"Neanderthal"

(Reviewed by Judi Clark MAR 20, 1998)

Two of the world's brightest anthropologists are brought into a hunt for a missing race. They've received a mysterious message from their old professor who's been missing for months in the foot hills of the Himalayas. Dr. Matt Mattison and Dr. Susan Arnot soon find themselves faced with the Homo Sapien Neanderthalensis, actually they find two bands of the species...

If you liked Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bears series, you may find this one interesting. Others say it is reminiscent of Crichton's Jurassic Park or Congo, but that may have been before they read the book. This book was marketed fairly heavily.   If you like a quality plot or if you get very agitated by shallow characters, forget this novel. It's not really all that well written. My theory is that Darnton started to write a dissertation but changed his mind when he realized that with fiction you leave out the footnotes. So he quickly found a recipe for action adventure and filled in the story line with some relationship tension, sex, spy stuff etc.  On the other hand, he has done some good research and the concept is credible (in an X-Files kind of way) and interesting.

• Amazon reader rating: from 162 reviews

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Bibliography: (with links to Amazon.com)

• Neanderthal (1996)
• The Experiment (September 1999)
• Mind Catcher (August 2002)
• The Darwin Conspiracy (September 2005)

 

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Book Marks:

• Lucid Cafe review of Neanderthal
• Time Magazine critique of Neanderthal
• RebeccasReads.com review of The Experiment
• The New York Times review of The Experiment

 

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About the Author:

John Darnton was born in New York City in 1941. He has worked as a reporter, editor and foreign correspondent for The New York Times since 1966. From 1979 to 1982 he was the Bureau Chief in Warsaw.  In 1982, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reports from Poland where for two years he described the nation's problems and the martial-law crackdown. He is currently the Cultural News Editor for The New York Times. He is married to Nina Darnton, who is also a journalist, and lives in New York City.