. That would be perfectly fine in a Weekly Standard cover story. In a thriller, it's a little like having the author interrupt the story to insist that Dr. Evil actually has a death ray. Crichton's proof is itself laughably rigged.
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Unfavorable
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Robert J. Wiersema
Unfortunately, the clumsy inclusion of the scientific material disrupts the momentum of the thriller aspects of State of Fear, while the low-grade theatrics of those thriller aspects detract from the force of the scientific thought. It's a balance, all right, but not the one Crichton readers were hoping for.
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Unfavorable
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Los Angeles Times Steve Wasserman
The plot is contrived, the characters one-dimensional, the predicaments predictable. Crichton has an unerring instinct for cliché... Whatever his literary aspiration, Crichton's real genius is to have written the first neo-con novel. Inside this bloated 600-page book is a fierce and compelling Op-Ed piece desperate to get out.
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Unfavorable
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Washington Post Dennis Drabelle
Time and again, the action slams to a halt while someone smart and skeptical (a stand-in for the author) grills someone smug and ill- prepared on the state of his or her environmental knowledge, then supplies the correct answers at length.
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Unfavorable
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Houston Chronicle John W. Royal
The plot feels tacked on, something Crichton made up on the spot to support his views. The novel often slams to a stop so there can be page after page of speeches and charts that express Crichton's opinions but do nothing to advance the narrative.
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Terrible
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
Reads like a shrill, preposterous right-wing answer to this year's shrill, preposterous but campily entertaining global warming disaster movie "The Day After Tomorrow."
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Terrible
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Sydney Morning Herald John Birmingham
It's bad writing and it lets the reader ignore the larger point Crichton is trying to make.
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Terrible
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The Onion A.V. Club Tasha Robinson
Crichton's readers deserve better. His thesis deserves better. Even his vaguely drawn cardboard characters deserve better, in the form of a story that doesn't make them all look like putzes, no matter what side they're on.
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