Michael Crichton - The Andromeda Strain

Pros: Good Michael Crichton novel. Scary. Sci-fi/horror mix
Cons: None

When I was either in junior high or in high school, I first read the late Michael Crichton's 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain after watching director Robert Wise's 1971 film of the same title. That movie, about an extraterrestrial organism ...

Pros: Suspenseful, scientific, easy to read
Cons: Outdated, the ending (or lack thereof)

Warning: This review contains potential spoilers.

Recently while going through a box of books in search of 1984, I came across a copy of Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain that I had picked up at a yard...

Pros: Well Written, Great Plot
Cons: couldn't put it down

I first read this book when I was overseas in Vietnam. I could not put it down. The first night I read about 1/3 of the book. The next night another quarter and on the third night I finished it. I have read it once more about 7 years ago with...

Pros: Exciting
Cons: A lot of scientific references

Imagine…an unstoppable disease from outer space that kills on contact and is totally unknown. The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton, a well known, 59 year-old doctor and writer out of Chicago, is a twisted thriller about a foreign disease and...

Pros: Verisimilitude! Fascinating premise, good development of plot.
Cons: Verisimilitude comes at the cost of a sketchy narration device. Two-dimensional characters. Hard to grasp if you're not a science geek.

General comments:

It truly pains me to give this book only three stars. I love it - I've probably read it a dozen times in as many years - but objective examination of it leaves me with the certainty that it could have been something...

Pros: great character development
Cons: took to long to eventually reach some sort of point

Life often presents people with distress. It affects some people more than others, and at different times in different increments. Michael Crichton, while authoring The Andromeda Strain, must have felt the affects of this infamous distress. This was a...

Pros: Lots and lots of supporting info
Cons: Overwhelming at times

The Andromeda Strain is one of Michael Crichton's first novels, and it shows readers what they have ...

Pros: scientific aspects of Andromeda strain incident
Cons: poor character development, confusing plotting, little plot, confusing scientific descriptions for laymen

Like crime novels, I suspect medical crises novels represent a subgenre of writing that has its own devoted following, probably with this as a standing trophy of the collection. STORY SUMMARY "[T]he events surrounding the Andromeda Strain ...

Pros: Rare glimpse of an alarming scenario, great education if this is your niche
Cons: Anti-Climatic with mediocre execution

"The Andromeda Strain" is Michael Crichton’s account of five scientists; each with their own distinctive specialization, racing against a lethal and unspecified virus with a twist- it’s extraterrestrial.

More than that, it is the...

Pros: Will keep you reading/interested
Cons: Scientific jargon will trip you up in places

Within 10 pages of reading, you will be hooked. Crichton, just like with his other books that I've read, will pull you in early on this one. The Andromeda Strain is about a virus, and scientists' rush to figure out the what, where, when, why and how of...

Pros: Realistic Plot
Cons: None

“The Andromeda Strain”, by Michael Crichton, is a fascinating science fiction novel. Though it is fiction, Crichton, the author of “Jurassic Park”, makes the novel seem so real that it scares you.

A satellite from the Project Scoop is...

Pros: Good character development, Makes you think, Touches the bio- and chemical warfare subject.
Cons: Ending...

Project SCOOP, looking for a biological weapon to use in the cold war, launches a satellite to gather the aforementioned "wonderweapon". It lands in a very small town, killing most, and driving the rest crazy.

You will be gripped by...

Pros: Well writen, Interesting
Cons: A little short I got through it in a few hours

Michael Crichton has been for as long as I remember been my favorite author. A few years ago I read Congo (which like all his books was way better than the movie) ,and have ever since been hooked. I read The Andromeda Strain a few years back and...

Pros: This book was hard to put down!
Cons: none that were memorable

This book is very suspenseful accounting of how a group of doctors deal with a terrible epidemic tha ...

Pros: good writing, lingo
Cons: Ending was disappointing

This is one of the best books that I have read in recent memory. The author does a wonderful job of creating a scenario, and then letting nature take it's course. I was happy to see a woman character in the book (at the time the book was written, not a...