Rating: 
Summary: Shock Wave
Review: This was one of the best books that one has read, this book takes you through history from the beginning. When a ship, the Gladiator wreaks on uninhabited island in the middle of the ocean en route to the penal colony on Australia. The passengers make a grand discovery of diamonds whitch they use to start a dimond enpire. In 2000 Dirk Pitt takes one on a journey across countries and across oceans, on wild jetski ride and is set adrift to die by an ancestor of the people who were shipwrecked before on the island now called Gladiator Island. As in all of the Dirk Pitt books there are great odds for Pitt because of a plague that threatens to hit the island of Oahu, Hawaii. In ones opinion this book was the best Pitt book of all time that one has read, and is highly recommended by oneself to read.
Rating: 
Summary: For more credible sea adventures, watch Sponge Bob
Review: This is the second Clive Cussler "Dirk Pitt" novel I have read. The first was "Iceberg," the second in the Dirk Pitt series written in the mid-seventies. Finding that book a big letdown, I decided to read one written much later to see what kind of advances Cussler has made in his storytelling over the course of the last 25 years."Shock Wave" is an improvement over "Iceberg" but not by much. The beginning of the novel, which is a historical prelude, is actually the best, most believable part of the book. After that we ride the "Shock Wave" downhill all the way.. Unfortunately, Cussler seems to have a tendency to mar his storytelling with too many details and characterizations that are cliched, strange, predictable, boring, irritating, contradictory or just plain flaky. For instance: CLICHED: Why does every captain of every ship in Cussler's book have to be referred to/described as an "old sea dog"? And why does the delineation between good guys and bad guys have to be so black and white? The good guys are always 100% good, saintly folk and the bad guys are always 100% evil incarnations of the devil. With this kind of simplistic and unrealistic offering of characters, why shouldn't we just tune in to Cartoon Network? STRANGE: Two books, two main characters whose dark sexual secret is revealed at the end, one's a transsexual, the other a transvestite. What's up with that Clive? You got something in your past we should know about? Or is it just that "the Crying Game" is your favorite movie? PREDICTABLE: Watch out when the hero of a book series confesses to a main female character that he loves her and wants to spend the rest of his life with her. Man, talk about the kiss of death! With such guaranteed predictability, a closing chapter that is suppose to be poignant ends up being laughable! Further, how many times must we endure Pitt being chased by a more powerful aircraft, and his only recourse is to smash his own into it? BORING: Reading any passages involving that "old sea dog" Sandecker, Pitt's boss, are highly recommended as an alternative to strong sleeping pills. The mere sight of the character's name at the beginning of a paragraph immediately causes the eyelids to grow heavy and tempts one to skip ahead to the next chapter. Is there a duller character in the history of fiction? Probably not, although I suppose Pitt's sidekick, Giordino, comes close! IRRITATING: Cussler has an annoying tendency to describe every measurement in metric equivalents, despite the fact that the main characters in the series are all Americans. This is ONE thing he does consistently, whether it is the speed of an automobile, the length of a ship, or a distance on land. This ridiculous stylistic device is even carried through to the extent that when Cussler describes Pitt's boss enjoying a nice game of golf in Arizona (you can tell the sympathetic Sandecker is all broken up about Pitt being lost at sea at this point in our tale), distances to holes and greens are not described in feet and yards, but METERS! Makes you wonder if Cussler roots against the Americans when they play the Ryder Cup. Also irritating, but much more significant, is the fact that everybody's speaking style is exactly the same in these Cussler novels. The only discernable difference between the narration and the dialogue are the presence of quotation marks. CONTRADICTORY: This is most evident in Cussler's characterizations. For example, on one page, he describes Pitt's sidekick Giordino as someone who "could never sit around his living room watching TV in the evenings or read a book." Never mind the grade school grammar, a scant four pages later Cussler describes Giordino reading a mystery novel before falling asleep! Even worse, while marooned with Pitt, he daydreams about watching TV! Other examples abound, but one of my favorites is where Sandecker and Pitt are grousing about the billionaire