Matan

The plot is shaky, and feels at times as if it is just a cheap ploy, secondary in importance to its purpose, which is to create opportunities for Crichton to insert educational information about global warming into the book.

The characters, while fun and diverse, are all too familiar from Crichton previous works (A wise, eccentric, determined and objective billionaire businessman, a young, cynical, pragmatic nonconformist male scientist, and a brave, resourceful woman with “surprisingly” masculine skills are back bone of the team of “good guys.” The exact same description is true, almost word for word, for Lost Word, Congo, Sphere etc...).

If there are other Crichton novels that you haven't yet read other than State of Fear, read the other ones first.

Amazing.
Reading this book was for me an extraordinary experience. I felt as if Tuchman was sitting next to me, preemptively explaining further when I was about to ask a question, or summing up if I seemed to get less interested. Every time I was wished she had included some detail, there it was. And every time I felt that a topic has had enough coverage, it was the topic's last paragraph.

The writing style is simply perfect. Paragraphs follow each other in perfect and systematic logical order. Inside, the paragraphs are uniformly and elegantly structured with a topic sentence first, followed by details and examples, and summery. This pleasant invariability of format makes Tuchman extremely easy to follow. It also prevents the reader from getting lost in a long technical descriptions, such as movements of armies in battle. Compared with Tuchman's technical descriptions, other sources seemed written desultorily.

The methodical and systematic writing style and coverage of topics, combined with Tuchman's bewildering ability to accurately present all the information relevant, and yet avoid any redundancies or uninteresting excrescences make this book a wonderful masterpiece.

While the book does expose lies, many of them aren't nation wide phenomena (I remember elementary school textbooks, some published decades ago, that did present truthfully the facts).

Also, the author seems to have an agenda of nonconformist, disillusioned anti-capitalism (I almost included a spoilers alert...)

Fortunately, the author only makes his agenda clear in the last 30% of the book, and the first 70% are an unadulterated, fun and informative reading.