Rating: 
Summary: a superb work of fiction
Review: A page-turner all the way. I had to force myself to put it down at times. It's a masterful piece of story-telling, for sure, but much more: a complex portrait of a serial killer which is also remarkable lyric poetry. It's this juxtaposition which is so disturbing: a cold-blooded killer with the mind of a poet. Dickey's ability to "paint with words" is incredible. I don't know what else I can add to what other reviewers have already said. I was disappointed to discover (as I should have expected) that this novel is probably going to be made into a movie. No, no no! I don't care who does it or how good it supposedly is; it can't achieve what the novel did, which is told in the first person. Why, oh why, can't Hollywood leave this one alone? In any case, read the book by all means. I haven't read anything that caught my attention like this one did in a long time.
Rating:
Summary: a superb work of fiction
Review: A page-turner all the way. I had to force myself to put it down at times. It's a masterful piece of story-telling, for sure, but much more: a complex portrait of a serial killer which is also remarkable lyric poetry. It's this juxtaposition which is so disturbing: a cold-blooded killer with the mind of a poet. Dickey's ability to "paint with words" is incredible. I don't know what else I can add to what other reviewers have already said. I was disappointed to discover (as I should have expected) that this novel is probably going to be made into a movie. No, no no! I don't care who does it or how good it supposedly is; it can't achieve what the novel did, which is told in the first person. Why, oh why, can't Hollywood leave this one alone? In any case, read the book by all means. I haven't read anything that caught my attention like this one did in a long time.
Rating:
Summary: Zen and the Art of Slaughter
Review: An unforgettable, hypnotic meditation on survival and finding peace among chaos. Dickey paints a complicated, ambiguous lead character whose brutal and selfish actions are contrasted by his beautiful laments about nature, manhood and glaciers. Apparrently, there are several screen treatments of this novel in the works, including a dialouge-free adaption by the Coen brothers.
Rating: 
Summary: This isn't the book you're looking for...
Review: Despite what the jacket summary may say, this is not a story of a heroic soldier struggling to stay alive in enemy territory, like Capt Scott O'Grady's true story. Instead, this is a disturbing tale about a twisted, bloodthirsty murderer with no grasp on the value of human life (and little grasp on sanity). Dull dreamlike sequences drag on and on, slowing the pace of the book. Extended ramblings about such topics as smashing human pelvic bones and drinking blood attest to the narrator's (and author's) ugly morbidity. The narrator's boasts about his unmatched skills as an outdoorsman grow stale quickly. On the whole, this book will bore you and turn your stomach. For an exciting survival adventure, look elsewhere.
Rating: 
Summary: Pretentious nastiness
Review: I don't think I have ever read a book that I found so completely unpleasant as this one. The main character, an airman shot down in a WWII raid over Tokyo, keeps himself alive by one murder after another of the Japanese civilians he encounters. It is not the act portrayed so much as it is the way it is presented that I have a problem with. Whatever Dickey intended the reader to think about this numbing round of killing, I personally found it - and the 'hero' portrayed in the book - and the author who wrote the words - objectionable in the extreme. Apart from the unpleasantness of the story and main character, the language, especially for a writer who fancies himself a poet, is so bad. Passages alternate between the flat and the flatulenty overdone. Quite frankly, I found reading this book a kind of torture, and only endured it because I kept hoping that Dickey would work some of the same magic he was able to pull off in Deliverance - an ugly story that could as easily have failed but didn't. If you hate humanity and/or love deadpan descriptions of violent death inflicted by strangers or feel the need for some deadly droning prose, then this is the book for you. Dickey must really have been down on the human race and his own life when he penned this one.
Rating:
Summary: A FIRST PERSON POEM AS A NOVEL? Yes!
Review: I had the rare honor of a long telephone conversation with James Dickey 12 months before his untimely death. We talked about "To the White Sea" and the novel I was working on "Greif". James was busy writing the screen play for the novel, which I hope his daughter will finish. When I first read it I was sucked in, shocked, stomped and emotionaly drained. Here we have a novel written in the first person which is essentially some of Dickey's best poetry. At the same time Dickey places the reader squarely into the mind of a serial killer (Muldrow) who has the entire Japanese Home Army tracking him down. They are faced with "Muldrow's" ultimate camouflage! Himself! A wild human being hunting other human beings with absolutely no conscience or feeling for his victims. The reader will, at first, cheer on Muldrow! But as Dickey begins to work on your mind, you feel a chill up your back as he takes you on a wild ride that seems to have no end. I discribed my experiences in Alaska exploring the Brooks Range to Dickey, who merely chuckled. I had the impression this consummate Southern Gentleman had an unreal grasp of those desolate wind swept and COLD plains. COLD IS THE WORD THAT BEST DESCRIBES 'TO THE WHITE SEA'.
Rating:
Summary: Consummate storytelling
Review: I knew James Dickey at the University of South Carlolina, and I later spent 14 years living in the interior of Alaska. His last novel is a stunning achievement, missed utterly by anyone hoping for "Hogan's Heroes." Critics who wrote at the time that the protagonist is "a sick puppy" were probably also offended by the first 20 minutes of "Saving Private Ryan." If you want standard Hollywood, and you buy Dickey, you will be disappointed. To be a hunter, keen and alert, raised to know the life of the wild and the ways of the hunted, and then to be placed, as Muldrow was, into a world of aliens, each one a hunter, and to have all the usual means of becoming inconspicuous stripped away: that is the story. That was Muldrow's lot; what exactly was he supposed to do? No one who hates this book can admit to even a vestigial smidgen of the feral in mankind. Dickey's unlikely and unwilling hero had it, and so when he appears to be camouflaged at the book's end, he really is: no one in the crowd who sees him understands what he is seeing--and that includes some readers.
Rating: 
Summary: Wasn't sure what I was getting into...
Review: I read this due to the fact that I heard that the Coen Brothers were making it into a movie -- although I've read that this is no longer the case. In any event, this was my first Dickey novel and I have to say that all in all, I was very satisfied with the effort. The prose is interesting, lush and vivid in some parts and caustic in others. Some of the other reviewers seemed to be appalled at the plot and the surgical sterility that Dickey used to describe the deaths inflicted by the main character, but I found those exact things to be quite within the realm of believability, especially when the whole idea of the book is to survive like an animal behind enemy lines. I liked the book enough to want to go back and read more of Dickey's other works...
Rating:
Summary: Wasn't sure what I was getting into...
Review: I read this due to the fact that I heard that the Coen Brothers were making it into a movie -- although I've read that this is no longer the case. In any event, this was my first Dickey novel and I have to say that all in all, I was very satisfied with the effort. The prose is interesting, lush and vivid in some parts and caustic in others. Some of the other reviewers seemed to be appalled at the plot and the surgical sterility that Dickey used to describe the deaths inflicted by the main character, but I found those exact things to be quite within the realm of believability, especially when the whole idea of the book is to survive like an animal behind enemy lines. I liked the book enough to want to go back and read more of Dickey's other works...
Rating: 
Summary: Not bad, but not a page-turner either.
Review: I'm about half way through this novel, and while the main character and the situation he finds himself in are intriguing, I'm a bit disappointed by how slow the story moves. Being inside the protagonist's head shouldn't mean we need to follow every fleeting and repetitive thought that goes through it, does it? I have no doubt I'll finish this book and be satisfied with it in the end, but it won't be without a fair amount of effort. Call me a philistine, but I want a book to draw me in, not challenge me to stay engaged.
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