I thought this was brilliant! Reading a classic that is also such a brilliant film is a wonderful and it has made me very excited to read more Crichton. This reads more like a horror than a Disney classic and that is definitely a good thing. Some incredible scenes in this and the changes between the book and the film show, I think, what a top-tier director Spielberg is as he really fleshed out some of the character arcs.

Lesson from this book: Kids are annoying and will get you killed.

Ok I’m slightly exaggerating but have you noticed how frustrating children characters are during a crisis?

I’m sure they would be during the apocalypse or when being tracked by dinosaurs but I wanted to throw my phone at the wall a few times while reading this book.

With that said, I now have a new completely reasonable phobia, being eaten alive by a dinosaur.

Crichton did an amazing job at keeping me on my toes and completely stressed! I was afraid it wouldn't live up to the movie since I remember being traumatized by it as a kid but it totally did!

I really loved all the science bits which weren't in the movie.

Worth the read!

More books that made me not want to have kids: https://youtu.be/H_ES-eqbKQs

At the risk of offending what looks to be all my male goodreads friends who loved this (none of my female friends have read it, which is remarkable but probably not random), I couldn't finish it. It wasn't the multiple viewpoints or so-so prose, it was the science. I worked for awhile as an assistant paleontologist--field, prep, and curating--and I promise you, pretty much everything in the first 50 pages on this topic is wrong. I wasn't loving the book anyway, and kept finding random factual errors (passports not needed for international travel? You can't possibly fake a fax of a x-ray?) But the scenes on the fossil "dig" did me in.

1) you don't clean fossils in the field. You get them out of the field and into the lab, where you have air scribes, microscopes, safe places to rest them, and far more tools than you can schlep on your back out to the field.

2) "bits of bone flaked away as he dug." Then he's an incompetent idiot. You do everything to keep "bits" from flaking away. A bit IS the fossil. If this happens in the lab, you stop, stabilize, get a better prep person if you have a real star at it in your group, or you just quit. Plenty of fossils remain only partially exposed in museums trays because they are too friable to clean further. They're still useful. Just because it isn't on public display to wow the kiddies doesn't mean it isn't there. This Alan guy, he just keeps ruining the fossil. When real paleontologists flake a tiny little something away, they beat their breasts and curse and sometimes even cry.

3) They have the only egg site in the world for this species, and they're using jackhammers on it. Seriously? Jackhammers? We didn't own one. We wouldn't have taken one if it were a gift. You preserve the data at all costs, including leaving it the heck alone, if need be. Jackhammers may be rarely used with huge, whole specimens, if your team can drag a generator that far, but not in this case--never ever would that happen.

4) The broken bones get tossed aside and whirred up into fragments... No. Broken bones are also useful. Very useful. Broken bones get collected, cleaned, and curated. Museum collections are mostly of fossils that are partial. The only fossils I ever saw thrown away were some that got lost from their documentation and were therefore useless.

5) ...from which DNA is extracted. Not even in a million-year-old fossil, much less a 190-million-year-old one. When you crunch up fossils into sandy bits, all you get is sand.

6) rubber cement. Very big for stabilizing in 1903. Not so much when this book was written. A plastic resin dissolved in acetone is used, like polyvinyl butryal.

... and so on.

You simply cannot make that many factual errors and I continue reading. My suspension of disbelief is gone long before the monsters come on stage.

This is the third of his books I've tried, the second I've given up on before the end, and all three were just riddled with errors. And he was already famous--he could have interviewed anyone before writing. Why get it wrong when he could have, with a few hours of work, gotten it right? Maddening.

FOSSILS (dun dun dunnn)

Circling back around for a re-read. I mean, it's only been about 30 years. WHY NOT? And now that we have the 18th movie in 185 million years, I thought it might be a good idea to re-ground myself in why life will always find a way...

You know, since humanity can't.

So, let's be honest here. It was always a book about how all our plans will always go awry and we're a breath away from kicking it with our ancestors.

I wonder if, in another 185 million years, someone is going to gene splice their way to bringing us back, to put us in a zoo, and then blithely carry out their own extinction event because we JUST SUCK THAT MUCH.



