Link

Rating:
Summary: Painfully bad, internally inconsistent, but creative
Review: Are you creative? Are you good at visualizing fantastic worlds? Do you have poor analytical skills, and mediocre writing skills? Then this book will give you hope---you, too, can be a published author. This writer doesn't foreshadow, he telegraphs...and then repeats himself to make sure you don't miss it. And it's shocking that none of his editors managed to catch his misuse of several words throughout the book. (Using a big word doesn't make a sentence good, especially if you misuse that word.) I had to force myself to finish this book. Oh, well. If you wan't a book that challenges current scientific belief, read Crichton's Travels...

Rating:
Summary: An entertaining "E" ticket ride
Review: For all its faults, "Link" is as entertaining as a book can get. It is fast-paced, suspenseful and provides the reader with an education in popular science and mythology to boot. Like Crichton, Becker's writing style is clipped and fluid, which makes this book so easy to read in the course of a day or two. Although this novel's premise is controversial in its slaying of the sacred cow known as the theory of evolution, one cannot deny that it provides much food for thought by raising interesting and unanswered questions about humanity's past. All it takes is an open mind. You don't have to be a bible-thumping creationist to enjoy it.

Rating:
Summary: Read it!
Review: Great book! You'll enjoy it if you have an open mind about evolution/creationism. It may not be the literary pick of the year, but a fun read for sure! Especially liked the extensive bibliography.

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Read!
Review: My son in law read this book and gave it to me as soon as he finished it.... I read a lot and need to say that this was one of the best books I've read in a long time! I hated putting "Link" down as not only were the characters great but the story, the ideas, really made me think. Tho' fiction, this could well be fact. I read some of the reviews on this book and saw that many were upset by Walt Becker's *fictional* theory, but read with an open mind, this piece of fiction makes sense! I consider this a must read...... ENJOY!

Rating:
Summary: Big let down - I'd like my money back
Review: Link is a really annoying book. I enjoyed it on the level of an action adventure even though it was predictable and does read like it was written as a movie script. The annoying stuff which is where the book falls down completely is the 'science'. I thought it would be an educated, well researched and therefore credible book that hung together and answered more questions than it left open. But it's actually a thinly disguised old earth creationists account of why we didn't 'evolve' from apes.

Infuriating and for annoying me it gets 1 star.

Rating:
Summary: LINKS scores hole-in-one
Review: Walt Becker's debut novel certainly has stirred many into voicing opinions, some vociferously. I am not a scientist; I cannot contest some of the author's theories, not being educated in genetics and anthropology. However, he offers compelling examples of how convoluted the whole theory of evolution is. One thing to keep in mind when reading the book--it is FICTION. Fiction sprinkled with generous portions of fact, but nevertheless fiction. Never does the author purport that his theory is the only rational explanation for the inconsistencies in the fossil record and evolution's play in our genesis. With that firmly in mind, read a book that will fill you with wonder and the awe of "what if?".

Rating:
Summary: hope you don't know much about science
Review: Do not read this book if you have studied physics, biology, philosophy, or anthropology. The facts are simplified and out of context. Nevertheless, if you have no interest whatsoever in technical accuracy this may be an entertaining novel.

Rating:
Summary: Link makes you think!
Review: I am deeply chagrined over some of the reviews of this book. It seems as if some have used the review board to castigate Mr. Becker simply because he dares to posit an alternative- although admittedly unorthodox- view of the origins of man than that suggested by Darwinism. For those of you who engaged in attacking Mr. Becker's "science"you must not have realized that the work was FICTION! As with most science fiction works, many liberties were taken with regard to our current bodies of knowledge. Many of the "facts" cited in the book are quite simply "theories" that their respective theorists have put forth for contemplation and further exploration. I thought the book was a well crafted FICTIONAL tale relating to the possible origins of man. In fact, the fictional tale presented in the book is much more plausible than the THEORY of evolution that is today so disingenuously presented as "fact", when it cannot even explain such rudimentary questions as gender developement. I thought the story was fast moving, suspenseful and above all else, thought provoking. The bibliography alone will provide many an hour of collateral reading. I thought the writing was adequate and the character development sufficient within the overall story line. If your pulse did not quicken when Ricardo was being washed away with Jack feverishly trying to save his friend, you must not yet have "evolved." I would highly recommend this book to anyone who can overcome their Darwinian myopia momentarily and be willing to escape into a world of theoretical possilities presented nicely within a FICTIONAL construct. Buy it, read it, think about it!

Rating:
Summary: Bad Science - Worse Theology - Worst Writing
Review: How do you give zero stars? I will sometimes read a truly dreadful book to the bitter end, both as an exercise in self-discipline and to see exactly how bad it can get. Sometimes it gets really bad.

