Rating: 
Summary: Just plain bad writing
Review: Like another reviewer, I didn't get very far into this book before giving up on it (though I didn't actually throw it across the room). It wasn't just that it was boring and long-winded, it was simply that Mr. Bear is a bad writer. Cliches abound. He seems to enjoy using colors to describe everything! "The gray xyz was next to a white abc which had a blue-green exterior and a pinkish lid, etc, etc." The romance between the characters is like something you'd read in a crappy romance novel "she stood above the ridge looking strong. Noble. Gorgeous." Ugh!
Rating:
Summary: Good idea - a bore!
Review: I admit the idea is good. It is very imaginable that people in their prejudiced ignorance behave as it is described in the novel, that authorities act against their better knowledge and follow populist motivations. But after a very good beginning, the novel just loses its energy. This may be partly due to the fact that we have a hard-core sf-novel here and the scientific explanations are somewhat lengthy at times. I am not an expert, but I always understood the general idea of what Bear explained. Why did he not go the simple way and emphasize the action a little more as he did at the beginning and cut out the scientific bla-bla that no one is interested in, at least not for the story's sake? In addition, he changed from a more global point of view to a very private one, with the effect that the dramatic evolutionary change gets somehow lost on the reader. A drama important to all mankind becomes a tiny little problem of a family. Bear should have introduced more "cases" and described the cruelty of the masses explicitly to keep the drama up. But he chose to let the story trickle very slowly at the end. So there is absolutely no climax where we should expect one. In contrast to one of the other critics I would not mind a sequel, but it should show more action and suspense.
Rating: 
Summary: not for the layman
Review: This is a wonderful book, if you happen to be a viral pathologist. Most of us are not, however...and we are so much happier reading books that can be understood by the common people. The character development is shallow, and the characters are about as exciting as a self replicating endrogen. Let Mr. Bear keep his nucleotides and hydroxides, I'll stick with Michael Chrighton and Sidney Sheldon.
Rating:
Summary: A disappointing effort
Review: This is one of those failed efforts where you keep hoping and expecting for the book to catch fire and become exciting or thoughtful, but it never actually happens. Its also a classic example of a book which is filled with little subplots which you reasonably expect will have some particular meaning to the overall story; in this case, however, the subplots simply exist on their own to no real use. You keep asking yourself, "so what was the point of............". The real killer to many readers will be the fact that a large portion of the book reads like a biology text. The characters constantly break into discussion about the detail of genetic theory and make no attempt to make it easy on the reader; pretty soon the "speed read" light starts flashing. This is related to the book's other defects, in that the massive detail does not advance the story for the reader; it merely shows that the author and his consultants were biology majors in college. This is my first and last book by Greg Bear.
Rating:
Summary: A truly dull, fat, stodgy novel
Review: The first line of this wearisome book presents us with an incoherent simile, and drones on through hundreds of tedious pages crammed with lengthy lists of unnecessary medical details and stodgy info dumps to an entirely unininspiring and very predictable conclusion. This novel is simply bad, bad, bad. Stay well clear if you haven't already wasted your money on it, or even you have - reading it will lower your intellect.
Rating: 
Summary: A thought provoking fairy tale about species identity
Review: "Something pops out of our genes and makes monster babies ... with a single huge ovary?"So asks the incredulous United States Surgeon General in DARWIN'S RADIO, a fictional yarn of human genetics gone malevolently haywire. Or is it simply evolution leaving the path of gradualism as defined by Darwin, and taking a more scenic route? All good stories have a villain. In this case, it's SHEVA, a suddenly activated human endogenous retrovirus, i.e. one that resides in the "normal" genetic code on our chromosomes, that now forms infectious virus particles capable of lateral transmission between sexually active adults. What result are severe perturbations of the pregnancies of infected woman, and a bizarre skin condition that affects the faces of both parents. The world's best scientific minds can't stop it. And what is the connection between the mummified remains of a 40,000-year old Neanderthal family found in the Alps, and the corpses exhumed from a 10-year old mass grave in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, all of which contain SHEVA? Despite being (just) a work of popular science fiction, DARWIN'S RADIO poses an interesting, alternative hypothesis to the widely accepted concept of Darwinian evolution, i.e. natural adaptation one genetic mutation at a time, and makes some perceptive inferences on the nature of the species self-identity built into the human psyche. Moreover, the main characters are reasonably well constructed, particularly Kaye Lang, the swim-against-the-tide geneticist, and Mitch Rafelson, the outcast anthropologist. However, the novel is, at 525 paperbacked pages, just a tad too long. As it was, the conclusion's "pay-off" didn't seem quite worth the time that I'd spent to get there. I wanted to be able to say "Wow!", but couldn't. However, a 4-star rating still isn't too shabby. By the way. Do you have pronounced freckles on your face? If so, the Feds may be wanting to deport you to Iowa even now. Pack a lunch.
Rating:
Summary: Intriguing and Engaging Scientific Mystery
Review: This was one of the best sci-fi mystery novels I have read. It is very difficult to balance a good story with intriguing science, but Bear manages to do that and to take it one stop farther: the intriguing science IS the good story. If you enjoy sci-fi at all, especially if it has a twist of mystery, you will almost certainly enjoy this novel.
Rating:
Summary: A nice idea, but then it just rambles ...
Review: RE: my review of EON - the characters get away from him here & all blend together, ruining what could have been a biological manifesto.
Rating:
Summary: A good read
Review: This is the first book of Bear's that I've read; I picked the book up to get a feel for the author before reading his sequel to Asimov's Foundation series. Although the book begins slow (as he tries to lay into the reader the complex issues of each of the main characters), it picks up about a third of the way in and keeps speeding up as the character's separate threads come together and intertwine. As a warning, there isn't really a "resolution" to the story - it leaves you wondering and able to walk away from the book thinking. The science is indeed top-notch and rides on a lot of very deep biological and Comp Sci principles of the human genome deciding when and how to upgrade itself. This, combined with an almost X-File-esque feel of governmental politics and intrigue, sets the scene for a rather excellent read.
Rating:
Summary: I don't understand the significance of the title!
Review: OK, it was a good book. There, that's the review bit done. But I don't understand the title of the book. "Darwin's Radio" - what's the 'radio' bit got to with anything???...maybe I'm just dumb, but would someone care to explain?
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