Rating: 
Summary: A marginal effort
Review: I read this book a couple of years ago and just decided to write this after I saw a commercial for the film version. This book was nothing more than just "OK". Brin was able to hold my interest long enough for me to finish it and that's it. Not totally boring, but definitely not worth a second read. Here's the story in a nutshell: Gordon Krantz survives the Doomwar and after a particularly close encounter with death dedicates his life to attempting to restore America to its former greatness by lying to everyone he meets. His lies cause the deaths of nearly every really strong character in the book. Yet this deceiver has the nerve to whine on and on about "who will take responsibility?" as though he is the only person left on the blasted planet who is trying to do more than just survive. What conceit! Don't buy it, go to the library and check it out.
Rating: 
Summary: I read the first print. I loved it then and I love it now.
Review: I read this book when it was originally published back in the '80s It was and is one of my favorite books. I re-read it once every other year. A lot of your reviewers who dislike it seem to be missing the point of the book. Yes, it is a post-apocalyptic story, but this is not hard science fiction. It's social commentary and, most importantly, this is a story about the power of stories. The details of "how the apocalypse happened" and, to a certain point, the characters themselves are secondary to this. This is a story about hopes and dreams and how they can transform us for good and for bad. A bad story is what destroys the United States, not nuclear war. The words of Nathan Holn are what finally bring down a nation. Now Gordon has a different story to try and bring it back. Words, ideas have more power than actions. Gordon's story of an R.U.S.A., the story of Dena's Scouts and the idea of Cyclops are the tenuous glue that will bring a community together.
Rating:
Summary: An engrossing story with believable characters.
Review: For those who enjoyed "The Postman", I recommend "Earth Abides" by George R. Stewart. They share a post population crash theme and characters that act and react in a believable manner. It is a little dated but thoroughly enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: This book is amazing!
Review: I read all things by David Brin and have yet to be disapointed. With The Postman I started reading it, then passed it around my dorm. The book became quite a sensation (and this is in 1996). As for the movie, well, we all know that the book is usually better, but by no means should anyone be discouraged. I know many people who would kill to see a work like Startide Rising make it to film. No matter, David Brin is truly THE author for the 1990's...and beyond.
Rating: 
Summary: Thanks for the nice remarks!
Review: Thanks for the encouragement, folks. This whole Hollywood thing has been a roller coaster. But the book itself is an anchor. It was a reflection of how I felt when, as a kid, it seemed to me the world might go poof at any time, and how much we'd miss the little things in life... the things that make it worth standing up, now and then, and saying 'I am a member of a civilization.' Hang in there and make it work. David Brin
Rating: 
Summary: A fine and easy read
Review: In a roundabout way, I read this because of the Kevin Costner movie! I found a copy of the mass market paperback WITHOUT Kevin Costner's face on the cover, and snatched it up before only the movie tie in edition was available. It is one of the tenets of my religion that I never read movie tie in editions (the only exception I have made in recent years was THE ENGLISH PATIENT, and then only because I was not willing to wait to turn up a different edition used)? I wonder why publishers believe that there is a great demand for tie-in editions. I previously worked at the University of Chicago Press, and knew that the UC edition of A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT outsold the mass market movie tie-in edition by quite a bit. And this can't be the only instance. But enough of this particular hobby horse. Thanks to the fear of Kevin Costner's picture, I read my first David Brin novel, and I am certainly glad that I did. It is a real page turner; I bought it on a Saturday and finished it on a Tuesday, without sitting down and reading in it for any extended period of time. The story is compelling, the characters likable and interesting, and the situation intriguing. Everyone will, I am sure, have their own take on the probability of Brin's vision. For my part I do not believe that there would be the degree of loss of technology that he imagines, nor do I believe the survivalists would be so vehemently opposed to it (I have known a couple survalists, and they were as addicted to "stuff" and the products of technology as they were to their knife catalogs and SOLDIER OF FORTUNE magazine). But the great thing about the book is that it involves you to such a degree that you care enough to argue with it. Not a masterpiece, but a fun book.
