Rating: 
Summary: A great buffet of the wit of Douglas Adams
Review: This is of course, not a stand-alone work of fiction. It is instead a collection of works, from the unfinished Dirk Gently novel "Salmon of Doubt" to Douglas's many columns and letters. You get a much better perspective on who he is, how he thinks and what he finds important than you could get from his fiction. I laughed my way through this book but from time to time I stopped, stricken by great sadness that Douglas is dead now. It sounds excessive but I really do see him as one of the Great Minds of history. I respect him, his viewpoints and his work.
Rating: 
Summary: Not one of his better books, but still worth while
Review: Anyone who has read Douglas Adams knows that nothing is off limits in his books. Adams has his opinions and is not afaird to share them, which is what makes his book so enjoyable. He takes readers places most other authors do not dream of going, and he does it while giving you many laughs. However this book is not like many of his books, and perhaps that is because it is reallly a collection of several books. The first sections Adams sounds off on various issues, and like him or not, disagree with him or not, you have to respect someone who says what the feel regardless of what others may think. The novel portion of the book is very good, and I was really interested in the storylines and how the charcters evolved. If you enjoy his sci-fi novels but do not prefer reading political views or arguments, than stick with the Hitchhikers Guide. Read this book if you want to read about who Adams was.
Rating:
Summary: He was a hoopy frood...and this is one last tribute
Review: I was not sure what to expect when I received this book for Christmas. I had heard that there was an unfinished book and this was it. Well, this is what to expect:
1) A collection of letters, writings, and speeches from Adams. Some quite old, some more recent.
2) Some selected interviews
3) Less than one-half of what would have been the next Dirk Gently novel This book allows the reader (most likely Adams fans) to see the many facets of Adams' personality. You truly get a feel for how he thinks and what he truly was like as a human being. There is much more depth of Adams' character to be found in this book than anything else I have ever read about him. Even his website could not quite capture this feel. The editor did a simply marvellous job capturing Douglas' personality, character, and love for life. Two pure gems in the book would have to be:
1) His essay on the two neighboring dogs Maggie and Trudie. He met them while writing in New Mexico. Being a dog lover and owner, it was terrible interesting to see dogs through his eyes. It really gave me a feeling of how he viewed the world.
2) A short skit he wrote with Graham Chapman called The Private Life of Genghis Khan. (on the Douglas Adams website) I absolutely loved it. It actually introduced a character we meet in the Hitchhiker's series. When I finished reading I can say that I felt almost melancholy knowing he had passed and would not be around to finish his work, or produce even more. The thought is saddening. However, up until the point that you close the book, you will laugh. You will laugh long and hard. You may even re-examine yourself, your life, and your surroundings. This book despite its incomplete ending is absolutely the most fitting tribute to such a gifted and wonderful human being. In fact, the incompleteness almost adds to the tribute. DNA may be gone, but he will continue to influence us until we move on as well. As always, the answer remains 42...
Rating:
Summary: Posthumous compilation of Adams's work.
Review: Summary:
There isn't really much to summarize here. The book is a collection of magazine articles, letters, and first drafts of stories for future books by Douglas Adams. It also contains a biography and some extensive contributions by Adams's editor and several fans. My Comments:
As much as I love Douglas Adams' work, I'm just not so big of a fan that I want every scrap of writing he has ever written. Some of the stuff in the book is fun and interesting and I must admit that it is nice to see a bit more of the preservationist side of Adams rather than just the humor. But, this book is really more of a compilation of dissimilar material for the extreme Adams fan. If you absolutely have to have everything that Adams ever wrote, you'll probably want this book. If you are more interested in Adams's novels you may not find this quite so interesting.
Rating: 
Summary: Thoroughably Enjoyable
Review: DNA (what a great acronym his initials make!) proves in this posthumous collection that he is writer to be reckoned with. While some may think that Adams could only write silly stuff like the "Hitchhiker" books and his Dirk Gently novels, he shows in this collection of essays, letters, and short stories to be a marvelously multi-faceted author. His free-ranging imagination is quite fertile, and his essays often jump around, stream-of-consciousness fashion, but they never stray so far afield that his point gets lost. His writings about computers are particularly interesting, especially in hindsight (many were written in the mid-1990s for Mac publications). But, the most interesting thing to me is how this book affected my own thinking. About 20 pages into it I found myself swarmed by ideas for my own essays about life, my universe, and many things I have done, seen, or prognasticated upon. So pervasive were these thoughts that I bought myself a little notebook in which to jot them down. And that, to me, is the ultimate testimony to Douglas Adams and this wonderful collection: it will spark in you new pathways of thinking that will take you, with great vigor and vim, into the unchartered expanse of your own personal universe.
Rating:
Summary: The Salmon of Doubt
Review: The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time, edited by Peter Guzzardi, consists of a collection of material found on Adams's hard-drive after his untimely death in 2001, together with various earlier essays, stories, interviews, etc. It forms a tribute to the creative genius of Douglas Adams (and a last chance to squeeze some money out of the Hitchhiker franchise).
The book begins with a prologue, originally written by Nicholas Wroe for The Guardian, and an introduction by Christopher Cerf. After that, the collected material by Douglas is arranged into three parts, entitled, appropriately enough, "Life," "The Universe," "And Everything." The third part contains, among other things, some unfinished chapters from the next book that Adams had been working on before he died. That book was to have been entitled The Salmon of Doubt. These chapters have been edited together from several different versions that Adams had left behind, and forms only a short beginning, frustratingly, of the whole story, ending as it does abruptly in the middle. As the result stands, it is a story about Dirk Gently, but Adams had earlier confessed himself stuck, having found that the ideas he had been working on were more suitable for a Hitchhiker story, than for a Dirk Gently story. His plan was accordingly to write the sixth Hitchhiker book, and incorporate the best ideas from what he had already written on the Salmon of Doubt. Sadly, he never got a chance to do this.
