Rating: 
Summary: Building something out of nothing: the American Way
Review: Stories of Americans tied together by a possibly apocryphal piece of baseball memorobilia - the ball which connected with Bobby Thompson's bat to make the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" - aspire to make something profound out of the superficial. At the very least, the stories succeed in being surreal, which may describe America during the Cold War better than any other adjective. The book is not a complete picture of America; there could be no such book. But it gives a glimpse into the collective mind and soul of the baby-boomer generation better than anything I've ever read. Read this and watch Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanor's and you'll have a pretty good perspective on the dark side of post-WW2 America. However, a realistic "Generation X" character is lacking. The children of baby-boomers are portrayed either as followers or as loners; perhaps anything more textured would be beyond the scope of the book. But in general there is more texture here than you'll know what to do with. Have fun..
Rating: 
Summary: Great Novella, but Shabby Book
Review: This book is great for the first 80 pages. Read that. Then put it down. It tries to be the great American novel of the year, decade, century, millennium, space-time continuum, and so on. This is the problem: it thinks way too big. It makes a big promise which it never makes good on. Overall, it's just a mishmash of muck.
Still, that first chapter is incredible. Delillo would have been smart to stop there. Instead we get a self-indulgent mess that never really links or makes real sense deep down. It's always skirting, never exactly delving. Or let me rephrase that, it's always delving never arriving. If this book was a dinner party it would be catered and packed but have no host-and all the guests speak different languages.
Here DeLillo tries to give an account of the century but I thought Tommy Lee Jones summed up the universe and the threats to humanity better than Underworld in a scene from Men In Black when he says, "There's always an Archillion battle cruiser or and interstellar plague threatening to wipe out life on this sorry little planet." I don't think DeLillo ever sees the fun of being so fragile and near death all the time. He's so serious about himself he may have missed the key absurdity to reality. So, is this great literature? No. A baseball as a link between cold war politics and nuclear terror? Most Russians don't even play baseball. Perhaps chess would have been more suitable.
With this said, it's a good book, the kind you want to have read but that you don't really want to read. Put it next to Moby Dick that way. Read the beginning and then there are good parts mixed in. If you have the patience to sift, read on. If your in a hurry consider the first chapter a novella.
Rating: 
Summary: Wow! Boy was I impressed and so is uncle Elmer
Review: Sorry, forgot the question mark. I have an uncle Elmer. He is a family amusement. When I was a young man he used to come to family reunions,funerals and weddings and be quite entertaining. He was most famous for learning a new word from the dictionary each day or a new theory or concept he would vaguely touch upon and share with the younger members. "So whatcha think about the theory of real-tivity?", Uncle Elmer would pose. Or, "do any of you youngins know what a simulacrum is..hey you over there, Billy, ya know what a simulacrum is?" We were all as very young children quite impressed with Uncle Elmer -- quite impressed. Well that is of course until we got older and could see through sad uncle Elmer. We learned uncle Elmer was trying to impress us with this way-with-words and knowledge of the most obscure facts. We learned that he would play with those words, dance with his stories just to mesmerize, to impress, to sound "smart". How wonderful it would have been for all of us, but mostly for Uncle Elmer, had there been any real "point" or "substance" in his offering. However,uncle Elmer was an innocent -- insecure and uneducated, but harmless. That is not the case with Mr. Delillo. His wordplay and pretention is a black mark on literature and a damaging offer to those impressed with the uncle Elmers of this world and impressed with this gibberish! And that is the end of my very sad review.
Rating:
Summary: Boring
Review: Some scenes in "Underworld" are fascinating, others lengthy or straight boring. To me, they don't seem to jointly form a coherent picture (apart from the obvious fact that they span the cold war period). I don't know why this book is celebrated the way it is celebrated. I like other contemporary novels, e.g. "Gravity's Rainbow", "American Psycho", and some Palahniuk novels, far better.
Rating:
Summary: I can't decide.
