Rating:  Summary: A Corking Good Time Travel Adventure Review: I love time travel stories and this is a good one. What would the world be like if Ronald Reagan did not become president? One must admire the audacity of the author to write a story with that possibility as a main feature of the plot. I loved the hero going back to the "old" Hollywood, meeting some of the early stars and seeing the inside of the studios that are long gone. The trips through time allow the reader to see how the future changes every time the hero takes another trip to the past. I found it fascinating and read the book in one day. I wish I could find a heap of sequels. If you like this book (and you will), read all of Jack Finney's books... you'll like them too.
Rating:  Summary: GREAT BOOK--BAD ENDING Review: I realize that this book is the first of a series but, oh boy, the ending left me hanging. I agree with the other reviewers who liked the writing, the historical descriptions (terrific) and the character development. They were great! But I'm still hanging around waiting for book 2.
Rating:  Summary: Witty and entertaining Review: I thought this was an excellent book, just short of perfect actually. There are a number of plot twists and they were all appreciated. The theory of time travel seems to have a few loose ends, but I think that was intended - it makes you think about it. The ending seemed perfectly suited toward there being a sequel, which I hope we see. Be warned that the reason the protagonist travels back in time is to prevent Reagan from becoming President, so if your politics lean to the right you may not enjoy Delacorte's political viewpoint. For me, the politics were right on.
Rating:  Summary: I loved this book! Review: I'll admit that I'm a sucker for time travel books. Invariably, however, I am somewhat disappointed (I liked "Time and Again" a lot but found "From Time to Time," the sequal, did not live up to my expectations). This book was just terrific! It was fun and intriguing, posing challenging philosophical questions about time travel while presenting a fast paced plot that really grabs you and keeps you going. I highly recommend "Time on my Hands." I have already bought copies for my friends. I think you'll love it too!
Rating:  Summary: confused political polemic disguised as time travel Review: I'm a fan of time travel from way back. Finney's novels, Matheson's Bid Time Return, Allen Appel's books, and others. Time on My Hands starts well, but bludgeons you with anti-Reagan propaganda. I'm not the former president's biggest supporter, but I thought Forrest Gump had wandered into the plot. The time travel aspects are really confused, as Delacorte's understanding of time travel has several holes in logic. The ending is a complete cop-out, almost as if he had to meet a deadline. Its questions on the hazards of time travel affecting one's existence aren't well-thought out at all. You'd be better off re-reading Time and Again, or something like Ken Grimwood's Replay, Darryl Brock's If I Never Get Back, or even Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, which has elements of time travel. But skip this one and travel to anything else.
Rating:  Summary: Good enough Review: I've always liked time travel novels, so getting this one was a natural. Jasper Hudnut has disovered a time machine (he knows it's a time machine because this isn't the first time he's run across it) in a Paris museum. The left leaning Hudnut manages to convince Gabriel Prince, writer of travel books and recently dumped, to use the machine to go back to 1941.There, he is to make sure Ronald Reagan, then a actor, never becomes president. Prince does't have to kill him, but if he wants too...Prince has no intention of killing Reagan, but he wouldn't mind seeing a world minus President Reagan either, and jumps on the machine, only to find himself accidently sent to 1938. Hudnut may have had 2 missions for Gabriel - the 2nd being to save his cousin Lorna, an actress who was killed in "The Great Storm" of 1938. Prince immediately falls in love with her, and, well, read the novel to find out everything that happens. Now, the Left long ago convinced itself that Ronald Reagan was a "amiable dunce", and the author continues to cling to that story. Here, Delacorte portrays him as a complete bumpkin - likable enough, but with no sense whatsoever. Gabriel tries to boost his film career, believing that will steer him away from his eventual path of politics. Unfortunately, Reagan is accidently killed in a swimming accident (I'm not giving away the ending, this is a time travel story remember), and Prince returns to the future. Delacorte's vision of a Ronald Reagan free world is unintentionally hilarious. In the first place, apparently Ronald Reagan was the only person capable of stopping the Carter juggernaut, as Carter wins fairly easily in 1980. This ignores the fact that the Carter presidency was so dismal, the Republicans could send up a, well, a "2nd rate B-movie actor" against him, with a major 3rd party candidate drawn from their own ranks, and still win with a majority of the vote. Having won though Carter turns things around fast, creating a virtual utopia. The world is nuclear free, and the Soviet Union has simply collapsed, having run out of money (the author doesn't explain why they didn't run out of money during our own timeline). That's a political quibble though.The story itself has a few minor holes. At one point, our hero pops up in 1935, and meets a young Jasper Hudnut, who immediately senses that he's from the future. Uh-huh. Still, I'm a sucker for a good time travel story, and this is a good one. Delacorte effecively portrays 1938 Hollywood, and asks all the paradox questions that pop up with this kind of thing (he tries to answer some of them as well, although he maybe should have left that alone as well). If you can ignore his (sometimes heavy handed) politics, you should enjoy this. One last thing. I don't know what everyone else is talking about. I thought the ending was great (didn't you guys read "About the Text"?) It leaves room for a sequel, or it can be left alone. In any event, it makes you think.
