Fatherland

Rating:
Summary: Best thriller-fiction book I've read in the last 2 years
Review: Fatherland is a magnificent book to read. A view to a fictional future if the German Nazis would have won the war and accurate historical facts takes the reader into a differently ordered world. What if?... Amazing!

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Summary: great and chilling book
Review: if you like to be frightened ... read i

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Summary: good idea.....
Review: Though makes you think what if....Harris is not as detailed oriented as Forsyth is..Would like to see how Forsyth would've written this...

Rating:
Summary: Almost great, but definitely good
Review: It's not quite Gorky Park, but it's as close as anyone not named Martin Cruz Smith has come to showing us the horrors of being an honest cop in a totalitarian regime. Some of the alternative history doesn't satisfy, but most of it really strikes home. Harris definitely made a good decision to not delve too deeply in the supposed reasons that kept the U.S. out of the War. However, the whole scenario rests on a valid assumption: the Cold War was a conflict of power, pitting the dominant power on the European continent against the U.S., the only nation state who could check the dominant European state's pursuit of global domination. Good Book. The details about the new Berlin are really eye-opening.

Rating:
Summary: Orwell meets Deighton
Review: Robert Harris has done something that I've been waiting to see for years: turn out a WWII political thriller that is as good as something that Frederick Forsyth or Tom Clancy could write. In the lines of Jack Higgins' "The Eagle Has Landed" and Len Deighton's infinitely better "SS-GB", Harris has surpassed both of them by throwing us into the nightmare world of a Nazi-dominated Europe. Even though it's probably more far-fetched than both "Eagle" and "SS-GB", Harris makes his atmosphere utterly believable and totally scary. This is something that Jack Higgins could never do, and Deighton has done only to a certain degree. This is a book you'll want to read over and over again.

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Summary: This is no "what if Spiderman joined the Fantastic Four"
Review: Fatherland was a good book, but it was not what I would classify an alternative history. It was basically a rewriting of Orwell's 1984 in an imaginary world that might have been. There were facinating nuggets of "what-ifs" peppered throughout the book, but that is not the focus. The focus is on the March, Charlie, and the mystery that they are trying to unravel.

Rating:
Summary: What if?
Review: This book makes you think. What if one thing would have been diffrent? What if we would have taken J.P. Kennedy's advice? Would Hitler be the dictator of the most powerful country in the word? After I got done with it I tought of other things that could have gone the other way. The south winning the civel war. The British winning our war for independance. Or maybe even Oswald missing JFK. Just think about it.

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Summary: Great Scenario-Author does nothing with it.
Review: The whole basis for this novel, that the Nazi's won the war and Hitler's 75th birthday celebration is coming combined with a detective story is a "what if" readers dream but the author sets up a great premise and does absolutely nothing with it. Oh, there's a murder, and there's a secret behind the murder, but I can't believe all the other reviewers of this novel were even a bit surprised by the "secret" revealed. The only reason that even a moron couldn't guess what the "secret" is would be that there would have to be something else in a book this hyped, wouldn't there? Sadly there isn't. Also, the author pretty much stole the idea from Len Deighton's absolutely superb novel SS-GB which he could be forgiven if it was any good. SS-GB is the real thing and has an actual ending to go with the premise. Fatherland is a very poor imitation.

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Summary: Murder mystery, Nazis make a good, not great, weekend read
Review: Having just returned from Northern and Eastern Europe where I spent time in Berlin and Poland (the setting for "Fatherland"), I was pleased to find this book at a friend's house the other day. And so I plopped down on a lawn chair and read the whole thing, straight through, yesterday afternoon. I fully admit that I am a sucker for techno/action/spy/anything-WWII novels and this was no exception. Harris is a fine enough writer who has come up with a interesting plot that reminds me of some novels I've read involving alternate US civil war outcomes. Of course you have to stretch your imagination a bit, but isn't that the point? I'm sure that those who love the bulk of mass-market novels out today realize that much of what they read is less-than literary genius, but fun nonetheless. Harris' hero, Xavier March, is likeable, yet not loveable and the other characters fill their necessary plot roles as well as any supporting figures in such books. His descrip! ! tion of a 1964, Nazi-ruled, capital of Europe, Berlin is right on (at least as Albert Speer would have had it) and his concentration camp lessons (i.e. detailed descriptions of how Hitler and his cronies came up with and planned the "final solution") are chilling. Throw these elements together with a murder mystery and you've got a most enjoyable book.

Rating:
Summary: Compelling book, historically accurate, and a real thriller.
Review: Robert Harris has written a compelling novel that is not only a real thriller but carries a powerful message about man's inhumanity to man. If you start this book, you will not want to put it down. A real plus is that the book is historically accurate and places emphasis on the importance of documentation of historical events. Documents fix history in time. I recommend this book highly; by contrast, the movie based on the book does not do this excellent novel justice.