Rating: 
Summary: Worth the read!
Review: I just finished this book last night, and was suprised to find the severe criticism of Killing Time here. The plot is fun and interesting, and the commentary is fascinating and worth pondering. So many reviewers have focused on his "information is not knowledge" line, but that is something many critical thinkers have been saying for years. The best part of this book was the contrast of a highly technological "civilized" culture with an African tribe the main character also spends time with. The story evolves so that we realize that the answer is not quite so simple as the rejection of information, for that often leads to an even worse consequence. Rather, the main character realizes that any attempt to cure the ills of a (dis-)information society must address people's love of information and their equal dislike of any serious contemplation of information.
Once again, definitely worth the read.
Rating: 
Summary: Astonishingly bad
Review: Did the man who wrote the gripping and articulate Angel of Darkness and The Alienist write this thing? I can't believe it. It reads like a bad college attempt at a novel. Characters are flimsy, the narrator is voluble but without form, and the constant message that things will get unimaginably worse and so and so will feel incredibly worse...well, it has to be either another person's book under Carr's name or some ploy to earn a few dollars on a discarded manuscript. The ideology of it is childish. Yikes.
Rating:
Summary: big mistake
Review: After reading and enjoying Mr Carr's 1st two books, I happily grabbed this book up and was ready for an entertaining evening. Sadly, this may be the worst book I have read in the last ten years. Immature, pointless, self-serving, and just plain bad. Mr. Carr shows much promise as a novelist and it is a shame he stank so bad here. Whoever Mr. Carr is trying to emulate with this dreck should try to shake some sense back into him.
Rating:
Summary: Horrible
Review: Just a terrible novel. I got about halfway through and just gave up. Poor writing style. I see it has a two star rating, pretty low and I don't see how it managed to get the second star.
Rating:
Summary: Kill Time with Carr's Killing Time
Review: In Caleb Carr's newest fiction foray, Killing Time, his protagonist, Dr. Gideon Wolfe faces a Global Village that would have made Marshall McLuhan shout "I told you so!"As McLuhan predicted, too much information quickly sets in place a series of cataclysmic events, not the least of which is worldwide political imbalance and total forfeiture of government authority to global corporations. The insidious part is that people in general don't know this is happening, believing these puppet governments are still in charge. Predictably, the corporations have made decisions based on good business, not good environment--turning Earth into a wasteland, and creating, among other things, a mean planet--rife with disease and poverty and water wars. Third World countries have de-evolved into havens for syndicate dictators and black market mercenaries. Like his previous novel, The Alienist, Carr's story begins in New York City. But it quickly departs this familiar territory for imagined terrains unknown. Like his Alienist protagonist, Killing Time's hero, Dr. Gideon Wolfe, has a love of criminal psychology and a soft spot for misfits. But the environs described in this story are not as painstakingly painted as in Carr's Alienist world. In Killing Time, the Internet is like a character--the epicenter of everything--including business transactions and government. All news is ravenously devoured, regardless of truth or fact. Information, once a commodity, has evolved into an addiction--like an intravenous data drip And everyone in the world is a junkie. This overwhelming curiosity creates a suitable environment for spin doctors to play God and change geopolitical dynamics with artificially created news and history. It's a role for which Dr. Gideon Wolfe abandons his life as a prominent criminal psychologist and professor to join a band of renegades with a disinformation agenda. United for the cause and supported financially by an independently wealthy son of an Internet mogul, this team of accomplished [but flawed] misfits sets about "righting" some of history's "wrongs," by delicately putting a new spin on previously recorded facts. In this penultimate game of control, false documents, lies and general history re-writing is considered a reasonable cost of this war on business. Still, Carr manages to snare the reader by writing in a style tha tmkaes you think Dr. Wolfe is telling you his adventure over drinks--or through a diary. The first-hand narrative is what makes you care about Wolfe, and the people he grows to admire and love in the story. His fluid writing style draws you into each scene and guides your imagination to fill in the blanks where appropriate. And despite the dark surroundings, the year 2023 isn't all bad for Wolfe--and us, in this techno romp through muddy oceans and nuclear armies. Carr, also known for his non-fiction historical essays, manages to create an interesting group of characters, some of which are more fleshed out than others. And he hits all the basic "how-to-write-a-story" marks. His love of history [and New York City] is clearly visible in his efforts to weave specific events into his story quilt. And while this novel is not nearly as beautiful as his ugly serial killer tome, The Alienist, it's still time well spent.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing...
Review: I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Carr, since this book is such a departure from his historical fiction ("The Alienist," and "The Angel of Darkness"--"The Alienist" is a masterpiece!). I was disappointed in this book. I don't know what Carr was trying to achieve with this novel, but it's a combination of mystery and science fiction that doesn't quite come off, in my humble opinion. It takes place in 2023, and it's mainly about the assassination of the President in 2018. The investigation into it takes the main character, psychiatrist Dr. Gideon Wolfe, through many confusing twists and turns, and I was left confused and wondering what Carr was trying to prove here. It was not easy reading, and it seemed as if the book had been written in haste--there was not the character development nor the detailing one expects from Carr's fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Satire? Irony? Bad SciFi?
