TIME ON MY HANDS

Rating:
Summary: Hilarious and Wonderful...Where is the Sequel?
Review: After reading Ken Grimwood's Replay, I developed an abiding interest in the subject of time travel. Left cold by Hollywood's most recent version, I returned easily to the realm of the novel. I stumbled upon Delacorte's book on Amazon, and couldn't be more glad that I did. As a fan of both early hollywood and politics, this novel could not have been more up my alley. However, you need not be a fan of both. The novel's plot, summarized several times over on this page, is original and fun. The story flows well, the characters are intriguing and well drawn. The joy of Delacorte's novel is in the details. It gets them just so. He spent a good deal of time on the novel and it shows. It is warm, witty, and geniunely original. I couldn't recommend this comic novel more highly. Dutch, Gabriel, Jasper, and Lorna are worth the read. It poses ethical questions to be sure and does not (despite what the whiny Kirkus Review says) supply answers. As any good ethicist knows, it is not possible to answer these questions. The ending, of which I will say nothing, is tantalzing. Delacorte has said he would like to write a sequel. It is now 5 years later and we're still waiting. Can I travel ahead in the future on the time machine to find out when it is coming out?

Rating:
Summary: I want more!
Review: I enjoyed this book a lot. I want the author to do a sequel. It could involve totally different characters who come across the repaired machine, or the same character doing other things.

Rating:
Summary: Stopping Ronald Reagan
Review: I enjoyed this book. The main charactter is sent back in time to alter events so that Ronald Reagan does not become President. The use of old photographs works pretty well throughout the book. Its tough to further describe what goes on here without giving away cool parts of the book.

Rating:
Summary: Time-tripping with history.
Review: I found this book to be quite interesting. Though not quite up to the standard of other time travel novels, the book is an engaging read. The premise is this, a modern political activist wants to go back in time and keep Ronald Reagan from becoming President. However, he's not up to the voyage himself and convinces a travel writer, Gabriel Prince, to do it for him. Gabriel ends up making the journey several times because not only does he keep Reagan from becoming President, he also keeps getting him killed. Along the way, he also falls in love, and is pursued by a couple of 22nd century crooks who claim to own the machine. This book is a page turner and the pictures add a nice touch. I hope Delacorte writes a sequel.

Rating:
Summary: time travel lover
Review: I had a wonderful time reading this book! I stumbled upon it from an Amazon recommendation and have since ordered one for my son to read also.

It was hard putting this book down once I started reading it. It's the kind of book that is very easy to read and you can bring it on an airplane trip and the hours just fly by!

As I guess you can tell, I highly recommend it and hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

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: Great Read !
Review: Peter Delacorte's novel Time On My Hands is the best read I've had in years! From the very first page, I was hooked. The premise, of being able to travel back in time, to alter history, had me trying to guess what was going to happen on the next page, or even the next paragraph. Just when I thought everything was going to turn out the way it was supposed to, a wrench would be thrown in! Then, to my delight, it seemed like the whole toolbox was thrown in!
Let me tell you...I have been made a huge fan of Mr. Delacorte's writings from here on in. If there is to be a sequel to this novel and I sure hope there is, you can count on me being one of the first of his many fans, to line up and purchase it.
Thank you Mr. Delacorte for opening up so many discussions with this novel.

Rating:
Summary: Very competent time-travel story
Review: There's a whole sub-genre of science fiction dealing with time travel, often offering ingenious approaches to its paradoxes or deriving humorous consequences from them, and often of interest only to hard-core SF fans.

By contrast, this is a book that I can recommend to those who normally avoid SF, like my wife, as well as to SF fans. The premise is interesting: A man travels back from 1994 in an attempt to deflect Ronald Reagan from the path that led him to become President. The characters are well-drawn--both the real ones from Warner Brothers in the 1930s and the fictional ones--and as a reader I was drawn in to their stories. The storyline is compelling, and kept me up much of the night to see what would happen next.

I won't spoil the result for you, but I should note that if you think that Ronald Reagan was the best thing that ever happened to the United States, you probably won't enjoy the book.

Rating:
Summary: Too Much Fluff
Review: This was a 300-page novel that was 400 pages long. I mean, there was so much fluff that I often found myself skipping pages because, paragraph after paragraph, nothing was happening. With a good bit of editing, this could have been a very good read. Sorry to have such a minority opinion, but that's the way I see it.

Rating:
Summary: A likeable time travel novel
Review: Travel writer Gabriel Prince, the protagonist of Peter Delacorte's Time on My Hands, spends a dreary afternoon in 1994 in Paris's Musée des Techniques. He encounters there the eccentric, 72-year-old Jasper Hudnut, formerly an academic physicist, who is intrigued by a jet-ski-looking machine he finds stashed in the museum's basement. Though Prince is a trifle unnerved by the occasional, near maniacal intensity of Hudnut's gaze, he accompanies his new acquaintance to a nearby café, where the conversation turns quickly to politics--specifically to Ronald Reagan's presidency in the 1980s. Hudnut would prefer a world in which Reagan had never been elected. But unlike your average embittered liberal, content to complain about Reagan's ascendancy, Hudnut means to prevent it.

So begins Delacorte's delightful time travel novel, which is at least as likeable as Jack Finney's classic Time and Again--even for readers who do not share Hudnut's political views. Told in the first person, the book is Prince's account of his journey, at Hudnut's urging, to 1938 Hollywood, where the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn, not to mention B movie star "Dutch" Reagan, can regularly be spotted in the Warner Brothers commissary. But changing history is not as
easy as it looks. Sometimes you don't get it right on the first try. Delacorte's plot becomes deliciously complicated as Prince attempts repeatedly to manipulate events to his satisfaction. The ending of Time on My Hands will leave you pondering the book's twists, and hoping that Delacorte means it when he says he'd like to write a sequel.

Debra Hamel -- book-blog reviews
Author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece