Rating:  Summary: Great Book Review: the cobra event was a wonderful page turner at the end and really informative I would reccomend this and the eleventh plague to all readers!
Rating:  Summary: A Page Turner at Its Best! Review: Once again, Preston writes a book with such flare and excitement on a topic that can actually occur, and that probably will occur at some point in the future. It truly opened my eyes to biological warfare. Watch out though. If you start reading it when you only have a few hours here or there, you could be in trouble, as you will not want to put it down.
Rating:  Summary: Absolutely terrifying Review: This book is incredibly realistic. I couldn't put it down. I recommend it to anyone. Richard Preston is the best author I have ever read.
Rating:  Summary: Extremely Fascinating and Informative Book Review: As i read through this book, I realized that biological warfare is a subject that needs to be understood by more people. We all live our day-to-day lives oblivious to the evils other countries are conjuring up. I think this book is a must read because people need to be aware of such subjects as biological weapons. I would recommend this book for anyone who can take it seriously, yet not become paranoid with the new-found information.
Rating:  Summary: Great story Review: Excellent book; you cannot put it down. It's part mystery, pasrt sci-fi, part espionage. It does make you stop and wonder.
Rating:  Summary: A great literary accomplishment Review: The Cobra Event is a very well thought out novel based on facts researched by Richard Preston. The novel has a great plot full of action and suspense. I highly recommend this novel.
Rating:  Summary: facinating thriller with a lot of truth & fact to back it up Review: i am a avid reader of virus patholigi and bioterorism books and the one is one of my top three. Richard Preston has done a great deal of reserch that has resulted in this book being not only realy plausable but allso some of the tecnoligi that he mentions are being created. i highly recomend this book to any sci-fi, science or anyone who is interested in a realy good science thriller.
Rating:  Summary: Good Story Review: I enjoyed the story although the writing could be better. Some of us who complain about poor writing should reconsider the quality of our own reviews, however. As a thriller, I found this exciting and informative. It's not supposed to be great literature, but Preston does spell correctly.
Rating:  Summary: It was an average thriller. Review: I don't get into required reading for shcool, and like to pick out my own book, however this was a descnet choice. I predicted a great book of creativity and lots of new litature from Richard Preston, and from many sources it looked to be different, however I believed it to be dull and uncreative, like it was copied from your basic thriller. Nevertheless the details and diction seems to bring it back to life. So i really cant decide if i liked it or not, so read it and decide for yourself, i thought it to be average.
Rating:  Summary: Good research; awful writing Review: As all the magazine reviews have said, there's a lot of valuable research and privileged information in this book. But what may not be clear, except in the quotation from (of all places) "Entertainment Weekly", is that the writing is quite bad -- as if a very bright scholar or journalist had taken a night-school course in writing an "airport thriller", then talked a friend into publishing it without bringing in a co-writer or a good editor. (An editor is credited, if that's the right word here; I would have withdrawn my name if I were her.)The plot is a little about forensics and epidemiology, new and interesting to most readers, and a whole lot about silly chases through tunnels and shafts, more like the script for a video game than a silly TV movie. What's missing, despite a few tries, is any insight into the only interesting character -- who is, as usual, the Bad Guy, not the Lovely Doctor or the Brave Agent. Worse, by making him a lone madman with a fixed address, rather than a resourceful and rational group, the entire plot becomes "Catch the Serial Murderer", his weapon almost irrelevant, rather than "Defeat Bio-Terrorism", without which there's no reason to publish or read this particular piece of fiction. The bookstores are already full of cops-versus-psycho novels. At the sentence level, Preston's style is full of incorrect syntax, idiom, and semantics; mangled metaphors; pointless brand-names and jargon; jarring shifts between action and exposition -- sometimes within a single paragraph. It's like a poor imitation of the clumsily didactic novels of James Michener or Leon Uris. Perhaps there's something infectious about bio-terrorism as the theme of a bad novel. Tom Clancy's "Rainbow Six" has a very similar theme; the Big Bad Guy and his gang have the same technology and the same motivation (pruning, not profit or political change) -- and it's Clancy's most pointless and poorly-written novel.
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