Review of Kindle edition
Publication date: May 14, 2012
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Language: English
ASIN: B007UH4D3G
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 4349
466 pages

I would guess that the majority of the people in the world have heard of JURASSIC PARK. However, the group of JURASSIC PARK related books, movies and merchandising has become a world wide phenomenon based upon the success of the movies not this novel. The novel is good but not good enough or appealing to enough people to accomplish that without the superb, crowd pleasing movie.

One complaint I have about the book is that it contains lengthy sections of computer code which are absolutely unnecessary to explain or further the story. I suppose this appeals to those fascinated with computers but I find it hard to imagine that most readers do more than skim over both these sections and most of the numerous charts depicted in the book.

Another problem I have is Dr. Grant's disparaging attack on Donald Gennaro. Throughout the book, up to this point, Gennaro was one of the admirable characters. Steadfast and brave, overcoming fear to function as needed. Why suddenly change this characterization? Why did Grant insist on his harebrained scheme? If making certain that all of the dinosaurs were killed was that important, and I suspect that it was, there would be several ways to do it which would not require Grant, Ellie and Gennaro to proceed with Grant's scheme.

There are a few other things which don't make much sense such as the way the computer was programmed to count and keep track of the animals. But I suppose that this is part of Crichton's point, that it is not possible for people to really control extremely complex systems and technology. Something will always be overlooked, bad decisions will be made, the unexpected will always occur.

Worth reading, though not quite five stars but certainly more than four so, with no other options, I am marking it as five.

horribly sexist, borderline racist but if u can get past that (and some of the clumsy plotting and lack of character development), it's worth the read. loved the dinosaurs and the science.

No one:
Literally no one:
Mrin at 3 am: HOW DID T REX SCRATCH THEIR KNEES????!!!
I have this T Rex toy..I tried bending that dude at various angles..still it couldn't reach its knee!!
I kinda felt bad for them...BUT then I remember that if Dino WOrld was real..T REX would be the Mean girls!! I swear by it!! They have the same look in their eyes !!
They could bully other Dinos as much as they wanted..BUT they can't even starch their knee
[image error]





If T-rex EVER come alive...THEY GONNA EAT ME FIRST FOR THESE MEMES xD

My Favorite Book/ Movie Combo. Both are excellent! I give Spielburg props for making one of the greatest blockbusters in movie history. full of so much suspense and danger that my adolescent mind could not stand it. but at the same time I was so fascinated I could not look away. the result was a lifelong obsession with dinosaurs. but nothing I have encountered fiction or non fiction, Museum or nova program. has ever matched the feeling I got from watching Jurassic Park. I re-watch the movie ever couple of year and consider it one of my top five favorite movies.

Then I read the book. and the book fulfilled my fascination. the book starts out so similar that I thought it was a screenplay of the movie. you find a lot of those nowadays. but then the T-Rex attacked and the stories started to diverge. and I started to get the same longed for feeling the movie gave me. like most book made into movies everything is much more detailed. the characters were more well rounded. it was like discovering the background of a close lifelong friend. you knew the basics but never the details. Crichton gave Jurassic park his patented danger of Science run amuck style, or Frankenstein effect. vocalized by Dr. Ian Malcolm and his (glazed over in the movie) chaos theory. which quickly became the most interesting difference in the book. the chaos theory is properly explained and of great interest. the book was about the Chaos theory playing out the movie was more about suspenseful entrainment. also the books emphasis on private industries misuse of technology in pursuit of the almighty dollar. personified by the portrayal of Richard Hammond in the book. I am the first to admit that Crichton can tend to be preachy but I thought he had a point and was disappointed by the skimming over of this issue in the movie. Richard Attenborough portrayed Hammond as a good natured loving grandfather. it was as if Spielberg removed the book's soul for entertainment value. but hey it worked.

all in all the push goes to the Movie, but the book is still one of my favorites.

SPECTACULAR! I use that word because this read was like a cinematic experience for me. Now I always laugh when a reviewer says they left a review for a few days and almost forgot the book (details I would assume). I am the exact same way and I am way worse with movies. I remember when Remember the Titans came out. My kids watched it start to finish over and over. They were 6 & 8 and they watched it at least 100 times (like in a row, they were obsessed with it for whatever reason). I watched it a ton too but I just got the disney stream and watched it and you know what I forgot a ton of it.
However, the same cannot be said for me and Jurassic Park. I just have always loved that movie and I know it start to finish and inside out. Has to be a dinosaur thing which I think goes hand in hand with a guy thing.
So the movie is very close to the book. The book to me is better and different enough from the movie that most should really enjoy it. There is great scientific discussion that deal with ethics. There are all kinds of interesting scientific tidbits throughout that really get you thinking as well. One has to remember that Chrichton has a scientific background and you often hear that his books are to scientific. I don't think having seen the movie plays into that NOT being a factor here. I think all the scientific points are made so the lay man can easily understand. We are not talking rocket science here - just the basics. At least I am no longer afraid to read him as he is not to sciency at all.
My review was basic as I assume the majority are well acquainted with the story but as I said there are enough differences to make the book a worthwhile read. I have not read to many books that have been made into movies. As I mentioned it probably doesn't even matter if I did as I tend to forget the movie very quickly anyway. Yet I so loved this read as it was like the movie and the book were going hand in hand for a lot of it. It enhanced the reading experience in a way for me. I loved the experience so much that I just ordered World War Z to read as it is one of my favourite Zombie movies aside from I am Legend but the I am Legend book was written in a different time and isn't a modern enough read for me but that's just me. So I may do this book to movie thing more often when I am familiar with the movies. This new experience will serve as another type of reading break from my thriller/horror reliance which I admit may not always be too healthy a thing. So if you are looking for a great break try this read out. An easy five star review but I am a huge fan of the whole idea behind this book. :)