villain not using his money to help the unfortunate. Quite a laugh, when our hero, Pitt, can think of no better way to spend HIS money except to lavish it on " a collection of antique automobiles and aircraft worth millions of dollars" in his abandoned airplane hangar/bachelor pad protected by "enough security systems to guard a Manhattan bank"! FLAKY: In two words, Dirk Pitt, a man who gets manhandled by a transvestite but beats up the guy's delicate sister who is described as being sturdy as "a sapling tree." Pitt is a one dimensional, silly character whose most redeeming quality is an unwavering egotistical smarminess. Consider: Dirk Pitt goes to a Washington D.C. party in the dead of winter in a convertible. (Flake!) He leaves the party early with the lead female. They discover they're being followed and she asks why he just doesn't speed away from his pursuers. Instead of saying something normal like, "Sorry, hon, they're driving a faster car" he says: "That's a Cadillac STS behind us, with a three-hundred-plus-horsepower engine that will hurl it upwards of 260 kilometers an hour. This old girl also has a Cadillac engine, with dual four-throat carburetors and an Iskenderian three-quarter cam." I'm surprised Cussler didn't have his lady friend swoon and reply "Ooh Dirk! Say it again!" One reviewer claims Dirk Pitt is more real than Ian Fleming's Bond. Don't buy it. At one point in this book, Pitt gets the stuffing beat out of him, then suffers the hardships and deprivation of being marooned at sea for THREE WEEKS. In spite of this, he's perfectly fit enough to take on a billionaire's fortified island, including having to scale sheer cliff walls and confronting a security force of over a hundred. He gets his ribs broken, gets shot twice in the torso, then gets burnt to a crisp from a volcanic eruption. His colon is punctured and he suffers a collapsed lung. Despite this, the hospital staff can't keep him down because he has to get back to his multi-million dollar car collection for a welcome home party. This is a more real character than the Bond of the Ian Flemings novels (not the movies)? Come on! My advice to anyone who approves of books like this is to just rent a Jean Claude Van Damme movie or read a comic book, because you will be treated to the same lack of sophistication but will waste a lot less time.
Rating: 
Summary: Shock Wave!! A very good read
Review: This was my first Clive Cussler book and it will not be my last. The book was a fast read filled with lots of action. The only negative that I could come up with was that Dirk Pitt would escape tough situations a bit easy. Bottom line Shock Wave is worth your time reading!!
Rating:
Summary: MY FIRST CUSSLER...AND BOY, WAS IT DANDY!!!
Review: After being suggested Cussler, I was overjoyed to find an adapted version during a scrounge at Borders. Gee...there is no shortage to the action, is there? It was a very interesting plot. Heck, even the 40-page starter was good enough to make a seperate novel. Just one problem: I don't know how many times Pitt was "staring in the face of death" or "finally meeting a challenge that could get him." After a while, it got boring. Yeah, Cussler's way of getting him out of death's way was cleverly written, but.... Anyways, I encourage (the people of all ages, now!) you to get this exciting book!
Rating:
Summary: Shock Wave
Review: Shock Wave by Clive Cussler is a good book to read while at the beach or pool this Summer. It has action, adventure, intrigue and mystery within its covers and it will keep you engrossed till the end. After reading so many Cussler novels, with his main hero Dirk Pitt, you get to know how the author will get the hero out of harms way. But, this book has a few extra twists and turns that were quite unexpected as Pitt continues his adventurous and legendary career with NUMA. The book starts out, as usual, in the past as Cussler lays the foundation for the mystery to come. Two people get washed ashore on a raft afer a horrible storm sinks a British clipper ship. This of course is a tropical island where a billionaire Australian diamond dynasty is started and the villian for the book hails from. As the title to to book states it's Shock Wave and that happens to be the new method/technology for extracting diamonds from under water and it's killing seals and dolphins around the Antarctic coast. Cussler works his magic telling a tale to keep you at the edge of your seat. Pitt gets into his usual confrontations, but his relentless drive gets him past the odds, storms, and hunger. All to bring justice as Pitt triumphs, but at what cost? Cussler has worked a suprise into this book... something that will astonish the reader as the suspense of the story continues till the end. This is one of Cussler's better crafted stories.