Rating:  Summary: An okay time travel story Review: If you had access to a time machine, and you could go back to any period in the 20th century to preemptively clean up one of mankind's messes, who would you choose to visit? Hitler, maybe? Actually, physicist Justin Hudnut, who has the machine, considers just that -- but he doesn't speak German. The obvious second choice is to go back to Hollywood in the late '30s and derail Ronald Reagan's political career. Yeah, it raised my eyebrow, too, though I'm certainly in favor of anything that would eliminate the Gipper from our history, and Hudnut makes an excellent case for the expedition. But he can't go himself, so he recruits travel writer Gabriel Prince. Gabriel undertakes the mission, landing in Malibu only a few years off the mark, immediately falls in love with Hudnut's gorgeous cousin, Lorna, and shortly becomes a screenwriter by cribbing the plots of the great movies of the 1950s. And he discovers he rather likes "Dutch" Reagan. The young actor from Illinois is naive and not very bright, but he's personable and his liberal credentials are solid. (This was before Nancy Davis's conservative family got hold of him.) Then, of course, things go badly wrong and Gabriel has to try to correct his mistakes by returning to his own time, . . . only the machine's accuracy is several years off again, and the situation is only exacerbated. All in all, this isn't a bad story, though it's somewhat overwritten in the early and later chapters. I'm not sure the author's theory of how the time-stream works holds together, either. But the picture of the Warner Brothers studio is good, though, and so is Prince's take on the studio system, and his commentary on the great stars of the day. The subtitle is "A Novel with Photographs," but there aren't very many of them -- not _like Time and Again_.
Rating:  Summary: No time like today... or yesterday... or 56 years ago Review: Mr. Delacorte's creation reads on a totally different tangent from other, more conventional time-travel works because of the localization of the scale of temporal involvement by the story's protagonist, Gabriel Prince. His original intentions certainly reek of grandeur - and it even appears, on his first trip to his own time, that he succeeds in his mission to make the world a better place without Ronald "Dutch" Reagan as President. In actuality, the book gradually becomes a story of personal tragedy, with Gabriel pitting his wit, effort and some limited 1990s technology against an inexorable inertia of Timestream to save not the country or the world, but the woman he loves and the man he comes to consider his friend. All characters are well-developed, with fascinatingly complex personalitites. Theory of time travel is underdeveloped, and even the contemplation of the nature of time are muddled, but it appears the author purposefully draws the readers' attention away from this so they can fully appreciate the drama that makes the novel such a pleasure to read.
Rating:  Summary: Unbelieveable!!!!!!!!! Review: Peter could build the tension so vivid, but at teh same time he can turn it into laughter. This book makes me wonder wheter time travel is possible or not, but the most prominent thing is wheter it is a worth-trying travel. Never heard of Peter's name, he is absolutely not as famous as Ernest hemingway, Shidney Sheldon, etc, but He has the thing that makes him different and stunning.
Rating:  Summary: A Lost Time Evocatively Recreated Review: Peter Delacort's Time on My Hands is a very successful time travel story in the tradition of Jack Finney and Richard Matheson. Unlike them, however, Peter chooses to add a controversial element -- the presidency of Ronald Reagan and what things might be like if his political career were stopped before it began. This is dangerous stuff for a time travel novel -- Reagan's supporters are legion, and they remember the old man with great affection. I was more than doubtful when I purchased the book for this very reason. While not a Reaganite myself, I respect Reagan as a past president who accomplished things. Still, even though Delacort's take on the Reagan presidency is not as kind as mine, he treats Dutch in such a way that you begin to like him as a character - flawed, it is true, but human and admirable. This novel's great strength is its recreation of 1930s Hollywood. Here Delacort shines like no other time travel novelist. He describes my native Los Angeles as no Angeleno ever has - and Peter's from our sister city to the north, San Francisco, whose denizens have not always been kind to the City of Angels. Peter Delacort recreates Malibu of the '30s, Warner Bros. (for whom I worked for 25 years, and so know quite well), the times, the people, the water they swim in, the political and social climate of a city that lays in wait for the archaeologist's spade and brush. In short, this is a great read on a number of levels. I can't recommend it more.
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