Rating: 
Summary: Dazzling Masterwork
Review: Don Delillo triumphantly returns to familiar ground with his new masterwork UNDERWORLD. Just as in MAO II, the action begins on a baseball field with an epic event. As in RUNNING DOG, an object of historical fascination is covetously pursued. Like END ZONE, links between thermonuclear war and sporting contest are drawn. For new readers, this book offers a kaleidescopic introduction to Delillo's magical everyday world of the last fifty years. Delillo's enormous literary talents are on full display. There is no more original writer active today. His work is challenging, and transforming. As with all great literature, it will affect how we perceive the world we live in. This is not a dry, bloodless Novel of Ideas, but a vibrant, pulsing piece of living art that opens the senses. The prose sparks and crackles with unique insights, with luminous revelations. Delillo's art is metaphysical; his language is charged.
The power of language remains at the heart of UNDERWORLD. While garbage, and waste disposal, run throught the novel as a leitmotif, it is language that transports the human experience through history. Words capture and recycle our thoughts, feelings and sensations. Delillo articulates the shapeless.
The structure of UNDERWORLD represents a breakthrough for Delillo. His past novels suffered in the final analysis from idiosyncratic plots whose locomotion would drop sharply by books end. In UNDERWORLD, the technique of burrowing backwards through time frees the author from the imperatives of forward plotting.
Sub-surface connections, the web of invisible relationships that can be seen only from certain angles, these are Delillo's sights. For those willing to invest the time and effort, this novel is an immense pleasure.
Rating:
Summary: You can read this book, or listen to the recording.
Review: Delillo's latest offering will not win over any converts easily. Underworld is not a quick and painless read. You would be a Delillo acolyte to keep turning the pages. But even if you're not, the book demands at least one successful attempt. Delillo commits an informed heart and a passionate mind to give Underworld a teeming life of its own which reflects our own disordered times. On that score alone, you might feel better served by any number of books. However, Underworld also triumphs as it underscores the central fact of our existence - its irresolvable duality. The aspect of nagging strangeness and troubling portent is perpetually challenged by its opposite of calm certainty and reassuring familiarity. Hope and despair. These are the contrary pulls of Underworld, which find refuge in Delillo's precision-tool prose with its cutting-edge of black comedy. Some may find the lack of straightforward, narrative continuity in such a hefty read quite off-putting. Underworld is ultimately indebted to James Joyce's Ulysses in its scope and width. All in all, Delillo's Underworld is a reliable search-engine to the truths of our time. Get the audio tape if you can't get through the book. The 9-hour audio version contains some marvellous authentic sound recordings which are a treat. The cinematic, opening 'baseball" chapter is not to be missed, especially for those, including myself, who have no experience of the game.
Rating: 
Summary: What a disappointment!
Review: This book came touted via the Internet and friends, but I found it so cumbersome and tedious that I cannot recommend it. I liked the first chapter, even though I'm not a baseball fan. However, the author lost me when he left the ballgame. It seems to me that DeLillo must fancy himself a Faulkner for the '90s. However, his dark, dense prose lacks Faulkner's rhythm, beauty, and poetry. I finished the book just to prove to myself that I can still run an endurance race. What a waste of my precious spare time!
Rating: 
Summary: Boring beyond belief
Review: What an incredible waste of supreme talent! Don Dellilo writes with imagery and poise second to none. I took pause often to marvel over his writing skills. However, the only reason that I finished Underworld was several plane trips with no other reading material available. The reader begs for this marvelous author to actually tell a story or teach us something about the human heart. I am not sure what we get instead. It reads more like an an author's notes from Creative Writing 101 than a novel. It's one thing to get angry about a book, often a mark of great art (e.g. Phillip Roth). It's an entirely different thing to get bored. Underworld rates a generous 3 only because of fantastic prose, but I would not actually recommend it to a friend.
