IN
Michael Crichton was born in Chicago and was graduated summa cum
laude from Harvard University. At twenty-three, Crichton was a
visiting lecturer in anthropology at Cambridge University, England.
Upon his return to the States, Crichton began training as a doctor,
and was graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1969. He paid his
way through medical school by writing pseudonymous thrillers, one
of which (A Case of Need, 1968) won an Edgar Award. By the time he
graduated, Crichton had already written a bestseller (The Andromeda
Strain, 1969) and sold it to Hollywood. He then pursued
postgraduate studies at the Salk Institute in California before
taking up writing full time.
Crichton has written ten novels -- The Andromeda Strain, 1969; The
Terminal Man, 1972; The Great Train Robbery, 1975; Eaters of the
Dead, 1976; Congo, 1980; Sphere, 1987; Jurassic Park, 1990; Rising
Sun, 1992; Disclosure, 1994; and The Lost World, 1995 -- each of
which displays an intimate knowledge of a different, specialist
subject, among them primatology, neurobiology, biophysics,
international economics, Nordic history and genetics. He has
directed six movies, including Westworld, Coma, and The Great Train
Robbery, and is the creator of the hit television series ER (which
won eight emmys in 1995). He is a computer expert who wrote one of
the first books about information technology (Electronic Life,
1983); he has run a software company; he has designed a computer
game called Amazon; is a committed collector of modern art and the
author of a learned study on Jasper Johns (Jasper Johns, 1977). His
other works of nonfiction include Five Patients: The Hospital
Explained, 1970, and Travels, 1988. Crichton's novels have been
translated into twenty-four languages; eight of his novels have
been made into films, including Jurassic Park, one of the most
successful films in motion picture history.
Michael Crichton is married and lives in Los Angeles.
"AN EDGE-OF-THE-SEAT TALE". -- St. Petersburg Times
One fact about this sequel to Jurassic Park stands out above all: it follows a book that, with spinoffs, including the movie, proved to be the most profitable literary venture ever. So where does the author of a near billion-dollar novel sit? Squarely on the shoulders of his own past work‘and Arthur Conan Doyle's. Crichton has borrowed from Conan Doyle before‘Rising Sun was Holmes and Watson in Japan‘but never so brazenly. The title itself here, the same as that of Conan Doyle's yarn about an equatorial plateau rife with dinos, acknowledges the debt. More enervating are Crichton's self-borrowings: the plot line of this novel reads like an outtake from JP. Instead of bringing his dinos to a city, for instance, Crichton keeps them in the Costa Rican jungle, on an offshore island that was the secret breeding ground for the beasts. Only chaos theoretician Ian Malcolm, among the earlier principals, returns to explore this Lost World, six years after the events of JP; but once again, there's a dynamic paleontologist, a pretty female scientist and two cute kids, boy and girl‘the latter even saves the day through clever hacking, just as in JP. Despite stiff prose and brittle characters, Chrichton can still conjure unparalleled dino terror, although the wonder is gone and the attacks are predictable, the pacing perfunctory. But his heart now seems to be not so much in the storytelling as in pedagogy: from start to finish, the novel aims to illustrate Crichton's ideas about extinction‘basically, that it occurs because of behavioral rather than environmental changes‘and reads like a scientific fable, with pages of theory balancing the hectic action. As science writing, it's a lucid, provocative undertaking; but as an adventure and original entertainment, even though it will sell through the roof, it seems that Crichton has laid a big dinosaur egg. 2,000,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB main selection. (Sept.)
"AN EDGE-OF-THE-SEAT TALE". -- St. Petersburg Times
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