Rating: 
Summary: Big book.. Big time Fun Reading!!
Review: I bought this book when it first came out in paperback years ago. I could not believe when I bought it, I'm not one for a book thick book, but I am definatly glad I did. I couldnt put this book down. Great book for beach reading and rainy day weather. Different familes thrown into this action packed story about the Earthquake we all hear will come and dread. A Must Read!!
Rating: 
Summary: A Little Slow at First, Then Bam!
Review: Don't let this book's size daunt you or the sometimes terribly boring parts at the beginning stop you. Once you get past the first 250 pages or so we have a powerful book that will have your head spinning because it could happen! The largest earthquake in recorded history hits the central of the country. Thousands dead, millions homeless, and the nation's economy about to crumble.The book has two very likable central characters. Firstly there is Jason, a teenager from a broken home, whose mother dies in the earthquake and whose father doesn't really seem to care about him, even after finding out that Jason survived. Jason floats a boat down the Mississippi (not quite like Huck Finn) and encounters Nick, a real kindhearted sort whose best friend gets gunned down by a deranged cop and who gets shot by the same cop and then has to do battle with a poisonous snake. Nick and Jason form a strong bond that is far greater than Jason ever had from his family. Meanwhile, there is a crazy evangelist, a KKK sheriff, and an Army general that are each coping with the disaster in different ways. Though these characters are less interesting, they add important roles to the plot of the book.
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Summary: Wild Adventure on the Mississippi
Review: I love this book. At the age of three, 'way back in 1939, my parents brought me to Reelfoot Lake in the heart of the New Madrid fault country. I've never forgetten the eerieness of that experience and look for books about the historical earthquake or sci-fi projections of future ones. Most, like Hernon's 8.4, aren't any better written than a Robin Cook, but THE RIFT is different. It's literature! I am sure it's no accident that the plot is far more than a disaster novel. It's a picaresque travel-tale and its structure parallels the greatest of all American novels, HUCKLEBERRY FINN, with a rebellious white boy and an intelligent black man confronting dangers and weirded-out characters on the Mississippi and along its banks, and finding great depths of resourcefulness in themselves, as well as friendship and trust. And you get a delicious sci-fi disaster story on top of all that! Who could resist? I've lived in the South about half my life and found the characters entirely believable. Like Mark Twain, Williams shows us the murderous underside of fundamentalist religion, yet at the same time doesn't demonize the preacher and his surprisingly creative wife. Murderous fanatics they turn out to be, but a lot more likeable than the Ku Kluxers and the drugged-out Militia creep from Detroit. (I've lived in the Detroit area, too, and that little piece of smarm could be patterned after a few racist haters and baiters who got in the news.) Yet even he is not without a soul. Williams understands the politics of the American lumpenproletariat, the reasons for resentment and their unfortunate tendency to blame everyone but their genuine enemies. So you get a political analysis, too. Samuel Clemens, I am sure, must have read this novel in Heaven about as many times as I've read it down here.
Rating:
Summary: A Real Surprise
Review: I bought this book (from Amazon.com, of course) because the subject matter interested me. I had never heard of the author, and apparently he hasn't written much of anything else, except a book on English composition. What a wonderful surprise it was to find the book such a satisfying read! It's a long book (almost 1,000 pages), but it never flags or drags. The author alternates the text of old letters and accounts from people who lived through the 1811-12 New Madrid earthquakes with his fictional narrative, and also includes some fascinating factual information about earthquakes--especially nice for those of us who avoided taking geology in school. :-) The plot follows several characters who live through a new series of earthquakes in current times. All the characters are very well developed and believable--this author KNOWS people and he knows how to write about them. I especially enjoyed the interaction and relationship that develops between the middle-aged African American son of an Army general and the young white child of a "New Age" mother and lawyer father, who end up traveling down the Mississippi together after the first in the series of modern earthquakes. There is plenty of action and a great deal of wry humor in this book. Now I only wish Walter J. Williams had another work of fiction available to purchase and read.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty good
Review: Pretty good story, but its a little over-the-top portraying race relations in the American South. From what I have experienced there, the American identity has overtaken racial identities for most people, even the uneducated. I would have liked more of the story related to long-term changes for global civilization ala Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" books, and less nitty-gritty detail ala Tom Clancy.
Rating:
Summary: Great disaster epic
Review: This book chronicles the trials and tribulations of Nick and Jason as they try to rescue themselves from the widespread destruction of a major (really quite an understatement) earthquake. The descriptions of destruction and major industrial accidents caused by the quake are quite vivid. Since I like this sort of thing, I was really impressed by the amount of thought and research put into it.
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Summary: An exciting tale of a mega earthquake
Review:
The New Madrid fault, the subject of this novel, is an actual geological fact, and really was the site of a mammoth earthquake in 1811. The author, Walter J. Williams, has done a massive amount of research on the subject and opens each chapter with letters and news articles written by observers of that massive quake,during which the Mississippi actually was caused to run backwards for a period, due to the shifting of elevations in its bed.
