Rating: 
Summary: Stunning
Review: The world into which Tolstoy plunges his readers in the first paragraph of War and Peace is one that has vanished only to be revived every time one picks up his masterpiece. War and Peace covers all the gamut of human feelings, from love to betrayal to hope to jealousy. Tolstoy's keen understanding of human nature in all its forms drew me into the plot and permitted me to truly enjoy his novel. The characters literally leapt from the paper to become, in my mind, true, living people whom I got to know as well as my own friends.
Rating:
Summary: Simply the best; as good as advertised
Review: I disagree with those who earlier stated that the final philosophical chapters detracted from the book. If you have a genuine appreciation for history, it all only adds to the book's richness. Despite its length, War and Peace reads quite fast, and every word and character is worth it. I got more out out of this book than any other - fiction or non - that I have ever read. It enriched my life and is quite simply the finest piece of literature I have ever read.
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Summary: Do not be scared by its length it is a marvellous read.
Review: This is a beautifully written and translated book. Tolstoy knows how to tell a grand story weavng different characters and events together with the mastery of a quilter. The description of Pierre getting ready for his wedding is one of the most moving and funny in literature. This is a book that people often lie about having read so as not to appear uneducated and people who have are branded'egg heads' People should read it for pure pleasure and nothing else. I read it over 30 years ago while waiting for my first child to arrive and finished it the day after she was born.
Rating:
Summary: It is beautiful.
Review: War and Peace is one of the best novels that I have read so far. Tolstoy very successfully brings out the humanness in his characters and it is a pleasure to watch and understand the characters from their turbulence in thought and action. I think I learnt a lot about people , various kinds of them and the restlessness ( as he shows in Pierre Bezukhov) which in my opinion is present in varying degrees in most of us. The novel part of War and Peace keeps you in a trance. However I found the last part of the book which is the philosophical treatise on free will and personal choice in shaping history,not so attractive. Personally I find it difficult to agree with this line of thinking which Tolstoy puts forth. However I must say in conclusion that War and Peace is one of the most enjoyable and enriching books that I have read so far.
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Summary: Escape into your own romance: War and Peace
Review: Even Tolstoy refused to call it a book. Instead, think of it as virtual reality, 19th century style. Pursued at leisure, with time taken for dreams as well, War and Peace will transport you to Russia at the time of Napoleon, a time truly of love and hate, strength and suffering, life and death... That is Tolstoy genius, the facility to twine stories, moods, and scenes to make a distant time and country come alive. The characters live, they grow, they fascinate. Perhaps one can read and not be changed, but that same person would be one who could also love, and not change. A book to immerse in, to live in, to leave on the bookstand for months on end. A footnote: War and Peace has unfortunately slid into the same pit as Moby Dick, Silas Marner, Wuthering Heights, and everything that Dickens ever wrote. Ignore the company and read the book. Another note: Woody Allen said once that he had learned speed-reading and then read War and Peace on a plane flight from Los Angeles to New York. The verdict? "It's about Russia".
Rating:
Summary: The greatest book ever written
Review: War and Peace has the reputation of the greatest book ever written, and it doesn't dissapoint. You don't so much read this book as live it.
What Tolstoy has done so effectively is to give himself room to let the characters grow. You don't get a three page info-mercial about each character, but you get to know them from their thoughts and their interactions with other people. The result of this is that when something profound happens to a character, or within a character, this change reverberates deeply within the reader.
The scope of this book is enourmous. Tolstoy takes you from romances, to battles, inside the mind of Napolean, and most of all death.
War and Peace not only tells a great story, it raises interesting questions such as man's free-will and whether there's a god. It does so through the characters self doubt and trials, and results in an amazing and powerful book.
If you havn't read it, don't be discouraged by the size, you MUST read it!
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Summary: War and Peace is one of the best books I've ever read.
Review: War and Peace is one of those books that you never forget (at least I never will). It's a wonderful story of how various people in Russia dealt with the French invasion. I really appreciated how I could identify with the characters. Another thing that I liked about War and Peace is that it made history really believable and exciting
Rating:
Summary: A True Classic
Review: What I am about to review is not Tolstoy's actual book but an adaptation of his book by British playwright Helen Edmundson. And what an adaptation it is. As many people know, Tolstoy's War and Peace is a thousand something pages long. Well, Helen Edmundson has taken all the action of this huge paperweight of a novel and compressed it into a 4.5 hour play. And when I mean compressed, I mean she has managed to get everything into the play including a subplot about how Pierre takes up freemasonry, which is absent from Sergei Bondarchuk's 7-hour film adaptation. She wasn't able to dramatize Denisov unfortunately but she managed to make a reference. Compressing an entire book, especially a book of such immense length, is no easy feat. If you try to adapt a novel that is of considerable length, good luck. Most adaptations are so long that an audience is given an option to leave after the first part is over and come back the next day. Examples of this are the 8 1/2 hour "Nicholas Nickleby", the six hour "The Cider House Rules" London's recent six hour West End hit, "His Dark Materials", and of course, Peter Brook's nine hour long adaptation of "The Mahabharata" which has been cut down to less than 5 1/2 hours in a film version. It's also very interesting how Edmundson chooses to have Pierre and Napoleon engage in imaginary conversation. It's quite a fascinating device. I have read the actual book (which I loved), seen the opera (which I also loved even though it starts somewhere in the middle of the book. Actually, if you ever see the opera, read the book first. The opera starts 500 pages later.), seen the film (which I also also loved) and now I have this play which I bought in New York and read on the train ride home. Helen Edmundson has achieved an amazing feat. I salute her.
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Summary: A Beautiful Book About Life, and one of my very favourites.
Review: This major work by Leo Tolstoy is totally wonderful. It is a panorama of Russian life during the Napoleonic era. It tells a very comprehensive story about Napoleon's invasion into Russia, and the disastrous effects of that. It shows the strength and character of the Russian people during this very terrible part of their history. This is an extremely long and complex story, but one that should be read nonetheless. Such a long and detailed story leaves the reader changed after he or she has read it. It is such a beautiful story, and it left me with a sense of wonder at the changes that humanity has encountered over the centuries and it clearly pointed out the size and the complexity of life itself. I have read this book only once so far, but I can still clearly remember the beauty and the scope of this great novel. I would like to read it again once more sometime just to refresh my memory. It's probably one of the longest books that you'll find, and the Russian names can be a bit confusing to an English-speaking person, but it is so worth the effort!
Rating: 
Summary: War and Peace...okay....
Review: I quite liked this read. It holds a high place for me in contemporary fiction; but I didn't understand a lot of things. First of all, the constant descriptions of the robots are very inaccurate as there were no such things existing in Cold War Russia. Secondly, I found the presence of spaceships to be a bit far-fetched; also, "communism" in Russia? Please, please, please. This Leo Tolstoy guy gets all his perks from writing about scantily clad Russian robots and coca-cola. I didn't understand the relationship between a lot of characters either; robots do not feel love. And penguins don't actually fly. You have to remember that War and Peace set a certain standard for androidal fiction - from Goosebumps to Carl Segan - but I didn't enjoy it myself.
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