The Whole Truth
by David Baldacci
|
List Price: Our Price: $0.01 You Save: $26.98 (100%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The Whole Truth
Book Review: Baldacci's new hero, A. Shaw, shines
Summary: 4 Stars
It looks like David Baldacci may be trying to create a new James Bond-type hero. Shaw is a secret agent who has nerves of steel to take on terrorists single-handedly.
Shaw is a man of action, but he wants out and he wants to settle down with the woman he loves. That is, until she is killed.
Now he's on a mission to find the person responsible. The mastermind is Nicolas Creel, a philanthropist, but also a man who believes the world is better off believing nuclear holocaust is only a button push away.
As a defense contractor Creel benefits from the weapons build up so he not against creating public opinion where it serves his needs. However, it isn't necessarily the truth.
The Whole Truth has some great plot twists and it reads quickly (with the help of short chapters). While it's a great thriller, the central question of the book is intriguing: Just how easily can public opinion be manipulated and to what ends?
Book Review: A Wild, Wonderful Book Ride
Summary: 5 Stars
This is what a thriller should be!
Enjoyment plus education--"The Whole Truth" brings you into the military arms world and the interesting new field of perception management (making "truth" for a wealthy client by manipulating the media, especially via the Internet).
In his recent bestseller (TWT), Baldacci serves a literary feast of:
1) fast-paced action around the Globe;
2) sharp, clever sentences like "Those experiences gave him armor for skin.";
3) Revenge served hot when the lover of Shaw (an elite anti-terrorist operator of the US Govt) is killed as collateral damage by the CEO of Ares Corporation, the maker of high-dollar military arms---Shaw begins his personal mission to collect the ultimate revenge. All the security a billionaire can afford cannot protect the CEO from the death sentence Shaw has given him.
Baldacci deserves five stars for TWT & I give it to him!
Book Review: What a silly book
Summary: 1 Stars
Did David Baldacci really write this book or did he hire a first year creative writing student from a second (no third) rate college to write it for him? How can someone who wrote Absolute Power write such a SILLY book? Only to make money off his previous successes, although not that many. This book is so full of bad writing it is hard to know where to start in describing it. Here is an example of the wonderful prose: "Machine gun fire came at them like a swarm of bees with fifty-caliber stingers." The plot is unbelievable and at the end when nothing seems to be fitting together "Miracles did, it seemed to happen." Well this book did not have miracles, it is just plain BAD. David Baldacci should be ashamed of him self for putting his name on it.
I have read most of his books but will read the reviews first before I spend my hard earned money on him again.
Book Review: Preposterous premise, settings and hero....other than that....
Summary: 1 Stars
As much as I like Baldacci and have enjoyed his previous books, this one was just TOO preposterous. The book is so cliche-ridden and repetious that I cringed at much of the lame narrative and descriptions in this clunker of a "thriller". Apparently plenty of other readers enjoyed this book but if I'm going to be asked to buy into such drivel I'd at least like it to be tempered with some tongue-in-cheek humor (ala' Clive Cussler for example). I was glad for Baldacci when this book was over with and I was glad not to have to read yet another description of Shaw's impossibly blue eyes, his dark wavy hair, his massive 6'-5" frame, large muscular hands...*yawn*.
I'll give Baldacci another chance if he can refrain from making his protagonists such a collection of superlatives and cliches; a plot that doesn't rely on over-the-top coincidences would be nice too.
Book Review: Fast paced thriller
Summary: 4 Stars
Baldacci sure has been pumping them out lately but this is the best of the lot. An arms magnate uses the media to generate potential world conflict and a change in world order. A small group battle to expose 'the whole truth'..
So far nothing new and I have read many variations on the plot for years. So why four stars? Well, for one it is a page turner, it also has strong characters (most of whom are flawed in some way), entertaining bad guys and sufficient twists to move away from the well trod path of the these types of thrillers. You don't dwell on the slightly flakey aspects of the plot because the story whips you along. The themes of media control and perception management seem daft until you remember that the invasion of Iraq was based on 'facts' that were incorrect....