As a scientist, I like science fiction, and one of my favorite books is James P. Hogan's "Inherit The Stars", a sci-fi speculation on the origins of the human race. Like all literature of this genre, Hogan's book requires some suspension of disbelief. "Link", on the other hand, requires you to pluck out your brain and heave it out the window. The plot of "Link" purports to be based on scientific facts, yet the book is packed with internal contradictions, pseudo-scientific speculations, and outright mumbo-jumbo, set into a seemingly endless succession of short scenes that alternate between pedantic dialogue and Hollywood-style megaviolence. Too many scenes end with a portentious cliff-hanger. Like this.

After the first dozen or so miraculous escapes from deadly peril the plot begins to sound like the Perils of Pauline, but that's okay, because these are heroes with the right stuff. The heroine, who has no experience with guns, whips the cover off a heretofore unnoticed fifty caliber machine gun mounted atop a truck in which she has ridden for some days, and hoses through several belts of ammo to drive off the bad guys. Never mind setting the head spacing, firing in three-round bursts to keep the monster from overheating, or the fact that those things buck like a saddled-up rhinoceros. She's got spunk. A few scenes later the hero must snag the pontoon of a convenient passing narcotraficante's floatplane, climb into the cockpit to subdue the pilot and passenger, and pursue the bad guys who have kidnapped the heroine and hauled her away in a helicopter (whew). In all this the faithful Sancho Panza sidekick, a chubby Mexican national with several handy Ph.D.s and a convenient M. D., takes a bullet that nearly tears his foot in half. The blood flow can only be stanched by the hero stuffing a rag through his foot, but a few hours later he is keeping pace with the hero's gymnastics with a "limp". !Que hombre!

Not until page 334 does the book arrive at its true basic plot premise, a weird version of "scientific creationism". Just in case the reader is unfamiliar with this pseudo-scientific, pseudo-theological doctrine, the book spends nine pages on a very tedious dialogue about the evils of the Demon Darwinism. All the familiar arguments are rehashed, including the one that Darwinism is responsible for racism, war, and even rapacious business practices. There is even the obligatory attack based upon the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which deals with entropy, the tendency of energy systems to devolve into randomness. Sounds good on the surface, but the law does not apply to an open system like the Earth's biosphere, with an external energy source, or to biological systems sensu strictu. (Strict application would mean that plants could not convert simple gasses and water into the complex sugars that are the basis of life on the planet, or that embryos could not develop into humans). The hero and heroine are further saddened by their observation that most scientists are blindly-faithful Darwinists (not true) and therefore by implication atheists (definitely not true). Following this gush on the glories of God and His creation, the hero and heroine go into the bushes and rut like bunnies despite having recently been stung numerous times by killer bees while attacking, unarmed, a band of ruthless international arms traffickers and mercenaries. Peculiar timing, but I guess you have to get the sex in somewhere.

This plot also falls into several theological traps of its own devising. In another pedantic dialogue the reader is advised that the aliens are not God, yet for spiritual motives they practiced genetic manipulation upon primitive homonids and then interbred with them to uplift them from an animal state and create humans. (I admire, say, the mountain gorilla, and sympathize with its plight, but I do not feel sufficient empathy to either "uplift" them or to have sex with one. Where is the Prime Directive when you really need it?) Now one of the more important passages in the book of Genesis also says that God created man in His own image, a passage Christian believers in evolution interpret to mean His spiritual image. Since in this book the humans end up looking like the aliens, that bit of Genesis about the "own image" is overlooked because of troubling theological implications. I also think bestiality is widely frowned upon by religious believers and atheists alike. There are other similar issues, but hey, when you're battling Darwinism you cannot let a little heresy stick in your craw.

If you want to read a book that is more entertaining, more intellectually satisfying, does not offend your intelligence, and is ultimately far more spiritually uplifting, stick with "Inherit The Stars".

Rating:
Summary: Comments on the science in Link
Review: As one of the authors to whom Walt Becker acknowledges a debt, I feel, first, compelled to correct information attributed to me within the body of this certainly exciting adventure book, and second to respond to Becker's questions about our primitive ancestors in his "Afterword." In his chapter, "The Lake" he states that in studying the Osiris myth of Ancient Egypt I discovered that all the numbers needed to calculate the length of years for precession to bring about the "Great Return" were to be found in the ancient myth. Although Graham Hancock ("Fingerprints of the Gods") also attributed this to me, it is exceedingly misleading and not at all what I wrote.(These numbers make their appearance in Plutarch's account of the Osiris story...after Hipparchus has made his "discovery" of precession.) As for the questions Becker poses about how ancient cultures could have possibly calculated such things as the circumference of the earth, Becker displays his ignorance of such simple solutions as that used by Etatosthenes in the 3rd Century BC.Jane B Sellers [e-mail]