Pedazo libro me acabo de meter entre pecho y espalda. Insistía un poco demasiado (uno de sus personajes, que casi operaba como portavoz moral de lo que sucedía) en el fin de la ciencia como paradigma central que destituyó la superstición y la necesidad de un nuevo paradigma por insuficiencia, no tanto de la ciencia, como del humano en su "explotación", que sustituya al científico. Personalmente me parece imposible que eso vaya a suceder a pocas generaciones vista, sino hay una catástrofe que nos retrotaiga a tiempos primitivos... pero como paso hacia delante, la destitución de la ciencia, no lo acabo de ver, aunque sí su evolución en algo más afinado.
Generalizaciones aparte, esta especie de thriller científico funciona pero que muy bien y te tiene en vilo desde el mismísimo arranque, con multitud de explicaciones del adn entre otras cosas, que como suele suceder cuando lo hacen bien, aumenta la inmersión. Un gustazo total. Son cuatro estrellas muy cercanas a 5. Amantes de la lectura (adll. Fantástico o ciencia ficción)

“Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.”

Reading this brings me so many memories as a child in the 90's. What kid doesn't love dinosaurs?

I've managed to go my entire life without reading or watching anything Jurassic and I have no idea why. This book was fantastically thrilling.

From page one there is a quiet horror that seeps out of the pages, the build-up is slow which only adds to the dread, the gloom is a real as the mist over the island.

Then all of a sudden everything happens at once and I spent 60% of the book in a state of anxiety.  There is no let up, no recovery time, no time to sit back in your seat, its full on up until the last page.

This book is as relevant today as it was back in the 1990's. The messaging within this book is thought provoking, very well researched and put together by the author for a read that educates and well as entertains.

This is an incredibly bingeable book to read but the level of tension would only allow me to read a couple of chapters at a time.

Five stars.

Will absolutely read book two in this duology before the year is out.

Trigger warnings: gore, violence, blood, a LOT of death and biting and descriptions of intestines and whatnot, death of an infant, animal death, really shitty grandparenting.

27/11/2022
I listened to this on audiobook this time and it was...an experience. I did genuinely miss having all the graphs and tables and stuff in the audio version, so I suspect I'll probably stick to print in the future.

21/9/2021
The global panini continues and Melbourne is a fucking mess at the moment. But the comfort of knowing dinosaurs won't eat me is eternal.

5/11/2020
There's something strangely comforting about reading this in 2020 because, like, the world may be an absolute shitshow 24/7, but at least I'm not at risk of being eaten by dinosaurs.

3/12/2019
For some reason this time around, I found it weirdly comforting that Malcolm is all "We're not killing the planet, we're just killing our ability to live on the planet." Although I have no idea if what was accurate in the early 90s is still accurate today...

9/11/2018
I'm bumping this up to 5 stars on this reread because that is how much I love this book. Do I have problems with the fact that the female characters do almost nothing? YES. But it's such a great mixture of action and science and the sudden cuts between DINO MAYHEM and then the relative calm of the control room works really effectively. Basically? I LOVE THIS A LOT IT'S FANTASTIC.

14/9/2017
I continue to love this book a little bit more with every reread. Sure, it's dated. Sure, it alternates between ALL THE SCIENCE/MATHS and ALL THE ACTION. Sure, there's a grand total of two female characters (not counting the dinosaurs), one of whom is eight or nine and pretty irritating. Sure, the ending is a little abrupt. And yet somehow, it's become a comfort read for me. Go figure.

5/3/2016
On reread, I'm bumping this up to 4.5 stars. Sure, it's pretty dated now, what with lines like "When we started excavating in 1983" and entire plot points depending on insanely antiquated computer systems. But the pacing is SO GREAT, the plot is tense throughout, and even if you've seen the movie a thousand times (like I have), you're still dying to know what happens next and who's going to get eaten by a mother-effing velociraptor. In short, it's great.

