Rating: 
Summary: One of my favorite books
Review: I read this book for school, during the summer. I wasn't expecting much, since I had never read a Michael Crichton book before, I just knew him as "The dude who wrote Jurassic Park". The amazing thing about this book and most of Chrichton's other novels is that he makes an exciting mix of action with, well, events that don't put you to sleep, and a lot of realism to back the plot up. I'd suggest this to everyone, because the story is just so amazing. That's all I have to say.
Rating: 
Summary: great book, but more science would make it better
Review: I like hard SF and was at first very reluctant to read Crichton because of the garbage at the cinema which is based on his work. However, I am impressed with the amount of research and detail in his novels. It is refreshing to read a novel that has ideas in it--a playground for the mind as Larry Niven put it--rather than the usual trite, melodramatic silliness which passes for "Literature." If you other reviewers do not understand some technical jargon or concept you run across in his books, use the internet to find out what it means! Or even an encyclopedia or dictionary. It isn't 1969 anymore and it's very easy to use a search engine. (It was rather tedious of crichton to explain in detail how to convert base ten numbers to binary, something most kids learn nowadays in 5th grade. Also, listing every single cryptic parameter in a CBC w/o any explanation was a bit much... Does he just want to fill up pages? Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate, Mean Corpuscular Volume, etc. were not covered in my 5th grade health class.)I agree with a few other reviewers that the characters in the AS are somewhat lackluster, to put it nicely. This is often the case in hard science fiction such as that of Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter, and Larry Niven. While this is a shortcoming, I find that I would rather read about new ideas and learn about science rather than about people. With them, so often it's just the same old nonsense. Even if you find the AS a difficult read, I'll bet it was more thought-provoking and inspiring than trite, formulaic nonsense the likes of Harry Potter and the Vampire Lestat. Amusing characters, but how can they compare to the contemplating order of the cosmos?
Rating: 
Summary: Maybe I missed something...
Review: Even though it was a summer reading book assigned for school, I was excited to read this after reading the enthralling reviews online. Now after reading it I can say that not only was it a huge disappointment, it was quite possibly the worst book I have ever read. Take "Jurassic Park" (another book by this author), shrink it down to the biological scale, and give it the most disappointing and least energetic ending possible. The book is loaded with meaningless outdated pseudo-science, flat characters and brief encounters with exciting events unrelated to the actual plot. It is in my opinion a bad turn in a book when characters start having seizures simply to add a lively turn to the monotony of the current sequence of events. Any thrill the reader may have for the solution to the problem itself will be firmly beaten down by the ending of this book. Since the events themselves are simply not exciting, the author's attempts to make them seem like action-movie material fail utterly.
Rating:
Summary: Great Read
Review: While the ending was a bit lame, and Crichton's persistence that this was a true story is quite frustrating, the book was very entertaining. It wasn't as thrilling as some of his others, and I am reluctant to give it 5 stars, but I haven't done so in a long time, so I will. I feel that if the book were written today, it would be even more exciting. Much of the story has become dated. But someday a movie with a similar plot like Outbreak will be dated as well. This book started Crichton's career and was a bestseller. I wouldn't make it my first Crichton read, but I think it is a step above his latest, _Prey_, but only because of when it was written.
Rating: 
Summary: This is one of Crichton's first books!
Review: This is a good Crichton novel, although very outdated technologically. It is still a good read, but not his best work. It's another one of Crichton's books that nearly drown you in medical and scientific jargon, but it is all in all a good read.
Rating:
Summary: 1969 written outbreak
Review: written in 1969--ahead of its time
an interesting style of writing
put forth that man has the power to destroy and to heal
Rating:
Summary: The Original Bioweapon Thriller
Review: Michael Crichton's work often may be formulaic, but in the Andromeda Strain, he takes full advantage of a standard sci-fi formula to create a gripping, frightening tale of biological disaster. The premise: a crashed space probe releases the Andromeda Strain, an alien bacteria that coagulates human blood. The scientists dispatched to study the bacteria in an underground biocontainment facility soon find themselves in a struggle of science vs. nature and eventually discover the Andromeda Strain's weakness in a very H.G. Wells-esque realization. Overall, the book is well done and enjoyable despite its reliance on formula for its plot, and though slightly dated, the tale is still compelling today.
Rating:
Summary: his best book ever!
Review: In 1969, Michael Crichton wrote his first novel, which he has, so far, left unequaled (although he has come close). He starts out with a chilling scene that goes unexplained for a while: an entire desert town gets wiped out. Why? We don't know yet. As we delve deeper into the novel, we see a group of respected scientists looking into the case of a space satellite that crashed nearby, and apparently carried an extraterrestrial bacterium with it, that caused an entire town to die of hemmorages. As the scientists investigate and experiment further, the pace is quick and never dull, despite the fact that it's mostly a bunch of guys working in a laboratory. The ending is a little anti-climactic, but by no means dissatisfying. What really makes the book worthwhile is all the science involved in the story. This is science fiction (of sorts), yet it draws on science facts of the day, and made it a mostly plausible story even when in was written in the 60's. The accuracies are fascinating, especially concerning the fact that if we are to come in contact with extraterrestrial life, the chances are over 99% that it will be single-cell (the book has a chart for this--see it for yourself). A marvelous book from a writer sadly unrecognized by most literary snobs. Read this!
Rating:
Summary: The Andromeda Strain
Review: It was awsome. The way the Crichton used something that was so farfetched, yet so close to reality. Sweet.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent early book, worth reading even in the 21st Cent
Review: I've enjoyed a number of Michael Crichton's novels, finding his erudition and dedicated research and some of his philosophy in sympathy with my own interests and concerns. In looking through a list of his books, I found that I had read most of the later works but had missed one of his very first, The Andromeda Strain. I decided to correct the omission and fully enjoyed the book. Although it's a little dated (having been penned in 1969), it bears up well. I was amazed at the number of scientific discoveries that were already put to technological use as early as the 60's (fiber optics being the one that comes most readily to mind). As in so many of his other works of fiction, Crichton introduces underlying issues of modern society, bringing some of the behavior we tend to accept as a "given" into question. In the case of the Andromeda Strain, he focuses on the hubris of the US military and of the scientific community. He highlights society's blind faith in technological "fixes" for every miss management of the environment, as though scientists and engineers can unfailing forestall the effects of every misdeed perpetrated by humanity on the rest of the planet. In Andromeda Strain, the space program has been more or less subtly commandeered by the military to probe Earth's upper atmosphere for non-terrestrial bacteria with which to culture biological weapons of mass destruction--sound familiar? They succeed more fully than they are prepared to handle when the tiny organisms get loose among the naive biota of the earth, wrecking havoc with every living thing. To the rescue is a team of 5 carefully chosen scientists from a variety of fields, sealed away in a hyper-isolation facility in the middle of the Southwestern Desert. Can they save the earth in time? Read on! An excellent early book, worth reading even in the 21st Century.
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