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.

Reading this book is a frustrating experience.
Two main complaints:

1. Very often, the same fact is repeatedly stated several times in the span of a few paragraphs, each time phrased slightly differently.
This I found incredibly annoying, and it has several annoying results:
A. A sensation that your time is being wasted by too little new information per page.
B. Paragraphs are nebulous, as if the author didn't have time or patients to complete the collation process...
C. Most significantly, it gives an annoying feeling that the writing isn't 100% fact driven. It automatically switched me to sophistry look-out mode, and every time I read a surprising fact I felt the need to look it up, as if I was reading a newsstand opinion column.

2. It seems that the author explores the facts from some kind of moral high-ground. The genocidal totalitarian policies explored in the book are so extremely inhumane and despicable that the moralizing tone of the author's narration in unnecessary and distracts from the facts, adding yet another reason to feel like some fact look-up might be called for.

These two issues result in the feeling one gets when reading a newspaper editorial or opinion column, or a book with some philosophical, non-factual agenda. To be perfectly clear, I have absolutely no doubt that every word written by the author is backed by facts. But when reading a history non-fiction book, a feeling of insecurity regarding the factual integrity of the writing is enough to make the reading experience unpleasant.