Rating: 
Summary: For readers seeking a thrill!
Review: If you love science fiction or are just looking for a good book, this is a great book to read. The first pages I read got me hooked. I could not put it down after that. Michael Crighton knows how to add the science and tell a story at the same time. Although there is a great story plot, the science is not overwhelming. It adds to the story. The Sphere starts out with an alien "crash" in the Pacific Ocean. The most odd scientists are called in and are told to keep quiet about what they are about to see. They are astonished at what they find. Nobody can figure out what this huge sphere is. None of the scientists know how to explain it until one scientist goes in. Unexplainable phenomena start happening and an unknown being starts communicating with them. All of their lives are in danger but will they come out alive? Read it to find out. If you want the best science fiction book out there, The Sphere is for you.
Rating:
Summary: recommended reading for those who like psychological dramas
Review: After reading the other 2 reviews, I felt compelled to say that I too thought this book of Michael Crichton's was a thriller. I don't have the best concentration when it comes to book reading, but so engrossed was I in a particular hair-raising passage in this book, when I was tapped on the shoulder I threw the book across the room. For a few minutes, I felt as if I was actually there in that predicament. This book, as well as Airframe, were the most exciting for me. Couldn't put them down. Skip the movie, I was horrible.
Rating:
Summary: SIMPLY OUTSTANDING
Review: The depth and detail of this book is amazing. When you pick up this book you might say "This will take a while". But if you're like me, when you pick up a book you like, the pages fly by. The movie is good too, but I reccommend this book because there are a ton of things cut out of the movie from the book. If you like Science Fiction, this is definitly the book for you. 90% of the time you will be sitting on the edge of your seat wondering what will happen next. Also, the last ten or fifteen pages of the book are the perfect ending. The characters in this book are realistic, with definite personalities. All of them are perfectly suited to be in this Sci-fi novel. Teenagers that like Science Fiction will enjoy the book too. I, myself, am 13 and got a real kick out of this book. I rented it from our public library and couldn't put it down.
Rating:
Summary: Sphere is the best
Review: Just read it. It has a great plot, and well, just read it@
Rating:
Summary: Hey Kids, Do you like Action Packed Books?
Review: The book Sphere, by Micheal Crichton, had everything a reader wants. It had action, adventure, and side-of-ones-seat-suspence. It was a an awesome pageturner. A subject will not want to put in down. In the book, Norman comes of age by making large decisions. He must leave his friends if he wants to survive. He also must go into the @#@&*! to survive and delete the past. Gutek and Tostevin gave two thumbs way way way way up!
Rating:
Summary: A Real Page Turner
Review: Sphere is one of those books you can not put down, no matter how tired you are at 11:00 PM with work the next day. Crichton has the ability to easily explain time warps, black holes, matter/anti-matter and other conceptual ideas which can be so difficult to grasp. The psychological dynamics of the characters are finely described, so you don't get mere robots talking science to one another. There are personality conflicts, episodes of jealousy, love affairs, etc. The Sphere has the ability to manifest one's thoughts into material reality. The crew begins to abuse this privilege, which says a lot about the Human Condition. As all the other reviewers have said before, the movie stank. Don't see it.
Rating:
Summary: Incredible Work Of Art - A Speed Of Light Page Turner
Review: This was my third Crichton book that I've read and was honestly sitting on the shelf for a rainy day. Last week, I picked up Sphere and within a fraction of my normal reading time for a 300-400 page book, I was finished with Sphere and hoping for more! Michael Crichton leads you through the story without any break-points or useless information. He manages to make items like the Time/Space Continuim, Black Holes, Paradoxes and other intense scientific items easy to comprehend. Up until the last few pages, one did not know how the book would be resolved. Excellent writing! I highly recommend reading Sphere, especially if you have not seen the so-so movie version.
Rating:
Summary: MY FAVORITE CRICHTON STORY
Review: I can't believe that no one else has reviewed this book! Has everyone been living under a rock? Or maybe the movie deterred Crichton fans from undergoing this one? Well, the readers are missing out, because this is his most fantastic story yet! Crichton takes you into the characters heads and makes you feel what they feel. What an adventure! And what a scare! VERY EXCELLENT BOOK!
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting, but never hits the mark
Review: I vividly remember when I read Sphere that I thought it would play better as a movie; and if people think the movie is a bit meandering and weird, the book is certainly the same. Crichton gives us three partial stories for the price of one, but unfortunately none of them ever seem to click. The book opens with an extremely promising, thought-provoking concept that is too quickly and unfortunately abandoned: Beneath the modern-day ocean a ship thought to be alien, sunken for three hundred years, turns out to be American-built, having apparently traveled through time to get there. There's no sign of any crew, and the flight recorder only gives them a hint to how the ship got there. It's a great story at that point, but there Crichton decides to deal with the one oddity found aboard: The sphere. Without getting too much into the specifics, it's enough to say that the second two partial stories don't do the first one justice. We get a bit of mystery over what's inside the sphere, and what (if anything) might be trying to communicate and how. Then follows a tale of paranoia as the characters each have different suspicions about what's going on, and none of them can be sure whether they can even trust themselves. It all ends on an unsatisfying note, having accomplished little or nothing. It seems clear that there was no set theme to Sphere, and as a result the story fragmented under stress. It started out so promising, but the really juicy and fascinating questions were never answered. To me the mystery of the ship and its origins and history was far more intriguing than the mystery of the alien sphere, yet the former was sacrificed to bring on the rest of the story. Having read some real classics, I don't count this among them; Sphere was a novel without direction or purpose, that seemed more like a bad echo of Forbidden Planet than an original work. In some ways it's an interesting read, but I wouldn't rank it too highly on the reading list.
Rating:
Summary: Enjoy the thrilling tales, but avoid blackholes
Review: I bought Sphere since it looked like a promising science fiction. It turned out to be one of the most astounding novels I have ever read. The decoding of an alien message and a conversation with Sphere itself reminded me of the parallels in Carl Sagan's epic: Contact. They are masterfully written, backed by the Crichton's sophisticated knowledge in psychology and computer algorisms. Sphere brings us much more than a thrilling entertainment; it repeatedly feeds us with the newest information in technology, while not omitting the fundamental elements of scientific methods: Yes, telepathy might be possible but we always have to ask for plausible reasoning based on confirming evidence. However punctilious Crichton might be, he is no professional cosmologist like Stephen Hawking. In explaining time travel, he suggests a future spaceship from earth passes through "blackholes" to get into parallel universes and travel through time when "wormholes" would have been the more relevant choice (when any object would be torn down into subatomic partials by a blackhole's super strong gravitation). Moreover, the ending of the novel doesn't brought conclusion to the unsolved mystery of neither the future spaceship, nor the sphere. Their significance to the advancement of human society was left ambiguous. Perhaps Crichton should write a sequel. Sphere is only the second Crichton book I read. Just a week ago, I picked up Disclosure mindlessly from my bibliophilic grandpa's 9-foot bookshelf just to kill some time. It was sitting beside a 1906 German Bible and a pile of ancient Japanese literature analogies. I didn't know why in the space-time continuum did such randomness take place, but increasingly, I discovered that Crichton was very enjoyable to read and there was always depth in every plot. I deeply recommended his books for novice airplane riders, skeptical psychologists, skeptical physicists, and professional poets.
| 
