Rating: 
Summary: Not Spencer's best, but....
Review: Never the less, this is still a good book, and it is Scott Spencer doing what he does best, writing about matters of the human heart. His characterizations are good,and as always his books are hard to put down. He is one of this country's best writers, and I am glad to see this book in print again. If you have never read Spencer before,"Endless Love" is one of the great love stories of all time. If you've read one of his books, you will want to read them all. Let's hope the movie does justice to this book, (unlike the "Endless Love" disaster,) and that we can look forward to many more books from Mr. Spencer.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but not for everybody
Review: Scott Spencer has created a haunting story about love, beliefs and rendenption with Waking the Dead. Fielding Pearce and Sarah Willians have one of the strongest love affairs from recently literature. They are meant for each other, despite their antagonistic political beliefs. They live togheter, and Pearce can't come to terms with Sarah's political activities --she helps refugees , for one. They have a common life, against all odds. But everything Pearce believes is about to fall down in the moment when Sarah is murderer in the explosion of a car. His life chages drastically, he becomes more cynical and less sensitive. Years later, he is married again, and running for a position as a Senator, but he has never got over Sarah. While caimpaing he starts seeing her and he wonders if she is really dead. Rather than telling everything by the numbers, Spencer chooses to go back and forth with the chapters, showing how past interferes in the present. His style is very heartfelt and accurate. His particularly choice of word works really good through the novel. I cannot forget to mention the characters: they are quite well developed. Both Sarah and Pearce sound like regular human beings, the kind of people we know, that's what make them believable. Sarah has the rebeliouness of the 60s, and Pearce is the poor man who makes something huge. It is a very interesting book that deserve to be discovered, nevertheless, I don't recommend it to everybody. Many people may not enjoy its particular pace and Sarah's ideas, which can be a bit disturbing at these times we live.
Rating:
Summary: A romantic ride into the shadowlands
Review: Scott Spencer may be one of our finest literary sherpas to the shadowy territory that lies between the love story, the mystery romance and the ghostly fable. His stock in trade is atmosphere, rich characterization and plotting a beguiling narrative that reveals as much to the reader as about the reader. His novels work as mirrors in which we see ourselves. WAKING THE DEAD is no exception to this rule, but it is exceptional in many other ways. This a novel to treasure for long, chilly nights by the fire (or to recreate them in the subway). Reading Scott Spencer is an intimate act and this novel, as most of his work, will take you far away and remind you that sometimes, if you get lucky, nothing is what it seems, specially trade paperbacks.
Rating: 
Summary: Pulitzer material...
Review: This has all the earmarks of a prize-winning Great American Novel, right up there with Richard Ford's 'Independence Day,' Russell Banks's "Affliction" and Mary McGarry Morris's "Vanished." I loved this book. I, too, relish certain scenes. A lovemaking scene in particular stands out. His descriptions are among the best in this area that I have ever read: muscular, nearly sculptural. The scene in the restaurant when Fielding announces that he believes he is having a nervous breakdown: I found myself very moved - to tears. In fact, I cried several times during the reading of this book, which incorporates so many elements of life: the poitical and the personal, on so many levels! The reason I mentioned that it should win a Pulitzer is because it tackles a particularly important moment in American history: the dividing line between social conscience at its compassionate best and crazy worst and materialism at its heady best and greedy worst. I loved that it ended with Fielding reading the word "help" in one of the letters from a member of his constituency. You know that there is plenty of good work for him to do, just as his true love, Sarah, was doing hers. Great style, great heart. Congratulations to the author on creating a classic I'm certain will live on as literature. As for the movie - did it ever come out? I'll have to check my video store.
Rating:
Summary: Poetic, mysterious, thrilling
Review: This is a book of jaw-dropping power. It has the goose-bumps of a ghost story, and the page-turning plot of a mystery, but the real story is the way Spencer writes. He has a way with the English language that is almost like no other. I was simply amazed at the fluid prose, the careful construction. The love story swept me up and kept me enthralled. Spencer can write of obsessive love like no other author, but unlike his Endless Love, where the love had a creepy, stalker quality, this is the sweet and romantic love of a man who cannot give up on a woman just because she is dead. Find a copy of this book and read it, you will love it.
Rating:
Summary: Winning and Losing
Review: This story is about the tension between a life of carefully orchestrated public accomplishments and a concurrent and unexpected emotional breakdown. The hero, Fielding Pierce, is collapsing internally but is propelled forward by a political career that seems indestructible, even when his conduct careens wildly between pursuing his ambitions and succumbing to his personal demons. Anyone familiar with Chicago politics will love the supporting characters involved in the campaign at the center of the story; the love story has a hard time competing for the reader's attention. The hero's family is also wonderful, and Scott Spencer achieves perfect pitch with family dialog. Sarah, the lost lover, is the only character who is at all one-dimensional, which makes it all the easier for the hero to recreate her as he wishes. The movie is a disappointment, but I think that is because it could not quite capture the subtleties of the counterpoint between the hero's public life and private life. Maybe this is a problem when a book is written too well -- without Scott Spencer's lovely prose, thorough characterizations, and perfect descriptions, the movie script just bogs down and doesn't quite know what to do with itself.
Rating:
Summary: Well written this book keeps you engrossed until the end
Review: Waking the Dead is a story about a guy who meets an falls in love with this woman only to have her get killed. He grieves endlessly but then he begins to think that he can see her walking around. His friends begin to think that he has lost his mind but at this point he doesn't care because in his mind she is alive. I reccommend this book to anyone who just wants to read one good book this summer.
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