|
| |  |
This item may be eligible for  . Get FREE two day shipping.
See this item's eligibility during checkout.Cooking, Food & Wine | Home » » » Next | | | | | | | Description: | | Is a loved one missing some body parts? Are blondes becoming extinct? Is everyone at your dinner table of the same species? Humans and chimpanzees differ in only 400 genes; is that why a chimp fetus resembles a human being? And should that worry us? There's a new genetic cure for drug addiction—is it worse than the disease? We live in a time of momentous scientific leaps, a time when it's possible to sell our eggs and sperm online for thousands of dollars and to test our spouses for genetic maladies. We live in a time when one fifth of all our genes are owned by someone else, and an unsuspecting person and his family can be pursued cross-country because they happen to have certain valuable genes within their chromosomes . . . Devilishly clever, Next blends fact and fiction into a breathless tale of a new world where nothing is what it seems and a set of new possibilities can open at every turn. Next challenges our sense of reality and notions of morality. Balancing the comic and the bizarre with the genuinely frightening and disturbing, Next shatters our assumptions and reveals shocking new choices where we least expect. The future is closer than you think. | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Michael Crichton | | Hardcover:
| 448 pages | | Publisher:
| HarperCollins | | Publication Date:
| November 28, 2006 | | Package Length:
| 7.5 inches | | Package Width:
| 4.1 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.5 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.85 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 502 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
 Weak Plot and CharactersNov 02, 2009
This is one of the weaker novels I have read. The only thing that really saved it was the pace. Also the fact that Crichton likes to write 3 page chapters. With a busy life I do not have the chance to invest 30 minutes in a book to get to a stopping point. Crichton gives you neat little 3 to 5 minute sections.
This novel is a look at gene therapy. There are about 4 plot-lines which are loosely intertwined and all come crashing into one another at the end. Crichton, being a lawyer himself, likes to use legal proceedings as a plot mechanism and as a way to explain things to the reader. While it was interesting to see the concept of gene therapy, legal rights and possible abuses, the plot felt too loosely stitched together. It was almost as if Mike had some ideas he wanted us to think about, then halfheartedly through in some prose and characters to make it not feel like an article from a law review or a medical journal.
All in all, not one of his better efforts, but works well as a thoughtless leisure read.
T
 Genetically Mutant BookOct 26, 2009
I love to sit back and gobble up a good Michael Crichton book. Next is not one of those books! Starts out great, as Crichton books so often do. Then it just falls flat. It goes everywhere. It's like Crichton was just shoving all his little bits of research on genetics into the book, not worrying about how or where they might fit in.
The plot bounces all over the place and never really held my interest after the first few chapters. The story just got more and more outrageous and never really came together coherently. Perhaps that was the point Crichton was trying to make - the field (and industry) of genetics has great potential for spinning out of control in ways that we can't yet imagine. Unfortunately, for me, Next just spun out of control and never recovered.
He Has Done BetterOct 20, 2009
I'm not what you would call a Michael Crichton fan butI do enjoy his work every once in a while. I picked this up because of the bargain price and I got what I paid for. The story is pretty weak and there are so many characters that at some point they just kinda meld together and you don't really care. I did find the talking chimp and parrot funny but I don't read a book like this for the humor. It's not terrible but it's not that great either. It's hard to write about an issue and craft a story around it (Crichton is pointing out the ills of our current laws related to genes) and I applaud him for doing it. It just could have been done better.
A dreary slog of hateful characters and disjointed storylinesOct 07, 2009
Michael Crichton can be an effective author even if you disagree with his neo-conservative agenda. He can be effective even when extrapolating science a little too far. Here he is simply an uneffective author. He brings an interesting idea to the table - that of transgenic experimentation - only to leave it mouldering on the sidelines with extraneous plots and characters without a single redeeming characteristic. His scientists falsify information and steal each other's ideas. His lawyers are unethical. He even gets simple scientific facts wrong (nitrogen is not heavier than air and is, in fact, the lightest component of the three gases that make up 99.9% of natural air). Even when he gets his scientific facts right, he draws erroneous conclusions (e.g. he assumes the peer review system is useless because a bad egg, like stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk, can get falsified information published, but ignores the fact that he was caught and the offending articles purged). It's a shame, because Crichton has an interesting point to make through all this, and his 5-page "author's conclusions" at the back of the book are lucid and well-thought out. It IS absurd to be able to patent a naturally occuring gene, for example.
My main objections are not even the technical ones. The technological/scientific neophyte that still enjoys a good sci fi thriller like Jurassic Park or Timeline is going to find little to like here. One example is that he has three storylines involving transgenic species. He has a talking orangutan, a human-chimp hybrid, and a human-parrot hybrid. Forget the fact that he already used super-intellegent apes in Congo. These three storylines don't intersect (the chimp and parrot end up together at the end through a coincidence, but that's in the last few pages, and if you think my giving away an event in the last few pages is unfair, it's because it's a pointless plot mechanation that spoils nothing!). He throws in a subplot about a pathologist stealing bone tissue because..... why? He has several employees of the same company doing illegal things, and I couldn't keep them straight so I'm not even sure how to explain those subplots.
There is no doubt that the last 100 pages (about 1/4 of the book) is a very effective action-adventure. There is also no doubt that the setup to bring about the chase is (to my knowledge) a unique situation previously unheard of in fiction. But by then I didn't care. I almost didn't get that far because I was tempted to stop reading 1/2-way through. (The ending did raise my star rating from a 1 to a 2.) But I would advise saving yourself the frustration - just go to the bookstore and read the last 5 pages (the author's note), which is better written and makes the point the book was trying to make.
 Good read, but not his bestSep 23, 2009
I've always enjoyed Crichton's books, including 'Next'. However, I felt like there wasn't enough complexity in the plot, resulting in predictable endings. However, it was still a entertaining read.
| | |
Huge Savings!
|  | | Look out for the Open Box Items and Grab'em before they're gone! |
|