Review: I slogged through this endless mosaic over the course of about 50 lunch breaks. As with some of Delillo's other books, I had no idea what's going on. Every time I felt like I knew what was going on, plot-wise, those characters/that storyline, went away. Never did I find fusion among the various stories or characters. But. It's Delillo, and there is something so transporting and lovely about some of his sentences. Absolutely definitely not all of his sentences. But some of them make me stop reading, read the sentence again, and almost start crying. He has beautiful words. After I finished this book, and had to have a mental IV for about a month, I started missing it. I couldn't remember what I thought it was about, but it emits some kind of literary pheromone that attracts me.
Rating: 
Summary: What?
Review: A dense, impenetrable and ultimately dull, directionless novel. Perhaps I don't "get" it because I don't live in America, never have, and never will, but this whole bloated affront to forests just rubs me the wrong way. It takes fifty pages for some kid to get to a damn baseball game, and it's downhill from there.
Rating: 
Summary: If I Had to Pick Just ONE "Great American Novel", It's This
Review: Of course, there are many "GAN"s, for different historic periods, demographics, etc. But *Underworld* somehow manages to span so many of them, and over a 50-year post-War period that now spans into the post-9/11 future, that it's *more* than great, *more* than a "remarkable achievement"--it's just breathtaking, unbelievable. In a sense, whatever you're looking for, you'll find it in *Underworld*. And don't be daunted by its length--it's actually a real page-turner, in the GOOD sense, though it begs for multiple re-reads. I'm familiar with the negative criticism of the book--that it's full of "sound bytes", it's a non-linear story, whatever...and sure, you bet! Though I wonder how many people who affect to dislike it have actually really *read* it--and don't worry, it's not (just) about the Cold War, New York, drugs, or baseball. It is a monumental masterpiece, a book that will be a classic for many, many years, and it will take that long for we as readers to fully come to terms with its genius, if indeed we ever fully do. All that, and it's STILL a...FUN READ! It really is. How DeLillo pulled all this off, I'll bet even HE doesn't know. I wouldn't recommend *Underworld* as a reader's first Don DeLillo book--that would be *White Noise*, probably, which still holds up as a cultural mirror when I teach it in college freshman and sophomore classes, though it's now 18 years old--but then again, so does *Americana*, DeLillo's first novel, published in 1971! But I consider it to be one of the finest American novels written in my lifetime, one of those books you've just gotta read before you die. Actually, death and the threat and fear of it (even, or *especially*, in "life") is DeLillo's Great Theme--in ALL his 13 books--and MY life, for one, has been enriched by having read them all, and in particular this one.
Rating:
Summary: Not for the traditional-minded
Review: This is an experimental novel in that it is not told in a conventional time sequence (though it can't be called non-linear - it has a linear time structure, it's just that that structure runs backwards). The subject is, nominally, The Cold War. But the book runs the whole gamut of human emotions, hopes, and dreams. First and foremost it is about the invisible world that exists beneath the surface of things, the world of synchronicities. It has more in common with recent films such as "American Beauty" and "Magnolia" than it does with anything I can think of in recent fiction. A criticism I have seen is that it is dull, tedious, and/or pretentious. Personally, I didn't find it to be any of those things, but then I really enjoy unusual and unconventional storytelling. It wasn't an intellectual chore to read it, even if only for sheer entertainment value; I couldn't put it down, and the 800+ pages flew by like lightning. Like the works of Pynchon or Rushdie, you have to let it make its own rules rather than judge it by conventional means. At the same time, DeLillo is, in my opinion, far more accessible than either of those authors. I thought it was exceptionally good.
Rating:
Summary: Can't recommend
Review: 'Underworld' is an empty vessel: a posturing, self conscious and intellectual drudge.
Rating:
Summary: It isn`t what I expected
Review: Undoubtedly my being a non-american did not stand me in good stead as I struggled through the many pages of this book. There`s no disputing the quality of Delillo`s prose, but it was at times over elaborate and did not compensate for an extremely lacklustre storyline that just dragged along and rarely showed signs of gaining momentum. Only the events surrounding Nick Shay made for interesting reading and it was always somewhat dissapointing when the spotlight shifted to one of the many other mundane charachters most notably Klara Sax.
I`d suggest "White Noise" for those who seek a more satisfying and less fragmented read.
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