Timeline- Unabridged

Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: This book was awsome, exspecially if you are a history buff like myself!

Rating:
Summary: Great literature? No. Highly entertaining? Yes.
Review: I was especially eager to read Timeline because I had just returned from the Perigord, the region in France where most of the action in Crichton's time-travel book takes place. I had toured the grim castles and fortified towns he describes, and canoed down the exact stretch of the Dordogne that's at the heart of the book. I found that Chrichton was able to bring the medieval period vividly to life, far better than I'd been able to do as I toured the area. As usual, Crichton provides enough of a believable scientific basis for his story to allow an easy suspension of disbelief. I was even more impressed by the amount of research he did to be able to paint such a clear and convincing picture of the area in the mid 14th century. OK, his characters do get into one scrape after another, and help manages to arrive just in the nick of time. But the book still kept me turning the pages late into the night. Robert Adler, author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation; and Medical Firsts: From Hippocrates to the Human Genome.

Rating:
Summary: Overall a fun read
Review: This was a very easy read for me, after reading Great Expectations and Les Miserbles I needed something easy and extremely entertaining, this fit the bill perfectly. There is no thinking involved in this novel and like other reviewers have said it seems there was never any suspence you always felt like the charecters were always going to get out in the nick of time, Overall a fun read

Rating:
Summary: Knights and Fair Maidens ....Adventureous!
Review: Great plot and story. Very original and well thought out.

In a nutshell: A billion dollar corporation has found a way to travel back in time and study the past for its own personal gain. Some of its scientists get trapped in medievel europe and the story follows the corporations' attempts at getting them back.

Great detail and focus on the characters and places like Crichton usually does. If you enjoy stories about Knights in shining armour rescuing fair maidens with an additional sci-fi time travel twist, you'll really enjoy this story. The plot is well thought out and keeps the reader guessing all the way.

This book completely overshadows its' movie counterpart (as is usually the case) which lost a tremendous amount of detail and tone in its' screen adaption.

Great nighttime read! Hark ... who goes there?

Rating:
Summary: Deeply flawed but enjoyable
Review: Ok, this is popcorn fare, no question about it. If you're a quantum physics nerd, a middle ages buff, and willing to suspend disbelief for a fun yarn (like me) you'll enjoy. If not, stay far away.

SPOILERS
Here are the biggest flaws in my opinion:
-the title of the book is timeline, but it is supposedly made clear that what they are doing isnt time travel at all. Which it clearly is. I suppose we just have to assume the guys running the show didnt know what they were doing, but you'd think they might bother to, you know, check that out. Kind of a big deal.
-Crichton does a masterful job of showing the middle ages in a fresh light, particularly how dangerous it would be for us soft futurites. Heck 2 army rangers get their heads seperated within seconds of arrival. But then 4 scholars manage to battle it out in one improbable escape after another, wiping out dozens of trained warriors as they go. Yeh, right.
-The ridiculous prohibition against taking modern tech back to the time. Wasnt it a different universe, so who cares? Oh yeh, forget that. And why is some wierd knock out chemical ok, but not a beretta? Nonsensical, and a total plot contrivance.
-Didnt it ever occur to these shmoes to send somebody back to get help? It wouldnt have worked but they didnt even try?
-Ok those are just pet peeves, but whats up with the end? They decide to basically murder Dolinger, for what? Being an A-hole? Is the penalty for being a greedy corporate SOB now death? Everyone involved volunteered! Should the guy who runs NASA be condemned to brutal death after every space accident? Whats with Crichton and condemning marginally nasty but ultimately harmless quasi-villians to horrible deaths aka the actor in State of Fear? Just weird. Why not have the professor slit the throats of the rest of the command team while theyre at it?

Rating:
Summary: Not very memorable.
Review: The biggest problem with this story, IMO, is the lack of cohesion due to Crichton taking an ensemble approach to the story. Crichton is an author who favors plot over character, and that's unfortunate, because a plot without great characters is never as memorable as a plot WITH them.

I admit to being captivated by the quantum physics aspect of the story, though that's not enough to rate a novel highly.

Rating:
Summary: War and Peace? No. Fun read? Sure.
Review: Timeline is never going to go down as a classic of modern fiction, but it is everything you would want it to be, a fun, fast-moving read with enough interesting scientific concepts that verge on plausability to suspend your disbelief for long enough for you to enjoy the story.

I haven't read much Crichton and have heard from the faithful that a lot of his other stuff is better, but this one kept me from getting to other things that I should have been doing and that's always a good sign.

Rating:
Summary: My Favorite Book
Review: Timeline is my favorite book. I bought it, read it and loved it. Then I gave it to my mother who loved it, she gave it too my father who loved it, he gave it to my sister who loved it and sent it on to a friend of hers. I like to imagine that it's still being passed along. I bought a second copy and lent it to my best friend, who lent it to his sister, who lent it to her other sister who lent it to a friend and so on. I'm pretty sure I'll never see it again. A great sci-fi journey.

Rating:
Summary: i would have given it 10 stars...
Review: I am an avid reader, mostly concentrating on fiction such as Crichton, Tolkien, Carr, Wrede, Rowling, etc. So if you don't like any of those, then maybe this isn't the book for you...

But if you do then I would say that this is one of the best books I have ever read. I don't throw that around lightly either. Taking place in a time and place quite different from our own, I was completely drawn into this fictious world of knights and warfare. Having read this book no less than five times, it is still just as interesting each time. I have every single one of Crichton's books and in my opinion this is the best. Of course, medieval (spelling? ha) warfare is a subject I find extremely intriguing, so maybe that's why too...Nevertheless, two of my uncles also read Timeline and agreed with me, so I know I'm not completely alone. :)

Rating:
Summary: Review for Timeline by Michael Crichton
Review: -James Maloney

Overall, this book was very entertaining. If you're a person for sci-fi books, this book is for you. I learned a lot too. Now I kind of look at time and space a different way. How it begins with a couple finding an old man in a desert is very interesting. The characters aren't really important at all there but the plot that it leads up to is. The only problem about the book is that there are a lot of characters that are irrelevant to the story. Once you start to get to know a character, they don't come back for the rest of the story.