nwhyte

Of course, I saw the film when it first came out, and found myself continually comparing the book to it. But in fact the book holds up well - a lot of the shocking visual moments from the film are reasonably firmly rooted in the book, and sometimes actually come off better on the page. And the book turns out to be not really about the process of reviving dinosaurs, but about the fragility of human endeavour against the chaos of the natural world - the author's mouthpiece character, who gets to speak long infodumps and whose gnomic statements preface every section of the book, is not a palæontologist but the mathematician played by Jeff Goldblum in the film.

I did notice, however, that very few of the Costa Rican characters and none of the walk-on black characters actually had names.