Review: I am a fairly serious fan of Science Fiction and I also really liked Caleb Carr's other books. So when I saw this on the Sci-Fi shelf I was really excited. Unfortunately, this is not just bad Science Fiction, it's bad fiction. I began to think that Carr was going to satirize Sci-Fi early on when I encountered (pg 49) "'It has been said,' Tressalian expained, 'that the man who controls electromagnetism controls the know forces of our universe'." This is about as much a cliché or hackneyed idea as possible. Furthermore it is almost word for word a quote from Chester Gould, creator of Dick Tracy comics. This occurred in the 1960s when Gould was in serious decline and had introduced space ships, people living on the moon and eating giant escargot into his strip. The phrase was so ridiculous that it became a poster sold in head shops all over the country. When I read it in Carr's book I thought that his intent was to take on Sci-Fi with broad humor. However this is not the case. This book rambles along with the preposterous plot that "information is not knowledge" but by manipulating information you can change the course of history, topple governments, and all sorts of stuff. There is also the usual assortment of genetic manipulation, some weird female circumcision thrown in for no apparent reason. I have no idea what Carr was trying to do with this book, it's boring, and it's long; a deadly combination.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Be Too Quick To Judge
Review: First of all, most of you probably know what this book, "Killing Time," is about, so I'll just spend the time letting you know what I got out of it. I must say that this was the first Caleb Carr novel that I've read, and since I have gone on to read his earlier works, "The Alienist," "The Angel of Darkness," and the better portion of "The Devil Soldier." All of those works are quite phenomenal and I must say that, though they differ very much from the sci-fi formula of "Killing Time," the author's writing style is recognizable in all of them, which I take as a good sign. For instance, whenever you read a Michael Crichton book, you can tell it's his writing.
"Killing Time" is not really what one would call adventure. In fact, once I had first finished the book, I wasn't sure whether I liked it or not. The reason for this is because, in all reality, it's not the kind of book that you actually enjoy. But that should not prevent you from reading it. As an example, "Animal Farm" was a great book, but I definitely did not enjoy it.
I would say that I'm about 75% certain that Caleb Carr knows everything. This book literally deals with every economic catastrophe that could occur in the near future. The author describing a future where issues of global disaster litter the earth is not to say that these things will actually happen. This book, like the other great ones in its genre, is simply using the future to tell a tale regarding the present. Our society is seriously flawed, and though we learn from the past to prevent future mistakes, new unexpected problems will continue to pop up and dwell throughout the course of the world until the world itself ends. The main new problem which we are inexperienced in, would be the information age. "Information is not knowledge" is the deepest line in the book, one which requires a lot of pondering to fully understand, if that's even possible. I believe that Caleb Carr is definitely aware of every issue today that may threaten tomorrow. Carr, after all, does more research for his books that just about anybody else out there. Which means that in his writing of a fiction book, he is, in actuality, doing more studying than one who writes a nonfiction book.
Basically, "Killing Time" is not a book with great character development or marvelous scenes of immense effervescent feelings. This, however, is not the fault of the author. Anyone who reads this book--which despite it's highly intelligent writing style is quite easy to pick up and read--should understand that the author did, with "Killing Time," exactly what he intended to do: tell a cautionary tale of the dangers that the future may hold if we refuse to learn from the past and, in the process, let new and old historical atrocities repeat themselves.
And on a final note, you will realize on the very last page why the book is called "Killing Time." Despite all of the serious subject matter I had just read, I really couldn't help from letting a huge smile spread across my face.
Rating: 
Summary: Stick to historical fiction, Caleb
Review: Being a big fan of 'The Alienist' and 'Angel of Darkness' as well as of sci-fi, I was naturally really looking forward to 'Killing Time." Unfortunately, it was a big disappointment. All of the great character development from 'The Alienist' and 'Angel of Darkness' was missing but what was worse was that Carr doesn't have the gift for describing the future in a way that isn't laborious. You can pass on this book and hope for another historical thriller from Carr sometime soon.
Rating:
Summary: Information is not knowledge
Review: One of the characters in this novels says "information is not knowledge." This is probably the best line in the book. You can really look at Killing Time in two ways; as a thoughtful essay on the dangers of the information age, or as a mostly unsatisfying action/sci-fi novel. Caleb Carr would have done better expounding on his ideas about history, culture and the internet in a nonfiction book rather than try to stuff them all into this short, poorly plotted novel. Set about fifty years in the future, Killing Time is mainly about an extremely timely and important issue --the ease with which large numbers of people can be deceived by information age technology. In the future as foreseen by Carr, plagues, wars and environmental crisis have ravaged the world even as technology continues to flourish. A group of the world's most brilliant scientists establish their own community-without-borders and play a series of high tech pranks on the world (the basic plot is vaguely reminscent of a much better novel, Atlas Shrugged). When a psychiatrist named Gideon Wolfe makes some disconcerting discoveries about a vast cover-up regarding a presidential assasination, he is drawn into the group's plans. Naturally, one of them is a beautiful but deadly woman named Larissa who Wolfe falls in love with. The story follows the group's misadventures as they embark upon a morally ambiguous campaign against the universally corrupt governments of the world. The main problem with the book, alas, is the writing. I haven't read any of Carr's other novels, but from his reputation I expected more than this; it reads like a low budget movie script. The reader is not adequately introduced to the world of the future; the frenetic action starts too quickly and continues for most of the book. This does not help in what is primarily meant to be a philosophical inquiry into some fundamental questions about society. Another thing that gets in the way is Carr's gratuitous sermonizing on a variety of topics (this reminds me a little of Dean Koonz, though he is better at plotting his novels). There are constant snide remarks about the tastelessness of modern life and the shortcomings of various cultures, nations and religions and so forth. Even if you agree with him, this does not add anything to the novel. As for the message, it is, oddly enough, simultaneously heavy-handed and ambiguous. Carr is seemingly a harsh critic of technology, the internet and the so-called information age. Yet, when it comes down to it, he also believes that science and technology may hold the solution to our problems. The ending certainly suggests this. Ambiguity is not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, it can be a sign that someone has thought out a position thoroughly. Such a nuanced position, however, does not go well with a simplistic, action-dominated plot. Overall, I'd like to see a better book written on the same subject.
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