Among the other material in the book, there are two pieces of writing that were of special interest to me. The first one is a reprint of an interview that Adams gave for American Atheist, and the other is a printed version of an extemporaneous speech that Adams delivered at Digital Biota 2, Cambridge, in which he gave his view on the origin of the concept of God.
The material collected in this book shows Adams at his funniest best. The chapters of The Salmon of Doubt that he had finished gives as a glimpse of what would have been another triumph of comedic writing for Adams, had he only been given a chance to finish it. The book ends with an epilogue written by Adams's close friend, Richard Dawkins.
Rating:
Summary: Everything was good
Review: My world collapsed around me when I found out that Douglas Adams had died. I had also failed a chemistry test the previous day, so I was, as you may be able to imagine, fairly distraught. I immediately commenced my "memorial" to Douglas by re-re-reading all of his books. (I have read Resturant at the End of the Universe about six times now) This simply didn't seem like enough to do justice to one of the greatest authors of all time. Imagine by confoundment when, while walking on the streets of Burlington, Vermont, I spotted this wonderful homage in a bookstore window. I dragged my buddy into the shop with me and walked out with not only a copy of "The Salmon of Doubt", but also a hardbound edition of the Complete Hitchikers guide (The one with all of the books, plus a few shorts), and a copy of Robert Ludlum's "The Bourne Identity" (see my review). Anyway, when I returned to our condo where my family and friend were staying, I flopped on the bed and started to read. In no time flat, I was lauging histerically at some of the marvellous essays, speeches, and magazine articles contained in this book. Such articles as "Little Dongly Things", "The cookies" and "The Trousers", brought new light to a side of Douglas of which I had no idea. The new Dirk Gently novel (part of it, anyway) is good, though not as refined as his earlier works. This collection of writings is indeed a fitting tribute to a wonderful author. For a fan of Adams, it will be a joyous ride throughout his life and career. For a non-fan, I would sincerely recommend getting into Hitchhikers and Dirk Gently before tackling this book. An excellent read, earning every one of it's five stars. EFD
Rating: 
Summary: Continuing the Tradition of Zombie Authors
Review: The Great American Public has wished upon the monkey's paw, and The Salmon of Doubt has arrived at the door. In our eagerness to get more of what we like, we no longer let trivialities like death prevent authors from continuing to publish.
Adams wrote with one of the lightest, deftest touches going. He noted himself that he had to work enormously hard at a manuscript to make it look effortless. The bad news is that dead men may publish, but they can't work enormously hard at a manuscript to polish it. Since this patchwork culled from at least three distinct versions of The Salmon of Doubt won't fill enough pages, the first two-thirds of the book are filled with speeches, essays, letters, and random notes. The Hitchhiker's Guide was charming in the way it sent up the inanities of life; the short pieces attempt the same with much less subtlety and wit, and are largely charmless. What seemed offbeat in the Guide often seems merely smug in his speeches.
It is sorely disappointing to see Adams fall victim to the insistent demand for "more of the same." The editor and publisher may have intended this as a genuine tribute, but it comes across as opportunistic and cynical. You should make time to read the Hitchhiker's Guide; you should read the completed Dirk Gently novels if you have time; life is too short to waste time on works by George Romero extras...
Rating:
Summary: No, it's not his best.... But it's WELL worth it!
Review: My husband got me this for Christmas, and it was a shock! I didn't even know it existed, or I would have already bought it. Reading through the first parts of the book, which is mostly disjointed thoughts, interviews, letters, etc. was really the best part of the book. This is the true Douglas Adams, and it's great to see the way he worked and lived. The Hitchhiker's Series, and the Dirk Gently books were great, and it showed this wonderful creativity, but this book shows the man himself. I found myself laughing out loud many times, and sometimes just being thoughtful. The rating of 4 instead of 5 is simply because of the story itself. No, it is not finished, and I couldn't say whether he would have wanted it published as is or not.... It would be much better if finished... But who could copy his style? I feel it's a necessary addition, but I think it would have been just fine without out. I'm glad to have it to complete my Douglas Adams library (and I have almost everything he's ever been involved with), and will re-read it many times, just as I have the rest of them.
Rating:
Summary: Sadly Disappointing.
Review: I have to admit, I was very excited and very pleased when I found that there was ineed one more Douglas Adams book to read, albeit an unfinished one. I thought I would get, at the very least, the chance to peer inside the mind of a master at work, and at best, I would experience more of the fabulous nonsense that just makes sense which Adams is famous for. How very sadly disappointed I was. A good part of the first two-thirds of the book is trash: journal-style entries kvetching about technology, recycled newspaper articles and interviews, with a few gems thrown in to make skipping over the irrelevant things nearly impossible. The short story was disappointing as well, as it had already been published in the five-volume Hitchikers' set. So it was with some relief that I settled into Adam's unfinished novel, for which the posthumous collection is named. Everything that I had loved in the other books was there, with the exception of one crucial element: The Adams ending. The plot was developing quite nicely, with the completely random elements one is used to in a Dirk Gently plot, but just when it finally seems to go somewhere- It stops. Forever. You will never know where the other half of the cat is, or where on (or off) earth DaveWorld is, never have that fantastic conclusion of all the oddest details turning out to be the most important ones, ever again. Please, people. Douglas Adams was a genius, it is true, but this is not the way to honor his passing. Don't exploit his poor faithful readers by taunting us with a story that no one can ever finish, padded with fluff. The Salmon of Doubt, in short, should have been left unfinished, unpublished, the way its author left it.
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