Customer Rating: 
Summary: Can this happen...? Would you go if you could...?
Comment: I couldn't believe it but this is only my second Crichton book! How crazy is that? I was in Goodwill one day (one of the BEST places to find great older books) jamming to music on my iPhone and going through the hardcovers when I saw this book.
I read `Jurassic park' a while back but, like I said earlier, nothing by Michael since then. So I bought it and... well... here I am! A book about time travel going back to the 14th century? Ok, I'll bite. Michael has a true gift for telling a story and his research is stunning! I don't know when the last time was I saw such a large bibliography at the end of a book! The idea of being able to go back in time would be a definite draw for most of us but for someone who actually had the ability, means, and money to make it happen? The drive has to be downright consuming!
Doniger was such a man. Driven, mad, obsessive, brilliant, controlling, dreamer, scientist, CEO, and a real dinglehopper! His companies have developed the tools and means to be able to "travel" to the past. There is a lot of science and nerd-stuff but Michael does a very good job of explaining it without it becoming boring or making you feel stupid. I love authors who can do that. So even though this story was heavy on quantum theories, quantum mechanics, space, time, and disproving theories it DID NOT take away from the story in any way.
My only "complaint" was that it took him about 100 pages to really get into the story. I remember a few years back when Stephen Spielberg was directing `Jurassic Park 2' one of the suggestions he got from people was "get to the dinosaurs faster"!! I felt that way when I read this book. I was like "dude, seriously hurry up and get to the good stuff"! Well he did and the good stuff lasted right up to the last page. I especially loved the chapter before the last chapter. Foreboding and utterly chilling. It's a shame that we lost such a master of this craft we call storytelling, but he left a lot of work for us to enjoy... and I certainly will!
Customer Rating:
Summary: A real page turner!
Comment: Timeline is an interesting juxtaposition of six-hundred-year-old medieval history and futuristic science fiction. All history and science fiction buffs should go ape over this book, especially if can dig walking around 14th Century Europe during the first twenty years of the Hundred Years War. Yikes!
In this novel, France and England are hard at it in a series of scattered wars over English possessions in France as well as England's claim, led by Edward III, to the very throne of France. Of course, the French, under Charles IV saw things differently. So when the two opposing forces clash, as Michael Crichton describes so beautifully, the scene explodes into everything you'd expect from such a tumultuous time; knights in shining armor, beautiful maidens, intense sword fighting, violent battles and secret passageways. And, to spice things up a notch, the whole thing takes place right at the tail end of the Black Death that swept through Europe around 1349 decimating the population and causing tremendous economic and social upheavals. Now the kicker. Modern-day time travelers enter the picture, they find themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time with no way out except to fight their way back. It's an old fashioned a page turner. I read it in two sittings. I suggest you do the same.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Fun to read but nothing holds together (spoilers)
Comment: Michael Crichton knows how to write a suspenseful book that keeps you on the edge of your seat. But the reader normally expects that the plot will make some sort of sense at the end. A few well-drawn characters would also be a plus. Here the villain is investing billions of dollars in a technology for travel to alternate universes, which just happen to be replaying our past (why this would be so is never explained). Although these are defined as "alternate" universes, somehow someone in that universe is able to leave a message for us in the present at an archaeological site(again, not explained). And while the villain must use elaborate machinery to compress an individual down to his digital essense in order to transmit him along the "quantum foam" into the alternate universe, amazingly enough no machinery is required to recreate the traveler from the digital bits at the other end. Why not? The deus ex machina, of course: as one character "explains," "we happen to have chosen an alternate universe where no machine is required at the other end." What does the villain want to do with this amazing technology in which he has invested billions? Learn something about history? Have people pay multibucks to be sent in to alternate worlds? Nope. He wants to use the historical knowledge he gains to create elaborate historically oriented theme parks in our world, and he's buying up the land around archaeological sites so that he can make money from hotels and restaurants. And, while he's sending people into the past history of one of those sites solely in order to get information needed to recreate archaeological sites for this purpose, the travelers never give the information to the people he's funding to excavate the sites except by accident. Huh? As a result of one such inadvertent disclosure the archaeologist professor in charge of the French site where most of the action takes place goes charging back to the U.S. to confront the billionaire. Somehow, notwithstanding elaborate, multi-level security on the travelling machines, the good professor ends up stranded in the past. No explanation forthcoming. Of course the villain then has to send the archaeologist's team of graduate students into the alternate universe to go rescue him (without warning them that he's left stranded in the same place a former company employee who became a psychopath by riding the quantum foam one too many times). The rest of the novel plays out against this ridiculous, hole-filled scenario. Now that our heroes are back in the past, you'd think we'd get some character development, but no. The one who had previously been obsessed with the past decides to stay there. After getting knocked silly in a tournament and experiencing a few other pain-inducing events, the second male protagonist, a skirt-chasing dilettante, concludes he has never felt as "real" and "authentic" as he does in the past. Since he has thus adequately "matured" he is accepted as a mate by the female graduate student, about whom we learn little. The rest of the plot is just an excuse for a lesson in the history of 14th century France and England, with a lengthy bibliography at the end designed to show us that Crichton is a "serious" writer. The "suspense" in the 14th century has something to do with a hidden passageway into a fortified tower, which everyone is looking for for no apparent reason and which, once it is found, seems to lead to no plot development of any consequence. In sum, if your goal is to get your teenager to learn some history without too much intellectual effort this book is for you. Otherwise, pick up some Barbara Tuchman or for fiction try Connie Willis' Doomsday Book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Time to Sleep? Nah.
Comment: Admittedly, the science in Timeline is weak in comparison to other Crichton novels. However, I really stopped caring once he took me, convincingly, to the middle-ages. This book is one heck of an exciting adventure! -Stephen Prins, author of: Strife of the Lorin
Customer Rating:
Summary: Really dislike the reader for the audio book
Comment: I'm having a hard time telling if I like this novel or not because the reader for the audio book is so annoyingly bad. He uses a perpetually whiny tone for every scene and character and his accents for characters are just odd. I dislike it so much I decided to come here to write a review on it. And by looking up the reader's name, I'll be sure to never get another audio book by him.
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