Books like The Paleontologist

In addition to his Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s dinosaur adventure story delivers world-class excitement and deeply satisfying reading. Doyle’s story of explorers who find living dinosaurs in the Amazonian rainforest can hardly be matched for its originality.

I read it long ago and found it so memorable it was worth another read more recently. And I’m glad I did. The dinosaurs are portrayed dramatically, to say the least, but I was also impressed by rereading that the characters were quite ingenious. Professor Challenger, the expedition leader, is a gruff, highly irascible fellow, given to brawling as much as to debate. Ned Malone, newspaper reporter, and central “I “ character is a riveting taleteller and keen observer of dinosaurian and human nature.

The concept of this story is amazing, especially at a time when they are “bringing back” different species. I am often amazed at what scientists have been able to accomplish in real life, and it’s even more fun to read about it in fiction. 

Another thing that I loved about this story is how it shows that nature cannot be contained. We can manipulate it, but we’d better not make too many assumptions about how things will progress because nature has its own way of doing things.

The characters were also great in both the book and the movie.

This story has gained a large following in the online dinosaur fan community. I admire it for its unapologetic brutality, which is not only reminiscent of the original Jurassic Park novel but also the horror/action films of the 1980s, such as Aliens and Predator.

The authors also clearly have a passion for military history, as the setting of the Vietnam War is well-researched and accurately represented. Despite the story not shying away from the sobering brutality of war, it does not shy away from the sci-fi angle, as the plot of Soviet scientists using time travel to bring dinosaurs to Vietnam is very much front and center as well.

This book will be adapted into a movie next year, which recently finished filming. I will likely revisit the book prior to the film’s release.

A commonly discussed debate among dinosaur fans is whether or not Jurassic Park was influenced in any way by this book. Not only did the Carnosaur novel predate Jurassic Park but the film adaptations of both were released only weeks apart in 1993.

Regardless, this book did many of the same things in Jurassic Park several years before Jurassic Park’s release. The novel also features an eccentric billionaire cloning dinosaurs, but what I believe truly separates both stories is the fact that while Jurassic Park is set on a remote island, Carnosaur follows a sleepy little town where the primal creatures escape to and wreak havoc.

What follows is a gruesome series of attacks and mauling that send shivers down my spine each time I revisit this story. While this book is not as highly regarded as Jurassic Park, I believe it deserves to be remembered as a piece… show more.

Lisa Regan is a stellar writer, and Vanishing Girls was a literal can’t-put-it-down read. I raced through the first four books in this series (Detective Josie Quinn series) and can’t wait to read the rest. I promise if you try it, you’ll feel the same—it’s addictive! Detective Josie is a mess—but you’ll be rooting for her big time. This situation is dark and disturbing, and this author excels at making things worse and worse for her characters. The writing is fast-paced and twisty—seriously, you’ll want to hold on tight to the armchair!

I was enamored with the main character from this book. Learning about the world and mythology with her made it way more enjoyable for me and put me right beside her for the ride. Every terror, struggle, victory, and loss were so much more poignant because I was so attached to Laura Caxton.

The villain is evil with a capital E, and I found myself hating them more with each exposure to them. Solid action and tension that kept me interested and hanging on.

I’ve always loved writing and learning about history. And no one exemplifies the marriage of these preoccupations better than McCullough. With his first book, he didn’t set out to do groundbreaking research - he just wanted to tell a great story. 

In The Johnstown Flood, McCullough does just that.

The book tells the story of one this once flourishing town that was destroyed when a nearby dam gave way, and a deluge swept away homes, businesses, and people. 

Throughout the book, McCullough brought these poor souls back to life through great prose and an ability to connect with his subjects. Even though this happened well over a century before I read the book, it made me feel, at least a bit, the devastation of the event.

This book is unique because it shows the reader how you can walk in the footsteps and travel like those trekking across Pennsylvania in the early 18th Century where there were no interstates or turnpikes, but instead, indigenous paths that influenced the roadways we know today. It also gave me a visual where I could experience firsthand what a traveler saw when he or she walked this route.

Scott Ellsworth's account of a legendary game that took place between the Eagles of North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) and Duke University on Duke's campus in Durham, in 1944 (the Duke team comprised medical students but included several former college stars). John McClendon, a protege of the game's founder, John Naismith and coach of the Eagles is widely credited with having transformed the sport, refashioning a slow, stolid affair into a fast-paced, exhilarating game. In the process, he turned the Eagles in mid-century into a juggernaut in the Carolina Intercollegiate Athletic Association, a conference of Black colleges and universities. Jim Crow made it illegal for the Eagles to compete publicly against their intracity rivals, but both programs relished the prospect of playing one another, and a secret game was organized, widely considered the first integrated collegiate game to be played in the south. Ellsworth paints… show more.

I live in the same world where too many modern novels (including mine!) take place—a world of professionals and students, people whose hands get dirty only if we’re repotting our tomato plants. So it’s wonderfully eye-opening to enter the setting of this book, along with farmers, prison guards, nurses, and other rural folks who are actually living out the current debate over natural-gas fracking. While the gas-company officials are clear villains, the townspeople on both sides are portrayed with compassion and complexity. Who are the “good guys” and “bad guys” when a prison guard sells his mineral rights to the frackers for the cash to start a dairy farm? Or when a gas driller has an affair with a woman whose husband died of environmental cancer?