Rating: 
Summary: Top 10 best book ever
Review: This book is among the ten best books I've ever read. I would highly recommend this one to anyone. It is the perfect blend of history and fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Review: I really enjoyed this book. It is well-written and the characters are great. A very appealing combination. A few wonderful reviews ahead of mine tell the reader what the story is about, so I won't, but I will tell you, this book is a keeper. (Highly Recommended!)John Savoy
Savoy International
Motion Pictures, Inc.
Rating:
Summary: A great combination of history and magic
Review: Pete Hamill is a legend of New York, and FOREVER feels very much like his magnum opus. It's a wonderfully well thought-out and well researched history of New York City as told through the eyes of one fictional character. Cormac O'Connor, a young 18th Century Irishman, through an accident in the street and a colision with a mystical destiny finds himself travelling to make a new life in America in the 1740s. Here, he becomes embroiled in a quest for justice, power and vengeance against the man who drove him from Ireland. After an encounter with a powerful shaman, Cormac finds himself granted a power that can be the greatest blessing or the darkest curse...immortality. the only condition is that he never leave Manhattan Island. The following 250 years trace Cormac as he witnesses and becomes part of the development of NYC. Watching him through the slave revolt, the War of Independence, the War of 1812, the great New York fire, the nineteenth century boomtimes and the tragic events of September 11th, we see Cormac experience life's great emotions, love, loss, success and failure. Combining a beautiful telling of Celtic mythology with a rich and vibrant civic history, Pete Hamill has created two truly remarkable characters...one is Cormac o'Connor and the other is the City of New York. Read FOREVER and be glad that you did. It is certainly worth it.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but not great
Review: "Forever" has a fascination premise -- a man who is given the gift of living forever, as long as he does not leave Manhattan -- and much of the novel meets the reader's expectations. The first section when Cormac is growing up in Ireland is compelling and so is the last portion of the book, the modern-day era culiminating on 9-11. The book also has one of the best endings I have read -- so please readers, do not take an advance peek. This is the first book by Pete Hamill I have read and he is a first-rate writer.
However, the story drags in the middle when Cormac's endless personal reflections overshadow the interesting encounters he has, Forrest-Gump like, with such real-life historical characters as George Washington and Boss Tweed. The plight of the struggling Irish in early New York City and the injustices endured by enslaved African Americans are moving. The occupations he pursues in NYC (printing and journalism) play well with the plot and I liked the concept of "brain sludge" he builds up from living too long (how Cormac gets rid of the sludge is very clever and logical).
But I thought the pace and suspense would have improved if the book were 75-100 pages shorter. The way Cormac moves to a resolution of his essential conflicts (will he avenge his parents' deaths down to his enemy's last generation? will he tire of living centuries after everyone he knows and cares about is long dead?) would not have suffered with a slightly abbreviated story and less ruminating over his fate.
The only remaining questions are: Will "Forever" be a movie and will Tom Hanks again play the "time traveler"?
Rating:
Summary: Good summer read for lovers of Big Apple
Review: For a writer like Hamill whose best work is centered on New York, it's a shame that "Forever" seems to lose a bit of steam as soon as the main character sets foot on Manhattan island. The first chapters set in a devastated and demon-haunted Ireland are beautifully written and compelling. But Cormac's adventures in the New World take on a high school history class slideshow-like quality as the novel skips from period to period. And as much as I admire Hamill's multiculturalism, by about the fourth dusky femme fatale that Cormac conquers it started to curdle into a kind of condescending exoticism. Hamill can still write the pants off most authors out there, however, and glimpses of some lesser-known periods of New York history are fascinating. Altogether well worth a look.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful novel
Review: I received this book as a gift for Christmas, but finally got around to reading it this summer. For the first hundred pages or so, I was not sure I was going to enjoy the book and wondered if I should continue reading. Thankfully I did, as 'Forever' turned out to be one of the best books I have read in quite a while. Although it is over 600 pages, once you are drawn into the story, it flows effortlessly through the years of Cormac's life on Manhattan (Although I was a bit frustrated at some of the jumps in time, but they serve their purpose and Hamill knows what he is doing). The conclusion is incredibly powerful and well worth the reading one must do to reach it. I highly recommmend 'Forever' as a great read this summer. Someone who does not have interest in American history, however, may not enjoy the novel as much as I did.
Rating: 
Summary: 17yearold Review of Forever
Review: I'm a 17 year old high school student and here is my review of Forever.
Young Cormac O'Connor, for most his life, thought he was a part of good Christian family, but he soon learned that this was a shroud to his true identity, a Celtic. With the death of his family and everything he ever knew Cormac must travel to America to avenge the death, and honor, of his family.
Forever can be explained in the simple seven letter word of the title. This book, at first, seemed to be about wars and their relationship with New York, but it slowly evolved into the willy-nilly adventures of the never dieing Cormac O'Connor. Anyone will start to wonder how random events connect in some sort of deeper meaning of this novel, and why the relationships between characters are never strongly established and end abruptly with barley a resolution or reason for existence. Also the sudden jumps, which skip any interesting event, in time throughout the book makes one wonder, is a book about immortality worth reading?
Forever is filled with numerous characters but none of whom are memorable. The characters last for twenty pages and then drift into the abyss where the plot of this book went. At one point in the book Cormac meetings George Washington, the president not the peanut guy, and ask him if he will end slavery, and Washington simply doesn't reply. You think the book will pick up here but it doesn't. Slavery is never mentioned again, but the arbitrary death of a thieving aristocrat, Tweet, is glorified during the time period which the Civil War was being fought.
Sadly enough there is no developments in this book past the first hundred pages of this six hundred page book. Maybe there are no developments because there is no plot. This book is the arrangement of a thousand-and-one small bits of stories thrown together with no connection other than they are written in the same book. Hopefully this is the author trying to give a message; life is dull.
All of this brings up one question; can you really call this a book? I'm afraid not. It is more of an assembly of meaningless stories through the eyes of a withdrawn young man, Cormac. From the tone of the book Cormac is as tired of life as anyone with be of reading this 600 page book.
Rating: 
Summary: It was okay, but possibly not worth the time needed.
Review: I felt that the story had a great build in the first half of the book, but after the initial section of his life (the point up until Cormac attains eternal life), the story falls short. The author skips time in big sections and doesn't match the time devoted to the beginning to the other sections of time. The historical aspect and views of America in the past in current vernacular makes it a good historical novel, but the magical parts are hard to believe and you are left wondering about characters that played major parts in the protagonists life. The ending is greatly disappointing for its lack of direction, but even with all of its faults, it is quite readable and the setting is interesting enough to keep the reader reading.
Rating:
Summary: Fell short
Review: It had promise. I read through it hopeing it'd get better. But Cormac just didn't come to life. Even before he turned immortal I just couldn't get a feel for him, he felt more like a random body tossed in and used to tell the stories around him. Which could have worked but the stories around him failed to be as interesting as they should have been. The one charecter that captured my attention (Mary Burton) was gone almost just as quickly, and it seems like Cormac never feels anything. Except for when it's extream grief and need for revenge. Could have been better. Much Better. But if somone else (or even the same author) gave it another shot I'd read it.
Rating:
Summary: a wonderful historical novel.
Review: If I could, I would give this 41/2 stars. it held my interest all the way through. Hamill could have devoted more time on the early and mid twentieth century. After being disappointed by his ending in a previous novel, I was very satified with this one. It was worth the read.
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