Rating: 
Summary: A great big yawn!
Review: Yes, the baseball game in the opening section is interestingly described but this book was so boring, I stopped reading it halfway through for the sake of my sanity!
Life is too short for this kind of pretentious, over-hyped, long drawn out waste of time.
Rating: 
Summary: Vivid Slices of Life
Review: This is a great book. It chronicles the life of the infamous baseball hit by Bobby Thompson, "The shot heard around the World". The book doesn't have much to do with baseball. The images and scenes described by Delilo are so vivid you feel like your watching a movie. It's really a slices of life book. It takes you in many different directions, in many different era's following the lives of the many different owners of the ball. I loved it! It's a project though being 800+ pages, but well worth the time.
Rating:
Summary: HIGHLY OVER-RATED
Review: The book was highly over-rated by the literati. I guess I'm not one of them, because I couldn't get half way through it. I wish I could remember what it was about, but it left absolutely no impression on me whatsoever. I've said enough.
Rating:
Summary: A contemporary classic
Review: Only a philistine would complain about the length and breadth of this novel. These are part of its immense appeal. Delillo writes better than any other living American author, and he has never had a greater canvas on which to display his majesty. Few others would be willing to try to weave together such disparate storylines as we get here, but it's easy to feel their connection, through the recurring motifs and themes.This is an important novel, all the more so in light of recent developments in American history.
Rating: 
Summary: My Dinner with Andre
Review: If you liked the movie, "My Dinner with Andre" you may like this book since it too goes on and on. Like greyhound 9, I just couldn't make it all the way through. I am on page 222, and have considered giving up since page 30. I keep hoping the characters will be more interesting - but it hasn't happened yet. Both the writing and the characters are flat.
Rating:
Summary: I gave up
Review: I tried, really _tried_ to plow through Underworld's 800+ pages. I just couldn't do it. Too much like work. I can appreciate what DeLillo was trying to do to sum up post-WWII America, and using the travels of one of the most famous baseballs in sports history is certainly a clever way to do it, but I simply never felt engaged in this work. The characters seemed flat and uninteresting...and I got really fed up with nearly every character speaking like Jackie Mason. "What? You want I should finish this book? You should know from books!" I suspect that if you are about 50, and you grew up in Brooklyn, you'll enjoy this more than I did.
Rating: 
Summary: The Tin Man of Literature
Review: Possibly no one writing today writes a sentence better than DeLillo. Sometimes he's so good with syntax and diction he can make you swoon. But if there's a heart beating under all that icy, finely machined prose, it's hard to discern. And so the problem with Underworld is that it's a bit like spending weeks hugging a glacier. Humor, insights, compelling characters are supplanted by DeLillo's way with words. Language for language's sake. Language is the real character and concern of the novel, and finishing it bestows a sense of accomplishment, as if one scored a personal tour de force nearly as laudable as writing it. But it likely won't leave you changed in any measurable way. Diction and irony are fine, but not at this length. Underworld seems to have a message. If it only had a heart.
Rating:
Summary: Slight;y Over-weight
Review: Good because of the theme and Delillo's observant,unique, and almost full exploration of it, but could have used another editor or a better editor or more editiors. Too bad because even-though the story doesn't really go anywhere, many great books are that way . And with about three hundred pages of fat trimmed off, this could have been great.
It's just a bit too stylish and cute. The author's need to write something more dignified then everyone else is marked in every sentence. THere must be someone who can do better on the same subject. Buy it if you like this type of writing, but don't expect any attempt on actual storytelling. And the title's kind of corny. Boom?
Rating:
Summary: The Writer as Virtuoso
Review: DeLillo is to writers as Pavorotti is to tenors: a virtuoso, a show-stopping athlete. UNDERWORLD is about connections, the supporting web beneath appearances, a verbal (and nounal, adjectival,adverbial, gerundial) paean to the esoteric mystical perception that all things are one. It is simultaneously ribald, blasphemous and reverent, spiritual in all the deepest and truest senses. This writing is simply astonishing, stupefyingly grand and good. It reveals our species-specific (special?) ability to anthropomorphize and invest even inanimate objects into the web. Everyone from housewives to terrorists can (and, I suspect, DID) find inspiration here. In a sheerly technical sense, this writing is so good, it has a whiff of brimstone about it...like what they used to say about Paganini's fiddling. As long as UNDERWORLD is, it's over far too soon.
Rating:
Summary: One of the most enjoyable books I have ever read
Review: I was taken into another dimension with this book, the layers and richness of experience, the characters and situations and timelines , the human horrors and routines, the dreams and tragedies, the past that led us to where we stand now. I loved every page, every story line. Don Delillo proved himself to me as an astronomical writer, his strong and unique style, his repetitive phrases that give his writing a poetic and magical edge. I can not stress enough, as an avid and obsessive book lover that you must give this book a chance. It is one of the few books I will read again.
| 
