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Summary: A book that has everything
Review: this book was a book that had everything. It took place in the future and in the past. When haveing to solve problems the authur actully brought up real questions that needed to be solved. She didn't use a magic wond to make things better she used real science to slove the problem.
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Summary: not much point
Review: Parallelism is supposed to have some sort of resolution, otherwise, there's no point in setting up such a structure in the first place. Okay, there's a deadly disease in each timeline, as well as a crusading hero. What is the mysterious connection between the two events? Nothing.Read "Changing Places" by David Lodge if you want to see parallelism with a purpose. And did anyone else get tired of the word "Cutthroat?"
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Summary: Add me to the list of those who loved it...
Review: Yes, I agree that alot of the futuristic part of the novel is a little silly. But, honestly, I don't care. An English professor once made a comment to me that I feel can be applied to this novel. We were discussing "comic relief." He told me "Most people consider comic relief in the sense that the light moments provide a release of the tension built in the dramatic or tragic moments. But, in my opinion, the term is appropriate in another way: the comedy throws the tragedy into 'relief'--and makes it all the more harsh for the comparison." The bumblings of the whole "future crew" serve a purpose in "The Doomsday Book." They show how, in a scientifically advanced society, disease can still wreak havoc among an unprepared populous. Even a world that understands disease and germs and contagion is vulnerable. Thus, how much more do we understand the confusion and superstition that ran rampant amongst the medieval plague victims! And for all those readers who condemned the book for a lack of connection between past and future, I recommend a basic course in literary symbolism. Trust me, it's there (just a hint: for the most obvious, let the bells lead the way!) Anyway, all this aside, read this book for the plague story. Period. It's fascinating and heartbreaking. I finished "The Doomsday Book" a week ago, and am now halfway through my second nonfiction book on the Plague. I can't help but recommend a book that peaks my interest in any subject (let alone such a tragic one!) to that extent.
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Summary: Connie Willis: Doomsday Book
Review: Connie Willis' best work in my opinion. The Black Death, a terrible trajedy is brought to modern readers like never before. Readers meet the actual people of Medieval times, the common people, not just the clergy and royalty of the history books. Highly recommended.
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Summary: One of the best science fiction books I have ever read
Review: This is one of the best novels I have ever read recently. It is "science fiction" but really transcends the genre.
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Summary: Not recommended
Review: Throughout the first part of this book it continually rains, which made me more than once wonder when all the cardboard characters were going to dissolve and wash away. This book is simply bad, and the part that should have been most interesting, the part spent in the past, contains too limited locations, plot, and characters to really satisfy. Several of the plot points are so artificial and poorly resolved that the book becomes an exercise in frustration. I cannot recommend this book.
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Summary: Immensely cathartic, deeply moving
Review: I've read this book three or four times now, and it never gets old. Willis is a master of suspense, and this is especially apparent as the reader already has some clue as to when Kivrin ends up and what will happen to her medieval friends. This is by far the best book I've read in years.
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Summary: style is most frustrating
Review: I notice that a lot of people really like this book, but I found it very irritating. It takes until page 386 before the author gets to the point. In the meantime she uses and re-uses a couple of really irritating devices: characters constantly repeating factual information, like the symptoms of various diseases or constantly going over their concerns about someone's welfare; or character's about to find out some crucial piece of information but constantly being frustrated by some minor mishap. I get enough of this kind of thing every day at work and don't need to read it time after time in a book. The basic idea of this book is good and the last quarter of it moves along at a reasonably good pace. But it takes a long time to get there and I almost put it down several times.
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Summary: Outstanding
Review: When I finished this book today I put my head down and cried myself to sleep. I felt that Willis was not just writing a story, but standing in for all those lost souls of the Black Death. "Remember us," I hear them cry. How many died alone, unshriven? How many selfless priests and nuns, like Father Roche, tended them and caught the disease? We stand so smugly in the 20th century and think of them as ignorant peasants, wonder how they could think that the world was ending, that Satan was in control. After all, it's JUST A DISEASE. That's what Kivrin keeps saying. Just a disease. I've studied the plague in several history texts but nothing brought it home to me as this story did. I felt the despair, the terror. This isn't just a story. It's an experience. Don't read it if you like happy, undemanding books or technological gobbledegook. Do read it if you want to understand what it was like to live through hell on earth in the company of a saint.
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Summary: a history buff's dream
Review: OK, OK, so there's really no suspense regarding just WHEN Kivrin wound up, but you KNOW you've got a great book in your hands when you can glare right back at errors like that and say, "I don't care." And you don't, you really don't, because Willis handles the material so well. Leave the suspense for Dunworthy and Ahrens and all the rest from the future--YOU'RE too busy following Kivrin through an ice-encrusted, haunting medieval landscape, falling in love with characters (like Roche and the two little girls, Rosamund and Agnes), learning to dislike quite strongly such meanies as Lady Imeyne, and discovering (surprise, surprise!) that the Middle Ages was hardly the deeply chivalrous, romantic era it has often been made out to be. The ultimate tragedy is that you really find yourself CARING for the characters in the story. You can read in a text book that one third of the population died of this plague, but it is infinitely more moving to watch one or two characters you love become stricken and die. Willis does an excellent job of making 1348 and the people therein and the trials they faced accessible to a modern audience. And to those who found the book too depressing...I found it to be, ultimately, a message of hope for the faith and survival of the human spirit. The scene in which Kivrin tends the dying Father Roche at the end is incredibly moving and illustrates this point perfectly. To any Medieval buff, to anyone who's just plain interested in an excellently-crafted story, READ THIS BOOK.
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