Oh, by the way, this was a really fun book, even now. :)

My second time reading this, the first time being back in the 90s. It's a solidly entertaining story, with lots to say about the use of scientific power and knowledge that continues to feel relevant decades after it was first published.

This time around I listened to the audiobook, and I thought the narrator did a great job! It's quite different from the film, but having seen the film makes it easy to fill in the visuals in your head.

Worth a read if you haven't read it, and worth a reread if you have, because it holds up fine.

Clearly not my type of book. Michael Crichton can write, that's for sure and he did hold my interest but the book was just plain silly to me.

That was an awesome audiobook!!!! Scott Brick did an amazing job!
I was 12 when I first saw this at the cinema, I loved it, and have watched every subsequent jurassic Park film. Chris Pratt anyone?!

The Jurassic period ended 145 million years ago, and it sometimes seems as though Jurassic Park and Jurassic World films will continue to be made for the next 145 million years. After all, those six films about living dinosaurs reconstituted for the modern world through DNA technology have made over $6 billion at the box office, and movie tie-in items like toys and video games have generated another $5 billion. Talk about a monster! And it's interesting to think that it all began with this 1990 novel that did some restoring-to-life of its own, providing a helpful boost to the careers of both novelist Michael Crichton and (later) filmmaker Steven Spielberg.

Crichton, a Harvard-educated physician, found that his first love, ultimately, was writing. While he sometimes delved into genres like historical fiction, his core métier seems to have been the cautionary science-fiction tale in which human beings’ careless wielding of advanced technology results in deadly consequences.

It was so with Crichton’s first and perhaps best novel, The Andromeda Strain (1969), in which a satellite, sent into space by the military in search of micro-organisms that can be used as bioweapons, instead crashes to Earth and unleashes a deadly disease that threatens all of humankind. It is a scenario that resonates in a world that has seen outbreaks of new contagious diseases like Ebola, HIV, Zika, and COVID-19 since the novel’s publication. Another early Crichton project, the film Westworld (1973), tells the near-future story of a Western-themed amusement park in which the androids that are supposed to entertain the guests instead begin attacking the guests – a plotline that bears comparison with that of Jurassic Park.

Jurassic Park begins with a mysterious animal attack on an isolated Costa Rican beach, and then proceeds quickly to the novel’s main plotline. An industrialist named John Hammond, who has founded a company called InGen, arranges to bring a group of people to the island of Isla Nublar, off Costa Rica’s west coast. There, he has been overseeing the creation of living dinosaurs synthesized from the DNA found in amber-encased mosquitoes that bit the dinosaurs millions of years ago. Hammond’s plan is to make the dinosaurs the centerpiece of an amusement park, to be called (unsurprisingly) Jurassic Park.

Hammond’s guests include Dr. Alan Grant, a paleontologist; Dr. Ellie Sattler, a paleobotanist; Donald Gennaro, a lawyer whose firm is considering pulling its support from Hammond’s latest project; and Dr. Ian Malcolm, a mathematician who specializes in chaos theory. Dr. Malcolm seems to be of particular importance in the novel, not least as an unofficial spokesperson for the ideas of author Crichton – as when he remarks, in his first meeting with Alan, Ellie, Gennaro, and Hammond, that “In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought” (p. 80).

Hammond’s hope is that his guests will conclude that the park is safe and ready to begin receiving visitors. Spoiler alert – things don’t quite go that way.

It is good that, before getting to all the dinosaur-attack stuff, Crichton emphasizes the sense of wonder that a modern human being might feel upon seeing a living dinosaur, as when Ellie first sees an apatosaurus with a “long, graceful neck”:

Her first thought was that the dinosaur was extraordinarily beautiful. Books portrayed them as oversize, dumpy creatures, but this long-necked animal had a gracefulness, almost a dignity, about its movements. And it was quick – there was nothing lumbering or dull in its behavior. The sauropod peered alertly at them, and made a low trumpeting sound, rather like an elephant. (p. 88)

Grant senses that his professional life as he knew it may be coming to an end – something that he had not expected – to which Malcolm laughingly replies, “Story of our species….Everybody knows it’s coming, but not so soon” (p. 94). Lawyer Gennaro meanwhile is angry that Hammond has invited, for this preliminary tour of Jurassic Park, “a bespectacled boy of about eleven, and a girl a few years younger, perhaps seven or eight, her blonde hair pushed up under a Mets baseball cap, and a baseball glove slung over her shoulder” (p. 102) – Hammond’s grandchildren Tim and Lexi.

