Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park

Michael Crichton, 1990

Geneticists have discovered a new technique for recovering and cloning the DNA of extinct dinosaurs, and one man sees this as the perfect money-making opportunity. John Hammond's goal is to use this technology to open the world's greatest theme park on a small island off the coast of Costa Rica - a place where dinosaurs are displayed like zoo animals for the adoring public. But when a small group of experts are brought in to investigate the park's safety, things start to go wrong. What starts with a minor power loss in the facility eventually leads to a complete breakdown of order. And for those people lost inside the park itself, it becomes a struggle for survival against some of the greatest predators ever known.

This was a re-read for me. I first read it about 15 years ago after seeing the movie version and with the recent movie re-release, I figured it was as good a time as any to pick this one up again.

I have to say that, while I still really enjoyed this book, I like the movie better (which is very rare for me). I actually thought that most of the main characters were better developed in the movie version (Grant, Sattler, Malcolm, Hammond, Lex and Tim), and the jump-out-of-your-seat moments were more dramatic and/or scary in the film. There were more of these moments in the book, which was fun, but the ones that the movie put in (the T-Rex attack on the cars, the raptors in the kitchen) were just better done in the movie version.

I still really liked this book, though. Plenty of tense and scary scenes, good storyline, intriguing and novel concept (at least at the time it was written), and (mostly) interesting characters (I kind of hated Lex in the book). Definitely worth a read. Now I just have to go and dig up The Lost World,