Beginning in British Columbia, Canada a catastrophic series of dams collapse on the Columbia River threatening to destroy the Richland Nuclear Reactor in Washington State and the ultimate poisoning the Pacific Ocean.
Christopher Hyde has worked as a researcher, editor, TV interviewer specialising in stories of technology, intelligence and the environment. He also writes using the pseudonyms
5 stars for the lovingly described disaster but 3 stars removed for the out of left field racist outburst from one of the leads. It comes halfway through the novel and knocked me out of caring at all what happened to the character. If you ignore that then there is a dramatic, cascading series of burst dams that is quite impressive.
My mom found this at a library book sale, and I picked it up on vacation out of curiosity. I love disaster stories, so the basic plot of this is right up my alley. And the disaster part is fascinating. It definitely feels like a lot of research went into the science of a massive flood.
The rest? Ehhh. It’s clearly a book of its time, having been published in 1979, but there’s a lot of unexpectedly gross sexist and racist crap in this book. I thought my eyebrows were going to crawl off the top of my head when the book’s heroine, as such, starts antagonizing a black character. Wow.
Also, this book subjected me to far more dick than I ever wanted. Sex is shoehorned in, male characters think about their erections... bleh.
The disasters in the book are really well written, but honestly, I wish I could unread the rest of it.
Awesome read. I found this book after almost 36 years
The 5star is for the book itself. 0 stars for the digital copy of this book. Horribly done with text suddenly ending on different pages and what not. No one at the seller ir even Amazon reviewed it!? Ridiculous.
A palling really bad Kindle conversion. Obviously know if human even looked at it. Buy this in her Tubi or don’t buy it at all. Publisher should be embarrassed.
Great tale. I also happen to live in one of the places mentioned that was wiped out. Scary that this could still occur.
Nevertheless... I would had given this a much higher rating except for two reasons: 1. Too graphic on Sex when not needed to be inserted (almost tending to making some sections written too excessively porno in nature), 2. Many typos (spelling errors) and by mistake the Publisher inserted an extra repeating of Chapters Six to Nine. Someone at Bantam should had been fired over this? Sloppy job of publishing the Canadian version of the paperback.
So, instead of a 5 Star, even though the story is really good, it is because of the pre-mentioned flaws (one by the Author, the other major one by the Publisher) I'm only giving this 3.5 Stars.
A good and sometimes even funny read, which I did not expected in a thriller. I am not a geologist, so I can not say whether his descriptions were technically accurate, but his ability to write a good paced book is unexceptionable.
I thought about releasing this book in wild too, but my DBF got interested in it after I have read some quotes aloud to him, so I kept it.
I first read this book many years ago but decided to read it again as it seems fitting of our turbulent times. I came away from it with a new perception and understanding now that I am older. Sometimes revisiting a book from the past can seem like you are reading something totally new.