Rating:
Summary: Shockingly good
Review: In an age when we sometimes feel there are no real
heroes left, it is fun to read about a man who has no faults
- a man who is courageous, intelligent, skilled, and a true
gentleman. We know he is too good to be true, of course, but
it is still fun to read about him. That is the kind of
character Clive Cussler has created in Dirk Pitt, the hero
of 13 different books! In this adventure, Shock Wave, Pitt comes across a
villain who is an evil as Pitt is good, a billionaire. Shock Wave, like the other Dirk Pitt novels, is good
old-fashioned escape reading. Cussler's characters are all
pretty predictable and one-sided, and there are no deep
meanings to explore. But the plots are quite well done, and
the writing, though a bit bombastic, is fun to read. If you
have read others in the series, you will certainly enjoy
this one. And if this is your first, there are plenty of
other titles in the series.
Rating:
Summary: Its No Shock that Shock Wave Entertains
Review: This was a very very good book. Clive Cussler is very good at keeping people entertained. The main character Dirk Pitt is like Indiana Jones meets James Bond all roled into one. The plot revolves around an acoustic plague that is killing off sea life. While Dirk and his NUMA crew are investigating what is the source of the vast murder of the sealife, The deadly sound waves hit a cruise ship and kill numerous people. On that boat was Maeve Fletcher the runaway daughter of Arthur Dorset who owns and runs the diamond mines which are the source of the sound. This was one of the best Dirk Pitt books I have read
Rating:
Summary: Grave Dissapointment
Review: I was loaned this book by the president of our company. Generally I admire and respect this man's opinion, but I would have to say in this case he was sadly off base. This book is not worth the paper it was printed on. The characters are contrived, the plot twists are implausible, and in general the story comes off as silly and very unentertaining. I am able to understand the necessity of needing to make a story entertaining by stretching the feasibility of the plot. This book stretches too far and the plot too far however to make it completely farsical. Mortally injured hero's coming back to save the day in an unplausible situation, are not my type of heros. I was sorely dissapointed in this book and will probably never read another Cussler book again.
Rating:
Summary: Corny, stilted dialog and cardboard characters; painful read
Review: This was my first (and last) Clive Cussler novel. I was unfamiliar with his work and was given the book in with a stack of others. As it turns out, I had just re-read Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light" prior to starting this book, and the contrast between Zelazny at the peak of his powers and this sad piece of writing made it all the more unbearable. The characters are meant to be "Men of Action" as I read from the editorial reviews--and I suppose they are--but as they leap from peril to peril without pause and the incredible coincidences begin to pile up, even willing suspended disbelief falls by the wayside. As "Dirk Pitt" himself says, "Incredible piece of luck that we stumbled into each other in the middle of a blizzard [while on a remote Antarctic outcrop]." Yes, that WAS incredible, but it's the least incredible thing in the book. Just another ho-hum miraclous-stroke-of-luck occurrence in the life of Dirk Pitt. The historical framework at the book's beginning is somewhat interesting and kept me reading past the painful weight of the dialogue, and the background on technical aspects of the diamond trade is informative; but when the novel finally lumbers into the modern era, it deteriorates rapidly from there. Mostly, it's the characters that do me in, though. From the name of the hero, Dirk Pitt, to the unutterable speeches that spill from out their mouths, there's hardly a word of unstilted, unscripted human dialogue to be found. There are so many clumsy groaners throughout this overlong book that I was sure it was supposed to be a parody: "Some strange force assulted our senses, unseen and nonphysical."
"Penguins and humans, they're all vulnerable to this scourge." It reads like an action movie as realized by "The Simpsons." Apart from the dialogue, the characters are hackneyed retreads from standard adventure series books, described in stereotypical terms. Cussler's annoying habits of specifing, by roster, a character's clothing labels and accessories and reminding us of his ethinc background is supposed to add realism but just calls attention to the clumsy writing. What do you think, Dirk? What thoughts are swirling in the maelstrom of cogitation behind your tanned, craggy features, supported by your not overlarge sinewy frame dressed in an Armani European-cut cashemere sweater with well-worn orange-faced Doxa Submariner dive watch with heavy stainless-steel band on your wrist? "I don't even want to dwell upon that horror." Yeah, me neither. Save your money, and more importantly, your time.
Rating:
Summary: The name is Pitt, Dirk Pitt
Review: My first "Dirk" (and last). I'm astounded at the lavish reviews. Ian Fleming's Bond could get away with this stuff because it was fresh. This effort is just plain silly.
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