Rating: 
Summary: Great Nariation but not that good of a book.
Review: This audio rendition of Charles Dickens Hard Times features the renowned voiced of Paul Scolfeild, distinguished British actor. I found the narration to be very well done and it helped me get into the story but I have to say that I did not find the story to be a classic. There is not too much depth to the characters and the pace of the story seems to go too fast. All in all a decent book, perhaps worth while listening to it, but not one of the greats of world literature.
Rating: 
Summary: BEAUTIFUL, SORROWFUL, AND HONEST
Review: Dickens creates a novel that virtually revolutionizes literature of the 1800's. At a time where most writers wrote in a stuffy prose full of unrealities and a jaded outlook, Dickens dares to tell with honesty what he sees through his window. Hard Times has yet a misleading title. It gives one ideas of harshness, depression, poverty, and social decline--although the actual reality of then-London, still not something you would choose to read. However, Hard Times has as much depression and poverty as any of Dickens' other works. It is just in this case that Dickens chooses to remind the world that in the deepest despair there is beauty yet to be seen. Dickens was a strange author. In his supposedly inspiring books, you get an overdose of sadness, and in his depressing books, you find beauty. It is this case with Hard Times. It is a poor, honest man's search for justice in a world where only the rich have merit. It is a girl's search for true love while battling the arranged marriage for money. And lastly, a woman's search for recognition against her favored, yet dishonest brother. It is these searches that at last come together and become fufilled. And, while at the same time telling a captivating story, it comments on the then--and still now--presence of greed and total dishonesty one has to go through for money. The title of this review sums up Hard Times. Its beauty comes from the pure searches for truth, the sorrow comes from the evil the characters most overcome to get there, and the honesty is both the truth with which Dickens portrays life and the the overwhelming truth that these protaganists create. Holly Burke, PhD. Clinical Psychologist, Abnormal Psych. Professor Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins Inst.
Rating:
Summary: Unfairly criticized.
Review: Although critics dislike Dickens' novels for their twisted, drawn-out plots and his maddening penchant for creating soap-operas in the midst of otherwise realistic plots, these faults must be considered in light of the genre that Dickens wrote for: the magazine serial. Even if one is not fond of the structure of Hard Times, a closer example of the story as a period piece crafted to satisfy the tawdry tastes of the rag-reading public exposes a masterpiece of suspense and morality. A very important work and worth reading with or without this context.
Rating:
Summary: not his best, but pretty good
Review: It's the way things happen, not the pizzazzy prose or the dialogue, that sets Charlie up to be read by every high school student alive. While not hideously exciting to the modern reader, there is a lot to be gleaned from this compassionate narrative about the unhumanness of the modern world.
Rating:
Summary: The complexity of Dickens
Review: "Death by verbosity" describes the critic's failure not Dickens'. There are no such things as neat conclusions in Dickens, note the several rewrites of the the final chapter of "Great Expectations". Dickens expanded the concept of character in the novel to embrace the socially situated type as a means of understanding the relationship between society and the individual. This helped to forge a self-conciously social literature and thereby making the link between art and politics textually explicit.
Rating: 
Summary: Death by verbosity
Review: Charles Dickens did for the art of literature what the 80's did for music: Made it intolerable and robbed it of any beauty. The Dicken's aesthetic of excessive description drives the reader to tedium and makes him wish that Dicken's was payed for every word he saved instead of every one he wrote. His knack for wrapping up loose ends in a nice neat conclusion is overshadowed by the time and effort it takes to reach that point
Rating:
Summary: Saved by the Ending
Review: I love the ending of this novel by Dickens when he says:
"Dear reader! It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be! We shall sit with lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn cold and grey."
This novel is all about what one would think of as a dreary life in a north England mill town (fictitiously) called Coketown. It is named after the seemingly endless plumes of thick coal smoke being emitted from many different mills in this small lifeless town. But true to Dickens style he gives us a delightful set of characters that we can love or hate through their passions, opinions, crimes, and good deeds, but who keep us entertained through a quick read of about 300 pages. Interestingly a young girl called Sissy, the daughter of a missing circus clown father, is perhaps the most sympathetic and "normal" of the lot.
There is method in the madness as Dickens tries to push us in the direction of accepting that fate was not preordained for these folks and they could choose a better life if they so desired. He includes many biblical references and references to the mid 1800 culture to keep it all upbeat and entertaining.
I was expecting a more depressing plot to reflect the title "Hard Times", but in many ways it is good times for some of the characters, and as Dickens says at the end that he can hope for a positive outcome for their lives - the precise details of which he leaves us guessing.
Entertaining 5 star read at a bargain price by a wonderful author.
Rating: 
Summary: Hard Times
Review: The book was rubbish, I loathed every second i had to endure flicking through it's greasy pages. I think that the crimes in the novel influence our younger generation for the worse, and at worse could cause a youngster to commit a serious crime. I am writing this reveiw out of concerjn, often I am kept up at night by youths firing fireworks, most liely because they have read Hard Times. If we got rid of the book Hard Times I personally believe that the amount of murders would drop by half, world hunger and war would probably come to an end, we cannot let Hard Times take over our lives, and cause our younger generation become generates.
Rating: 
Summary: Dickens.....not at his best, but still....Dickens
Review: The fact that Dickens wrote "Hard Times" in weekly installments, more than probably means that there was a time and space constraint. It must not be a coincidence then that this is among his shortest novels. I suppose this is why at times, his characters wind up being caricaturesque, and not as complex and real as some of his other very memorable characters. By the same token, some of his subplots do not fit in to the main plot the way they do in most, if not all, of his other works.
Dickens is trying to explore and provide us with a picture of the effects of utilitarianism on different types of human characters, and in my opinion he does a good job, but only as far as individuals go. We can see the impact of the post romantic victorian social system on all of the novel's characters, and this makes the book interesting. The downside, however, is that when Dickens tries to extrapolate and paint a picture of the social struggle going on, he falls quite short. He tries to oversimplify too much, and in my opinion, fails at that.
The "nothing but Facts" system psychologically castrates most of the main characters in the book. In one way or another, they all have their share of "Hard Times", and this can surely be attributed to a dehumanizing system, where people are statistics or simply gears within the machine which represents the newly industrialized world.
It is no surprise that there are absolutely no happy people in this novel. This is definitely not one happy book, but overall it's really worth reading. If what you're looking for is a book that easy to read and to understand, and a page-turner, just stay away--read John Grisham instead ;-). If you want to read Dickens, this is more that probably not his best, but it's still good.
Rating:
Summary: Dickens Had a Hard Time Writing This
Review: Readers should always remember that while reading. Instead of the usual monthly periodical installments with room to spare, "Hard Times" was done in weekly installments with a very limited space allotment, for the newspaper "Household Words." Dickens found the combined pressure of time and space nearly intolerable, given the breadth and depth of his vision for needed social reform. One can only imagine how much better, fuller, and more satisfying this book would have been -- in plot, character-development, dramatic impact -- if Dickens had written it as 900 pages over two years, rather than 300 pages in five months.
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