Rating: 
Summary: Can life be extended only at the expense of children?
Review: I liked this novel for its fresh style and evocation of a New York I had visited previously ('Time and Again' by Jack Finney - a wonderfully evocative novel enhanced by some great photographs from the time). But then the novel bogged down. I didn't like the literary way in which Martin told his tale. No-one would tell a story like that - reliving the events in the sequence in which they occured. People jump to the punch line, and then fill in the details - harder to manage in story telling, but if you are going to have a character tell a story it is important, to me, that things are managed realistically.
I was also haunted by another book I had read ('Bug Jack Barron' by Norman Spinrad). Was this story heading in the same direction? It sort of did, but in a more refined and thoughtful - if less engaging - way. For a while I thought our narrator may have ..... but that's another story!
I'm happy enough to have spent some time with this novel but its not one that I think I will remember fondly for a long time.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I loved Ragtime, was entertained by some of his other books, but this one... I plowed through more than... half of it ... until these dots drove me nuts!
Rating:
Summary: Interesting Setting, could have been better
Review: I recently finished the audio version of this book, well-read by veteran actor Sam Waterston, and have to say that while I enjoyed Doctorow's portrait of 1870's New York City I thought there was some sizeable gaps in the plot.Without giving away too much of the story, the novel is narrated by a NYC newspaper editor, whose main "free lance" reporter Martin Pemberton has recently disappeared. Martin is young, engaged to be married, and is the son of the late Augustus Pemberton, who is alleged to have made his fortune in slave trading and price-gouging during the Civil War. After Martin confronts his father in a scathing school essay, he is ultimately disinherited. Now, shortly before Martin disappears, he tells McIlvaine (the narrator editor) that he saw his late father riding in a great coach in Manhattan. That all seems spooky and mysterious enough, and Doctorow skillfully reveals secrets as the story unfolds, but for me the real beauty of the novel is the depiction of NYC in the 1870's, dominated by Boss Tweed and his corrupt municipal police force, judges, senators, etc. At the time of the novel Tweed's influence is starting to slip a little, and towards the end Tweed's exploits in Cuba, which had little to do with the story, were nonetheless entertaining. However like many aspects of the plot, the political network and influence of Tweed was touched upon fairly superficially, without a lot of detail to enjoy. Everything is tied up quite nicely at the end, perhaps a little too abruptly, but I was a little confused as to certain aspects of the novel. What exactly happened to Martin, as opposed to the kids at the orphanage? Why was the police informer who robbed the paperboys killed? In any event, for those of you who like historical novels, The Waterworks may appeal to you and certainly had some fascinating passages. Doctorow is a skilled writer, even when not at his best. If you haven't read anything by this author though, I would start with Billy Bathgate or maybe Ragtime first.
Rating: 
Summary: E. L. Doctorow does a magnigicent job with this book!
Review: I think that this was one of the best books that I have ever read. The use of diction in this book was fabulous. Just when you think you figured someting out, the story twists and turns and your completly wrong. The ending was a complete shock to me, and "The Waterworks" is a perfect title to this novel.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: I thought that this book was really good, it blends subtle traces of mystery, horror and 19th-Century science fiction into a book that could have been written by H.G. Wells.
Rating:
Summary: Nice basics; too many ellipses
Review: I've read a few Doctorows in my time and would rank this one the lowest. The writing is crisp and pungent, like an autumn breeze, but the book just never quite blew stongly enough to fill my sails.
Rating:
Summary: Not the one to pick up
Review: I've read a few Doctorows in my time and would rank this one the lowest. The writing is crisp and pungent, like an autumn breeze, but the book just never quite blew stongly enough to fill my sails.
Rating:
Summary: Don't bother
Review: If you disliked Ragtime, this one will really make you retch. Pseudo-history tacked onto a silly plot and jazzed up with "writerly" pretensions, insights to the universe, god and man, sanity and lunacy...this book takes the fallen cake. But as the good Doctorow points out, finding the faults is only half a review. This book has good points too, so bring your microscope and a bottle of aspirin and let the search begin. The style is a very cheap imitation of Pynchon's masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon used ellipses by the bucketful as a way to link thoughts that are not always clearly connected. Doctorow uses them as extra periods, perhaps to lengthen a book whose house-of-cards plot could have been told in a chapter. A short chapter. Historical novels are not literature any more than historical poems are epics. Doctorow knows his dates but has never met the muse; he copies assiduously from old periodicals but does not know how to make people talk on paper. But what the heck, it's a bestseller, he's rich, and "no one but a blockhead writes except for money."
Rating:
Summary: Mr. Doctorow has written a fairly good mystery novel
Review: In _The Waterworks_ E.L. Doctorow tries his hand in writing a mystery and the results are fairly successful. Doctorow is no stranger to period pieces, as all of his readship knows. It is circa 1871, in New York City and the notorious Tweed Ring is very much in control of the Democratic Party's Tammany Hall and much of everything else that matters. In _The Waterworks_ the narrator, Mr. McIlvaine, the city editor of a New York newspaper, while endeavoring to investigate the disappearance of Martin Pemberton, a freelance critic, unwittingly assists in efforts to ovethrow Boss Tweed and his gang. Besides being quite atmospheric and evocative of that era, the book is loaded with colorful characters, including the fabulously wealthy, but dastadly Augustus Pemberton (father of Martin), who is presumed dead but occasionally shows up in the most unlikely places, the incorruptible Captain Donne (a possible former love interest to Martin's widowed mother), and the very shadowy and mad scientist-like Dr. Sartorius, who figures strongly in some strange doings regarding a number of street urchins and some very wealthy, but very sickly old men. There is a graveyard scene in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx that, although somewhat familiar to fans of the horror genre, may cause some readers' hair to stand on end. The plot contains no particular surprises or innovations in the mystery-horror realm of novels, but is nevertheless fairly well written and held my interest. Mr. Doctorow does, however, give away the solution to the mystery too soon, thereby dampening somewhat the novel's impact. He would done better by waiting to the very end to reveal this, rather than choosing the ending he did, however charming.
Rating:
Summary: Mr. Doctorow has written a fairly good mystery novel
Review: In _The Waterworks_ E.L. Doctorow tries his hand in writing a mystery and the results are fairly successful. Doctorow is no stranger to period pieces, as all of his readship knows. It is circa 1871, in New York City and the notorious Tweed Ring is very much in control of the Democratic Party's Tammany Hall and much of everything else that matters. In _The Waterworks_ the narrator, Mr. McIlvaine, the city editor of a New York newspaper, while endeavoring to investigate the disappearance of Martin Pemberton, a freelance critic, unwittingly assists in efforts to ovethrow Boss Tweed and his gang. Besides being quite atmospheric and evocative of that era, the book is loaded with colorful characters, including the fabulously wealthy, but dastadly Augustus Pemberton (father of Martin), who is presumed dead but occasionally shows up in the most unlikely places, the incorruptible Captain Donne (a possible former love interest to Martin's widowed mother), and the very shadowy and mad scientist-like Dr. Sartorius, who figures strongly in some strange doings regarding a number of street urchins and some very wealthy, but very sickly old men. There is a graveyard scene in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx that, although somewhat familiar to fans of the horror genre, may cause some readers' hair to stand on end. The plot contains no particular surprises or innovations in the mystery-horror realm of novels, but is nevertheless fairly well written and held my interest. Mr. Doctorow does, however, give away the solution to the mystery too soon, thereby dampening somewhat the novel's impact. He would done better by waiting to the very end to reveal this, rather than choosing the ending he did, however charming.
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