During the initial tour of the park, in automated Land Cruisers, Hammond’s guests see their first velociraptor – an animal that will prove to be a dangerous antagonist for the characters.

The head was two feet long. From a pointed snout, a long row of teeth ran back to the hole of the auditory meatus which served as an ear. The head reminded [Grant] of a large lizard, or perhaps a crocodile. The eyes did not blink, and the animal did not move, Its skin was leathery, with a pebbled texture…yellow-brown with darker reddish markings, like the stripes of a tiger. (p. 129).

In a striking bit of foreshadowing, the raptors display their propensity for hunting cooperatively, in packs, the way mammals like wolves do. Their behavior in this regard makes them very much unlike the Tyrannosaurus rex, the largest predatory animal in the history of the planet, with its “enormous square head, five feet long, mottled reddish brown, with huge jaws and fangs” (p. 165).

Meanwhile, Malcolm, in one of the Land Cruisers, continues to hold forth with his disquisitions on chaos theory, telling Gennaro that Jurassic Park is bound to fail, cannot possibly control the dinosaurs that are its reason for being, because “the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way” (p. 178).

Malcolm’s perspective is notably different from that of the park’s chief engineer, John Arnold, and from that of Dr. Henry Wu, the geneticist who oversaw the process of re-creating dinosaurs through DNA technology. Both believe that the technology behind the dinosaurs is sound, and that the park is safe. It should be no surprise that Malcolm is eventually proven to be right, and Arnold and Dr. Wu wrong.

Human error is part of the reason for the chaos during this initial tour of Jurassic Park: Both chief engineer Arnold and chief geneticist Dr. Wu, at different points in the timeline for the story, make crucial mistakes relating to their respective areas of expertise. The other agent of chaos is human greed: Dennis Nedry, a disgruntled computer expert with a contract for the Jurassic Park project, intends to steal dinosaur embryos and deliver them to agents for Biosyn, a company that is a rival of InGen. In order to cover his planned escape, Nedry has arranged for the park’s computerized security program to go temporarily offline; and it is at that moment, that nexus connecting human error and human greed, that predatory dinosaurs begin escaping their enclosures.

As in the film, a core moment occurs when the tyrannosaur breaks out of its enclosure, and an adult panics and leaves Tim and Lexi behind:

Ed Regis just turned and ran in the opposite direction from the tyrannosaur, disappearing into the woods. The door to the Land Cruiser hung open; the paneling was getting wet.

“He left!” Lex said. “Where did he go? He left us alone!”

“Shut the door,” Tim said, but she had started to scream, “He left us! He left us!”….

“Lex,” Tim said, “close the door.” But Lex was screaming “He left us, he left us!” in a steady, monotonous wail…. (pp. 204-05)

Many of Steven Spielberg’s films -- Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Empire of the Sun (1987), Schindler’s List (1993) �� include scenes in which children are lost or abandoned by adults who are helpless in the face of some larger, menacing force. Therefore, it is no surprise to me that Spielberg emphasizes in his Jurassic Park film the emotional starkness of this moment. It is still the moment of the film that most stands out for me – a shocked Lexi quietly saying to herself, “He left us. He left us.”

Alan Grant and Ian Malcolm, in one of the other Land Cruisers, help the children escape the tyrannosaur, but Malcolm is injured in the process. Later, receiving morphine for his injuries, Malcolm still has sufficient energy and inclination to offer his ideas regarding the problems that he sees at work in contemporary scientific research: “Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something” (p. 317).

Malcolm subsequently builds further upon his critique of contemporary scientific ethics, and makes clear that he is not just accusing profit-driven capitalists like John Hammond:

“Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward. Particle accelerators scar the land, and leave radioactive byproducts. Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.” (pp. 317-18).

Many scientists of the present day might accuse Malcolm of oversimplification; but by this point in Jurassic Park, relatively few of his interlocutors on Isla Nublar would be likely to contradict him.