16/2/2013
If you start this book expecting it to be exactly like the movie, then you'll probably be sorely disappointed. It IS like the movie, up to a certain point. But at the same time, I'm fairly certain that chunks of the plot for Jurassic Park III came from this book. So it's kind of a weird hybrid of the two.

A lot of it is quite scientific, which I love. There are more encounters with the dinosaurs. There are pterosaurs. The raptors plan their attacks. Various characters that survive in the movie die here, and vice versa. And perhaps most importantly, there's no set up for a sequel. It was only after pressure from fans and Steven Spielberg that Crichton even wrote a sequel!

It's an action packed book - possibly to the point of overkill - and I love it. Just don't expect it to be the same as the movie.

5.0 Stars
I love everything about dinosaurs so it's no surprised that I loved reading Jurassic Park. I

I loved the introduction to the novel, which discusses real advancements in bioenginerring rhat were already occurring in the 1980s. Crichton offered an unsettling warning that fiction like this could potentially turn into reality as scientific advances in cloning and genetic manipulation continue. This book is full of discuss of chaos theory, which I actually really enjoyed. Malcolm is the rock star of matheticians!

Overall, this novel is a good mix of adventure and science with a few great, gory dinosaur attacks. I would recommend this to fans of the movie who want a fun, yet intelligent, foreboding story of humans attempting to play god.

Originally posted on Books With Chemistry



Well, everyone knows what this is about, but for this review to make sense, I’m going to suppose you all live in caves and have never heard about the existence of Jurassic Park.

Everything starts with a billionaire that wants more money. It has been discovered that extincted animals can be cloned and, in a way, brought back to life. He uses this to buy a remote island in Costa Rica and build a theme park that features the famous dinosaurs. Things, however, don’t go as expected and there are many disasters caused by this.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It was impossible to put down, and even when I already knew the story, I found myself wondering what was going to happen next and how the characters would solve their problems, and that’s an important factor in a book.

I liked most of the cast. They were varied and three dimensional. But, there’s someone I really hated, and that’s Lex.



I wanted to kill Lex most of the time. She acted her age, but god, she was so so so annoying. Grant, Tim and her could be talking about something important, and then she would say something random or stupid to bother Tim. What the hell?

Maybe this is a coincidende, but in all the books I’ve read and there is a kid as a major character, I hate him/her. It happened to me when reading The Shining. I couldn’t stand Danny. Most of the time I wanted to shake him and slap him and make him disappear. And now it’s the same thing with Lex! Ugh. I hate children.

There was another thing that bothered me too in the book, and it is that Jurassic Park delivers the message that science (and therefore scientists) are evil – that all are scientists are arrogant and believe themselves gods and that they do what they do only for money.

That’s arguably right sometimes, but I hate when people generalise things. You see, I study chemistry, and I really hate it when people think I chose that because of the money. Other times, people tell me I should have studied something else because “all chemists do is create drugs and bombs that kill people – they’re in the world just to harm.”

In this book, however, is more general and it talks about ALL scientists. The one who delivers all these monologues is the mathematician Malcolm, and his speeches couldn’t be more annoying – not because of the content but because they were so repetitive.

But there’s also the other message, which I rather loved, and that is not to play gods. Stories where people act like gods are fascinating and scary at the same time, and the latter point is because they always end badly. Just see how things got in this book… or look at Jurassic World, or books like Frankenstein and tell me if you agree with me.

I’ve just noticed most of my review is me whining and complaining, but this book was really amazing. I loved the movie and I loved the book even more. I just had to point out the negatives.

Still, I recommend this wholeheartedly. If you like the movie, you will LOVE the book. Don’t worry about my complaints – maybe they won’t bother you. The problem here was me and my impossibility of not seeing the negatives first.



...

Pre-review:

Parts of this book reminded me to The Monstrumologist, but with dinosaurs instead of Anthropophagi. Overall, it was good and I enjoyed it, but I have some complaints. Review to come.

I have never been terribly impressed with Crichton's work, but I have always been told that I must read Jurassic Park to really appreciate him.

I was not expecting much from this book, but I was disappointed nonetheless. The whole story seemed fragmented and disorganized. This was supposed to be about a sort of fantasy world created by an eccentric, wealthy man, but throughout the book I felt like It was more Michael Crichton's fantasy than anybody else's. It was as if he had several goals for this book and tried to find a not-too-ridiculous way to tie them all together.

None of the characters are developed at all. This is a chronic problem of Chrichton's, but it is much worse here than in any of the other books of his that I have read. He simply presents a character with an age, physical description, and stated profession, and then expects us to accept him/her.

I could rant for a while about this book, but allow me to wrap up with a final complaint. Chaos theory does not really apply to this story at all, yet it is woven into it to an astonishing degree. Without Ian Malcolm and chaos theory, this book would have been better and significantly shorter.