Sphere

Rating:
Summary: Vapid 'manifestation' of interesting ideas
Review: Cardboard characters purporting to be geniuses in their fields talk textbook drivel while acting like spoiled adolescents. This book makes me never want to read Crichton again. I read Disclosure and quite enjoyed it, but Sphere is preposterous. Not the ideas in it, which concern a spaceship found at the bottom of the ocean, time travel, and the nature of reality. No, all that I could digest. But the poor writing and thin characterizations were almost more than I could bear. Read the Dune series for a rich, complex and involved sci-fi adventure. Crichton is a lightweight and will be forgotten after his career is over and the publishers aren't pushing his cheap writing on us.

Rating:
Summary: A great book!
Review: Once I started reading this book, it was hard for me to put it down. It was slow at the begginning like most of Crichton's books, but once it started...I couldn't put it down!

Rating:
Summary: Great book!!!
Review: It was great. Can't stop reading onceyou started. Suspenceful and chilling!!! one of Crichtons best!!

Rating:
Summary: Crichton's best yet! Read it yet? If not, do so now!
Review: A space-ship from the future? An unexplored region of a space-ship? What is it? It's a great book. The ability to manifest your thoughts and fears with ease by some unknown alien force is creative, suspenseful, and down-right brilliant! Definately Crichton's best as he describes every thought of every character and making no person anymore innocent than the next. Each character is dynamic and different in many ways. The ending is nothing for Crichton to be proud of however, and perhaps would have been better with a hanging ending allowing the reader to decipher what would happen to the rest of the world with these manifestations. I hope the ending wasn't brought to such an abrupt halt because Crichton was too afraid to make a book any longer than 400 pages. If he were to be more descriptive and maybe added more thought and imagination to the ending, then it would have been worth reading an extra hundred pages or so. This is not the case, however, and the ending is the reason that I gave the book a nine.

Rating:
Summary: Crichton's worst.
Review: A three-hundred-year-old-spaceship at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Sounds interesting enough, right? Well, listen to this. The 'life form' controlling the Sphere inside the spaceship is nothing more than a scientist's 'manifestation' as Crichton calls it. The Sphere is a supposed liason between imagination and reality, creating whatever the person inside it imagines. I give Michael Crichton great credit as an author. (I've read seven of his books.) But he was obviously hurting for a plot when he wrote, (or perhaps 'manifested') Sphere. The story does not flow along smoothly, and the end is big disappointment. If you love Michael Crichton's works, but you haven't read Sphere, I advise you not to. The ending, which wraps up in the final ten pages, is a waste of the other 350 pages.

Rating:
Summary: Crichton's Best, Why hasn't this become a movie?
Review: This book is magnificent. The events that occur are mesmerizing as the humans communicate with the sphere. The idea of an entity living in the depths of the Pacific Ocean for 300 years is fascinating. The sphere manipulates the humans thoughts to confuse them about time and recent events. This book is much better than any of Crichton's novels and will forever be a favorite of mine. The only bad part was the ending, which seemed to not have been pre-planned and finished in a rush, but how could you judge the dazzling 350 page story by a 7 page ending.

Rating:
Summary: OH! THIS IS INTERESTING,BUT, OH! THE ENDING,OH NO!
Review: What else can i say about this fine story about two central points, extraterrestrial contact and psychology or maybe psycho first?. I don't know but i must say that the ending was so simple that don't deserve any more comments.

Rating:
Summary: It is impossible to put this book down.
Review: I stayed up all night reading. The book leaves you in such suspense, it's scary. How could such creativity be put in one book. Crichton has written one of the best books ever. It makes you think about what could happen to us in the future. What will we find if we explore other galaxcies? 15,000 thumbs up.

Rating:
Summary: Rival to the Mighty Jurassic Park?
Review: Sphere was one of the few books I ever speed-read. I finished it in one three-day weekend in 7th grade and loved every minute of it. Although, as is usual for Crichton, the last 20 pages were disappointing, the last 2 pages made up for it completely. The ending leaves you guessing about who did what: Do they still have "The Power"? I've debated this with a friend of mine who has read the book, she thinks they all forgot it, I think only the one lady kept it, and it appears some people on here think they all remembered. I guess only the soon-to-be-released movie will tell us truly (hopefully). This is one of, if not the, greatest Crichton books ever written. Like all his other books, it has a different subject than most are used to and it is no way similar in subject to his other books. The style is mostly the same, and you can see big flashing signs of "CRICHTON" throughout the book. A true great.

Rating:
Summary: Crichton's Absolute Best
Review: Sphere was fantastic. Although only my second M.C novel, I thought that Crichton did an outstanding job of luring the reader into a suspense filled journey of the unknown. I found myself continuously trying not to "cheat" and see what that Sphere thing really is. The ending was just like the plot...DEEP!! If you don't have an open mind, don't even go there. You'll probably find something in the book that didn't compute. However, if you like "deep," sci-fi, suspenseful Crichton, you'd better not sleep on this one because when Hollywood gets a hold of it, they'll ruin it for sure...Just like JP, Lost World, and Congo.