Is the science behind Jurassic Park valid? Heavens, no. But Crichton certainly knows how to write an action scene, as with a moment of confrontation between Dr. Alan Grant and a velociraptor that has been injected with a syringe full of poison but has not yet been affected by it:

The velociraptor snarled and jumped. With frightening speed it swung back toward Grant, jaws wide….The raptor loomed over him, rising up, its head banging into the infrared lights above, making them swing crazily….The raptor reared back, and lifted its clawed foot to kick. Grant rolled, and the foot slammed down, just missing him. He felt a searing sharp pain along his shoulder blades, the sudden warm flow of blood over his shirt….The raptor kicked again, smashing down on the radio, spattering sparks. It snarled in rage, and kicked a third time, and Grant came to the wall, nowhere else to go, and the animal raised its foot a final time. (p. 400)

Will Dr. Grant survive this encounter with a smart and particularly dangerous predatory dinosaur? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

The many action scenes of Jurassic Park are interspersed with further expressions of Malcolm’s skeptical outlook on contemporary scientism, as when he says, in a conversation with Ellie and Hammond,

“You know what’s wrong with scientific power?...It’s a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are. It never fails….Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual guru. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you have attained it, it is your power. It can’t be given away; it resides in you. It is literally the result of your discipline.” (p. 342)

By contrast, Malcolm claims, scientific power can be attained quickly, without discipline, by those who are not yet mature enough to handle that power, who are motivated only by emotions like ambition and greed. Malcolm even suggests that humankind is witnessing the beginning of the end of the scientific era, and adds that “All major changes are like death….You can’t see to the other side until you are there” (p. 350).

Ellie understands what Malcolm is saying. Hammond, unsurprisingly, does not.

Over the course of Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs seem to find their way toward eating the unsympathetic and villainous characters more often than not. The park’s game warden, a former big-game hunter named Robert Muldoon, at one point happens upon the corpse of a character who was willing to risk the lives of others in order to get what he wanted. Muldoon looks at the torn and partially-eaten body and says, “Not a nice way to go. Maybe there’s justice in the world after all” (p. 305).

Reading Jurassic Park while on a trip to Costa Rica, I found it strange that the final resolution of the story involves the Costa Rican military -- because Costa Rica has no military. As part of its successful forging of a strong democracy in an historically unstable region, Costa Rica abolished its army in 1949 (a fact of which Costa Ricans are quietly but unmistakably proud). But let that go.

Throughout Jurassic Park, Crichton takes pains to include computer printouts and other graphics, showing how diligently he did his homework. Characterization, by contrast, is not Crichton’s strength: each person in the novel is given one or two salient character traits, and then simply re-demonstrates those character traits over the next 400-odd pages. But then, I suppose one could see the same strengths and weaknesses in the work of other science-fiction writers – Jules Verne, for example, who like Crichton wrote science-fiction novels that, while weak on characterization, are compulsively readable.

Approached in those terms, Jurassic Park certainly accomplishes what novelist Crichton sets out for it to do. The park, in short, is open for business, and awaiting your visit.

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/

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PLEASE NOTE THIS REVIEW IS ABOUT A BOOK THAT BECAME ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR MOVIES OF ALL TIME MORE THAN 20 YEARS AGO, GROSSED OVER A BILLION DOLLARS AND CHANGED THE WAY WE LOOKED AT SPECIAL EFFECTS FOREVER. IF YOU CONSIDER ANYTHING IN MY REVIEW A “SPOILER,” THERE’S A GOOD CHANCE YOU WERE CREATED IN A LAB FROM SOME FOSSILIZED AMBER.

It all begins with a billionaire who has a big imagination and a lot of spare money lying around. By dropping a ton of dollars into the biotechnology field and really thinking outside the box when it comes to the wheres and hows of DNA sample collection – John Hammond has figured out how to bring dinosaurs back from extinction and now dreams of creating a theme park unlike any other. What he didn’t plan on was the fact that science is often unpredictable . . .

n   “The history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously . . .”n

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Now on to my super literary review:

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I honestly believed I had read this book back when the movie came out. It turns out my brain foiled me once again and I actually had not. Bottom line: senile brain = bad, reading Jurassic Park = good.

Man oh man I had no clue what I had been missing. Spare me your “oh but it’s sooooooo science-y and I got bored before the story really took off” or the “you do know there is no way this could ever really happen, right????” talk. I don’t care. Yes, it is super science-y and yes, dinosaurs still aren’t free-ranging on an island off the shores of Costa Rica, but it doesn't change the fact that this book is phenomenal.