As Williams explains, most earthquakes are caused by the twenty-two mile thick platelets of the earth's crust--floating on the near liquid molten material under them, like the skin on hot milk--colliding; for example the Pacific plate pushing inexorably under the North American plate on the Pacific Coast, as was true of those along the San Andreas fault, especially the great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 and the subsequent California earthquakes and others in the States of Washington and Oregon. The resulting slippage and the resistance of the continental plate has created the Coast Range and the Cascade and Sierra ranges of mountains with their concomitant boils and pimples, the volcanoes that periodically erupt there. The great rift that runs under the Mississippi River, however, is different. It is the result of an ancient attempt by the continent to separate into two continents, which failed but left a great weakened fault line running from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to the Gulf of Mexico, called the New Madrid Fault. Other fault lines spread out from it like strands on a spider web. The last big quake there caused little loss of human life, due to the fact that it was only lightly populated. In this story, however, the author predicates another (inevitable, the only question is 'when?') quake on the New Madrid fault, which triggers slippage of the adjacent fault lines as well, causing a mammoth 8.9 (on the Richter scale) earthquake--about the largest release of energy of which the earth is capable, one thousand four hundred times as powerful as a 5.5 quake--in the heavily industrialized and populated Mississippi basin. The story follows many characters, all well drawn and easy to identify with, both before, during, and after the earthquake. He also has done a magnificent job of plotting the very plausible collateral effects: floods as the levies fail, fire from the inevitable gas line ruptures and butane tank spills, as well as downed electric and phone lines, totally disrupting communications. Other issues are deadly mixtures of chemicals in a chemical plant like sulphuric acid and carbon tetrachloride (cleaning fluid) resulting in phosgene gas, killing thousands, and the near total destruction of a nuclear power plant. Altogether, the story is spell-binding as well as educational. Reading it, one can project the things that might result from any major natural disaster, and thus make some preparations "just in case." More than that, other mind-bending scenes--like the protagonist who is stranded in a cottonwood tree surrounded by the flooding Mississippi and finds himself face to face with a large, aggressive cottonmouth moccasin intent upon killing him. The characters are diverse, from an aerospace engineer to a morose teenage boy who loves to skate, to an End Times preacher who has prepared for years for the "tribulation" stockpiling food and guns and ammunition, to a futures speculator on the market, to a Gateway Arch guide, to a racist sheriff, to a managing engineer of a nuclear power plant and more. All are convincingly portrayed, and the dialogue is extremely realistic and well-written. As a great example of a post apocalyptic book,I recommend it highly. Joseph Pierre
Rating: 
Summary: Couldn't finish it....
Review: I did my best.. hit 400 pages before deciding I had better books waiting to be read. While the premise of the novel was very interesting, I was unable to find a single character that I actually cared about. One of the things I loved about "The Stand" (a book I had heard this one compared too.. good Vs evil following disaster).. was that I actually cared for some of the protagonists. That was not the case with this book. During some of the perilous chapters... I was never on the edge of my seat because I didn't really care if the characters survived or not.
I gave it 2 stars in fairness since I didn't finish it.. Maybe it redeemed itself in the second half... however I didn't see an indication it would.
Rating:
Summary: A Cut Above the Rest
Review: Disaster novels and post-apocalyptic books are full of two-dimensional characters making their way through places where the guys with the most guns eventually win, might always makes right, and the Big, Bad Gub'ment was something that tried to take your guns away and tax you to death for silly Satanist liberal ideas like giving poor infants child care. Thankfully, some of these books, like The Postman and Lucifer's Hammer, manage to transcend this trend and focus on the very human side of what might happen in a world where government protection is no longer available. The Rift is one of those books. Walter J. Williams creates a terrifying, but plausible, shattered Midwest where fears of nuclear spillage, racist gangs, and looters gone wild have become quite real. The novel is enormous, and focuses on several groups of characters, including a skateboarder who hooks up with a black guy, an Endtimes preacher who begins running a despotic survivalist camp, a racist sheriff at odds with his community and his own values, a nuclear technician who manages to save millions of people with his skills, and a lady Army COE General whose leadership saves millions more. Williams uses his amazing skill for writing dialogue to flesh these characters out, and the result is that none come across as overly two-dimensional. The sheriff is still a decent man, the "good" guys aren't always good, and the Gub'ment can still be Big and Bad. Williams manages to create a wholly believable scenario with wholly believable characters. No one is going to mistake this with Shakespeare, but his dialogue is top-notch (did I mention the dialogue yet?) It's a satisfying read (and it should be, weighing in at darn near a thousand pages), and moves along at a nice pace, never dragging, even during the "boring" parts (which aren't really boring). A lot of writers could learn a great deal from Williams' style of storytelling; it reminds one of a mix between Stephen King (for ease of reading and storytelling ability) and Elmore Leonard (for dialogue and depth of character development through dialogue). The premise isn't necessarily original, but The Rift definitely transcends the "post-apocalyptic" genre into more mainstream literature, but at the same time, it's a worthy addition to the PA library as well, if only as an example of what can be accomplished with a limited plot and a lot of skill.
Rating:
Summary: Two and a half weeks of my life, and worth it.
Review: What with being interrupted by other stuff I had to read for work, it took me two and a half weeks to get through the 900-plus pages of "The Rift," but I begrudged the time I couldn't spend reading it. Williams has a nice, smooth prose style, he's obviously done a huge amount of research, and he's peopled this book with nine major characters and dozens (hundreds?) of supporting players, many of whom are conceived in wonderfully intricate ways. Even the worst characters (Omar Paxton, Rev. Frankland) come across as human and even weirdly sympathetic. I've never read anything by Williams before, but you can bet I'm going to be getting his other stuff in the near future.
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