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Summary: Great Example of the Shipwrecked genre.
Review: This book is one worth reading. I would suggest it if you like adventure novels. I have read it a total of 8 or 9 times. You wont regret buying it. A good first long book for children.
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Summary: Boring
Review: This book was really boring. It gets off to a great start, a family stuck on an island, but then it just gets slower and slower. The Dad won't stop preaching. Much better movie
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Summary: Oldy But Goodie
Review: This is a great classic. Everyone can read this book, and will enjoy it. This book is about how a family get shipwrecked and stays together, and they don't just sit around they start building a house and getting food. After a while the family starts to enjoy the island, and they start to consider it as "Home". I have to say this is a great book and teaches you that you have to be thankful for what you have (a family). GO GET THE BOOK!!!!
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Summary: A Fourth Grade Reader
Review: This is a pretty good book.It is about a shipwrecked family on a deserted island and their adventures on it. I found this book exciting.I would recommend this book to 12 or 13 year olds.
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Summary: Overall good but with weak points
Review: This is a very good book. However, it has a few weak points. These include the family eating some things that do not taste good and cause problems (for example: acorns, which tasted like "chestnuts") and them being able to shoot just about anything and kill it. In reality, if you shot a lion with a slow moving lead ball, it would cause lots of damage, but the lion would still be able to run a little ways and attack or charge. The good points are numerous too. The character developments throughout the book are excellent and the fact that there were pirates in the region is accurate. Although this book is a "children's book", I would not recommend it for young readers. I had a hard time getting through the sometimes monotonous parts myself. However, this book is overall, very good and therefore, I recommend it to you.
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Summary: Very boring. Comprehension on it.. very hard!
Review: This is not a childrens classic! It is boring. At page 26 I was confused. I read it for A/R (accellerated reading) resons. The movie is much better, and reccomend that you watch it instead of reading the book.
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Summary: The Swiss Family Robinson
Review: This is the best book I have ever read in my life! I know that you know what the book is about already from other descriptions so I won't even bother with that. If you like adventure, survival or clasic stories this is a great book for you. If you have seen the movie, than be ready for a story much different and better than it! Go out and buy the unabridged version right away!
Rating:
Summary: Did not live up to our expectations.
Review: This reading of The Swiss Family Robinson was not a true representation of the book. It was abridged down so far that it became more of an overview. Several of the basic facts from the book were switched around for no apparent reason and the general theme of faith in God and strong values brought out in the book are all but ignored in this rendition. The other complaint we had was the actual reading of this abridged version. For an actor we found him extremely lacking in zeal and extremely monotone. It was almost comical how he could read the exciting bits with so little inflection. The musical interludes and background were good. It was a good overview in general, even if the facts were messed up. I would only recommend this to someone, however, if the integrity of the original manuscript means nothing to them.
Rating:
Summary: kinda slow paced
Review: Though not really horrible and boring or anything, THE SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON did seem a bit repetitive. We don't really need the step by step description of how each animal is tamed and every foodstuff harvested. But the story is great fun and is particularly interesting as an example of the Western man style of writing. Blithe assumption that this family would completely conquer the wilderness was a remnant of the age when white, Christian Europe/America had the utmost confidence in our Manifest Destiny to rule nature. Most of the situations in the book wouldn't have happened so smoothly in real life.(animals are much harder to tame than that) It's hard to imagine a book like this being written today. In the current climate of political correctness, an author approaching the Swiss Family Robinson story would most likely ditch the religious angle entirely, have the family display much greater sensitivity for the animals which they readily exploit in the novel and, of course, there's no way the boys would be allowed to take such great pleasure in hunting and learning to shoot. But, as it stands, despite a little too much lack of imagination, this is just a good old-fashioned adventure in which readers can feel how life in the wilderness was like, and should thoroughly enjoy it.
Rating:
Summary: good old-fashioned adventure
Review: Was it just me, or when you were a kid were you too mystified by why the castaways were so anxious to get off of Gilligan's Island? Personally, even if Ginger hadn't been there, it always seemed like a pretty idyllic existence. (Lost in Space was a little easier to fathom; Dr. Smith was a royal pain & the kids were profoundly annoying.) So when we were all sick one time and our Mom read us Swiss Family Robinson, one of the immense satisfactions of the tale was that most of the family decided to stay on their island after help came and even those who left seemed destined to return. A couple of years later we got to see the fine Disney version and, though it makes some significant changes in the story, it too has been a favorite of mine ever since.Johann Wyss's classic (it was actually completed by his son) is an extraordinarily unsubtle family version of Robinson Crusoe. The Robinson's are shipwrecked somewhere near New Guinea but through pluck, self reliance, familial togetherness and a heavy dollop of Christian faith they manage to create fairly comfortable lives for themselves, domesticating seemingly every animal known to man and cultivating innumerable crops. While their adventures are always instructive and informative, the book is awfully repetitious, we don't really need the blow by blow description of how each animal is tamed and every foodstuff harvested. And many folks will find the Christian message far to heavy-handed. I actually think this is a case where it's pretty easy to justify reading kids an abridged version, rather than the entire original text. But the story is great fun and is particularly interesting as an example of the Western man regnant species of writing. The sort of blithe assumption that this family would completely conquer the wilderness is a remnant of the age when white, Christian Europe/America had the utmost confidence in our Manifest Destiny to rule nature. It's hard to imagine a book like this being written today. In fact, I recall a movie called Friday from several years ago, which portrayed Robinson Crusoe as a sort of helpless fop, completely dependent on Friday. In the current climate of political correctness, an author approaching the Swiss Family Robinson story would most likely ditch the religious angle entirely, have the family display much greater sensitivity for the animals which they readily exploit in the novel and, of course, there's no way the boys would be allowed to take such great pleasure in hunting and learning to shoot. But, as it stands, despite a little too much pedantry and proselytizing, this is just a good old-fashioned adventure--kids, boys in particular, should thoroughly enjoy it. GRADE: B-
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