I had given Spielberg so much credit (even knowing his film was based off of this book), but the credit is all owed to Michael Crichton. Not only are the characters/dialogue/etc. ripped right out of the book, but Crichton did it so much better. Sure, certain unforgettable scenes were created purely by Spielberg



but there are literally HUNDREDS of pages of action that were not included in the motion picture, additional plot twists, new dinosaurs and other surprises to prove to all that Crichton’s original was sheer genius. In fact, after reading Jurassic Park I questioned why some parts of the original were ever changed for the film at all. Of course I realize that not every page of a book can be included in a movie adaptation, but the changes in Lex, Tim, Ellie and Grant’s characters were unnecessary and the changes to Hammond are almost unforgiveable. Hammond was never meant to be portrayed as a well-intended old fool, but rather a mad scientist much like Dr. Moreau. I’ll refrain from saying more as to not spoil the reading experience for all, but trust me when I say if you liked the movie, you’re going to love the book.

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I know, Jeff. I know. It’s hard for me too.

Copy provided by my local library who deserves a shout out since their “what you should be reading” pop-up screen finally picked a book I might actually like.

Here’s a bonus Dr. Malcolm gif for everyone who realizes he’s the sexiest mathematician to ever walk the Earth . . .

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He can chaos my theory anytime.

And here’s a bonus Brundlefly gif for Jeff  since he refuses to acknowledge the magic and wonder that is all things Goldblum . . .

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Movie wins out over book.



"But scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step. You can do it very young. You can make progress very fast. And because you can stand on the shoulders of giants, you can accomplish something quickly. You don’t even know exactly what you have done, but already you have reported it, patented it, and sold it."

Malcolm: Movie wins for Ian, Jeff Goldblum perfection. Though book-Malcolm has a number of such interesting lines and is full of 1989 version* of chaos theory, eventually he grows tiresome . Interestingly--c'mon, is this seriously a spoiler?--book Malcolm is laid low by an infected wound. You can probably guess what happens.

Ending: Movie wins. That bit at the end of the book about searching for the raptor eggs and the breeding behavior? I mean yay for Dr. Grant, but talk about anti-climax.

Sexism: Edge to the movie for being slightly less annoying, although the movie paired off the paleontologists who had a non-sexual, mentor-mentee relationship in the book. The female child, Lex, is ridiculous in the book, annoying and helpless, although she is allowed to defy the stereotype by being dependent on a baseball glove and ball. In the movie, she takes Tim's computer role.

Children: Movie version wins. Tim's quite the hero in the book, a role given to Lex in the movie. Lex in the book is pretty much everything one might hate about children.

And, finally, Dinosaurs: obviously, much better in the movie.


Storytelling: Crichton's prose tends to be workman-like, and although he does manage to occasionally convey the immensity of the dinos, he rarely hit the from-another-epoch notes for me.

"Obviously the fitness of the animals to the environment was one area. This stegosaur is a hundred million years old. It isn’t adapted to our world. The air is different, the solar radiation is different, the land is different, the insects are different, the sounds are different, the vegetation is different. Everything is different. The oxygen content is decreased."

Different, right? Note that the velociraptors were scary in both places.




Interestingly, I had very few preconceptions about the book, except that it would be different from the movie; adaptations are rarely faithful to source material. Except, interestingly, it wasn't; the scriptwriters had barely touched it. Sure, backstories and detailed dialogues were left out, as well as opening extraneous scenes about some baby-biting dinos in Costa Rica. Mostly though, there was trimming, and parts of the movie--especially early on the island--seemed page for page for the book:
Nedry? All there, right down to the silver candy wrapper.
Chain-smoking Arnold? Yep, Samuel L. Jackson nailed that too.
Malcolm's croaking doomsday about 'life will find a way' and wearing all black? Yep, there too.

*As pointed out by others, note date limitation in knowledge for both.

Overall, interesting, but I was left with a curious desire to re-watch the movie.

Three triceratops.

I mean, do I need to review this? Probably not. Am I going to anyways just so I can gush about how incredible it was? Oh yeah. RTC