Rating:
Summary: Brin wins again... The Postman lives on!
Review: I read this when I was in high school and although I understood it, I didn't really take this story to heart. Two questions were finally answered: Could I have survived like Gordon Kranz did? and What would life be like without life's simple pleasures...? David Brin brings to life a normal Minnesota man who struggles with the way things are now versus how they were before the war and the winter. Gordon gets lucky and makes a lie become a truth when he takes on the persona of the Postman and reconnects several Oregon towns while keeping just a step ahead of Holnist survivalists. Brin also ties in the dependency on technology for the survival of a community...Cyclops, as well as the government's military experiments (not in the movie). In the end, because of a simple pleasure, something that we take so much for granted...the mail...a nation is restored. I loved the book, winced at the movie version (although it does turn out quite nicely), and wished that other writers could capture, as Brin does, the very nature of the post-haulocaustic U.S. Read it, understand it, and think... Could I have survived like Gordon did or would I have listened to those "little" voices that told me to quit?
Rating: 
Summary: The Postman falls flat
Review: I decided to read The Postman because I had heard good things about both the book and it's author, David Brin. I couldn't have been more misled. The book follows the adventures of a wandering loner in a post apocolyptic america, who finds that by impersonating a US postman, he can find saftey and food within the dwellings of the usually untrusting survivors. Along the way, he finds that his ruse has generated an icon that people can follow, to re-build america from the ashes. It doesn't sound too bad, I even liked the idea. Unfortunatley, Brin's writing style is flat, boring and so mundane, that he fails to bring any sense of drama, romance or even interest to any of his situations and characters. An example includes the postman falling in love with a woman for the romance part of the book, and then when he loses her, we don't care, because she was NEVER DEVELOPED as a character...This book is full of "bad sci-fi" cliches, and predictable plot developments. Everything from the Wizard of Oz computer to the characters refering to things like, the "Doomwar" or the "Anti-Tech Riots." I mean this book was written in 1985? The dialogue and writing sound more like 1955! like Even such small things as how ALL the survivors refer to the Doomwar and the Chaos that followed (Brin's capitals) by the same names, even though we are told that they have all been isolated from each other for 20 years WITH NO COMUNICATION! This tells us that Brin didn't give this world any thought! The book is supposedly full of grand ideas, and in reality they all fall flat, and become cliched, mostly because Brin treats his readers as idiots when his main character, who is delivering mail and bringing hope to the surviviors, stops and thinks to himself, "Gee if there was only a symbol, a person that everyone could rally behind, I would help them if I could..." A good author would have given us this sense of events, (i.e. - the postman not realizing what he is doing, as he himself yearns for hope) in a subtle, interesting way. Unfortunatley, Brin just can't deliver his own ideas, and instead we end up laughing, when we were meant to be inspired. BMAN
Rating:
Summary: Too Bad
Review: In this book Brin tries to make a point of women needing to understand technology better and to participate in political disscussion. A very valid point. Too bad almost nothing in the story conveys this moral. This is like watching MadMax and then at the end of the movie the moral is "Be Kind to your Elders". Doesn't make alot of sense. Despite this I thought the book was pretty entertaining. It's just that when an author wants to show us an important point or moral, the moral should be the cornerstone of the story and the focus about which the characters revolve, rather than something thrown in at the end. To do otherwise is an injustice to the moral, and make the moral seem unimportant.
Rating:
Summary: The Postman Delivers
Review: The Postman is a good, quick read, but about halfway through the plot and story start getting fuzzy as Brin uses the story to explore philosophical issues. I'm a big fan of post-nuclear fiction, and the book does not fully exploit Brin's interesting postnuclear view of the world. (the jack-of-all-trades and the master of none syndrome) The movie, on the other hand, does. It has a good, consistent, patriotic story and is everything the book should've been. (which doesn't happen very often) Still though, the book is quite good and I'd read it again if I had to do it over. I only wish the movie was longer and had more time exploring the postnuclear world as it did in the opening scene.
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