Rating: 
Summary: Very good book
Review: The Fourth Hand, like John Irving's other novels is a very well written and all around exceptional book. Patrick Wallingford is a TV journalist who is divorced and likes to hit on other women single or married. Patrick is reporting a circus in India when he gets his left hand bit off by a caged lion. When the novel first begins you will think this guy is a jerk but by the end of the novel he has changed dramatically. Meanwhile, a man in Wisconsin has accidentally shot himself. His widow wants to offer his left hand to Patrick. Things occur throughout the novel and soon Patrick begins to fall in love with Mrs.Clausen, the widow. She is not too quick to let Patrick know how she feels. By the end of the novel Patrick is no longer the person he once was. This is a comic and love story compiled together to make an exceptional novel.
Rating: 
Summary: a disappointment from irving
Review: _The Fourh Hand_ is the only book I have read by John Irving that didn't raise goosebumps on my skin or cause me to cry. Not that those things are automatically required of a great book, but what I do require is being made to care. I found that as I read I didn't like Patrick Wallingford, the TV journalist ("Disaster Man") main character whose hand is eaten off by a lion, and didn't like the people surrounding him. Even after Patrick's humanization, presumably caused by the hand transplant and the "strings" that were attached, he seems shallow, more bemused by the fact he'd fallen in love than anything._The Fourth Hand_ is written in an acerbic comedic tone, ostensibly a treatise against the media and the news that transfixes us as a nation. Almost Swiftian, the novel might have made a better essay, possibly even without the love aspect which is supposed to be the redemptive force of the book but is not entirely believable. Great writers cannot be great all the time, and upon finishing all I wanted to do was re-read _The Cider House Rules_ or _A Prayer for Owen Meany_. First time Irving readers would be better off with one of his earlier works, and long time fans shouldn't expect too much.
Rating:
Summary: a disappointment from irving
Review: _The Fourh Hand_ is the only book I have read by John Irving that didn't raise goosebumps on my skin or cause me to cry. Not that those things are automatically required of a great book, but what I do require is being made to care. I found that as I read I didn't like Patrick Wallingford, the TV journalist ("Disaster Man") main character whose hand is eaten off by a lion, and didn't like the people surrounding him. Even after Patrick's humanization, presumably caused by the hand transplant and the "strings" that were attached, he seems shallow, more bemused by the fact he'd fallen in love than anything. _The Fourth Hand_ is written in an acerbic comedic tone, ostensibly a treatise against the media and the news that transfixes us as a nation. Almost Swiftian, the novel might have made a better essay, possibly even without the love aspect which is supposed to be the redemptive force of the book but is not entirely believable. Great writers cannot be great all the time, and upon finishing all I wanted to do was re-read _The Cider House Rules_ or _A Prayer for Owen Meany_. First time Irving readers would be better off with one of his earlier works, and long time fans shouldn't expect too much.
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