Rating: 
Summary: Despite a weak ending, a masterful job of writing
Review: A rare writer with a great gift for language, thought, and character development. Despite a weak ending, this book was a thorough pleasure to read. Wonderful insights into and articulation of the creative process.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but not as good as Enduring Love !
Review: Ian McEwan once again provides evidence of very capable writing skills. This novel however does fall into the shadow of Enduring Love.
Rating:
Summary: A superb comic vise
Review: Clive nor Vernon initiates the euthensasia pact and Garmony certainly does not come out on top. And no one mentions how funny and acidly satiric it is, chiefly as a study of the media and the middle-aged decline of '60s idealists. The ending is obvious, true, and cruel, but so are the endings of Waugh's Handful of Dust and Huxley's Genius and the Goddess, with which Amsterdam stands comparison as a small comic masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing for a Booker winner.
Review: This is my first read of McEwan. Booker winners have been my guidepost in the past, but this is a sad disappointment, both as prize winner and novella. Once I had begun to swim in the plot, the most jarring deficiency was McEwan's apparent lack of interest in the details of the principals and their friendships. It seemed he was racing to a conclusion - perhaps to finish in time for the Booker deadline?
Rating:
Summary: Not McEwan's best, but well worth while
Review: Enduring Love and Amsterdam were both two of my favorite books this year. I don't think Amsterdam is McEwan's greatest accomplishment, but its brevity should not be mistaken for weakness. Amsterdam is eloquently concise. Like all of his writing, Amsterdam is full of lovely symmetries and rich recurring psychological themes. I thought it was wonderful, deserving of the Booker, its depth unshaken by its length.
Rating:
Summary: Film Treatment
Review: A fine story about despicable people that reads like a film treatment. With the proper actors and director, I'm sure we'll all enjoy the show. As a book, though, it's amusing but shallow.
Rating:
Summary: Well-written and absorbing, but a Booker prize winner?
Review: This is the first novel by esteemed British writer Ian McEwan that I've read. While I certainly found it an intriguing diversion, I am rather surprised it was awarded this year's Booker Prize. The novel's central characters--Vernon and Clive--are rather undimensional. Their linked fates are surprising, even somewhat shocking, but I didn't experience much in terms of an emotional connection with them or the plot. What McEwan does have going for him is a prose style that is lyrical and--particuarly when describing the music of Clive's "Millenium" symphony--entirely musical.Recommended--but if you're looking for a little more substance, try "Master Georgie" by Beryl Bainbridge, one of the novels "Amsterdam" beat out for this year's Booker Prize.
Rating: 
Summary: Reviews
Review: Michiko Kakutani in THE NEW YORK TIMES, 12/1/98: "Ian McEwan's new novel, 'Amsterdam,' which won the Booker Prize in Britain this autumn, is a dark tour de force, a morality fable, disguised as a psychological thriller. A chilling little horror story, easily read in one enjoyable gulp," Daphne Merkin in THE NEW YORKER, 12/7: "'Amsterdam' has some of the standard McEwan touches-blunt writing warmed by lyrical bursts, and an outlook that tends to the acidic.... The novel wears its erudition lightly: there are quick subliminal echoes of Yeats and Larkin.... Although 'Amsterdam' begins and ends with death, it is one of McEwan's sunniest efforts-a slim jeu d'esprit.... Go ahead and enjoy it. Then, when you're in the mood to have your peace disturbed, hunker down with 'Enduring Love.'" Wendy Bounds in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, 11/27/98 "A quick study of the fragility of life-with its capacity for joy, genius, loss, and betrayal.... 'Amsterdam,' which recently won Britain's Booker Prize, is mostly a captivating pleasure."
Rating: 
Summary: "A consolation Booker", I agree
Review: I have been a faithful reader of Ian McEwan since the publication of his First Loves, Last Rites. When I heard that he had been given the Booker, I considered it a solid proof of the existence of literary justice. But, to my surprise, I found that Amsterdam is far below of McEwan's usual asset. How can we compare this work, with its arbitrary plot and its weak insight, with such brilliant novels as Black Dogs, The Comfort of Strangers, Child in Time, The Cement Garden, all of which may have won the Booker Prize without discussion? Until a few days ago, I thought I would recognize Mr. McEwan's style, elegance and profound insight of psichological mazes, but now I have to eat my own words: I didn't recognized a beloved author in this Amsterdam, Booker or not. Even Enduring Love, which has several minor flaws, structurally speaking, is better that this, his last novel. McEwan, a mature author, should be producing masterpieces, not prize-winners by the pound. Someone sold McEwan by the pound, and I regret it. The Booker Prize had demerit itself by not giving him the award with previous works. McEwan won, but in the end, I think, everybody looses, the Booker, the readers, and the author.
Rating:
Summary: A decent pot boiler but not of Booker grade
Review: Now let's not be TOO UNcritical. There's not enough there to gush so. The book has its virtues, of course. Very near the end you'll find the "thought transcripts" of the two dying antagonists. I cannot remember when I was so eerily moved as in those pages. But the novel is so short, and its world so very minute and narrow (upper class London), and its horizon so short (it stretches to just Amsterdam across the Channel) -- that you feel as if locked in a tiny fuggy Victorian parlor with four or five unremarkable, ordinary, boring people. Also, I could not believe the stagey whirlwind enmity that mushroomed between the antagonists at the end. The disastrous ending was no fated tragedy -- these two blokes were too bleeding stupid (cognitively underpowered) to avert the catastrophe. And this galled me -- why had I bothered spending time with these two twits? Are these guys typical of their milieu? If so, that confirms the suspicion about that world's narrowness. This is not a Booker winner - it's a pot boiler and I'd bet ten bucks the author fell off his stool when he heard it had been shortlisted. It is, however, a decent pot boiler.
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