Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a mixed review, because the book was so dualistic in nature I can't think of any other way to approach it. For the first 3/4'ths of the book, Robinson tells an interesting tale of the world if the Black Death had wiped out all of europe's people in the 7th century. The entire planet gets turned on its head: the chinese discover the americas, the Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution occur simultaneously, and Christianity becomes nothing more than a historical footnote. I'm a history buff, and I just ate this stuff up. Even better he finds a wonderful way to recount hundreds of years of history through the eyes of three souls "K", "B" and "I" who die, are reborn into the world, and then give us a glimpse of the next generation. This is a creative and gripping way to show us history filtered through three attitudes: revolutionary, protector, and intellectual. And for 500 pages Robinson delivers a wonderful story. And then on page 506 ("Nsara"), the Black Death visits the book itself. The book's dialog comes to a grinding halt. Social change skitters and stops. News of the world just sort of peters out into nothingness. The author stops telling a story through the characters and plot. Instead we're informed that stuff happened, and here's how the characters feel about it. To use the book's description, we're treated to 158 pages of coffe-shop talk. I can't tell you what a disappointment the last two chapters were. A storyline certainly unfolds, but it drowns in pages and pages of social commentary. The author seems to have saved his entire life's worth of preaching on the futility of religion, horrors of war, and the evils of racism for this lengthy diatribe. Any editor worth a tinker's damn would have told him to make his point in the story (which he did fantastically throughout the book) and save the dense, unrelenting commentary for his memoirs or the Op-Ed page. I'm upset because I spot-read the book in a bookstore to make sure that I'd be getting my money's worth. Of course, I carefully avoided the ending to not spoil the story. I needn't worry, the author did a fine job of that himself.