Rating: 
Summary: Too Dark, Too Pretentious, Too Too
Review: Underworld has the distinction of being the first book I have put down (in many senses of the phrase) since The Adventures of Augie March in the eighth grade (sorry, Saul Bellow). The setting is dark and not really evocative of its period or its place. The gimmick of having the characters live backwards through the narrative is just that. The female characters are poorly drawn, and the male characters carry around so much angst that they sink below ground. I am both a Cold War kid and a hazardous waste professional, and Delillo needs a get a life more pertinent to mine. All in all, you can indeed fool all of the reviewers at least one time.
Rating: 
Summary: A mind-altering book, a tonic of revelation!!!
Review: Being a Don Delillo fan, I waited hungrily for a year for this book. Then it came, and I dove in, teeth bared, tongue lolling. The book never gave me pause, and I consumed it quickly. But, by the end, I felt that I had made the end page too quickly. Had I missed something? Did I read too quickly, was the book's ideas too familiar? Sure, I enjoyed it, laughing along the way, astounded at points, constantly talking about it and making oblique references in conversation. I'm now three books past Underground and I feel still drawn too it, magnetically, in a way no other book has. Imagine, I want to reread all 834 pages again so soon, just a month after reading it the first time. So, instead I picked up White Noise and re-read it. Suddenly, Underground is washing over me and my thoughts, shaping how I see the world, the recent stock-market shake up, the whole world has been colored by this writer's insights. But it wasn't revelatory. It wasn't sudden. It sunk into my bones and affected my hindsight, spreading to my foresight and now my present vision. This is great literature. Not the sudden amazing shocking wow-ness. This book provides the true long deep marrow-sucking sensation of having to recreate your sense of the world around you. True, this effect is cumulative, having read numerous novels by the same author. But Underground was the apex of the experience.
Rating:
Summary: Finally recognizable emotional content in Delillo
Review: In Underworld Delillo finally offers characters whose engagement with a devastated millenial landscape includes an emotional reckoning that exalts them to a more humane status. While it's easy to understand the point made by creating hollowed out characters in a universe of normalized paranoia, it's more effective for the author to plant real human beings into his environment, a point demonstrated over and over again by such great apocalyptic urban philosophical writers as Juan Carlos Onetti, and even recently by Rick Harsch, author of the remarkable and unfortunately overlooked The Driftless Zone. It seems that Delillo has finally brought all his talents to bear in this latest novel.
Rating: 
Summary: An editor, an editor! my kingdom for an editor. . .
Review: "The book is a grossity. We have to invent words to describe the corpulence, the top-heaviness, the lack of discernment, pace and energy." _Mao II_ Philosophizing: sophomoric. Simile: facile. Tapestry: puerile. Baseball: boring. Check out his brilliant, infosophical earlier works -- deadly sober perceptions piercing the surreal space/time continuum we in the West call the 20th century.
Rating: 
Summary: I've never met a book I didn't like at all...until now.
Review: I don't ask much from a novel. Give me a tangible plot, some coherent paragraphs, decent dialogue and characters with reasonable definition, and I'll wade through it somehow. Particularly when Newsweek went into rhapsodies over it, and even the promotional reviewers in Amazon rated it the Book of the Century. So, what went wrong? My wife, a woman of very good taste and a liberal attitude, got to page 263 and gave up; I lasted for a few pages more. Tell you what I'm going to do--I'll stash this one on our bulging bookshelves for a year or so, and then I'll try it again. I hate to see the twenty bucks go to a complete waste.
Rating: 
Summary: A master storyteller at his peak.
Review: The baseball makes this book work. Not just any baseball, but a specific, lost, game winning homer which signals the beginning of the arms race and weaves itself into the tapestry of weird, obnoxious, and spiritual characters which comprise Delillo's fin de siecle history of the Cold War. For those readers of a certain age, this is their life, even parts of it they do not remeber or did not personally experience. So Lenny Bruce comes alive to remind us "we're all gonna die", J. Edgar Hoover entertains us with his paranoia, and Armageddon is conceived (and almost executed) by men who confuse rocketry with Jayne Mansfield's preposterous breasts. This is not just a Forrest Gump exercise, however, there is a story- several of them- upon which the author focuses his too-true-to-life prose- a Manhattan summer is both heard and felt, the desert of New Mexico burns, and then of course there is the Game, perhaps one of the best opening chapters ever written. Read this book.
Rating:
Summary: DeLillo reminds us that history is constructed.
Review: One of the greatest things about "Underworld" is that DeLillo presents a different history than that in the history books. It challenges the reader to examine history other than that which is widely known and circulated. By creating fictional characters and fictionalizing real persons, DeLillo can critique and engage in a dialogue with history as well while remaining less "academic" about the whole enterprise. He is able to philosophize without assuming the guise of the philosopher by engaging characters in discussion and through the characters' thoughts. A rather long read, but definitely one of the better books I have read recently.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best contemporary American novels ever written.
Review: "Underworld" teems with history and talent, words finely wrought as the parts of an atomic bomb, with as much complexity and power. It can be difficult. It can be demanding. It is a book to pay attention to, requiring of the reader devotion to the pages - devotion which pays off time and again in arias of language and stunning shifts in prose. At one point, a character attends a screening of a long-lost Eisenstein film, "Unterwelt," and notes: "Of course the film was strange at first, elusive in its references and filled with baroque apparitions and hard to adapt to - you wouldn't want it any other way." Ever clever, DeLillo has described his own "Underworld" - and like that film, you wouldn't want this landmark literary achievement, this novel of our time that will long outlast our time, any other way.
Rating:
Summary: unparalleled
Review: Read this book and tell me there's been a better American novel written in the last 40 years. Dare you. Peace
Rating:
Summary: A magnum opus to rival Gaddis, Pynchon, and America itself
Review: Don DeLillo is as good as anyone at depicting the surreality of contemporary America, where the facts, hurled in our faces daily at fiber optic speed, have become weirder and less believable than fictioneers of fifty years ago could ever have imagined. His previous novels, especially "White Noise," captured large slices of our world and presented them with riotous humor and substantial doses of dread, but in "Underworld," he's finally written something on a scale that approaches his subject. This novel contains nearly every topic of importance to come down the pike in the last half-century: race relations, the environment, the role of the artist in a consumer society, escalating violence, the cult of celebrity, drugs, the arms race, the space race, the pennant race, and more. All these diverse issues are dextrously woven into a tapestry that hangs from the extended metaphor of waste. For DeLillo, our history is not the distilled product of laboratory research, but the everyday detritus pitched out by the official culture-keepers, from the casual conversation of elderly "fresh air inspectors" who sit all day on New York stoops to a half-told joke by Lenny Bruce that only he finds funny. The size of the book should not be remotely intimidating; not a page is wasted and this reader craved more when the last one turned
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