Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Crichton is one of my favorite authors, and I had high hopes for this one- how could you go wrong combining Crichton and medievil warfare? The book started off well, but soon became quite boring. With a large opportunity for great action, he fails to keep us in suspence for very long, and the bumps in the character's roads become quite predictable. If you haven't read Sphere, check that one out instead.
Rating:
Summary: Connecticut Yankee (s) in King Arthur's Court Redux
Review: Admittedly its been many years, but does anyone agree that this is Twain's classic set in the high tech age?Good start; great promise; reduced to a fast paced but non-spellbinding revisit to Medieval Times. Such a premise had such promise! Oh Well, everyone is allowed one disappointment!
Rating: 
Summary: Timeline's good but too much to say in too few pages.
Review: I started this book hoping for a mixture of Jurassic Park and Pillars of the Earth and found a little of each but not enough of both. It was a good read - Crichton's science foundation and an interesting scenario made it a page turner, particularly the middle third. I had no trouble with the plot and reasoning here; this is fiction of course. I agree with other reviewers that the characters were flat and needed more development. The constant escape-flee-recapture scenes the characters went through got tiring. If anything, the book needed more pages to better describe and reveal the historic world they visited. All in all, however I enjoyed the book and recommend it. One note on the time traveling paradox. With infinite parallel universes, the fear on unduly influencing the future would be moot.
Rating:
Summary: It's worth reading
Review: There are few books in the market that take you to the worlds that Michael Crichton does. He effortlessly makes you believe that his imaginary world can actually exist. This book is one of his most unique works.
Rating:
Summary: Crichton's insightful comment right on target.
Review: This book was more action-oriented than I'd like, but the plot and science/science fiction were enough to keep me interested. Toward the end of the book, I found one comment to be as insightful as it is ironic: Crichton notes that in our modern society, the culture's supreme ideal is entertainment. It permeates everything -- from politics to education, and everything in between. This, from he who has mastered and exploited this penchant of ours.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't waste your time
Review: Of course, the "time machine" concept is always intriguing, but the execution here leaves much to be desired. Hard to believe this book is on the best-seller list.
Rating: 
Summary: Comparable to some Star Trek TV series scripts
Review: While the book is written in a more complex, detailed style, it reminds me of several Star Trek concepts: Time and space travel; trying to fit in with persons from another era. There is even a discussion of Star Trek's Prime Directive not to interfere with other worlds or to affect their history, although Crichton does not mention Star Trek. I wish the book had been more original.
Rating:
Summary: page turner, but...
Review: A real page turner, but tiresome after awhile. Heroes always have a quick, convenient way out. Reader begins not to worry, since in less than a page, the obstacle is overcome, and a new one presented...again, and again, and again....
Rating:
Summary: Crichton's character flaw
Review: It's no coincidence that, according to amazon's index, the people who are reading Timeline are also reading Grisham and Clancy. All three are remarkable researchers who re-imagine technical systems -- genetic engineering or quantum physics (Crichton), the law (Grisham) and the postmodern military (Clancy)as detailed but breezy narratives that give the sense of massive complexity without ever making you seriously engage your forebrain. Key characters get the same free pass: Bright grad students, novice lawyers and rank-and-file GIs invariably end up bailing out highly trained specialists when the going gets tough in these books. That's to be expected in genre fiction, but it places constraints on such novels that can't be glossed over. Most important is the utter failure of the characters in these books to rise above predictable, one-dimensional status. Timeline's characters are a case in point. They are not representations of people; they are allegorical figures with arms and legs. It is impossible to care about them or to be surprised by them in any but the most vague and sentimental way. Timeline manages to defer such problems for much of its length by ushering us through a fascinating series of time-travel conundrums, a detailed immersion into medieval life and climactic battle scenes that borrow from both epic lore and medieval romances such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight -- though in the latter case the references are too hamfisted to engage real students of the era. But by the last third of the book, the seams are showing badly. Key secondary characters are positioned and then forgotten; new ones are pushed onstage to take their place; main players step totally out of character. At one point a fiercely independent young feminist responds to a life-saving act by a previously weak colleague by cooing -- I kid you not -- "My hero." It's hard to imagine a real timeline that takes us from here to that silly moment -- even via the alchemy of quantum physics.
Rating:
Summary: Exciting from start to finish!
Review: Timeline kept my interest from beginning to end - I almost thought I understood quantum mechanics, but alas - I don't. Nevertheless, a fast-paced book that kept me turning pages, a very interesting premise, characters you will care about. I can't wait for the movie - I'm sure there will be one!
| 