Rating:
Summary: Surfing the Centruy
Review: Late in Underworld, DeLillo introduces the world wide web as a unifying metaphor for the book. This works beautifully, in an artistic sense, but it would be helpful to a reader to have the metaphor in mind at the outset. The scope of characters and situations is absolutlely huge. About page 500 or so, at the umpteenth shift across the decades (if not much sooner), you will find yourself wondering where in the world this book can possibly be going. Hang in there! DeLillo has rendered our entire culture as a kind of hypertext journey. He begins with a baseball and an atomic bomb and surfs these two threads over the course of the cold war. In lesser hands this would be a terrible jumble, but DeLillo is a master and he will deliver you--as we were all delivered from the dread of nuclear destruction that is already fading from memory--to peace in the end. Underworld is an immense saga of America, but without the all too familiar contrivances of the genre. It is a great and wonderful book, but make no mistake, it will challenge you listen for the subtle turns of phrase that define character, to note the faithful renderings of detail that yield resonating symbolism, and to recall, across a huge expanse of situation and dialogue, what is known and what is unknown. It is every bit as demanding as the best of Joyce or Faulkner and, for me, as rewarding in the end.
Rating: 
Summary: Some fantastic writing well hidden under verbal trash heap
Review: Even though I was often apathetic and had the feeling of slogging through a jungle with a dull machete--I have to admit there were passages of pure poetry that left me pleased and even excited. Nothing, though, in the entire book comes close to matching the breathless delight of that prologue. That alone was worth having to try and struggle through the rest of the novel. I give it a six rather than a two or three because the guy's obviously a fantastic writer who needs to buy a few red pencils and spare the rest of us his writer's self-indulgence. I think there's probably a fine book in there somewhere--or even two or three...
Rating:
Summary: Read this and you will know the novel is alive and well.
Review: Spectacular, Bursting, tour-de-force. This book has it all. I read it with amazement that someone can write like this. It will be the book to read in 2097 to discover what the heck was going on it the second half of the 20th century. Delillo has not only figured it out but shows us how he broke the code. This is the kind of book that, if someone else is in the room with you, you want to read them paragraphs out loud and say "isn't that amazing writing?. Cold Mountain was Great, but that was Mozart, this is Beethoven, Bach and Brahms.
Rating:
Summary: Underworld
Review: this is one of the most ponderous books I have ever read. It lacks a clear focus and drags you from chapter to chapter like a dental pick!! It was poor.
Rating:
Summary: A dead-on take of the Cold War in America
Review: Don DeLillo has long been one of my favorite authors. He is one of the very few writers, along with James Ellroy, who can take the past, re-tell history as it actually happened, add a few fictitious characters into the mix and make reality all over. One comes away from this book trying to remember Klara Sax, thinking, oh yeah, now I remember seeing one of her paintings in a gallery somewhere, once, a long time ago. It makes you think of all those fogotten things, those tremors and shakes at night and the oh no, uh oh, the bomb the bomb the bomb is coming for us and we're all gonna die and help me and please and over and over and over again it shudders you back into that forgetful frame we all experienced during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the thoughts of Big Deal, ain't nothin' can happen to us. We're Americans! The book is great. Although rather long, it breezes by like a mugging, a stop-still moment of life that lasts forever in under a minute, trapped in this zone, this time, this memory that never really happened like that afterall.
Rating:
Summary: An intriguing, annoying, confusing, addicting masterpiece.
Review: After putting the book down five times, renewing it at the library three times, vowing to forget it, and falling in love with it, I finished the book.
My first feeling was of accomplishment, which quickly faded to a sense of loss. I no longer had the incredibly complex myriad of seemingly unrelated vignettes to piece together into a comprehensible story. I kept waiting for a final chapter in which all of the characters came together, much like the final drawing room scene in Agatha Christe novel where the mystery is solved and the murderer revealed. I wanted a pink ribbon to tie around the plot, with every character accounted for and every sub-story with a definitive ending. DeLillo's book is vast in its length, complexity, and hypnotic-like attraction. I found myself hating the book and yet impatient to pick it up again to resume this seemingly aimless wandering through the fifties, sixties, and seventies. I want more from DeLillo. He brought back my childhood with his Sister Edgar and his street scenes in the Bronx. Read this book. Get through it all. It's worth it.
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