Reviews and Articles in General Publications

§ The New York Times November 24, 1999
Michael Crichton is profiled. He lives in a big house, has a limo and a personal assistant, and he read more than 200 books researching Timeline.

§ The New Republic 11.22.99
Lee Siegel's long essay celebrates the Harry Potter books and considers them in light of past works by J.M. Barrie, C.S. Lewis, Ian Fleming, and others.

...the rapturous reception [in the US] of the Harry Potter books is heartening, because J.K. Rowling is a literary artist, and these three books possess more imaginative life than the majority of novels that are published in this country in any given year. They are full of marvelous invention and humor and fun, but they have more than that. They are not fantasy-escapes from mundane existence, as they are being hailed; they are escapes from a general condition of hyper-rationality that, because it ignores the element of incalculability in life, has become unreasonable to the point of seeming receptive to fantasy and the occult as escapes from life. With Harry Potter, Rowling has brought reality back into the literature of escape, and back into our fantasy-culture. What a rarity, a literary imagination that is not self-conscious, and studied, and uptight.

(Tue 23 Nov 1999)

Timeline
Michael Crichton's new novel is reviewed everywhere:

• Sunday's New York Times Book Review gives it a full-page review by Daniel Mendelsohn. ''The new novel's daunting bibliography, with its single-spaced entries on everything from the construction of medieval water wheels to the aforementioned geons and black holes, reminds you that Crichton isn't nearly as interested in people and their inner workings as he is in things and their inner workings. ... Crichton's lack of curiosity about humans and their inner motivations limits him even as a science-fiction writer. The best science fiction, from 'Frankenstein' on, has, perversely, always been about how beside the point science is -- how it can't, ultimately, solve the Big Problems, because however sophisticated technology gets, human nature always stays pretty much the same. ... [F]ew entertainment products are as artificial as Crichton's own work. Like shiny windup toys, his novels are diverting -- they're manically entertaining. (I gobbled up 'Timeline' in a single sitting.) But like anything mechanical, they just end up repeating themselves. Whatever time Crichton is in, he's always writing the same book.''
• David Kipen's San Francisco Chronicle review asks what happened to Crichton: ''His new novel, 'Timeline,' is so carelessly imagined and indifferently written that it becomes hard to remember how good a maker of popular entertainment Crichton used to be. ... In fact, Crichton used to be a terrific novelist. He was never going to make John Updike lose any sleep, but he could make most readers lose sleep all night and call in sick the next day. 'The Andromeda Strain' invented a new genre, the techno-thriller, and did it in a sly, deadpan style that parodied scientific prose with wicked accuracy....''
• Richard Dyer in Boston Globe, calls Crichton's book ''slovenly but sort of fun''.
• Jim Argendeli's CNN review: ''Crichton has been criticized in the past for creating high concept, non-character driven stories. While that may be a somewhat valid criticism ... so what? In 'Timeline' the concept works wonderfully.''
• Two reviews in the London Times: Saturday's short review by Peter Millar says the book has ''all the intellectual vigour of early Star Trek'', while Sunday's longer John Dugdale review gives Crichton some credit: ''For what is seductive in Timeline is the academic material: the beguiling quantum conjecture; the eager, absorbing contrasting of received preconceptions about some aspect of 14th-century culture, such as sword-fights or hygiene, with the reality; the set-piece touristic trips to a tournament, a monastery, a castle under siege.''
• Publishers Weekly has this long feature on Crichton.

§ New York Times Book Review Nov 21

Ellen Ruppel Shell reviews Alison Jolly's Lucy's Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution (Harvard University Press): ''a charming, eclectic and sensible book, [in which the author] argues that while evolution certainly involves competition, the major transitions have arisen through cooperation''.